THE INTER-AMERICAN DOCUMENTARY

However, if cinema was instrumental to nation building processes for the greater part of the 20th century, it has been equally central to challenging and interrogating those since the onset of what David Harvey has termed the stage of “flexible accumulation” of capital (141-172) and what others call ‘globalization’ or ‘the database society.' In Harvey’s famous formulation, various technical, financial, and institutional innovations have led from mass industrial production to globalized regimes of flexible accumulation. New sectors of production have emerged, including new ways of providing financial services, intensified rates of commercial, technological, and organizational innovation, and above all, new markets that are no longer national in scope. Indeed, in cinema, the co-production of films and documentaries with narratives seeking to address an international audience, while often marketed as ʼnational,' have become more common, since an enlarged market share is in many cases, paradoxically, the only alternative for a national film production to survive. Other productions bypass the national altogether, either by being “internationally packaged … produced by a global network of companies, staffed on short, casualised contracts by a team of workers many of whom as deracinated as [the directors themselves]” (Kerr 48-49) or by being concerned with mobility, gender, ethnicity, or class issues that cut across nations. There are also supranational forms of production - such as those funded by the European Union, or aimed at a linguistically determined region such as ‘Hispanic cinema’ or ‘Lusophone cinema.' All this has led some to conclude that “we are witnessing … the emergence of a genuinely transnational communicative space” (Hjort 216). Further, as globalization has brought about uneven development, the various failures of neoliberal capitalism have turned our time into one of disaster and emergency, where the pervasiveness “of poverty and suffering, economic imperialism, endless wars and political crises, the predicaments of migration, refugees, terrorism and insecurity, and religious confrontations” (Demos xvi) have placed the post-Enlightenment paradigms of truth in crisis, thus bringing renewed interest in the potential political use-value of documentary.