Film & Literature: Crash Course Latin American Literature #12

0:00 In 1930s Armpina, a young boy grew up going to his local movie theater,

0:04 sitting in the same seat five nights a week for 10 years.

0:09 It was there in front of the silver screen from a seat perfectly

0:13 shaped his bumpies that he fell in love with the glamour of it all.

0:17 And do you know who that little boy turned out to be?

0:20 Ricky Martin.

0:21 Okay, fine.

0:22 The boy turned out to be a beloved novelist.

0:24 I was just making sure you were paying attention.

0:26 Hi, I'm Kurly Velasquez and this is Crash Course Latin American Literature.

0:35 Does art imitate life or does life imitate art?

0:39 These are some of my favorite questions

0:41 because there's no one way to answer them.

0:44 Art and life imitate each other in countless ways

0:48 that span the entire globe and all of human history.

0:51 And literature is no exception.

0:54 It's influenced by history, politics, science, even other kinds of art.

0:59 And on the flip side, literature influences life and culture right back.

1:04 So today, we'll zoom in and look at one very special relationship,

1:08 the one between film and literature.

1:11 You've probably seen your share of booktoscreen adaptations,

1:14 the good, the bad, and the ugly.

1:16 But it's not a one-way street.

1:18 What's often considered far less is the way that movies show up in books.

1:23 Which brings me back to that little boy in the theater.

1:25 His name was Manuel Fuig and he went on to become

1:28 a huge name in Latin American literature after his filmmaking career flopped.

1:33 But despite switching from film to books,

1:35 he found a way to meld the two by infusing

1:38 his love for cinema into many of his novels.

1:41 It's time for the curly notes.

1:43 We's novel El Beso de la moer arana the kiss of the spiderw woman is

1:49 set in 1970s Buenos Iris and tells the story of two men sharing a prison

1:54 cell Valentine a political prisoner and Molina

1:58 a gay man arrested for allegedly corrupting a minor and it sort of resembles

2:03 a screenplay in that it's written mostly in dialogue.

2:08 Aside from their dismal situation, the two men don't have much in common.

2:12 So to pass the time, Molina recounts his favorite Hollywood movies to Valentine.

2:17 And like a movie cuts between scenes,

2:19 Vue weaves these stories with scenes of the men's

2:22 daily lives in prison and their growing closeness.

2:26 For Molina and Valentine, films become an escape from their confinement.

2:30 And Fig really believed in this ability of films to help us transcend reality.

2:35 He told a New York Times reporter that movies help you to not go crazy.

2:40 You see another way of life.

2:42 It doesn't matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony.

2:46 It helped you hope.

2:47 And he was speaking from experience.

2:50 Like Molina Pig was a gay man who turned to movies

2:53 for inspiration and relief from his homophobic upbringing and culture.

2:58 As a child, he dressed up as the Hollywood starlets he adored,

3:01 an activity his father punished him for.

3:04 But for Pig, movies and novels were about even more than escapism.

3:09 They were also about change.

3:11 Real social change in the real world.

3:14 Kiss of the Spiderwoman was published in 1976,

3:18 the same year that he left Argentina in exile, and it was immediately censored

3:23 by the military dictatorship it boldly critiqued.

3:26 The Uruguan American author Go de Robertis

3:29 writes that Kiss of the Spiderwoman was

3:32 the first Latin American novel to directly link

3:34 political liberation with the dignity of queer love.

3:38 Two men in a room talking to each other becomes a microcosm of a dialogue

3:43 that the culture desperately needs to have

3:45 with itself without which no one will be free.

3:49 And to tie it all in a bow,

3:50 Kiss of the Spiderwoman has been adapted to film twice.

3:54 And total humble brag, my friend Tonatio is in the remake with JLo.

3:58 But Fig was far from the only Latin

4:00 American author to take meaning and inspiration from movies.

4:04 In fact, Chilean writers Alberto Fugette and Serio Gomez started

4:08 a whole pop culture inspired literary movement in the '9s.

4:13 The story behind it, it's brilliant, but it's also petty.

4:16 My favorite combination.

4:18 Back in the 1970s, a genre called magical

4:20 realism put Latin American literature on the map.

4:23 Readers around the world and the publishing gatekeepers who decided

4:27 which books would get translated and sold in their countries couldn't

4:31 get enough of books like 100 Years of Solitude and the way

4:34 that Gabrielle Garcia Marquez infused the ordinary with the magical.

4:39 But by the 1990s, the magical realism

4:41 label was weighing heavily on Latin American writers.

4:44 It painted only one image of Latin America

4:48 and it was how they were all expected to write.

4:51 Fugette ran into this conflict headon.

4:53 As the story goes, he received a pretty brutal rejection from a US

4:58 editor who dismissed his work because it didn't engage with magical realism.

5:02 Shunned Marquez and challenged the idea that in Latin American literature,

5:08 everyone wears sombos and lives in trees.

5:11 Forget words, not mine.

5:12 Pretty infuriating, right?

5:14 It's enough to make you want to start

5:15 a whole new literary movement as petty revenge.

5:19 It all kicked off with a short story anthology

5:21 that Fugette and Gomez published in 1996 named Makondo,

5:26 which featured not a drop of magical realism.

5:30 Mondo, which became the name of a literary movement,

5:33 was a reaction to the assumption that Latin

5:35 American literature could be boiled down to one thing.

5:39 But it wasn't a mere refusal of what came before them.

5:42 It was an expansion of what Latin American lit could look like.

5:46 Rather than telling stories of yellow flowers raining down from the sky,

5:50 Meondo literature was devoted to exploring gritty modern-day realism

5:54 with pop culture references and hallmarks of the modern urban experience.

5:59 Even the name Meondo is a pun on Garcia Marquez's legendary Mondo,

6:05 the setting of 100 years of solitude.

6:07 Fuget writes, "In Meondo, there's McDonald's, Mac computers,

6:12 and condos." In other words, nothing magical but the stuff of everyday culture.

6:17 And as the poet Beyonce says, the best revenge is your paper.

6:20 The Meondo movement led to some incredible work.

6:24 Like Fugett's 2002 novel, Las Peliculas de Mida, the movies of my life.

6:30 It's written from the point of view of a seismologist Belran Soler

6:35 as he looks back on his life through the lens of movies.

6:38 Fugette divides the middle section of the novel into 50 chapters,

6:42 each dedicated to a specific film and moment in Beltran's youth.

6:46 Dumbo is the backdrop for his fears of maternal abandonment.

6:50 Close Encounters of the Third Kind explores complex feelings towards his father.

6:55 Oliver encompasses the family's struggles with homelessness.

6:59 Be movie disaster films underscore his journey to his chosen profession.

7:04 and Soilent Green is a vehicle for understanding Beltran's

7:08 shock at moving back to Chile from Southern California.

7:13 These cultural touchstones not only help Beltran make sense of his life,

7:17 but they bring us into his world,

7:20 acting as a sort of shortcut to emotional and thematic understanding.

7:24 And for readers like me,

7:26 pop culture references in books can help us relate more deeply to the story.

7:31 Characters who watch the same movies I do feel familiar,

7:34 even if their situations and storylines aren't.

7:36 Like the protagonist of Gladisi's Lee Specctor's novel,

7:39 The Hour of the Star, is obsessed with Marilyn Monroe.

7:43 Kind of like how I'm obsessed with Selena.

7:45 We get each other.

7:46 But like I said at the start, all of this artistic and cultural exchange,

7:50 it doesn't just flow in one direction.

7:52 Books are a huge source of inspiration for filmmakers, too.

7:56 Sometimes indirectly, like how Christopher Nolan cited Jorge Luis Bourhees

8:01 as an inspiration behind his blockbuster film Inception, and sometimes directly,

8:06 like when a filmmaker adapts an author's text for the screen.

8:10 Now, if you've ever found yourself in a heated debate about which did it better,

8:13 the book or the movie, I feel you.

8:16 A bad adaptation of a beloved text is one of my biggest pet peeves.

8:20 But I'm also not a reader who demands word forword faithfulness

8:24 in an adaptation because when you're adapting a written work into a film,

8:28 it's more about capturing a vibe.

8:31 The translator, Ros Schwarz,

8:33 likens it to translating a text from one language to another.

8:37 The goal isn't literal accuracy, it's to distill the spirit of the original.

8:42 Few adaptations are more vibe than blowup.

8:45 Michelangelo Antoni's take on Julio Cortasar's short

8:49 story Las Babas del Diablo, the devil's drool.

8:52 It's set in the swinging London of the 1960s and follows

8:56 a fashion photographer named Thomas who maybe catches a crime on camera.

9:01 And a lot changed in the move from page to screen.

9:04 In Kortasar's story, the protagonist is named Michelle and he's

9:08 an amateur photographer and translator in Paris, a lot like Kortasar himself.

9:14 and what he accidentally captures on camera is a much different act.

9:18 But at their core, both stories

9:20 are exploring the photographers's relationship with reality.

9:23 As one film critic put it, the scenes that appear in the movie

9:27 but not the book further entrenched Cortasada's ideas, but with Antoni's flare.

9:33 When Gortasard saw blow up for himself,

9:36 he said he had the feeling that Antoni was winking

9:38 at me and that we were meeting above or below our differences.

9:43 Of course, Gortasad's story is far from the only

9:46 work of Latin American literature that scored a famous adaptation.

9:50 Tons of the novels we've talked about in this series have their own,

9:54 like in The Time of the Butterflies,

9:57 100 Years of Solitude, The House of the Spirits, and Feverdream.

10:02 So, keep your popcorn buttered for Latin American Movie Night.

10:05 Literature, like all art, reflects our culture back at us,

10:08 but it also helps us make new culture.

10:10 The stories around us help us understand,

10:13 process, critique, and even escape from our realities.

10:17 But they also help us understand ourselves,

10:19 who we are now, and who we might someday be.

10:22 Next time, we'll wrap up the series

10:24 by exploring how literature creates community.

10:26 From writers to translators to readers like you.

10:30 See you then.

10:31 Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Latin American Literature,

10:34 which was filmed at the Carlos Hernandez Studio in Indianapolis

10:38 and was made with the help of all these movie goers.

10:41 If you want to keep Crash Course free for everyone forever,

10:44 you can join our community on Patreon.

10:46 Oh, and if you're interested in learning about

10:48 some of the topics covered in this episode,

10:50 we pulled together a playlist you can dig into.