The cartographic impulse and the emergence of other Americas in Latin American documentary cinema

This dissertation examines a tendency in contemporary Latin American documentary cinema to map the affective cartographies of the region and visualize the planet through a cosmographic vision that according to Franz Boas (The Study of Geography, 1887) allows the realization of the invisible connections between geography and the human forces that shape it. This cartographic impulse, manifested by the constant exercise of reimagining the region, finds its origins in the colonial experience, the resulting disruption of Indigenous worlds, and the process of nation building that emerged after the wars of independence in the nineteenth century. It characterizes the works of dissimilar filmmakers from across the region such as Patricio Guzman (Chile), Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (Puerto Rico), and Eriberto Gualinga (from the Indigenous Kichwa-Sarayaku community, Ecuador), who materialize it as a visual strategy to reconsider historical and contemporary social events through the relationship between human and nature. My research contributes to recent debates on the notion of political engagement in Latin American cinema. In spite of cinema’s colonial legacy, the films I examine in this dissertation map alternative geographies and forms of territoriality, social and non-human ecosystems that assert the existence of a multiplicity of worlds.

My research is grounded in the notion that cinema is an instrument of knowledge that explores the relationship between reason and subjectivity as two complementary forms of seeing and understanding the world. I build my work on recent scholarship in film studies that position cinema as an educational and scientific tool and on works about the history of science that propose a reconsideration of images, vision, and the body as instruments for the development of knowledge, situating my research in the intersection between film and visual studies, postcolonial studies, and the history of science.