The Project

The idea for this Latin American Literature and Film Archive began to take shape during the Fall of 1998, when a group of University of Southern California graduate students and I decided that we wanted to explore the topic “Latin American Literature and Film” in a Spring 1999 seminar.

 

Informal conversations quickly developed into an inquiry about what, in the most basic terms, it meant to talk about film and literature generally, and, within that framework, how we might approach Latin American literature and film specifically. At the same time, we considered in practical terms what the seminar might require that students do, what resources were available for the projects they had begun to imagine, and how we could incorporate individual interests within the group’s overall enterprise.

 

We were all familiar with various Latin American literary texts associated with specific films, and some students already had in mind pairs or groups of works they were interested in exploring.  However, we needed a much broader framework from which to consider the actual, if not possible, associations between Latin American literary texts and films from around the world and, especially, the variety of ways in which pairs or clusters of texts and films had been engaged with one another. 

 

How and where to start? We were unable to locate any single source that provided comprehensive information that could be accessed together under  any of the following rubrics: 1) Latin American literary works that had generated films; 2) Latin American authors whose works were in some way adapted for film; 3) films that were directly or indirectly derived from Latin American literature; 4) directors for whom literature had served as an important source for their work in film; 5) authors who had written scripts based on their own literary works or on the texts of other writers, or who had composed original scripts that could be incorporated into their literary production.  We concluded that we would have to create our own repository of information, and the seminar thus became an archival as well as an analytical project.

 

The first part of the course was conducted as a communal investigative workshop. We aimed to produce an archive to which we ourselves—and in the future others like us—could turn to survey Latin American literary texts that had a significant association with films from around the world, or, from the other end, to identify the films that had drawn either directly or indirectly on specific Latin American texts. We worked together in the larger group and in teams, focusing first on literary texts as sources for films, regardless of whether the films aimed to adapt directly a particular text or merely draw on a work's storyline or themes or premise.  With priority given to the literary, we also considered more broadly Latin American authors who had been involved with film as screenwriters, directors, producers, and/or critics, and directors whose work seemed to have been marked by direct or indirect engagement with Latin American literature.  

 

The second part of the seminar focused on interpretation and analysis. Students worked individually and collectively, consulting with each other about their discoveries and approaches to the texts and films that seemed to produce the most compelling conversations.  They explored different models for talking about Latin American literature and film while also researching some of the traditions and topics to which their interest had been drawn. The reading and viewing assignments I formulated grew out of our discussions during the workshop portion of the seminar. The assignments also drew directly on students’ suggestions about the texts, films, and topics that the group as a whole could consider together or that might become points of departure for individual seminar papers.  For example, we considered together: El lugar sin límites, the 1966 novel by José Donoso and the 1978  film of the same title by Arturo Ripstein; Sor Juana’s Respuesta a Sor Filotea (1691) , Octavio Paz’s Sor Juana, o las trampas de la fe (1983), and María Luisa Bemberg’s Yo, la peor de todas (1990); José Pablo Feinman’s Últimos días de la víctima (1977) and Adolfo Aristarain’s 1982 film of the same name.  Among the individual projects that drew on group discussion, an analysis of Feinman’s novel and Aristarain’s film incorporated a consideration of film noire and la novela negra. Drawing on research focused on broad topics as well as on our shared  texts and films, some projects pursued advanced inquiries that became the basis for dissertations and book publications. For example, a project dealing with Tomás Eloy Martínez’s novel Santa Evita (1995) and the films Evita (1996; dir Alan Parker) and Eva Perón (1996; dir. Juan Carlos Desanzo) engaged more generally with the development of film in Argentina and the cultural industry surrounding Eva Perón. Another project ventured into documentary film theory and practice to frame and inform a reading of Gabriel García Márquez’s La aventura de Miguel Littín clandestino en Chile (1986) with Miguel Littin’s documentary Acta General de Chile (1986).

 

In the end, however, it was difficult, if not impossible, to separate the archival impetus from the analytical impulse.  Seminar presentations and final papers generated new questions about the work of particular authors and directors, as well as about the texts and films we had taken up as a group, and pushed us to imagine how the archive could be developed and shared with a wider audience in the future. 

 

The current site is an effort to respond to what that seminar group began to imagine over a dozen years ago.  Moreover, following in the spirit of the original project, this archive is, and remains, a work-in-progress that invites collaboration and contributions from all.

 

September 2012

 

 

Update in progress -- Spring 2020