ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a meta-critical interrogation of the broader picture of Latin American film's place in larger understandings of cinema around the world. It proposes to interrogate the traditional temporal coordinates to understand the historical trajectory or periodization of Latin American cinemas. Although the intellectual formation of Latin Americanist film scholars differs from that of Indian historians, there is nonetheless a certain similarity in the history-telling procedures of both groups. The geological model has proven remarkably resistant to efforts to reconceptualize the trajectories of Latin American cinemas and their relationship to other cinemas. Conceiving the "contemporary as plural" involves identifying the temporal heterogeneity of any given historical horizon. Other scholars are disrupting established periodizations by examining minor tendencies that fail to become dominant within the historical period in which they emerge and by exploring infrahistorias about private tensions and alliances between individual filmmakers that problematize institutional histories.
