Available From UC Press

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.

Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez is Professor and Chair of the Spanish Department at Amherst College. The author of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea: The Dialectics of a Filmmaker, he has published extensively on Latin American cinema in leading academic journals.

"An ambitious and accomplished book by a serious scholar who devoted a decade to the close reading of more than fifty films from different countries, thereby giving full sense to the term Latin American cinema. Starting with the silent era and finishing with the emergence of filmmaking by women directors, Paul Schroeder Rodríguez maps out an important artistic expression that is national, regional, and global at the same time."—Jorge Ruffinelli, Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Stanford University

"A cogently written history eloquently illustrated with case examples of various films in each period."—Tamara L. Falicov, author of The Cinematic Tango: Contemporary Argentine Film 

"Schroeder Rodríguez’s comparative framework is an important contribution to the study of Latin American cinema, global cinema, and Latin American history. Read against key discourses of modernity in Latin America and nascent and industrial histories of the cinema, the work reveals that Latin American cinema has always been part of global cinematic flows."—Cristina Venegas, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara