Movies are meant to be entertaining, but they can also be educational. People are naturally curious to know how much of what they see on their screens might be historically true. In Latin American History at the Movies, experts on Latin America focus on five centuries of history as portrayed in feature films. An introduction on the visual presentation of the past in movies sets the stage for essays that explore sixteen of the best feature films on Latin America made from the 1980s to the present.

Combining history with discussions of dramatic cinema, Based on a True Story: Latin American History at the Movies examines how film has portrayed Latin America from the late fifteenth century to the present. The book opens with an introduction on the visual presentation of the past in the movies, while the rest of the book consists of essays that explore the best feature films on Latin America from the professional historian's perspective.

"For the first time, a distinguished American breaks the "code of silence" as a male incest survivor. In Come Here, Dr. Richard Berendzen courageously speaks out on his childhood sexual abuse, the effects of which, decades later, returned to drive him over the edge." "Richard Berendzen was only eight years old the afternoon his mother called, "Come here," from her bedroom. That innocuous, two-syllable summons marked the beginning of a waking nightmare. During the next three years, Richard became the passion and prey of a woman whose violent mental instability took the form of repeated incestuous assaults on a child who was powerless to resist. Still, when the abuse stopped, Richard found the strength to put it all behind him and get on with his life - or so he thought...." "Not until Dr. Berendzen was in his early fifties did the secret he had so long repressed return to haunt him. An eminent astronomer and academician who had transformed American University in Washington, D.C., from a party school into a first-rate university, he was a devoted husband and family man whose only notable "vice" was workaholism. When his father died and Berendzen returned to his parents' East Dallas house, to the very room where he had been abused, something snapped. The shattering events that ensued are recounted with remarkable candor in Come Here." "Overwhelmed by a flood of forbidden memories and unanswered questions, Dr. Berendzen began making bizarrely suggestive phone calls, which were traced to his office. Forced to resign his post, he entered the renowned Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he was diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and commenced a slow and tortuous recovery process." "Writing with collaborator Laura Palmer, co-author of Elizabeth Glaser's In the Absence of Angels, Richard Berendzen has given us the beautifully composed, personal story of a man of science whom only the restorative power of faith could make whole. For Come Here is, ultimately, a chronicle of hope and renewal, and of the human spirit's boundless ability to heal itself."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Latin American History Goes to the Movies combines the study of the rich history of Latin America with the medium of feature film. In this concise and accessible book, author Stewart Brewer helps readers understand key themes and issues in Latin American history, from pre-Columbian times to the present, by examining how they have been treated in a variety of films. Moving chronologically across Latin American history, and pairing historical background with explorations of selected films, the chapters cover vital topics including the Spanish conquest and colonialism, revolution, religion, women, U.S.-Latin American relations, and more. Through films such as City of God, Frida, and Che, Brewer shows how history is retold, and what that retelling means for public memory. From Apocalypto to Selena, and from Christopher Columbus to the slave trade, Latin American History Goes to the Movies sets the record straight between the realities of history and cinematic depictions, and gives readers a solid foundation for using film to understand the complexities of Latin America’s rich and vibrant history.

This book charts a comparative history of Latin America’s national cinemas through ten chapters that cover every major cinematic period in the region: silent cinema, studio cinema, neorealism and art cinema, the New Latin American Cinema, and contemporary cinema. Schroeder Rodríguez weaves close readings of approximately fifty paradigmatic films into a lucid narrative history that is rigorous in its scholarship and framed by a compelling theorization of the multiple discourses of modernity. The result is an essential guide that promises to transform our understanding of the region’s cultural history in the last hundred years by highlighting how key players such as the church and the state have affected cinema’s unique ability to help shape public discourse and construct modern identities in a region marked by ongoing struggles for social justice and liberation.

This volume explores the ways films made by Latin American directors and/or co-produced in Latin American countries have employed the road movie genre to address the reconfiguration of the geographical, sociopolitical, economic, and cultural landscape of Latin America.

Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema brings together fourteen scholars to analyze Latin American cinema in dialogue with recent theories of posthumanism and ecocriticism. Together they grapple with how Latin American filmmakers have attempted to "push past the human," and destabilize the myth of anthropocentric exceptionalism that has historically been privileged by cinema and has led to the current climate crisis. While some chapters question the very nature of this enterprise—whether cinema should or even could actualize such a maneuver beyond the human—others signal the ways in which the category of the "human" itself is interrogated by Latin American cinema, revealed to be a fiction that excludes more than it unifies. This volume explores how the moving image reinforces or contests the division between human and nonhuman, and troubles the settler epistemic partition of culture and nature that is at the core of the climate crisis. As the first volume to specifically address how such questions are staged by Latin American cinema, this book brings together analysis of films that respond to environmental degradation, as well as those that articulate a posthumanist ethos that blurs the line between species.