Latin American Films Timeline

Third Cinema:

"Aesthethic and political cinematic movement in Third World countries (mainly in Latin America and Africa) meant as an alternative to Hollywood (First Cinema) and aesthetically oriented European films (Second Cinema).

Third Cinema films aspire to be socially realistic portrayals of life and emphasize topics and issues such as poverty, national and personal identity, tyranny and revolution, colonialism, class, and cultural practices).

-Encyclopædia Britannica, May 3rd 2017.

1950s and 1960s

• Movement towards Third Cinema, led by the Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino.
• These national film industries declined in the 1950s, mainly as a result of the strong international expansion of Hollywood-based studios.
• Emergence of the influential New Latin American Cinema.
• Defined as a movement by a 1967 filmmakers’ conference held in Viña del Mar, Chile, it encompassed the work of young directors whose work was experimental, low budget, and socially engaged.

1970-1980-1990

• Large amount of literature on this movement, whose influence continued throughout the 1970s.
• The economic crises of the 1980s had a negative impact in the production of movies.
• In the 1990s reforms in film legislation led to a dramatic decrease in state sponsorship.
• The result, paradoxically, was the development of alternative forms of filmmaking and the initiation of new outstanding film movements, like the New Argentine Cinema, including directors Lucrecia Martel and Adrián Caetano, among others.

Cuba, Venezuela, Uruguay, Chile, Colombia and Bolivia saw no significant film production for several decades, only a few sporadic attempts.        

1990

• In México filmmakers like Alejandro González Iñarritu and Alfonso Cuarón revitalized the national film industry and also achieved success abroad.
• Since the mid-1990s film production in Latin America has been revitalized by transnational coproduction agreements—like Ibermedia—and the creation of new state legislation aimed at promoting filmmaking in each country.

Fun Fact

It is a history recently evoked by the Venezuelan director Alfredo J. Anzola in his feature documentary El misterio de los ojos escarlata ('The Mystery of the Scarlet Eyes', 1993), which provides a rare glimpse of unseen images of Venezuela in the 1920s and 30s.

The footage is that of his father, Edgar Anzola, who made documentaries and two silent feature films, now lost, in the 1920s, and then acquired a 16mm camera and filmed mostly documentary footage throughout the 30s and 40s.

His efforts of the 20shad not led him to a career in film, and these 16mm films were not made for publicviewing; they were the work of an aficionado. Anzola earned his living as righthandman to a local gringo entreprenuer, who among other things, opened Venezuela's firstradio station, Radio Caracas, in 1930, of which Anzola became the director; a radioserial written and produced by Anzola père provides the title of his son's film abouthim.