Hablemos de cine: Locating the film journal in the development of Peruvian national cinema.

Abstract

Tracing the history of Peruvian filmmaking from the 1960s through the 1990s by way of the specialized film periodicals that critiqued them, this dissertation uses the periodical <italic>Hablemos de cine</italic> to piece together elements used to define Peruvian national cinema as it developed. As one of the only cinematically oriented publications to remain in print for twenty years, <italic>Hablemos de cine</italic> became a valuable resource with one of the most consistent, if less confrontational, visions of this period in Latin American film history. The journal is thus examined as a primary reference as to how Peru developed its own ideas of its national cinematic identity, rather than have it imposed on them from critics outside the country. In Peru, <italic>Hablemos de cine</italic> emerged in 1965 concurrent with a new national and regional interest in film and filmmaking. This project positions Peruvian criticism as well as national filmmaking within the framework of the New Latin American Cinema. This study also relates the journal to similar publications in Europe (<italic>Cahiers du cinema</italic> and <italic> Nuestro Cine</italic> from France and Spain respectively) as well as within Latin America (<italic>Cine Cubano</italic>, the Chilean <italic>Ecran</italic>, etc.). As a case study, this project confirms the film journal as a vital resource in the creation and sustaining of a national cinematic cultural identity by affirming or rejecting various cinematic exercises. Increased interest in both local production as well as cinephilia, the latter evident through increased attendance at <italic>cine-clubs</italic> and interest in film periodicals, delineates a trajectory of the development of a film culture. As the first major work in English concerning Peruvian cinema, this project also provides historical and critical analysis well into the 1990s, resisting the limitations of previous scholarship on the New Latin American Cinema to the 1960s--1980s.