From parents to children

by a genealogical reading of Colombian cinema

Abstract

In the Colombian cinema historiography, a lineal vision is recurrent: silent cinema, 40’s, political cinema emergence, Company for the Cinematographic Promotion (Focine) and Law of Cinema (Law 814 of 2003). This starting point hides a form of teleology, a certain idea of progress and an unconscious desire to erase traces: to kill the father by denying it. This paper, based on three specific cases, develops a historiographical reading that is based on the biological, but also cultural genealogy notion, in order to consider the study of certain families and familiarities that have occurred in Colombian cinema. According to this hypothesis, there have been exercises of symbolic appropriation, as well as notions of continuity and empathy that are interesting. In the first case, the position of Víctor Gaviria before the pioneering work of the Spanish José María Arzuaga is analyzed, as a very specific case of a director who relies on another previous director, and who voluntarily and consciously registers himself in a tradition. The second case focuses on the notion of tropical gothic, probably prefigured by Enrique Grau’s María (1966), consolidated by the cinema of Carlos Mayolo and Luis Ospina, and recently revisited by some directors (including Rubén Mendoza and Iván Wild). In the third case is located El río de las tumbas as founder of some tropes that return in contemporary titles (Perro come perro, Todos tus muertos, El silencio del río). This paper intends to understand the way in which these relations of kinship and this inescapable anguish of influences have worked in Colombian cinema.