Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

Here Fernando Cocchiarale discusses how the fields of contemporary art have overflowed past their previous boundaries, going beyond painting, sculpture, printmaking, and drawing; he cites collage and photomontage in the early twentieth century as [...]

In this text, writer and film critic Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes analyzes the underdeveloped state of Brazilian film, the sociopolitical and economic reasons for it, and what it implies on a cultural level. In Salles Gomes’s view, this problem is [...]

This essay is a brief history of how independent video developed in Brazil. Arlindo Machado highlights the role played by the renewal of open-signal television language. He notes that video emerged in the 1980s, at a time when Brazilian [...]

In this review, Ligia Canongia discusses the various exhibitions of work by Brazilian artists that were being shown in Italy at that time, in the early 1980s. The art critic notes the increasing use of mass media in international art since the 1970s [...]

In this article, the author draws the reader’s attention to the survival of cinema following the advent of television and mass media. According to Eduardo Llorente, the cinema is both a pure art and one of the visual arts. He recalls that one night [...]

This text demonstrates that Adhemar Bezerra de Albuquerque was a pioneer in photography and film production in the state of Ceará, Brazil. His production company, Aba Films—whose name comes from his initials—founded in the twenties is still [...]

Firmino Holanda tells the story of the United States film director Orson Welles passing through the state of Ceará in 1942, in the course of filming It’s All True [also known as The Story of Samba]. The film was controversial in various ways: It [...]

Ismael Xavier refers to Glauber Rocha’s essay “Uma Estética da Fome” [An Aesthetic of Hunger] in which he sees a connection to Frantz Fanon’s theory concerning an intellectual response to the consequences of colonialism. In so doing, Xavier [...]

Antonio Risério discusses the origins of the artistic avant-garde in Bahia in the 1950s and 1960s. He notes the syncretic nature of this particular form of art that embraces everything from high culture to popular culture to mass communication. He [...]

In this text, Jorge Mautner looks at Brazilian artists working in different disciplines (in the visual arts, music, literature, film, and theater), and the parallels between their past and present work. His thesis is that there is a liberating [...]

This list, which was compiled in December 1971, enumerates the eighty films that had been produced by the Sección de Cinema of the División de Educación de la Comunidad (DIVEDCO). It includes the title and length of each film, as well as a brief [...]

This document is the script for the documentary Pintura Mural Mexicana [Mexican Mural Painting], to be produced by Manuel Barbachano Ponce’s company, Tele-producciones. The documentary was made in response to a request from the Instituto Nacional [...]

Un chien andalou [Un perro andaluz (1929) [An Andalusian Dog]—a film directed by Luis Buñuel, with a script written by Buñuel and Salvador Dalí—was presented in Mexico nine years after it was shot. Efraín Huerta, a writer by trade and an [...]

A short article by the Mexican poet Xavier Villaurrutia in which he announces the opening of a film club, “16 mm Cinema,” and the projection of the “sobrerrealista” [over-realist] film by Luis Buñuel, Un chien andalou [UnPerro Andaluz /An [...]