4.14.2006
1. Introduction
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“Condors are not buried every day.” That’s the title of a Colombian film produced in the mid 1980s. That film was also one of the first Colombian movies I consciously watched because of its national origin. At the time, of course, I was expecting it to be as fun as a Hollywood Star-Wars or a Rocky 1-2-3, but it wasn’t. It was slow and dark and too boring for a middle-class teenager from a third world country. It was about “El Condor,” a peasant leader of the 1940s – a period in the history of Colombia ironically, but also realistically, called “La Violencia.” El Condor was ideologically linked – by family tradition – to one of the two national political parties. He operated for years, before being killed, as a violent political vigilante in different rural areas. The movie was a cinematic attempt to explain some of the conditions that, latter on – in the 1950s – triggered the rise of the Colombian leftist guerrillas and a never ending process of political and social violence that by the late 90s, and already expanded by drug trafficking and privately funded right wing paramilitary groups, would be causing, every year, 20,000 or more violent deaths across the country.
How did they manage to produce it? Where they expecting it to be successful in terms of audience attendance? What kind of impact were they expecting from the film? These questions have to do with the subject of National Film Industries and their thematic and economic struggles to exist. These struggles are formed through social processes which obey the desires and actions of groups of individuals that are interested in film. These individuals might be policymakers or filmmakers, critics or audiences, sometimes a combination of all these roles. Their agency and interaction with each other, their inter-related identities and interests, the structural restrictions they face, are the factors that shape the few or many films they attempt, and sometimes succeed, to make and show, a set of films created and forgotten in time, a set of films that by different accounts and arguments are linked to certain nation states and therefore constitute what is called a National Film Industry.
These challenges to create, maintain and expand a National Film Industry are the subject of interest of the present research. Understanding the processes behind National Film Industries is important for both economic and cultural reasons, and useful for people involved in different Cultural Industries, the audiovisual sector, cultural policymaking, and social and academic research on related fields.
. ¶ 9:28 PM
“Condors are not buried every day.” That’s the title of a Colombian film produced in the mid 1980s. That film was also one of the first Colombian movies I consciously watched because of its national origin. At the time, of course, I was expecting it to be as fun as a Hollywood Star-Wars or a Rocky 1-2-3, but it wasn’t. It was slow and dark and too boring for a middle-class teenager from a third world country. It was about “El Condor,” a peasant leader of the 1940s – a period in the history of Colombia ironically, but also realistically, called “La Violencia.” El Condor was ideologically linked – by family tradition – to one of the two national political parties. He operated for years, before being killed, as a violent political vigilante in different rural areas. The movie was a cinematic attempt to explain some of the conditions that, latter on – in the 1950s – triggered the rise of the Colombian leftist guerrillas and a never ending process of political and social violence that by the late 90s, and already expanded by drug trafficking and privately funded right wing paramilitary groups, would be causing, every year, 20,000 or more violent deaths across the country.
How did they manage to produce it? Where they expecting it to be successful in terms of audience attendance? What kind of impact were they expecting from the film? These questions have to do with the subject of National Film Industries and their thematic and economic struggles to exist. These struggles are formed through social processes which obey the desires and actions of groups of individuals that are interested in film. These individuals might be policymakers or filmmakers, critics or audiences, sometimes a combination of all these roles. Their agency and interaction with each other, their inter-related identities and interests, the structural restrictions they face, are the factors that shape the few or many films they attempt, and sometimes succeed, to make and show, a set of films created and forgotten in time, a set of films that by different accounts and arguments are linked to certain nation states and therefore constitute what is called a National Film Industry.
These challenges to create, maintain and expand a National Film Industry are the subject of interest of the present research. Understanding the processes behind National Film Industries is important for both economic and cultural reasons, and useful for people involved in different Cultural Industries, the audiovisual sector, cultural policymaking, and social and academic research on related fields.
. ¶ 9:28 PM
