Chapter 12

Mixing Monsters, Musicals and Melodrama: World Cinema

In This Chapter

Celebrating amazing cinema from around the globe

Understanding Japan’s monster movies

Enjoying Bollywood musicals and beyond

Exploring the cinema of three Latin American countries

When you browse the category lists of online distributors such as Amazon and Netflix, you find an odd mixture of groupings. Recognisable genres such as ‘comedy’ appear alongside media types, such as ‘television shows’ or ‘documentaries’, as well as broader, audience-driven categories such as ‘cult films’. But ever since the appearance of the humble video store, all distribution outlets have separated out international films into their own category of ‘world cinema’. Why is this?

In terms of the now sadly defunct video shop, the world-cinema section was kept separate for practical reasons. First, doing so allowed most video renters to avoid having to read subtitles, which is a genuine dislike of many viewers. Second, in the opposite sense, a distinct section allowed cine-literate types to go straight for those titles, which made them feel clever and cosmopolitan. Finally, the world-cinema category borrowed the slightly sexy, dangerous connotations of art cinema, so that these titles were often kept away from the kid’s cartoons, safely up on the top shelves.

So much for the grubby practicalities. As I discuss in this chapter, clearly more is going on when you lump together and dedicate a decidedly small space to films produced by every part of the world except Hollywood. Additionally, much bigger issues are at stake regarding the structure of the international film industry, the unequal access to funding streams and distribution networks across the globe, as well as the complexities of taste and film form in different national and transnational contexts.

Expanding Vision: World Cinema and Third Cinema

First off: the idea of getting audiences in the US and Europe to watch more films produced from different bits of the world is ‘a good thing’. People around the globe have so many different ways of telling stories, fascinating local cultural traditions and interesting landscapes to experience, why not explore the world from the safety of your cinema seat or sofa? Also, giving film-makers around the world more equal access to equipment, funding and distribution networks helps to level out the playing field.

Given this noble agenda, why is world cinema such a tricky term in film studies circles? Several reasons create this discomfort:

• The term world cinema means the world as viewed from the perspective of the developed Western world. So world cinema is in essence everything except films made in the West. Why shouldn’t action films from Hong Kong compete directly with action films from Hollywood without being placed in their own tiny ghetto of film culture?
• Who decides on the tiny number of world titles that do receive support in Western markets? Mainly Hollywood controlled distributors. Film festivals offer an alternative route to international recognition, but this process privileges a certain style of film-making: serious art cinema.
• Ambitious film-makers from non-Western countries are always going to be tempted to adopt Hollywood practices of style and form, or to produce films that cater for Western prejudices or look like adverts for the local tourist industry. Neither strategy is likely to produce the best quality films.

Why does Western culture exclude so much of world culture? Theorists Ella Shohat and Robert Stam suggest that Western culture is deeply Eurocentric. Eurocentrism is a way of thinking and speaking (also known as a discourse, see Chapter 15) that helps to create identity. For example, most Westerners have a Eurocentric view of history, which begins with the Greeks rather than any early Islamic or Chinese civilisation. Eurocentrism doesn’t rule out the urge to be cosmopolitan, which may appear to be a positive step in the right direction. But in reality, world cinema and its close relatives world music and world literature provide ways for Western audiences to ease their conscience while continuing to ignore the rest of the world.

The most concerted attempt to overcome the West’s Eurocentric film culture came in the form of the Third Cinema movement. Beginning in Latin America in the late 1960s, international film-makers set out to destroy the dominance of Hollywood (First Cinema) and European art cinemas (Second Cinema). These film-makers reject the commercial approach of Hollywood and the auteur approach of Europe, instead preferring a workers’ collective model. Argentinean directors Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino published a Third Cinema manifesto in 1969, which proposed the construction of a radical new film language to attain goals such as the ‘decolonisation of minds’ in the Third World.

Clearly these ambitious aims have yet to be fully achieved, but nonetheless the Third Cinema movement did serve as a platform for a generation of film-makers including:

• Nelson Pereira dos Santos: A leader of the Cinema Novo movement in Brazil during the 1960s and 1970s (check out the later sidebar ‘Opposing Hollywood: Cinema Novo’ for more details). His most famous film is a black comedy about cannibalism with the fantastic name How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês) (1971).
• Ousmane Sembène: A writer and film-maker from Senegal, which Europeans repeatedly colonised. Sembène made realist films in French and in his native Wolof language, which gained recognition via the French film festival circuit. His La Noire de … (Black Girl) won the Prix Jean Vigo for features in 1966 (see Chapter 19).
• Ritwik Ghatak: A Bengali film-maker whose left-leaning political films such as Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star) (1960) later inspired a brief Third Cinema movement known as New Indian Cinema in the 1970s (for more, travel to the later section ‘Pondering Bengali film: World or parallel cinema?’).

Be honest, have you heard of any of these film-makers before? How about Jean-Luc Godard, Roberto Rossellini or Wim Wenders? I hope that you can see what I’m getting at here. Film studies has traditionally been as guilty of Eurocentrism as any other aspect of Western culture, which is why everyone knows about the French New Wave but hardly anyone has heard of Cinema Novo. This critical favouritism becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy owing to the availability of film titles and research materials. For example, if (like me) you’re licking your lips at the prospect of seeing whether How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman lives up to its title, you’re going to be disappointed: it’s not currently available on DVD in the UK.

All things considered, Third Cinema carries too much political baggage for it to work within this chapter, which considers mainstream commercial films alongside more radical work. In the absence of a clearer, more recognisable term, I stick with world cinema instead, but please try to bear my initial reservations in mind when reading this chapter, whether you’re from the Eurocentric West or elsewhere.

So, with these considerations in mind, join me as I take a tour of a few of the more fascinating corners of world cinema, taking in exotic monster movies from Japan, rousing Bollywood musicals and dynamic contemporary thrillers from Mexico along the way.

Journeying into Japanese Cinema: Godzilla, Anime and More

Of all the cinema traditions from around the world, Japanese cinema seems to have a particular appeal for audiences in the West, and especially for young audiences. Contemporary Japanese films often gain cult status, attracting devoted followers who become part of fan sub-cultures obsessed with Japanese anime (animation) and manga (comic books).

A major attraction of Japanese films for Western audiences has always been their distinctive difference to Hollywood cinema. They represent a culture that feels alien and exotic in many ways – but also shares (and in some senses generates) the West’s rampant consumerism and love of new technology.

Reaching back to classical cinema, Japanese style

Although Japan’s film industry was busy producing films as early as many of their European counterparts, Western audience didn’t ‘discover’ Japanese cinema until 1951. When Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) won the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, European and American critics raved about its experimental structure and vivid imagery. Kurosawa quickly became the most celebrated Japanese director outside of his home country, although only his period films found favour, especially those depicting warring Samurai culture. He became an exemplar of Japanese culture in the West, while in Japan, although commercially successful, he was criticised for being too Westernised.

The contradictory status of Kurosawa at home and abroad raises fundamental issues with the West’s response to Japanese cinema, or in fact any cinema from a culture that’s separate to and different from your own. As a Western viewer, you clearly lack contextual information, may misread culturally specific content and run the risk of applying film theory based largely on European philosophy to these films. At its worst, according to British film theorist Paul Willemen, reading Japanese films from a Western film studies perspective represents an attempt to impose cultural practices and place the ‘foreign’ culture in a subordinate position.

Many film studies texts claim that Japanese cinema represents a kind of mirror image of Hollywood, which also enjoyed a classical period. Consider these details:

• Japan industrialised cinema on a scale comparable only to Hollywood’s classical period of the studio era between 1930 and 1960 (check out Chapter 9). In the late 1930s, Japan was probably the most prolific producer of films in the world, with between 500 and 2,000 films being made per year. It also had an extremely healthy exhibition sector with annual audiences of more than 400 million in 1940.
• Japanese film-makers did adopt and adapt elements of the Hollywood classical style (based on strong narrative cause and effect and continuity editing (see Chapter 2)), but to what extent is difficult to assess. Japanese audiences certainly loved the comedies of Charlie Chaplin, and the notion of slapstick entered the local film vocabulary. Kurosawa was a student of Western art and loved Hollywood movies.
• Several formal traditions in Japanese films, however, are specific to Japanese culture. Kabuki theatre was a strong influence on early Japanese film, and a narrator or benshi often accompanied silent films, thereby avoiding intertitles and leading to more static framing and longer takes than commonly found in Western cinema.

The best-known examples of classical Japanese cinema are the contemporary set domestic dramas (or shomin-geki) of Yasujiro Ozu. For example, Tokyo Story (1953) demonstrates Ozu’s distinctive visual and narrative style. The story’s main characters have a loose goal (as grandparents travelling round visiting their ungrateful children) but things end up in a similar place to where they started. People talk and are busy eating or doing other domestic chores, but rarely does anything dramatic happen.

Ozu’s typical camera placement is lower down than in comparable Hollywood films, roughly at the head height of the traditional Japanese sitting position. The camera is usually static, which allows careful composition of characters within the geometric features of Japanese domestic space. Above all, Ozu’s films have a stillness and elegance, which combined with their engaging human qualities, raises them into the canon of established world-cinema classics.

Facing an incredible, unstoppable titan of terror!

The title for this section borrows (okay, steals) from one of the marketing taglines used to promote the original 1954 Godzilla movie. It represents the sensationalist, campy tone that became associated with 1950’s monster movies in general, and certainly the equally unstoppable Godzilla franchise in particular.

The originators of the series, Toho Studios in Tokyo, produced a further 27 Godzilla films over the next half century, with the character evolving from a terrifying destroyer of Japanese cities to a benevolent guardian angel figure. Hollywood has twice attempted to capture the lumbering magic of the Japanese original, most recently with Gareth Edwards’s 2014 film.

Although some critics found Edwards’s version of the mythological creature too dour and serious when compared to the somewhat cheesy reputation of the Japanese series, in fact his tone is strikingly similar to the original 1954 release. Godzilla was conceived in a period when Japanese society was still traumatised by the atomic bombs that the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Even more directly, the film was inspired by further nuclear accidents caused by US testing of nuclear weapons in the sea around Japan during the early 1950s.

This reading isn’t a case of film studies scholars layering social context onto popular genre films; Godzilla is absolutely explicit in referring to nuclear paranoia:

• The opening sequence depicts a fishing boat destroyed by an underwater explosion, echoing the results of a recent nuclear accident widely reported by the Japanese media.
• Godzilla is awoken by the nuclear testing and emerges from the sea, breathing ‘atomic breath’ (grab the mouthwash) and wreaking havoc across Tokyo.
• The ethical dilemma at the film’s climax, where a scientist wrestles with whether to use a new ‘weapon of mass destruction’ against Godzilla demands to be read in the context of Hiroshima.

Japanese critics at the time spotted this allegorical treatment of the nuclear issue and the film faced criticism for cynically exploiting the recent tragedies. Nonetheless it was a commercial success, prompting a US re-edited version, which – remarkably – inserted a new lead character played by the American Raymond Burr and removed many of the explicit references to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This version, Godzilla: King of the Monsters! (1956), introduced the prehistoric monster to Western audiences and was also a hit. But its radical re-engineering of the original film’s ideology represents one of the clearest examples of Hollywood exercising its hegemony (powerful influence, see Chapter 13) over world cinema and politics.

The monster movie genre (or daikaiju eiga) that Godzilla sparked off is a major strand of the Japansese horror film. Other common forms include:

• The kaidan (avenging spirit) film: Features the return of (usually) a female spirit force to avenge wrongs done to her. The kaidan often has long black hair and wide staring eyes, parodying female beauty, and may be associated with a haunted house – a notably domestic, feminine realm. Examples include Onibaba (1964) and Ringu (1998).
• The techno/body horror film: Japanese society underwent a rapid industrialisation, largely during the 20th century, and combined with its military culture these changes created tensions around the human body. In these films, technology repeatedly violates and invades bodies in monstrous ways. Examples are Matango (Attack of the Mushroom People, 1963) and Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989).

Agreeing that anime rules, okay

The term anime generally means Japanese animated films. But it’s also part of a much larger culture within and outside of Japan, as well as the hub of a multimedia entertainment industry estimated to be worth around $6.5 billion a year and encompassing TV shows, video games, toys and merchandise. For example, the hugely profitable Pokémon franchise began in 1996 with games for handheld video devices and spread like wildfire through international markets. Although anime feature films remain a niche product in the West compared to Hollywood animation, anime has long-dominated the world TV markets.

From the Western perspective, Japanese animated films burst into international consciousness in the late 1980s, largely due to the international theatrical distribution of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988). Thanks to the influence of this film, the best-known examples of anime internationally are cyberpunk-inspired apocalyptic sci-fi films. But this genre is only the tip of the anime iceberg. You can find children’s classics such as Heidi, Girl of the Alps (1974), romantic comedies such as Aa! Megami-sama (Oh My Goddess!) (2000) and mainstream family blockbusters such as Princess Mononoke (1997). Within Japanese visual culture, the breadth and variety of anime is equivalent to that of live-action narrative film in the West.

Scholar of Japanese studies Susan J Napier identifies three major modes, or expressive frameworks, within the enormous variety of anime:

• Apocalyptic: Drawing upon Japan’s traumatic war experiences during the 20th century, visions of the end of the world feature across Japan’s cultural output, including novels and films. Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) is one example of a post-apocalyptic fantasy with a vision of hope and rebirth.
• Festival: Festivals are essential elements in Japanese social life, when the normal rules of repressive society are temporarily suspended and play with identity and behaviour can occur. You can see the festival mode in the wild fantasy, sex and violence common within anime. The mode is similar to what Marxist theorist Mikhail Bakhtin called the carnivalesque in Western culture.
• Elegiac: This mode is a wistful nostalgia for passing traditions, as well as lost love, beauty and youth. It’s often associated with nature, such as cherry blossoms or water imagery. For example, the romantic Whisper of the Heart (1995) has this recognisable sweet but sad tone.

Napier is clear that not all anime fit neatly within one of these modes. In fact many crossover between them. For example, the cyberpunk classic Ghost in the Shell (1995) has an apocalyptic tone, because its complex narrative ends on a point where cybernetic life no longer requires humanity to survive and replicate. With its more transgressive ideas about identity and its strong violent content, it also operates within the festival mode. Finally, the film contains powerful elegiac moments, such as the famous sequence when its female cyborg protagonist travels down a canal through the city in the rain, wistfully contemplating what being human means.

Investigating Indian Cinema: Bollywood and Beyond

One coherent ‘Indian cinema’ doesn’t exist. Instead, speaking of multiple cinemas and industries within the Indian subcontinent makes much more sense. The enormous diversity of religions, cultures and languages have created multiple sites of production and cinematic traditions.

In 2009, the Indian film industry produced 1,288 films in 24 different languages. Even the third most significant ‘regional’ cinema in India – Tamil language film – has an audience of 60 million people across India and a further 10 million ex-patriot, or diasporic, speakers across the world (check out the later sidebar ‘The importance of diaspora’). These audience numbers are comparable to a large European country such as France or Germany – yet no one ever refers to Germany as merely a ‘regional’ producer of European cinema.

Making a song and dance of Bollywood

The term Bollywood has created much confusion around Indian cinema. With its obvious echoing of Hollywood, the term is a patronising Westernised view and a back-handed compliment, in the sense that Bollywood films are considered the commercial equal of Hollywood in some ways.

Bollywood is a Hindi language cinema, which is the largest language grouping of Indian films, but not all Hindi films are Bollywood. The term refers precisely to the big-budget, star-driven films made in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), though Western journalists and critics often misuse the term as a catch-all for the entire range of Indian film production.

This confusion is partly because Bollywood films have achieved the highest visibility outside of India, thanks to aggressive international distribution and marketing. But also because Bollywood films are so distinctive and so unlike the classical Hollywood mode (see Table 12-1).

Table 12-1 Comparing Hollywood and Bollywood Cinema

Imposing Westernised theory upon films from different cultural contexts can be difficult, and so theorists of Indian cinema have looked to ancient Indian aesthetics for ways to understand Bollywood films. One important idea concerns audience emotional response, known as rasa. Some rasa seem universal (such as mirth or fear), whereas others have specific meanings within Indian culture (heroic energy). The text needs to signal each rasa, for example by using music to create a romantic effect.

Another particularly Indian ingredient is masala, a term from Indian cooking meaning a blend of spices. The masala principle means blending several rasa into each text, and creating the correct balance of emotional flavours.

Pondering Bengali film: World or parallel cinema?

Pop quiz: where does The Simpsons’s endearing shopkeeper Apu get his name from? If you know that Apu is also the central character from Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, you clearly know your world cinema classics (or you’re a complete Simpsons geek, but congratulations either way!). The fact that Matt Groening and his team pay homage to the Bengali director Ray is revealing for at least two good reasons:

• Ray was the first (and for several decades, the only) Indian director to achieve international renown.
• Ray’s films feel accessible to Western audiences due to their realist style and universal philosophy of humanism.

The first film in Ray’s Apu trilogy, Pather Panchali (1955), demonstrates a very different sensibility to the spectacle, high emotion, and song and dance of Hindi classics such as Mother India (1957) (turn maternally to the earlier sidebar ‘The mother of all Hindi movies’). Pather Panchali is shot in simple black and white, using only natural locations and a mixture of theatre and non-professional actors. No spectacular dance numbers interrupt the narrative flow; like all Ray’s films, however, Pather Panchali is intensely musical. It has a melancholy, haunting score by the (later famous) sitar musician Ravi Shankar and several characters sing folk songs at key moments in the drama. Most importantly, the film rewards humanist readings due to its wide-eyed and engaging child lead Apu (Subir Banerjee) and its universal themes of family and poverty.

Ray’s films aren’t representative of the whole of Bengali cinema, just as not all Hindi cinema is as populist as the biggest Bollywood titles. Both industries produce a range of products. Ray’s status as a prototypical world cinema auteur, however, did help to establish a route to international recognition for subsequent Indian film-makers, as well as creating a space for alternative film within India itself.

The Bengali city of Calcutta is home to an Indian intellectual culture dating back many centuries, and two of Ray’s contemporaries, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen, form part of this tradition.

Ghatak and Sen’s films are more explicit in their political engagement than Ray’s – for example, their critical stance towards the partition of Bengal in 1947. For this reason, they’re seen as being vital in instigating a Third or parallel cinema movement known as New Indian Cinema:

• Indian film has its own First Cinema in the shape of Bollywood and a Second Cinema in the auteur tradition influenced by Europe and characterised by Ray. Check out the tripartite categories of Solanas and Getino in the earlier ‘Expanding Vision: World Cinema and Third Cinema’ section).
• The widespread political turmoil in India during the 1970s led the government to set up a Film Finance Corporation aimed at supporting the development of more international auteurs like Ray. The result, though, was to allow more politically oriented directors to flourish, enabling the parallel cinema of Ghatak, Sen and others.
• This radical, modernist film-making movement failed to attract audiences domestically or abroad, however, and the movement stalled. Government funds were diverted to less confrontational middle-brow films suitable for a growing domestic middle-class audience.

The career of the successful female director Aparna Sen offers a good demonstration of the legacy of Bengali parallel cinema. Born in Calcutta, her father was the renowned critic and film-maker Chidananda Dasgupta. She acted in many of Satyajit Ray’s films as a teenager and young woman before making her directorial debut in 1981 with 36 Chowringhee Lane. Although not a commercial success, this film attracted critical attention through its open portrayal of female sexuality and the role of women in modern Indian society. Sen’s later films treat themes such as sectarian violence and mental illness – without a dance routine in sight.

Taking Bollywood global

Bollywood is not the whole of the Indian film industry, and Bollywood films are certainly not the kind that international critics tend to take seriously, but these facts result in a rather limp definition – commercially minded Hindi cinema produced in Mumbai – which doesn’t do Bollywood justice.

For some observers and (more recently) film scholars, Bollywood is much more. Just as Hollywood can’t be contained within a suburb of Los Angeles, Bollywood is increasingly coming to stand for a glittering array of globalised popular entertainment forms, not just film but also TV, music and advertising.

The international distribution of Indian films, and especially Hindi cinema, isn’t a new phenomenon. In the 1970s for instance, the Middle East became a significant export market for Indian films to satisfy the demand of a large transplanted community of Indian workers. But this export was piecemeal and largely controlled by state institutions.

In recent decades, this situation has changed beyond all recognition. The Indian government removed the previously restrictive tax and funding regimes in 1998, allowing national and international finance to create full-scale corporatisation within the industry. India has always had a very healthy production and exhibition sector, but the increased involvement of international partners opened up serious potential for overseas revenue.

As a case study, take a look at a typical Bollywood hit, Dhoom 2 (2006):

• Dhoom 2 was produced and distributed by Yash Raj Films, one of the major forces in the Indian entertainment industry, with subsidiaries in television, music, home video and even a fashion chain. The film was relatively big budget for the Bollywood industry at around $6 million, including the cost of extensive location shooting in Brazil and major stars such as Aishwarya Rai (see Figure 12-1).
• As a sequel to a surprise hit of 2004, the film uses the Hollywood model of franchise building and borrows marketing strategies familiar from the international action film, such as posters displaying the abbreviated logo D:2. The film was cross-promoted with tie-ins including Coca-Cola and Pepe Jeans.
• The film broke box-office records in India and went on to gross $26.9 million in its home territory. It received theatrical releases in the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand, bringing in a further $5.5 million. Its soundtrack was also the biggest of the year in India, selling 2 million copies. It has been released more widely on DVD and is available to stream on Netflix in the UK.

But even the strong performance of Dhoom 2 was dwarfed by the next instalment of the franchise, Dhoom 3 (2013), which was the most expensive Indian film ever produced and at $88 million is currently the highest grossing Indian film of all time at the box office worldwide. For Bollywood’s global prospects, apparently the only way is up.

Looking to Latin America Cinema

In the 21st century, the film-makers of Latin America (comprising Central and South America as well as the Caribbean) have made big splashes on the international independent circuit. Stylish thrillers such as Amores Perros (2000) and Cidade de Deus (City of God) (2002) have broken out of the world cinema ghetto and into mainstream multiplexes in many territories. Stars such as Salma Hayek and Gael García Bernal bring glamour and sex appeal, while directors such as Alfonso Cuarón win awards aplenty, including Oscars. Although Latin America has traditionally been a key market for Hollywood films, these film-makers and stars have turned the tables by appealing to a growing Hispanic population in the US.

Latin America is a large and varied area with many linguistic and cultural traditions, as well as a difficult history of colonial rule. Covering all countries and trends within this section is impossible, and so instead I focus on three key moments in three different areas:

• Brazil: As the largest country in the region, Brazil has produced the closest thing to a vibrant popular cinema independent of Hollywood.
• Cuba: This Caribbean island is a fascinating case study of a small national cinema supported consistently by a politicised state.
• Mexico: The three amigos of contemporary Mexican cinema – Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo del Toro – demonstrate the continued value of auteurism within a contemporary world cinema context.

Brazil: Hollywood in the tropics?

As the largest and most economically significant of the Latin American countries, Brazil’s film industry benefits from a huge domestic audience. Of course its demographics also make it a key target of Hollywood films and a favourite location for American movies. Hit comedies such as Bob Hope’s The Road to Rio (1947) and musicals such as That Night in Rio (1941) exploit the exotic allure and carnival atmosphere of Brazil’s biggest city. The country has also produced Hollywood stars such as Carmen Miranda, known as ‘The Brazilian bombshell’ thanks to her show-stopping performances and extravagant fruit-filled hats (she starred in That Night in Rio).

Carmen Miranda’s career began in Brazilian popular films of the 1930s, which, as elsewhere in the world, grew out of vibrant local traditions. This popular cinema was genre-based, with the most popular types of film including the following:

• The chanchada took elements from Brazilian carnival culture, blended them with bits of the Hollywood musical and added local comedy stars. Alô, Alô Brasil! (1935) helped to launch Carmen Miranda, and the genre remained popular into the 1960s when it morphed into sex comedies, known charmingly as pornochanchada.
• The cangaceiro was a Brazilian variant of the Western cowboy film, often with a strong musical element. The genre produced an international hit O Cangaceiro (The Bandit) (1953), which won prizes at the Cannes Film Festival.
• Brazilian melodramas such as O Ebrio (The Drunkard) (1946), a morality tale dealing with alcoholism and adultery, was hugely popular in Brazil and remains a touchstone for popular cinema culture to this day. Melodrama is also a vital element of the telenovela soap-opera format that dominates Latin American television worldwide.

The large size of Brazil’s domestic market prompted several attempts to stabilise film production within a studio system. An Italian producer Franco Zampari set up one notable example, the Companhia Cinematográfica Vera Cruz, in 1949. The company had the ambition of matching MGM’s production values as a self-styled ‘Hollywood in the Tropics’. Despite occasional successes, including O Cangaceiro, the studio fell foul of Brazil’s economic turbulence and closed just five years later.

Meanwhile a new generation of Brazilian film-makers were digesting the lessons of Italian Neorealism (see Chapter 11) and experimenting with a more authentic film-making style known as Cinema Novo (see the nearby sidebar ‘Opposing Hollywood: Cinema Novo’ for more).

The impact of Cinema Novo on popular cinema was short-lived, largely because government censorship forced the film-makers into ever more allegorical and experimental forms. Film scholars Stephanie Dennison and Lisa Shaw have described the continuing mutation of the chanchada genre throughout the 1970s and 1980s, including sex comedy and melodrama variants. The Brazillian horror film was much enlivened by the eccentric character of Coffin Joe (José Mojica Marins) who made inventive low-budget chillers in the 1960s and then became a popular television personality. In recent decades, the director Walter Salles has made quality films such as Central do Brasil (Central Station) (1998), which found a wide international audience.

Cuba: Small cinema, big ideas

Imagine a country where the government makes all the films, controls their distribution and even runs the cinemas in which they’re shown. Sounds like a dystopian sci-fi nightmare along the lines of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) right? Well, this situation was basically in place in Cuba for the latter part of the 20th century. You’re probably imagining poor Cubans being forcefully subjected to awful propaganda films and tedious documentaries about Marxism. But the fascinating thing about Cuban cinema is that it survived and even creatively flourished under these extremely unusual conditions. And it did so right under the nose of the world leader in free-market economics, the US of A.

Even before the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Cuba had a relatively well-developed cinema-going culture. Film historian Michael Chanan describes how the country’s sugar industry created a working-class audience hungry for cinema and a transport infrastructure capable of sustaining distribution. In the 1920s, Cuban audiences apparently thrilled to fast-paced action films and Hollywood stars such as Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. After the coming of sound, Mexican and Argentinian melodramas made some headway against Hollywood thanks to the shared language, but American films remained popular. Of course this situation changed after the Revolution, when the Cuban state became communist and allied itself with the Soviet Union.

After the Revolution, Cuba had only one producer, distributor and exhibitor in the market: the official body Instituto Cubano del Arte y la Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC). The ICAIC produced five to ten features and many more documentaries per year until the early 1990s, when its state funding was slashed. Contrary to expectations, these films weren’t all sterile propaganda, because film-makers sympathetic to the state ran the ICAIC and they were allowed relative artistic freedom. Here are three of the more unusual examples:

• Cuba Baila (Cuba Dances) (1961) uses the conventions of popular melodrama but offers a gentle satire of middle-class pretentions when Cuban street musicians take over a family party.
• ¡Vampiros en La Habana! (Vampires in Havana) (1982) is a popular adult animated film. The symbolism around vampires and capitalists is fairly obvious, but it’s great fun nonetheless.
• Cecilia (1982) is an expensive and glossy adaptation of a classic Cuban novel set in 1930s Havana. The film caused great controversy due to its reinterpretation of the original text to emphasise Afro-Cuban identity and religious practices.

Although the ICAIC lost most of its state funding in the 1990s, it continues to operate as a producer/distributor of a smaller number of films, largely thanks to international co-production treaties with the Latin American countries. Cuba has experienced a gradual opening up to Western ideas since that point, as evidenced by the popular comedy Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate) (1993). Its gentle treatment of gay identity and sub-culture was bound to be controversial in Cuba given General Castro’s well-known homophobic policies, but the film has also been criticised from the other perspective, for downplaying gay rights issues. But some critics point out that its ending, which sees its central gay character leave Cuba, has a tone of sadness for Cuba’s unwillingness to change.

Mexico’s modern auteurs

When the Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón won an Academy Award for directing Gravity (2013), the Mexican press was somewhat conflicted.

Having a Latino director at the top of the Hollywood tree was seen as beneficial, perhaps bringing fresh public attention and finance to the struggling Mexican film industry. And yet Gravity is clearly a transnational film production, featuring US finance and stars but shot and post-produced by an international crew in the UK. Fellow Mexican director Arturo Ripstein was widely quoted as saying that Gravity was a Mexican achievement as much as Rosemary’s Baby (1968) was a Polish one, referring to the nationality of its director Roman Polanski (in other words, not at all).

Together with Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo del Toro, Cuarón is part of a trio of directors linked by their nationality, talent and ambition. They’re also friends and professional collaborators, earning them the nickname ‘the three amigos’. Film historian Deborah Shaw sees them as representing the value of auteurism in contemporary world cinema: del Toro and Cuarón have created distinctive visual styles across a range of popular genres (check out Chapter 14 for more on del Toro’s auteur status), Iñárritu is the very model of transnational independent film-making.

But all three amigos rely on an impressive grasp of the conventions of international cinema in its different incarnations.

In particular, a closer look at Iñárritu’s films shows his career-building savvy:

• Amores Perros (2000) combines three separate stories into one narrative structure linked by a central event, a car crash in Mexico City. Film theorist Eleftheria Thanouli identifies this type of narrative structure as a key element of an international postclassical style of film-making, also found in the films of Danny Boyle, David Fincher and Wong Kar-wai.
• 21 Grams (2003) uses a similar narrative structure but this time across multiple locations including Mexico City and Memphis. A multinational cast of character actors speak English, and despite its Mexican creative crew, the film is effectively an American indie rather than a Mexican film.
• Babel (2006) goes even farther afield with multiple stories taking place in Mexico, Morocco and Japan. Its title refers to the Biblical myth of universal humanity, suggesting that people all around the world are essentially the same. The film therefore incorporates the humanism essential to notions of world cinema. Its cast includes major stars Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett.

The key element uniting these three films is director Iñárritu’s background in communications and marketing: he’s a consummate publicist. The marketing strategy of launching Amores Perros at the Cannes Film Festival paid off handsomely, with his Critics Week Grand Prize leading to a string of further awards and nominations, including Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. Iñárritu was then able to use this prestige to secure financing and distribution deals with Focus Features and Paramount. He became the kind of director whom stars such as Brad Pitt love to work with in order to keep them artistically fresh and commercially credible.

So where does this leave the ‘Mexican-ness’ of Iñárritu and his fellow amigos? During Cuarón’s big moment, his Oscar acceptance speech, he chose to poke humour at his own thick accent by telling an amusing anecdote about Sandra Bullock mishearing the word ‘earpiece’ as ‘herpes’. Thus he turned his accent, which for some ex-patriot people is a source of shame or discomfort, into an endearing character trait. Clearly this playful engagement with regional stereotypes is a long way from the confrontational stance of Cinema Novo (see the sidebar, ‘Opposing Hollywood’), but Cuarón’s self-effacing persona is vastly more marketable in the competitive marketplace of transnational cinema.