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Identifies and analyzes the emergence of a new genre of hybrid, poetic films in Latin American cinema.
Poetic Cinema highlights a new trend in Latin American cinema—the rise of hybrid poetic documentaries that emphasize aesthetic, visual, and sonic experimentation and blur the distinction between documentaries and art films or auteur cinema. To illuminate this trend, Cynthia M. Tompkins juxtaposes a series of documentaries and art films produced in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, and El Salvador between 2007 and 2021. Weaving together detailed formal analysis and a wide range of film theory, Tompkins draws out their shared poetic features as well as their similarities with French poetic realism, Italian neorealism, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Cinema of Poetry, the global movement of slow and minimalist cinema, and other traditions. Latin American films often blend documentary and fiction in their portrayal of social and political issues. Poetic Cinema shows that today’s hybridity goes further, rendering poetic documentaries nearly indistinguishable from art cinema in ways that reflect the heterogeneous origins of film in the region and worldwide.
"Poetic Cinema makes a major and timely contribution to film studies. Tracing a line from documentarians such as Prividera, Arteaga, Huezo, Comedi, Atehortúa, and Encina to works by Cozarinsky, Fontán, and Pereda, Tompkins argues that the poetic mode of representing reality—through fragments, impressions, inconsistencies, and loose associations—operates across both documentary and fiction. This poetic mode emphasizes tone and affect, expressing a sense of being 'in between' genres, identities, and temporalities while embracing ambiguity. Reading these films as artistic responses to historical trauma and ongoing systemic violence, Tompkins suggests that their shared aim is not to explain or resolve, but rather to reflect complex and often unresolved realities, generate alternative ways of knowing, and foster forms of community and shared memory." — Ana Forcinito, author of Hearing with Your Eyes: Women, Visions, and Voices in Argentine Cinema
Cynthia M. Tompkins is Professor of Spanish at Arizona State University. She is the author of Affectual Erasure: Representations of Indigenous Peoples in Argentine Cinema, also from SUNY Press, and Experimental Latin American Cinema: History and Aesthetics.