ABSTRACT
In 1944, Alfonso Reyes, one of the greatest Spanish-language essayists and a pioneer of Spanish-language film criticism, defined the literary essay as "the centaur of genres", a point of convergence between critical thought and literary expression, inhabiting multiple forms, a product of modern culture. The term "essay-film" emerges most forcefully in Latin America around 1968. Jogo de Cena exemplifies a modality of the essay-film in which intimacy, the larger world, and thought processes are linked together in novel ways—perhaps only as Eduardo Coutinho himself could do. In 1996, Philipe Lopate published "In Search of the Centaur", a pivotal critical text on the contemporary essay-film. As a symptom of contemporary epistemological and artistic impasses, the fake documentary has become a means to think through the institutionalizing of truth, as well as epistemologies associated with more traditional expository modes.
