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Suárez, Juana. Critical Essays on Colombian Cinema and Culture- Cinembargo Colombia. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. 276 pp.
This collection of essays represents a valuable contribution to the study of Colombian cinema and culture, offering a range of detailed analyses of moving images in Colombia that contribute to a fast evolving field of cultural reflections on the nation and its long-standing conflicts. Beyond what it adds to debates surrounding the representation of violence in Colombian culture, the collection also considers aspects of Colombian cinema that have received little scholarly attention, with fascinating chapters on topics such as silent cinema and the pioneering work of female documentary filmmakers. The book will undoubtedly become a key point of reference for students and scholars interested in Colombian film. It will also help consolidate comparative perspectives on Latin American cinema more broadly.
Chapter one examines four silent films in terms of their reworking of nineteenth-century cultural tropes, and gives a detailed account of early Colombian cinemas participation in the restructuring of society occasioned by new forms of capital. While the appeal to Sarmientos "civilization or barbarism" paradigm is a little anachronistic-Núñez's "anarchy or order" would enjoy a wider circulation at the time-Suárez compellingly situates these films in relation to tensions arising from the revival of Hispanism and the articulation of defensive nationalist discourses, tensions compounded by the historical coincidence of the first centario with Colombia's loss of Panama. By reading works like Bajo un cielo antioqueño (1925) against the grain of elite anxieties of "progress," she also provides a balanced assessment of the ways in which they simultaneously celebrate the social mobility facilitated by modernization while seeking to neutralize, through Christian, patriarchal conceits, the new social divisions that modernization generated. Her reconstruction of the troubled production of Jambrina's Garras de oro (1926) is a tour-de-force of archival research.
Chapter two analyzes seven films about La Violencia. While...