Two or Three Things I Know About Latin America

The porous and shifting understanding of film forms in Latin America has continually blended with other unstable categories such as “avant-garde,” “experimental,” “militant,” “documentary,” and “Third Cinema.” Glauber Rocha, filmmaker and theorist of the cinema novo, wrote in a 1971 manifesto that “a work of revolutionary art should not only act in an immediately political way, but should also promote philosophical speculation, thus create an aesthetic of eternal human movement towards cosmic integration.” What sort of cinema might complete this tall order remained (and remains) an open question. Exploring the extensive collection of Latin American films in Arsenal’s archives, this five-part program is cross-pollinated with selections from Ism, Ism, Ism, Jesse Lerner and Luciano Piazza's previous curatorial collaboration. It aims to respond to Rocha’s call, offering some possible paths to a revolutionary, speculative cinema of “cosmic integration,” in some of its more expansive, militant, psychedelic, ironic, playful, formalist, and contemplative modes.