5 Politics and Privatization in Peruvian Cinema
Grupo Chaski’s Aesthetics of Survival
One of the foundational tenets of neoliberal economics is that it seeks the privatization of all government functions. The case of the Peruvian film collective Grupo Chaski offers an opportunity to study the ways that political filmmakers have responded to the challenges of neoliberalism, which invariably privatizes vital public issues in the same ways that it privatizes national industries.1 Founded in the early 1980s, Grupo Chaski emerged in a context of neoliberalism, state violence, guerrilla resistance, and massive urban growth. Focusing on the experiences of the most disenfranchised sectors of Lima society, Chaski has been dedicated to revolutionizing all components of the filmmaking process. From the group’s inception, they have consistently worked on creating alternative modes of exhibition at the same time that they have sought to make their films available to the public via commercial releases, television screenings, videos, and other more mainstream distribution outlets.
The work of Chaski is noteworthy for its multipronged approach to politically progressive filmmaking that includes production, distribution, and exhibition. In addition, their three most well-known films were a tremendous success both within Peru and in the international community. Their first film, Miss Universo en Perú (Miss Universe in Peru, 1982), is a documentary that juxtaposes the 1982 Miss Universe pageant in Lima with the lives of lower-class Peruvian women. Their first feature film, Gregorio (1984), traces the effects of urban migration on a young boy from the Andes who joins a group of street kids only to later be rejected by them. Their second feature film, Juliana (1988), focuses on the life of a thirteenyear-old runaway girl who disguises herself as a boy in order to be part of gang that performs music for money. Each of these films attracted a massive audience relative to other similar types of film projects. For example, by 1990 Gregorio reached over one million viewers on the big screen in Peru, 7.5 million had seen it on Peruvian television, and dozens of millions had seen it on television worldwide.2
This chapter begins by placing Chaski’s work within the sociopolitical context of Peru during the 1980s. This section offers background on Chaski’s founding members and describes how the group both participated in and challenged Peruvian debates about culture and identity. The second section moves from context to specific analysis of their films and what I call their “aesthetics of survival.” In the third section, I close with an analysis of Chaski’s renewed activities since 2004, when they began working on a project of local, grassroots distribution and exhibition, a process they call “microcines.”
Context
The context of the film project of Grupo Chaski lies at the intersection of a number of Latin American filmmaking trends and sociopolitical developments. The first clue to the way that their work links Peruvian history and Latin American filmmaking is their choice of name. The group’s name is in Quechua, the native language of the Incans, and it means “messenger.” During the Incan empire the chaskis were messengers that carried information between communities. Oswaldo Carpio, one of the key early members of the group, gives this explanation for their choice of name: “Por hacer películas desde adentro, asume el nombre de los antiguos comunicadores del imperio de los incas, los Chaskis, sistema que funcionó y que puso la COMUNICACIÓN al servicio de todo un pueblo.”3 (Because we make films from within, we use the name of the ancient communicators of the Incan empire—the Chaskis. The Chaskis were an efficient system that put COMMUNICATION at the service of an entire people.4) Without question, one of the primary goals of Chaski has been to make films that communicate about Peru to Peruvians. Building on the long legacy of intellectuals like José Carlos Mariátegui and José María Arguedas, who vigorously worked to defend the rights and improve the social status of Peru’s indigenous communities, Chaski politically confronts the long history of racism and exploitation that has characterized the status of Peru’s indigenous cultures.5
A series of key social factors influenced the work of Chaski. First, the legacy of colonial structures that had oppressed, enslaved, and abused the indigenous populations for the benefit of the Spanish-descended elite, otherwise known as the criollos, continued to play an enormous role in debates about social inequities, identity politics, and political repression. These tensions relate to a second important factor: the emergence of the militant Maoist revolutionary group, Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, in the early 1980s and the government’s violent military response. Influenced by Maoist Marxist theory, Sendero Luminoso wanted to replace bourgeois social structures with a peasant revolution that would also incorporate Incan forms of life. Their approach, though, was extremely violent and the military responded with even more violence. As a consequence of the aggression in the rural areas of Peru and also as a result of the increasing turn to neoliberal free market economics that would be exacerbated during the regime of Alberto Fujimori leader of Peru from 1990 to 2000, these years also witnessed massive migration to the city of Lima.
One important aspect of Chaski’s films, consequently, is their focus on urban spaces and their interest in a broad, heterogeneous demographic of oppression that dismantles the indigenous as a monolithic category—a practice that links their work to that of filmmaking collectives across the globe that have directly confronted the connections between racism, urban realities, and social inequity. Chaski’s reconsideration of the identity politics attached to Peruvian marginal communities may be accounted for, in part, by the variety of perspectives and experiences of the founding members: Stefan Kaspar studied communications in Biel and Berna, Switzerland, where he also worked as an independent journalist until 1978. He then traveled to Peru to work on a film project on urban migration. Four years later he participated in the foundation of Chaski. Another founding member was Fernando Espinoza. Espinoza was an equally energetic force behind the creation of Chaski as he struggled against not only wider urban oppression, but also adamantly supported the rights of Afro-Peruvians. His dedication to highlighting the marginalization of Afro-Peruvians added an important perspective to Chaski’s approach to filming the challenges of city life.6 Espinoza was also instrumental in recruiting Alejandro Legaspi to Chaski. Legaspi arrived in Peru from Uruguay in 1974 when he was forced into exile by the Uruguayan dictatorship. As a boy he had worked on a number of films and had been influenced by the work of the New Latin American Cinema, especially that of the Argentine directors Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino. Serving as one of the main directors for Chaski’s films, he brought to the group a poetic vision combined with a clear commitment to politically relevant filmmaking. Another key perspective was added by María Barea, who had worked as a producer with Luis Figueroa, one of the founding members of the Cine Club Cuzco, and also with Jorge Sanjinés and Grupo Ukamau on El enemigo principal (The Principle Enemy, 1972). Prior to forming Chaski she had directed Mujeres del planeta (Women of the World, 1982) and had already established herself as a director committed to filming women’s issues from a feminist perspective.7 The founding members of Chaski brought together a rich background in filmmaking and a dynamic interest in merging progressive politics with a social commitment to the disenfranchised. This vision required Chaski to rethink the traditional parameters that had guided identity struggles in Peru prior to the massive urban migrations. The contrast of the rural with the urban and of the indigenous with the criollo elites that had shaped decades of debate about Peruvian identity politics no longer obtained in the hybrid, complex societies that were emerging as a consequence of massive waves of migration.
As Jesús Martín-Barbero notes, Lima presents one of the most extreme examples of urban migration in the 1980s.8 The rapidly changing social landscape called for new ways of thinking about progressive action, political resistance, and the politics of national identity. Afro-Peruvians and Asian Peruvians and Andean highlanders struggled together in the land grabs that would eventually result in new communities like that of Villa El Salvador, which was formally established as a district of Lima in 1983. Sensitive to the integral role that women were playing in these social movements, Chaski’s films attempted to reflect the changing nature of what José Matos Mar calls “a new pattern of solidarity.”9 In a 1990 document intended to reevaluate the successes and failures of Chaski, Carpio noted that Chaski’s work was a direct response to the population explosion of Lima. Even if they had wanted to focus solely on the problems of Andean cultures, he explains, they would have been unsuccessful because they did not have the knowledge base. Carpio indicates two key points of interest for Chaski regarding the urban explosion of Lima. First, the group was interested in the extraordinarily intense degree of socio-physical change that was affecting the urban topography of the city, placing the mestizo in the center of Lima’s new identity. Holding to the notion that cinema is one of the most significant forms of culture capable of reflecting and shaping national identity, Chaski hoped to intervene in the historical marginalization of the majority of Peruvians by challenging the hegemony of dominant Peruvian culture and offering an alternative cinematic narrative of identity.10 According to one document defining their goals, they wanted to “servir de canales de expresión de aquellos sectores excluidos del sistema de comunicación”11 (serve as a channel of expression for those sectors excluded from the system of communication). Their work was dedicated to “el desarrollo de una conciencia cívica en los sectores populares, sobre la problemática nacional”12 (the development of civic consciousness among the marginalized majority in order to promote attention to the problems of the nation).
In addition, the waves of migration pointed to significant social problems that demanded a critique beyond questions of ideology and identity. The migrations were a direct consequence of political violence and an economic crisis that was devastating the agricultural economy. Caught between the violence of the Sendero Luminoso, the state violence in response to Sendero, and the neoliberal economic practices of the Peruvian government, many Andean members of rural communities fled for the cities. In the context of the increasing authoritarianism of everyday life, Chaski advocated for democracy, the development of civic agency, and the opening of spaces for the cultural expression of marginalized sectors. They were opposed to “toda forma de autoritarianismo e intolerancia”13 (all forms of authoritarianism and intolerance). Chaski, then, had two major themes that dominated their work—a constructive effort to reshape the historically hegemonic narrative of national identity and a politically progressive project dedicated to exposing the sociopolitical structures that ruled Peru.
Chaski rejected the dominant narratives of Peruvian identity offered by both the government and by Sendero. Moreover, they discarded the nostalgic and romantic characterizations of indigenous culture that tended to create heroic images of oppressed people. Instead, they moved outside of the reigning categories of political identities. Chaski’s films do not idealize the disenfranchised, nor do they cast them as helpless victims. One example of this practice is the documentary short El taller más grande del mundo (The Largest Shop in the World), which focuses on the work of the mechanic Don Lucho. After being unable to find work in an established car shop, he decided to open his own shop on the street. Before long, he had hired a number of mechanics and had such an excellent reputation that people preferred coming to him over going to conventionally established mechanics. Chaski emphasizes in Don Lucho’s story the ways that the marginalized “survive” through flexibility and perseverance. Their lives are a constant negotiation between their needs, their desires, and the possibilities afforded by Peruvian society.
Chaski explains that they are committed to cinematic works that reflect the economic, social, and cultural reality of Peru with the participation of the marginalized sectors as both actors and protagonists.14 Throughout their documents they return to the idea that their work is connected to developing protagonists for the people whose cinematic protagonism and similarity with the characteristics of the community will lead the audience to recognize themselves in the characters on-screen and then engage in civic action. In this sense, Chaski’s self-image as social messengers indicates their interest in highlighting the process by which communities identify themselves as social agents and their commitment to exposing the material and ideological forces that attempt to limit those processes.
Chaski’s commitment to intervening in the politics and ideologies that were shaping Peruvian society in the 1980s and their belief that culture and communications play an essential role in the shaping of social consciousness necessarily led them to confront the politics and practices of the Peruvian media industry. At the time that Gregorio was released in the mid-1980s, 99.5 percent of all films screened in Peru were foreign. They indicate one of their primary goals as developing an alternative politics of commercialization “frente a la hegemonía transnacional”15 (in order to challenge transnational hegemony). This goal led them to work with distribution (commercial and alternative), trade unions, and other areas of film training, legislative advocacy, promotion, marketing, and film production. Chaski’s approach to the culture industry is noteworthy given that they have simultaneously attempted to change the laws governing media communications in Peru, while also trying to function within them and around them.
In a move that parallels Néstor García Canclini’s argument that state support is both essential and problematic for the development of local culture industries, they have consistently considered public advocacy for state support of filmmaking as a central part of their work at the same time that they have always been suspicious of state interference and wary of state ideology. Their recent work with a number of philanthropy groups like Ashoka and organizations like UNESCO, and their collaborations with European funding sources like the German television channel ZDF, further indicates the ways that they seek funding according to the structures available. In the neoliberal model, support for national culture comes not from the state but from private organizations. In keeping with their refusal to depend on the state, Chaski has received funding from international groups and also from local Peruvian philanthropists.16 At the same time, though, they are working on antipiracy laws.17 The practice of Chaski provides a model for flexible advocacy in the complex structure of global communications.
The Aesthetics of Survival
The context of Chaski’s collective film project reflects three major shifts in the possibilities for socially progressive filmmakers in Latin America. First is the rethinking of left strategies after the experiences of the 1960s and 1970s, away from violent militancy towards democracy, and away from clear-cut paths of resistance to more complicated, nuanced appreciations of micro-rebellions. Second is the changing shape of the media industry: the rise of television, the deregulation of the film market, and increased access to new media technologies. Third is the reconsidered notion of personal identity and of social agency. Whereas former theories of the marginalized imagined this class as either hopelessly victimized and/or essentially heroic, groups like Chaski advocated for a new aesthetic for filming marginalized communities, one that simultaneously emphasized the strength and resilience of the marginalized while also pointing to the concrete ways in which neoliberal economics, entrenched racism, and capitalist ideology created material conditions that threatened these communities to inevitably assimilate or face self-marginalization.
According to Chuck Kleinhans and Julia Lesage, who saw Chaski’s films in 1986 at the Havana Film Festival:
All of this kind of narrative development and characterization might distress a critic stuck in the standard Marxist political and aesthetic categories of fifty years ago. [ … ] As Grupo Chaski has analyzed it, the models of fully developed capitalism have to be rethought to account for the Third World. This implies a different aesthetic as well, one which doesn’t simply see the poorest people as desperate or as a negative example, but which acknowledges the unemployed poor’s strength in the face of harsh circumstances and their role as an essential component of revolutionary transformation.
Thus, Chaski’s films reflect a new political aesthetic that heralds a transition in the ways that progressive filmmakers imagined their work. According to Martín-Barbero, Latin American spectators, who are inundated with U.S. mass media, do not passively absorb the images of U.S. television and film that they regularly consume. He explains that the 1980s witnessed a transformation in Latin American debates about national identity that called for rethinking the notion of civil society and reconceptualizing the idea of a “political subject.”18 Martín-Barbero’s theory of cultural mediation is especially salient in the case of Chaski. The paradigm of the spectator as either a passive victim or a liberated revolutionary fails to account for the complex ways that communities respond to alienating images. As a way of rethinking these categories, Chaski has developed what might best be called “an aesthetic of survival.”19 Two of the most significant features of this aesthetic are the development of social protagonists, what the collective refers to as personas-personajes, and the emphasis on spectatorship as a process of knowledge-recognition, or conocer-reconocer.20 Whereas each of their films reflects these aesthetic strategies, the following analysis traces their appearance in their three most well-known films: Miss Universe in Peru, Gregorio, and Juliana.
Miss Universe in Peru
María Barea hastily organized Chaski’s first film, Miss Universe in Peru, when she recognized that Lima’s hosting of the pageant offered Chaski an excellent opportunity to create a social documentary about gender, social inequity, and Western “values.” In a brilliant use of Eisensteinian montage theory, the documentary juxtaposes images of the pageant with images of girls and women watching the pageant. The contrast between the European features of the contestants, especially when these hail from Latin American countries, and the indigenous features of the spectators highlights the ways that conflicting value systems cause social damage. Kleinhans and Lesage note that the film’s explicit feminism and anti-imperialism ask the spectator to consider: “What does this celebration of European standards of beauty and consumption have to do with the majority of Peruvian women?” The film further exposes other sources of conflicting views of Peruvian and Latin American identity when it contrasts the voices of the Peruvian elite and pageant officials against those of indigenous women organizing a protest of the pageant. These contrasts serve to show how official state-sponsored culture promotes racist, neocolonialist, and sexist ideologies that fail to account for the Peruvian “nation.”
Three additional features of the film provide salient examples of Chaski’s aesthetic. The first might best be referred to as the establishing shot of the neoliberal landscape—a technique they use in many other films as well. Chaski often composes crane-like, overhead views of their particular cityscape of choice, mainly Lima.21 These shots, though, serve the opposite function from the standard technique in dominant cinema. Typically such a shot establishes an authoritative, masterful perspective that shapes a coherent narrative. The use of the shot by Chaski, however, deconstructs this trend by showing the cracks in this narrative. As we hear voices by the Peruvian elite describing how the pageant will help to promote a view of the Peruvian nation to the world, we see the landscape of Lima dominated by foreign corporate images, such as neon signs advertising Coca-Cola or Pan American airlines. Given the angles of these shots, these corporate images are often shown to loom over the masses of people in Lima’s urban setting. The technique is subtle and effective.
The second key aesthetic practice reflects the complex gender politics of the film. Clearly one main goal is to critique the obvious racism, patriarchy, and sexism behind beauty pageants and to contrast the pageant with the lives of everyday Peruvian women. The first part of the film establishes this critique in clear terms. The eloquence and political engagement of the community activist women that are interviewed contradict the stereotype that these women are weak victims who are easily appropriated by dominant society. On the contrary, these women are examples of Chaski’s commitment to filming social protagonists. By presenting them as individuals engaged in struggle, Chaski reveals their power to resist while simultaneously exposing the challenges they face. But the film refuses to hold to a class-driven binary between the pageant contestants and the women activists. In one interview a woman activist explains that the pageant serves to distract the public from the very real challenges facing Peruvian society. Then, in keeping with the complex ways left struggles have tried to work across lines of oppression, the women recognize how their feminism links them to the women in the pageant. As Kleinhans and Lesage explain: “We see a vibrant and articulate Quechua woman organizer argue that the contest demeans every woman participating in it because the contestants are not only privileged, but also smart and talented, yet made to look like dolls.” Later, as though the words of the organizer scripted the moves of the filmmakers, the contestants are interviewed. Their complaints about the long hours and harsh conditions of their work serve not only to demystify the aura of the beauty queen, but also to establish tentative lines of solidarity between them and the lower-class women activists.
The third and most significant aesthetic technique is a shot reverse shot repeated in motif throughout the film. A television broadcasting images of beauty contestants, advertisements, or news announcers cuts to the image of a woman with indigenous features watching those images. She is in center frame in a medium-close-up that reveals only her body surrounded by blackness. Her face shows little expression. The images of the contestants and the advertisements that follow them display all of the grotesque trappings of capitalist media culture. The contrast between these images and that of the woman are so extreme that they create an intense dialectic of social conflict. The montage of these images offers a powerful critique of Western ideals of beauty, of consumer society, and of the ways that these images both attract and reject the Peruvian marginalized majority. But Chaski’s aesthetic pushes the critique even further by adding a few key twists to this form of political montage. First, they hold on the face of the indigenous-featured woman longer than one might expect. This slowing down of editing time coupled with the unclear expression on the woman’s face and the absence of context for her viewing produces profound unease in the viewer. Unlike the images on the television that proceed at a rapid rate primed for facile consumption, the image of the woman resists standard viewing techniques.
Remembering that the intended audience for this film was a population similar to that of the woman framed in the darkness, we can then note how this technique is an example of Chaski’s aesthetic of knowledge-recognition, or conocer-reconocer. The shots provide the viewer with information, raise their consciousness of the contradictions that rule Peruvian society, and then move to a process of recognition. Chaski emphasizes repeatedly that one of their main goals is to provide images of reality and to offer information that challenges official discourse. Consciousness raising, though, is only the beginning of the audience’s critical process. The means to political filmmaking for Chaski is to ask the viewer to see themselves in relation to the images. They elaborate on this in the following way: “Esto se expresa en la posibilidad de que el espectador reflexione, tome conciencia, asuma un sentido crítico, y que sobretodo la comprenda, se comprometa con ella y busque actuar en su transformación.”22 (We hope that the spectator will reflect on reality, become conscious of it, and will assume a critical stance. Above all we hope the spectator will understand reality, will commit to it, and will look to be active in its transformation). Chaski’s emphasis on recognition over identity politics as a source for political engagement and social transformation is in keeping with a similar critical move made by García Canclini, who, following the arguments of Paul Ricoeur, argues that it is better to “emphasize a politics of recognition over a politics of identity” because “recognition permits a dialectic of same and other.”23
The Spectator Shot
One way Chaski provokes the process of recognition is by repeatedly screening images of native spectators. In addition to the motif of the woman watching the pageant in Miss Universe, Gregorio has a scene where a group of street children watch a Hollywood movie full of violence and sex and Juliana has a scene where Juliana is watching a telenovela.24 These scenes are complemented by various occasions when the audience watches the gaze of Gregorio or Juliana as they observe advertisements, shop displays, video games, billboards, magazines, or other forms of neoliberal media culture. The technique of the spectator shot allows Chaski to highlight the pervasive existence of mass media culture and the problematic ways the consumption of this culture influences the Peruvian people. When the viewer watches a spectator watching alienating images of mass media, a series of critical reflections emerge. First is the obvious sense that the spectator that appears on-screen is demeaned and alienated by the media it consumes, but the almost immediate connection between the spectator watching the film and the image of the spectator within the film does not allow that impression to persist. It is instead followed by recognition, by the translation of the experience viewed on-screen to the experience of the film viewer, and also by the critical apparatus that distinguishes both the affinities and the distance between the spectator on-screen and the viewer watching the spectator. In this way the audience both identifies with the image of the spectator and refuses that identification. Merging a technique of distanciation with one of recognition, Chaski creates an intricate web of relations to media processes that does not allow for perfect associations and representations of power dynamics. The viewer recognizes the lure of media society with its offer to distract from practical reality while also being repulsed by it. By reflecting the viewing of media as a process, one that is alienating but not necessarily devastating, Chaski exemplifies Martín-Barbero’s description of the consumption of media as mediation.25
Towards a Social Bildungsroman
Added to the aesthetic effects of screening spectators, in their two feature films Chaski framed their child protagonists in specific shots that create a social bildungsroman where these children’s identities are caught between the alienating forces of society and their desire to develop their own sense of self. Both Gregorio and Juliana focus on the stories of two children who face extraordinary obstacles to their survival. Living in a hostile world and virtually abandoned by their parents (their fathers are dead and their mothers seem incapable of caring for them), Gregorio and Juliana are forced to take care of themselves. Both of them undergo radical transformations as a result.
Gregorio must abandon his Andean way of life, including his language and mode of dress, in order to adapt to life in the city. His family is forced to migrate to the city because they are unable to survive in the Andean village of Recuayhuanca. Prior to Gregorio’s departure we see him working, enjoying nature, and learning from his grandfather. As he leaves on a truck to join his father in the city, we see him facing backwards towards the sierra in an obvious sign of loss. Here the bildungsroman is troubled by forced migration and Gregorio is shown to be the passive victim of social forces. Once the family arrives in Lima they encounter the shock of urban life and Gregorio’s father, Jacinto, chastises his mother, Juana, for continuing to speak in Quechua.
The economic hardships of the city force Gregorio to immediately seek work as a shoe shine boy, forcing a rapid immersion in urban life that requires him to mature practically overnight. In one crucial scene he approaches a group of street performing boys. While enjoying the show, he becomes the butt of one of their jokes due to his migrant status and indigenous looks. He immediately leaves in shame, his first moment of urban community shattered by the reinforcement of his outsider status. Meanwhile his father’s health is deteriorating and he can no longer work, causing the family to be forced to abandon their apartment and participate in the land grab of Villa El Salvador, where they live in a shack made of straw and are forced to alternately battle the sands that the winds blow into their home and the constant police raids that terrorize the community. Shortly after, his father dies. Once his mother begins a relationship with another man, Gregorio feels abandoned. The street performer boys who had initially mocked him soon become his friends and he spends more and more time with them, returning home later and later with less and less money to offer his mother. Eventually his conflicts with his mother lead him to move in with the boys, who live in an abandoned bus. With the boys he takes drugs, plays video games, goes to the movies, looks at porn magazines, and steals, but he also has a sense of community that he had not had since arriving in Lima. After a robbery in an amusement park causes the group to scatter, he takes the stolen money to his mother. When she refuses it he spends it on himself. Later when he sees the boys again, they beat him up, telling him “no sirves para esto, quítate” (you are no good at this, get away). At the end of the film, he has returned home but he will never be the naïve boy he was when he came to Lima. The last scene presents Gregorio describing his experiences in an interview that has been shown in pieces throughout the film. His final words are “a veces tengo ganas” (sometimes I wish). Indicating the ways that the film is a narrative of becoming, Gregorio has not only learned how to survive in the city, he has learned how to express his desires.
Ricardo Bedoya compares Gregorio to De Sica’s Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946) and Juliana to Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1950) suggesting that Gregorio’s documentary realism gives way in Juliana to a utopic, marvelous ending, but that both films also have many parallels.26 Juliana lives in greater comfort than Gregorio and is at home in the city, but her abusive stepfather forces her to run away from home. Because her options as a young girl on the street are not appealing, she hopes to join Don Pedro’s group of street performers where her bother Clavito also lives, but to be accepted she must disguise herself as a boy. The disguising of her gender adds narrative tension that was absent in Gregorio, but this element does not overtake the central theme of the challenges that poor young children face in Lima. After being admitted to the group, she is shown working hard singing on buses for money and trying to avoid the regular punishments of Don Pedro’s Fagin-like personality. Like the gang that Gregorio joins, the solidarity among the “boys” is fragile, devolving into racist slurs against the two Afro-Peruvian boys and breaking down into cliques. But, in contrast with Gregorio, rather than bonding over drugs, they bond over music, responding to the harshness of their lives with jam sessions where they create music that they will perform later on the buses. Similar to Gregorio, documentary-like scenes allow the boys to tell their stories, which often include abusive, alcoholic parents, or the sudden death of a father. In keeping with the lighter nature of Juliana, they also recount their dreams, a tactic they use when they are depressed, frightened, or sad.
Eventually Juliana’s gender transgression is discovered. When Don Pedro threatens to beat her, the boys come to her defense and they all flee. The end of the film has them staying in a beached ship, living off of the money they earn singing on buses. The final scene presents their dream of a bus that travels throughout the city and has a “nice” driver. All of the passengers are their loved ones. The dream converts a hostile space that they see as threatening into a womb-like space of collective comfort and compassion. Most importantly, the dream ending allows Chaski to remind the audience that these young children not only worry about survival and companionship; they also have desires and fantasies. Unlike Gregorio, who literally had to find his identity, Juliana had a sense of herself and her dreams from the start of Juliana. Her bildungsroman, to the degree that the term applies to this film, relates to her learning how to negotiate between her needs and her possibilities without abandoning her dreams. In both films, though, the development of these children’s personal identities counteracts the neoliberal trend to privatization, where the state and its citizenry have no commitment to the disenfranchised. Here the development of these children as persons challenges the neoliberal model of seeing in these street children nothing but disposable life, commodities with no use value. The mere insistence that these children are people who have the right to dream and to desire undermines the neoliberal mantras that would discard not only their dreams but their very lives.
Not so Distant Dreams
Chaski’s most recent phase of activity has focused on the microcines project and the documentary Sueños lejanos (Distant Dreams, 2006). According to their website: “EL MICROCINE es un espacio de encuentro y participación donde se exhiben películas que fomentan valores, reflexión y sano entretenimiento. Es gestionado por líderes de la comunidad que son capacitados para desempeñarse como promotores culturales que buscan la autogestión y la sostenibilidad.”27 (THE MICROCINE is a meeting place and a space for community participation where films are shown that promote values, reflection, and healthy entertainment. They are organized by community leaders who are trained as cultural promoters. The goal is to empower them to be able to sustain the projects on their own.) The microcines project expands on their earlier work with alternative forms of distribution and exhibition while also taking advantage of advances in digital technology. As Paola Reategui explains in a 2007 document describing the early years of the microcines project, the viewing practices and possibilities of the Peruvian public have radically changed the screening opportunities for Latin American cinema. Neoliberal economic policy has resulted in a national film industry controlled by an increasingly smaller number of transnational corporations. The biggest change, one that García Canclini notes in relation to Mexico as well, regards the reduction in movie house screens and the shift in their location.28 Reategui notes that from 1990 to 2007 Peru went from 240 movie theaters spread out across the country to thirty-five multiplexes (with 150 screens), of which thirty are in Lima with only five movie theaters in the rest of the country. The location of these theaters is typically close to supermarkets and malls and 95 percent of tickets are sold to U.S. films. Ticket prices have risen, making them out of reach for the majority of the population and many lower-class communities have completely abandoned the custom of attending public film screenings, favoring instead home screenings of television or video. Film viewing has been reduced to “centralismo, exclusión, discriminación, consumo pasivo, dominación económica y cultural”29 (centralism, exclusion, discrimination, passive consumption, economic and cultural domination).
Alongside these increasingly dire prospects for Peruvian filmmaking and socially committed media, though, the rise in digital technology and the lowering costs of projection equipment opened a space for intervention. Seizing this opportunity and building on their years of experience with distribution and exhibition, Chaski conceived of an innovative way to reconnect progressive films with marginalized communities via microcines. In a transition from Chaski’s earlier work with exhibition and distribution, the microcines project envisions far greater collaboration with communities and far greater local initiative. The goal is to establish throughout Peru, and eventually throughout Latin America, small, local screening locations where it is possible to see films by and about Latin Americans at reasonable prices. These screening sites are already existing community spaces that can be converted into theaters easily. Tickets are purchased for about two soles or less than one U.S. dollar and audiences typically range from fifty to two hundred. Proceeds go to the local microcine organizers, to pay local taxes, to pay modest exhibition rights for the films screened, and to support Chaski.30
Table 5.1 Distribution of Microcine Income
Key to the success of the microcines is the development of local organizers. Whereas Chaski is pleased to organize local screenings, the microcine project is interested in developing a more integral notion of film and community—one that depends on the microcine as a locally driven cultural space. Their goal is to not only reacquaint Peruvians with Latin American cinema and with the practice of attending pubic screenings, but also to promote the film experience as a moment of reflection, debate, and critical exchange. To this end, they organize workshops to train community organizers that cover a range of issues including how to promote screenings, how to use screenings as a means to discuss and debate topics of importance to the community, how to develop critical media literacy skills, and more. The outside funding they have received has helped to cover the costs of buying projection equipment, organizing initial screenings, and running workshops.
Another major component of the project relates to their dedication to expanding their catalogue of films for distribution and to working to develop “kits” that package groups of films together. Each “kit” includes one short, one feature, one documentary, and one film for children. It is accompanied by a copy of their magazine Nuestro Cine (Our Cinema) with information about the films, a guide to promoting the screenings, and a screening license. By 2007 they had developed seven “kits” and had over sixty films for digital distribution. The array of films available varies from gritty documentaries to more mainstream-style features like those of Francisco Lombardi, but the common thread that links all of these films is that they each exemplify their goal of “cine latino para gente latina” (Latin American film for the Latin American people). “El Grupo Chaski defiende desde sus inicios, una actitud y una metodología ante un cine responsable, inmerso en lo cotidiano, con personajes auténticos y con la experiencia social compartida de todos los días. Es allí donde se encuentra las bases de sus conceptos, fundados en la expresión de lo real, lo auténtico, lo social.”31 (Since its founding Grupo Chaski has maintained an attitude and a methodology of responsible cinema, one that is immersed in the everyday, that has authentic characters and that reflects the shared social experience of daily life. Our work is based on an expression of the real, the authentic, and the social.)
In some ways globalization has had an ironic effect on the success of Chaski. After over twenty years of working to reach a Peruvian audience by the turn of the twenty-first century the possibilities for alternative filmmaking seemed grimmer than ever. When Chaski began the microcines project there were only thirty-five movie theaters in the country and the experience of watching films on the big screen was reserved for a small minority of the population. But just as globalization has meant the homogenizing of media culture, it has also brought technological innovation that has opened a space for alternative media access. Digital technologies and flexible distribution rights have allowed Chaski to match in numbers the exhibition venues (but not yet the screens) of commercial theaters. Chaski currently supports thirty-five microcines throughout Peru and six more in Latin America. The microcines project has proven that it is possible to circumvent the centralization of media access, creating a true alternative to the neoliberal model. The microcines project has also considerably expanded the local participation of communities, who now take an active role in their film experience from the moment of promotion. Moreover, the considerable exposure that Chaski has on the Internet via their own website, on video sites like YouTube and Daily Motion, and through bloggers and Peruvian film sites, further indicates the way that their project has benefited by the development of internet technologies that were unavailable to them in the 1980s.32
In the context of this resurgence, Legaspi, who was teaching a course on documentary at the Pontificia Católica Universidad de Perú, had asked all of his students to bring in a documentary to analyze. One student brought in an early Chaski documentary short that Legaspi had directed entitled Encuentro de hombrecitos (Encounter with Little Men, 1988). What struck Legaspi during the post-screening conversation with students was the fact that rather than discuss the techniques used in making the documentary, the class’s focus was on what had become of the little boys.
Proving to a certain extent the success of Chaski’s aesthetic commitment to using film as a medium through which Peruvians could connect with Peruvians, the students were immediately engaged with the people on the screen rather than mesmerized by the filmmaking apparatus. After the class Legaspi began talking about trying to find the boys, who would be in their thirties, and shooting a documentary about how their lives had changed. Once they had found the boys, Legaspi was intrigued by the fact that one of them—El Gringo—had remained in the Lima district, Agustino, all of his life, whereas the other—El Negro—had traveled extensively both outside of and within Peru. Contrasting the two ways that the boys had lived over the past twenty years with the dreams they had had as young boys, Legaspi imagined Sueños Lejanos as a documentary that would trace the changes in their personal lives and in Peruvian society. Mixing footage from the original documentary, especially the scene where each boy describes his dreams for the future, with archival footage of historical events during those years, Legaspi’s goal was to create “ventanas a la memoria”33 (windows to memory). And, in keeping with Chaski’s aesthetics, these memories both reinforce the sense that the boys are representative of a larger social group at the same time that they expose their individual identities and the different paths their lives have taken. Many of the shots are taken from moving buses or taxis that are meant to capture the protagonists’ point of view as they are looking out at the Peruvian landscape, indicating, like the walking shots of Gregorio and Juliana, the ways that the majority of Peruvians engage in daily displacements that are both forced and willful.
The project received funding through an award by CONACINE, the Peruvian national film board, in 2006 and was released in the fall of 2007.34 Shortly after its first screenings in Peru, it was screened at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam, one of the biggest and most important festivals of its kind in the world. Most importantly, the film had the benefit of the circuits of Chaski’s distribution. Whereas the commercial venues for films such as these will always be a struggle, one site of exhibition is guaranteed: the microcines. As a film that promotes reflection on the process of making documentaries about Peru’s marginalized class and that reflects on the film project of Chaski, the ultimate triumph of Sueños lejanos will be the way it offers local Peruvian audiences yet another opportunity to use the film experience as a means to engage in recognition, reflection, and critique.
Notes
1. Much of the analysis of Chaski’s film collective in this chapter draws on my essay, McClennen, 2008.
2. Carpio, 1990, p. 6.
3. Ibid., p. 2.
4. All translations are mine.
5. For more on these issues see Polar, 1994, and Starn, 1995.
6. Espinoza died of a heart attack on July 21, 2002, while filming the last scenes of a documentary on the role of African descendents in Peru. Titled El Quinto Suyo (Their Fifth One), the film references the Incan empire’s division into four geographic and political regions. The film’s goal is to add a fifth region to this story, one “en el que los Afroperuanos nos incluimos como parte de la historia del Perú, porque nosotros … también tenemos una historia que contar” (in which Afro-Peruvians include ourselves in the history of Peru because we … also have a story to tell; see http://www.cimarrones-peru.org/video.htm).
7. Barea has continued to be an active feminist filmmaker and has worked with Women Make Movies. In 1989, she co-founded the women’s film group WARMI Cine y Video, with which she produces and directs documentaries. Her films include Andahuaylas—suenen las campanas (1987), Porcon (1989/1992), Porque quería estudiar (1990), Barro y Bambu (1991), Antuca (1992), and Hijas de la guerra (Daughters of War, 1998).
8. Martín-Barbero, 1987, p. 198.
9. Quoted in Martín-Barbero, 1987, p. 198.
10. Hegemony and subalternity are concepts that flow throughout Chaski’s texts.
11. Grupo Chaski, 1986, p. 3.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Terms like “reality” may be out of fashion in some circles today, but it is important to note that for Chaski the capturing of reality has been an essential part of their effort. Given the distortions emanating from official discourse and the mass media, they feel a tremendous need to correct the prevalence of these misrepresentations with versions of the practical details of everyday life of the marginalized majority. In the struggle for representational politics, Chaski has viewed their work as both a corrective to official distortions and as a revelation to social sectors that only appear on screen as caricatures or stereotypes.
15. Grupo Chaski, 1986, p. 4.
16. For a list of their current sources of support, see http://www.grupochaski.org/index.php?id=581,0,0,1,0,0/.
17. It may not seem immediately obvious why antipiracy struggles would be important to Chaski, but independent local filmmakers can be even more vulnerable to pirating than major studio productions that can earn revenue in a variety of ways. Chaski has been committed to struggling for antipiracy because they feel that it is an important way to make smaller budget projects viable.
18. Martín-Barbero, 1987, p. 208.
19. Whereas this term does not appear directly in their work, they repeatedly emphasize the theme of survival as central to their project. One of their most popular series of documentaries is entitled “retratos de sobrevivencia” (portraits of survival). It would be interesting to consider Chaski’s aesthetic of survival in relation to Glauber Rocha’s aesthetic of hunger.
20. Both of these terms appear in various Chaski documents. My analysis will reflect their version of these concepts and elaborate on them as well.
21. Given their budget it is likely these are actually shot from apartment rooftops, balconies, etc.
22. Chaski Group, 1989, p. 2.
23. García Canclini, 2001, p. 13.
24. In an intertext with these scenes their new documentary Sueños lejanos opens with a scene where two men watch a documentary of themselves as boys that Chaski shot in the 1980s called Encuentro de hombrecitos (Encounter with Little Men).
25. Martín-Barbero, 1987, p. 187.
26. Bedoya, 1992, p. 278.
27. “Información de Microcines.”
28. García Canclini, 2001, p. 99.
29. Reategui, 2007, p. 6.
30. Ibid., p. 16.
31. Ibid., p. 10.
32. See, for example, the site for Cinencuentro (Filmencounter) (http://www.cinencuentro.com/) and the blog for the independent movie house, the Cinematografo, in the Barranco district of Lima (http://elcinematografode-barranco.blogspot.com/), both of which regularly cover the activities of Chaski. There is a two-part interview with Alejandro Legaspi posted by Cinencuentro on the Daily Motion site (http://www.dailymotion.com/videos/rel-evance/search/alejandro+legaspi/1). View their promotional video about the microcines project here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX2ErN5dqLs.
33. Legaspi, 2005, p. 4.
34. Information available in promotional materials.
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