La historia en breve

The first in a series, this collection of essays addresses the role of documentary film in negotiations of national identity throughout the Western Hemisphere. Twenty essays by scholars from Latin America, the USA, and Europe analyze narrations of nation in this genre, focusing on documentary film as a political medium, representations of the margins of the nation, postmodern documentary aesthetics, the function of documentaries in terms of cultural memory, and recent revisions of documentary film history. In a concluding section, four renowned filmmakers from Argentina, Ecuador, Mexico, and the USA discuss their own approaches to constructing imagined communities in the practice of documentary filmmaking. This volume contains essays in both English and Spanish.