Carl Sandburg, the celebrated writer who served in Puerto Rico during the War of 1898 as a young man, once purportedly observed that “Hollywood was a more effective educational institution than Harvard.” Teaching Latin American history through film leads one to conclude that Sandburg may not have been far off in his high estimation of film's pedagogical potential. In this exciting volume edited by Donald Stevens, which brings together a varied roster of Latin Americanists to discuss films pertaining to their country or period of expertise, readers will find insightful commentary on some of the most prominent films released in Latin America in recent decades that deal in some way with memory and the historical past. Fifteen chapters proceed chronologically from the pre-Columbian period (Mel Gibson's Apocalypto) through the Bolivian Water War that marked the turn of the last century (También la Lluvia, directed by Icíar Bollaín). Well-known films like Motorcycle Diaries and Four Days in September are discussed by Thomas C. Field Jr. and James N. Green, respectively. There is also attention to titles not widely known across the variety of disciplines in which Latin Americanists work.
Obviously, no book of this kind can cover every film, but a future edition might update the discussion of Che Guevara to include Steven Soderbergh's two-film epic in the same way that Green's earlier essay on Four Days in September has been revised here to include analysis of Wagner Moura's Marighella, released in 2019. Indeed, the book features a few essays previously published in another collection edited by Stevens in 1998 and titled Based on a True Story: Latin American History at the Movies. Thomas Holloway's piece on Aguirre, the Wrath of God is one of these. The essay is sharp, encouraging readers to ponder the multiplicity of identities historical characters assume and presenting a primary source to convey voice through different means than film. The process for deciding which essays to carry over from that book to this one is not always clear to the reader, but the pieces are uniformly stimulating, lending themselves to classroom assignment if students are watching a specific film discussed in the book. In fact, one could easily imagine the table of contents of this volume serving as a kind of syllabus for a course on Latin American history in film.
Teaching history through film presents distinct challenges and opportunities. Films, after all, render people in the past in vivid terms, making it easier for some students to engage with the processes, structures, and interpersonal dynamics that shape history. In his chapter “History, Autobiography, and Truth in Euzhan Palcy's Rue Cases-Nègres,” author Mohamed Kamara notes that “in a sense, every representation is fictitious!” (137). Films are texts, and engaging with them in a serious way requires some discussion of the form as well as the context in which they were produced. Therefore, for an edited collection like this to work, the films discussed must be notable for their technical qualities as well as their historical character. They should not be just movies about history but good movies about history.
Stevens is to be commended in that regard for his curation. Latin America is a wellspring of smart, innovative, and moving cinema. Readers of the book will certainly think of their own suggestions for films to be discussed, perhaps in future editions of this book—Lucrecia Martel's Zama and João Jardim's Getúlio spring immediately to this author's mind—but this impulse is a feature of the book's lively and substantive treatment of both Latin American history and film.
