ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the concept of art cinema, revealing its contradictory usages through a concise overview of its deployment in different historical periods and different geo-cultural sites. It draws on the work of US scholars Fredric Jameson and Lauren Berlant to proffer a new critical framework on the manifestation of the real in contemporary Latin American cinema. The chapter offers an account of how art cinema endures as a discursive category, tracing the shifts from prewar debates staged in film journals to the postwar emergence of new waves, and finally to contemporary film festival distribution and art house exhibition. It analyses art cinema aesthetics in a particular context, which means also identifying how that very context is writing itself in relation to a global market. The chapter concludes with an analysis of selected contemporary films in order to propose a notion of art cinema as an aesthetics of endurance particular to the geopolitical condition of neoliberalism and postnational globalization.
