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List of contents
Foreword
Adam Hyman
Ism, Ism, Ism
Jesse Lerner and Luciano Piazza
Visual Experimentation in Super 8: Mexico and Latin America
Álvaro Vázquez Mantecón
Little Cinema Is Dead! Long Live Cinema!
José de la Colina
A Secret History
Alfonso Gumucio Dagron
Cameraless South America: Under the Spell of Norman McLaren
Antoni Pinent
The Performative in Venezuelan Experimental Film
Isabel Arredondo
Fifth Caracas Super 8 Film Festival
Julio Neri and Mercedes Márquez
The Image Belongs to Those Who Work with It: Recycled Cinema in Latin America
Jesse Lerner
Ism Ism
Manuel DeLanda
Super 8 Experimental Film in Puerto Rico During the 1980s
Poli Marichal
The Appropriations of Che’s Image Experimental Cinema in Cuba?
Luisa Marisy
A New Phase in the History of Cinema
Claudio Caldini
A Pocket Constellation: In Praise of Argentinian Experimental Cinema in Super 8
Pablo Marín
OMR
Silvestre Byrón
Thresholds of Experience: On Marie Louise Alemann’s Umbrales
Federico Windhausen
“Fax Fatory” Studios: Solá Film
María Belén Moncayo
It Started as a Hobby: Experimental Film
Revista Ercilla
Mysteries of the Creative Act
Jorge Sanjinés
Resistant Stories
Ángela López Ruiz
Third International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival
SODRE
The Founding of the Center for Experimental Film
Claudio Salinas Muñoz and Hans Stange Marcus
Raúl Ruiz, Or Anthropology’s Trembling Images
Tarek Elhaik
Radio Belén
Mauricio Godoy
Miss Universo en el Perú
Mauricio Godoy
Proposal for Establishing the Film Institute in Barranquilla
Gabriel García Márquez
The Barranquilla Group, La Cueva, and Experimental Film
Marta Lucía Vélez
What is Poverty Porn?
Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo
Material for Release
Torquato Neto
The Resonant Times of Hélio Oiticica’s Quasi-Film
Rubens Machado Jr.
Super 8 as an Instrument of Language
Sérgio Péo
Films
Torquato Neto
TO ATTEMPT THE EXPERIMENTAL
Hélio Oiticica
General Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Image Credits
About the author
Jesse Lerner is a filmmaker, curator, and writer living in Los Angeles. He teaches in the Intercollegiate Media Studies program at the Claremont Colleges.
Luciano Piazza is an Argentine filmmaker, critic, and writer based in Los Angeles. He studied literature at the University of Buenos Aires, creative writing at New York University, and film and video at the California Institute of the Arts.
Summary
Ism, Ism, Ism / Ismo, Ismo, Ismo is the first comprehensive, United States–based film program and catalogue to treat the full breadth of Latin America’s vibrant experimental film production. The exhibition features key historical and contemporary films from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and the United States. From innovative works by Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica and Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo to the breathtaking yet practically unknown ouevre of queer Ecuadorian filmmaker Eduardo Solá Franco, the exhibition takes both the aficionado and the open-minded viewer on a journey into a wealth of materials culled from the forgotten corners of Latin American film archives. Equally unprecedented in its approach and scope, the accompanying fully bilingual catalogue features major scholars and artists working across nationalities, mediums, and time periods. Lerner and Piazza assemble a mix of original content authored by key curators, scholars, and archivists from Latin America: eighteen essays and articles translated for the first time pertaining to the history of Latin American experimental film, historical image-documents that are fundamental to the history of experimental film in Latin America, and program notes from the exhibition’s programs. The collection is an invaluable resource for scholars, curators, artists and others interested in the history of Latin America, modern art, experimental and avant garde film, political and Third Cinema, and other noncommercial cinemas.
Published in association with the Los Angeles Filmforum, and as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA.
Additional text
"We like Ismo, Ismo, Ismo because it penetrates an imaginary island where different creative latitudes fit: in pocket constellations and cinitos made up of those small and liberating formats that are 8mm and Super 8; in appropriations of hegemonic images that play to derail; in frames animated by a cinema without a camera, in refractory stories of so many identities that it helps to give visibility. Origins, advances, losses. Ismo, Ismo, Ismo has the power to recover what has been forgotten through fragments with which it configures a polyhedral memory. Better look through that prism."
