Film Alert 101: Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - Latin America - 6 (52) - Bolivia - Third Cinema : Sanjinés and the Ukamau Group

Saturday, 27 December 2025

Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - Latin America - 6 (52) - Bolivia - Third Cinema : Sanjinés and the Ukamau Group

Bolivia -

Jorge Sanjinés b.36 Antonio Eguino b.38

***************************************

Jorge Sanjinés

The National Bolivian Revolution of April 1952 reinstated the 1951 election victory of the leftist MLR party after the outgoing government had refused to hand over power and a military junta had taken over in what was apparently the 179th coup in the country’s continuously disastrous short history since Bolivia had gained its independence from Spain in 1825. The MLR's reformist program, backed by the well organised tin miners (tin being the country’s main export), in one of the few genuine social revolutions in Latin America, introduced deep structural social and economic change to one of the poorest countries in Latin America. These changes were reflected in the arts, especially film with the founding of the Bolivian Film Institute in 1953. Despite the overthrow of the MLR government of José Torres in a CIA - backed military coup in 1971, the momentum for feature film production, begun in the early sixties, just managed to survive.

Although previously lacking an ongoing film industry and any tradition of film production, features with an established Bolivian realist aesthetic and social identity were produced in the sixties and seventies through the efforts of individuals, notably Jorge Sanjinés and Antonio Eguino, working under difficult conditions and limited funding in a period when the government was increasingly at the mercy of the military. As director of the Film institute Jorge Sanjinés was responsible for the production of 27 newsreels, 4 documentaries and the medium length Aysa (1965). The Ukamau group which he co-founded with writer Oscar Soria and Ricardo Rada when the Insitute was closed in 1966, did get some initial encouragement from the authorities in completing their first indigenous language feature Ukamau (1966) a fictional story made in one of the principal Indian languages with non-professional actors depicting the clash between the Indian and mestizo cultures. The latter representing western culture in a debased form, was completed only because the responsible minister was given one script, when requested, while another was filmed.

“Sanjinés’ réponse to the mixed reception of the film and the uneven impact of some of the stylistic experiments undertaken to form the basis of the extensive theorisation of revolutionary cinema he undertook in the late 1960s and 1970s (Armes 296). As he made clear, Sanjinés´ concept of utility fundamental to his work was “to assist liberation struggles in Latin America” (Framework 10, Spring 1979). All film work of the group was subjected to rigorous self-criticism seeking fresh insights into the requirements of a cinema that is made for, as well as about, the people to develop awareness as well as entertain (297).

The group took their name, adopted in 1967, from the the Ayamara language, a word meaning 'the way it is'. Their first film in 1966 was about the revenge of a man for the rape of his wife. When the Film Institute withdrew further funding, Yawar Maliku/Blood of the Condor (1969), completed at great personal sacrifice to its producers (Keel), was a huge success. It was based on a newspaper report of a sterilisation program carried out by s team of American doctors on indigenous women in a Bolivian region without their knowledge at a Peace Corps maternity clinic. Recreating the Quechuya community response, a scripted flashback structure is used to contrast the lifestyle of the Americans with the poverty of the Indian population. After being initially banned in response to pressure from the American Embassy, Bolivian press campaigns and demonstrations resulted in the lifting of the ban. In release Blood of the Condor became the most widely viewed film in Bolivian history; the Peace Corps was expelled from Bolivia.

The response of peasant viewers to the flashback structure and the portrayal of protagonists as individuals led Sanjinés to question the efficacy of the style in which the group had been working. “The complex narrative built around flashbacks, in a rethink, was subsequently abandoned in favour of linear structure and a tendency towards sequence shots. This style [was] adapted to the traditions of oral narrative; the players on the screen are the historical actors of the events portrayed, they are dramatizing their own experience. “The use of long takes allows them the greatest space to express their collective memory, and a new kind of cinema is born” (Chanan 746).

In El coraje del pueblo/The Courage of the People (1971) financed by Italian State Television (RAI), Sanjinés abandoned the linear docudrama mode deployed in Blood of Condor for historical reconstruction in a collective re-living, rather than an analysis, of the massacre of striking tin miners in northern Bolivia in 1967 - ' the massacre of San Juan' - made in collaboration with actual survivors of the massacre who appear in the film in what Sanjinés termed 'direct dialogue'. RAI, upset by anti-American statements made in the film, cut controversial scenes. It was the last film Sanjinés would direct for the group and was never released in Bolivia. He was immediately expelled from the country when the Torres government was toppled by the military coup in 1971, going into exile where he continued to make films.

In this oppressive political environment, the head of the military junta, General Banzer, making it clear that no dissent would be tolerated, confronted the Ukamau Group with the choice of making concessions or going underground. Their next film, Pueblo Chico/Small Time (1974), was directed by Antonio Eguino, the cinematographer who had worked closely with Sanjinés on earlier Ukamau films including Blood of the Condor. It was hailed on its release by the Bolivian press and succeeded with a very heterogeneous audience. “In its planning and realisation,” Keel concludes that, “the group was driven into the politics of style that finally led to a neo-realist picture. Ukamau wanted the Indians to enact situations from their lives, and part of Pueblo Chico’s success is the achievement of that ambition” (ibid).

The narrative strategy in Pueblo Chico adheres to the major tenets of any realist aesthetic, namely verisimilitude of character and setting, and plausibility of action […] the reluctance to set forth a political program or thesis, or to assume even a precise ideological point of view [… ] Ukamau has ingeniously left the ending [ the immediate defeat of the commitment to the central issue in Bolivia of agrarian reform] suggesting the feeling of ambiguity that exists throughout the film.

Antonio Eguino

Erich Keel describes the theme and story of Pueblo Chico “as eminently Bolivian” in attacking one of the central controversies of contemporary Bolivian politics - Agrarian Reform. Decreed shortly after the 1952 revolution, the measure led to significant changes in the socio-economic structure of the country. The class of Creole ‘latifundistas’ were expropriated and disappeared as a class, much liberated land being returned to the Indians, the “compesinos’. Finally after 400 years of slavery and servitude the Indians had become fully integrated citizens. Set in the regressive period of the late sixties, the fifth feature film of the Ukamau Group tells the story of Arturo, a student of sociology who is returning to his home town to reverse the stagnant order in favour of the native Indians. But rather than overseeing the remaining parts of a large estate, as he is hired to do by his father, Arturo spends more and more time in the nearby Indian pueblo teaching the children and helping the sick. His presence seems to fill the Indians with a sense of pride, courage and assertiveness to demand their rights. Town leaders bribe the agricultural commission into taking land back from the Indians. As he becomes more deeply involved Arturo is increasingly isolated from university friends and threatened by the whites and mestizos in the town.

For Humberto Rios, a Bolivian director of militant films, then living in exile in Buenos Aires. “the Importance of Pueblo Chico was to test the possibilities which would allow cinema to exist in Bolivia” or as Equino insisted and writer Oscar Sofia, contributor to the scripts of all Ukamau’s films, endorsed, “Ukamau makes films for a specific audience […] films for national use, for the middle class and popular groups of Bolivia, and not for the elite.” - Erich Keel

In his 1976 manifesto on the problems of form and content in Latin American cinema, unlike Solanas and Getino with their distinction between first (Hollywood) and second (art) cinema, Sanjinés lumped the two together as “bourgeois cinema” with individualistic subjectivity and narrative suspense as core drivers, closing off spaces and time for reflection.” Hanlon considers that “his critique of bourgeois cinema, although it does not explicitly condemn European art cinema, implies that it is the most bourgeois of cinemas precisely because it appears to emanate from the imagination of an individual rather than a collective author.

The creator in a revolutionary society should be the means and not an end, and everyone should be a means and not an end, and beauty should play the same role. Beauty should have the same function that it has in the indigenous community, where everyone has the ability to create beautiful objects ,,,We try to make the images of the film, the music, the dialogue, etc., coherent with this culture; we set ourselves the problem of aesthetic coherence. (Sanjinés quoted by Hanlon p.356).

Bolivian-born Sanjinés further argued “that the politically committed filmmaker, almost by definition an intellectual educated in the Western tradition, must efface his or her personality in the work.” In Sanjinés assimilation of the response of Andean peasants, unexposed to or uninterested in cinema, to his use of close-ups and a flashback structure in Blood of the Condor, Sanjinés recognised that the viewer cannot be considered as an abstraction but one who is, always historically and socially conditioned. The Western-educated or influenced filmmaker, Sanjinés realised, must shed his or hers conceptions of what beautiful cinema is, in order to make a film “consonant with the spectator’s non-Western culture” (ibid).

According to Sanjinés in his next film, Courage of the People, he and his collaborators began their experiments in collaboration with their non-professional, mostly peasant, performers. In his subsequent two films, El enemigo principal/The Principal Enemy (Peru 1974), and Fuera de acquí!/Get Out of Here! (Ecuador 1977), Sanjinés began experimenting with long takes or sequence shots, techniques that became increasingly central to his theories of film-making “with the people.” Rather than “rejecting all previous cinematic language what we must reject are the objectives, methods and aims of bourgeois art.” The task Sanjinés set himself, as a revolutionary Bolivian filmmaker, was “to screen the available techniques for their aesthetic coherence with Aymara and Quechua culture ” (ibid 358, my italics ) which would have transformed the “transculturation from above” of his early films (most notably Blood of theCondor) to the “transculturation from below” of his later phase.*

Hanlon agrees with Javier Sanjinés, a professor of Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies, that transculturalism* from above and below is of particular value when analysing the career of Jorge Sanjinés, and Hanlon also suggests that the concept is generally applicable to New Latin American Cinema and, in particular, its relationship to European art cinema. More in keeping with the rhetoric of New Latin American cinema theory, in the case of La nacion clandestina/Clandestine Nation (Bolivia 1989), Holman further suggests, the term “dialectical transculturalism” is neatly expressive in the film where “various dialectics are at play : colonizer and oppressed, rural and urban, Eisensteinian ecstasy and Brechtian distanciation, European film technique and local conceptions of time.” Even taking into account the paradox in the heart of The Clandestine Nation Hanlon found “ that despite the return to previously abandoned European styles of filmmaking, particularly evident in Sanjinés´ adaptation of techniques from [Theo Angelopolous’s] The Travelling Players, the film succeeds in expressing the Andean cosmovision and, more important, was and remains well received by [Sanjinés´] desired audience” (359).

Roy Armes concludes that although further work was blocked in the 1980s, in the work of Sanjinés and the Ukamau group, “we have a rare example of a form of filmmaking based on a radical rethinking of the stylistic pattern of film production that allows totally non-western ways of seeing society and depicting interrelationships of individuals to their group to be expressed in a then [historically} predominantly Western medium (304).

* Transculturation is a term for a process, more complex than assimilation or acculturation, where a group, often subjugated, creatively adopts and transforms elements from a dominant culture resulting in new cultural forms involving merging and transformation of elements to create something novel. - John Beverly in an essay “Tensculturism and Subalternity: The Lettered City and Tupac Amaru Rebellion.” His book Subalternity and Representation (1999) begins with a history of the term.

****************************

Michael Chanan “New Cinemas in Latin America” Oxford History of World Cinema ed G. Nowell-Smith 1996

Dennis Hanlon “Travelling Theory and European Art Film” in Global Art Cinema R.Galt & K. Schoonover eds. 2010

Erich Keel “Militant Cinema to Neo-Realism : Pueblo Chico Film Quarterly Summer 1976

Roy Armes Third World Film Making and the West 1987

********************************

Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism