ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates the importance of acknowledging the long history of the "process genre", as well as the particular horizon within which such films re-emerged in the 1950s alongside contemporaneous debates that re-semanticized the notion of underdevelopment. It describes the deployment of a more robust, complex model of realisms that allows us to reposition the films of the "early" and "late" New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) as differential manifestations of this representational/discursive mode. The chapter has important implications for Latin American film historiography and criticism. By way of contrast, in the early NLAC documentaries, the representation of underdevelopment became an explicit objective, and was an innovative proposal. Documentary was that form, and a Bazinian variant of cinematic realism provided an ideological-epistemological foundation. In Brazil, on the other hand, nonfiction film emerges not within the context of sponsored corporate films, as in Chile, but within the context of the state's first film institution, the Instituto Nacional de Cinema Educativo (INCE).
