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Cinema and interculturality: film archives,
cultural diversity, film forms, and Amerindian
perspectivism in Ecuador1

Jorge Flores Velasco

Universidad Nueva Sorbona Paris 3
jorgefloresvelasco@gmail.com

Just two years ago I had the opportunity to do a research at the National
Cinematheque of the House of Ecuadorian Culture, in Quito, where are all the public
archives of moving images of Ecuador. The objective of the research was to make an
exhaustive search of Ecuadorian political cinema, more specifically to find films that
discuss the construction of the different national cultural identities, which conform the
plurinational and intercultural Ecuadorian State since 2008 (two thousand and eight).
The compilation of this corpus was necessary to develop my doctoral thesis project
entitled: Representations of national identities in Ecuador (1963-1998) since nineteen
sixty three to nineteen ninety-eight.

When I start my work at the Cinematheque, I found to my surprise that the

archive was being reclassified through a new software database in which new films
were available. The new films were often classified in film reels or videotapes that
included other unclassified movies. These films, produced in the late eighties and
nineties, showed the Amerindian peoples and other minority groups in full political
action, representations that have never been done before, with some exceptions to be
discussed here. These films showed the political empowerment of historically
exploited and excluded cultural and social groups, through the emergence of cultural
diversity in the film frame itself. During the nineties, cinema was also a field of
political struggle. First, political cinema was fighting the right wing parties,

1Jorge Flores Velasco, Cinema and interculturality: film archives, cultural diversity, film forms, and
Amerindian perspectivism in Ecuador, presented at the European Network for Cinema and Media
Studies (NECS): Archive of/for the future, d, Poland, 2015, pp. 19.

1
documenting this struggle. Second, political cinema was fighting against the
hegemonic representations of the political power. Finally, it was revisiting and
reliving the historic struggles of the Amerindian cultures and social movements in
Ecuador.

The emergence of cultural diversity in Ecuador is marked by a landmark event

that was the turning point of a new era of the Ecuadorian political scene, in which
traditional political parties were forced to give way space to social movements. The
Inti Raymi Uprising of 1990 (nineteen nineties) launched hundreds of thousands of
Amerindians from all parts of the country to the capital. It was the moment of
affirmation of this new period.

The entire exploited and excluded social groups from Ecuador struggle
together in the Inti Raymi movement for the first time in the history of the country.
Native Americans, African-americans, other ethnic minorities, leftist parties
(communist and socialist), non-governmental leftist organizations, trade unions,
student groups and members of the Theology of Liberation come together under the
banner of the Amerindian fight for the land rights. This movement is a continuation of
the historical seeking of the Latin America identity that began in the 20s inspired by
the Mexican Revolution (1910) and that was revived in the sixties in the context of
the Cuban Revolution and later in the seventies in the frame of the African Liberation
Wars. This leftist tradition fighting for cultural independence in Latino America shift
in this period from the idea of one culture to that of cultural diversity. The seeking of
Latin America identity based in cultural miscegenation was used to create artificial
national identities, which failed in certain countries during the nineties. In Ecuador, as
in Bolivia too, the identity crisis was generated by the resistance of the indigenous
cultures and the expansion of the Amerindian struggle to other social groups as a new
way to fight imperialism, the hegemonic Western culture and neoliberal policies.

The revival of the struggle for cultural diversity in Ecuador started in the 70s,
during a period of military dictatorships. The culture policies of the military were
oriented to the homogenisation of the population. A process of westernization of the
population via the exaltation of the miscegenation theory of the Ecuadorian Socialist

2
intellectual Benjamin Carrion entitled the little nation was established. The little
nation theory claims for the separation of the social dichotomy between white and
mestizo / Indio people in order to create a new social classification which includes the
mestizo in the white imaginary and relegates Amerindian culture to the past and
thus to a national imaginary. This new social classification was implemented by a
proceeding known as population bleaching, which consisted to force the mestizo and
Amerindian culture to accept the challenges of modernity and to become white. In
this process, cinema was instrumentalized to transmit the values of the new white
mestizo nation. Newsreel and documentaries played an important role in this process.
They were screened in cinema theatres before the Mexican and American films that
also reinforced the western way of life.

Fuera de aqu, Llocsi Caimanta ! (Out of here, 1977) by Jorge Sanjins

In response to the cultural policies of the dictatorship, a revolutionary

counterculture grew in the big cities, mainly dedicated to literature and painting. This
movement produced two films during this period: Quien mueve las manos (1975) by
frente nacional and Fuera de aqu, Llocsi Caimanta ! (Out of here, 1977) by Jorge

3
Sanjins and UKAMAU Group. These films make part of the New Latin American
Cinema movement and represent cinematic practices of decolonization of gaze, which
were lost in the eighties and nineties in the cinematic forms of the Ecuadorian
counterculture.

Llocsi Caimanta, Fuera de Aqu! (1977) is the first Ecuadorian experience of

engaged cinema. At the same time, it is the first film that confirms the existence of a
counterculture during the dictatorship period. Therefore, it testifies the survival of
cultural diversity in the country. It is also a prefiguration of the Ecuadorian political
scene of the nineties. In Llocsi..., there are two main narratives lines: one that is
closer to documentary and other that is closer to fiction, in which the plot of the film
intersects with the political reality of indigenous communities and urban leftists.
Llocsi... tells the story of an Amerindian community in the Ecuadorian Andes facing a
land dispute with the representatives of a mineral exploitation company. In the plot,
American evangelists preachers try to influence the decisions of the community. In
the end, the army arrives and commits a massacre. Members of the Amerindian
community played the main roles, while urban leftists and foreign anthropologists
and sociologists engaged in the Amerindian struggle played all the antagonist rolls.
The film allows us to reconstruct a subversive political scenario, which also rends
visible the survival of cultural diversity in Ecuador during the dictatorship. Llocsi
Caimanta! documents and influences reality. Three million people watched the film of
a total of eight million habitants in Ecuador. This film, which exemplifies Sanjins
theory and practice of cinema with the people, certainly influenced the uprisings and
political actions that would lead Ecuador to become a multiethnic and multicultural
State by the end of the eighties.

The 80s began with the murder of the first president of the return to the
democracy, Jaime Rolds, in a context of international conspiracy, which led the
country to a new collective collapse. In the middle of the decade, the State began to
fund a program to patronize the Indigenism in documentary. These films made by
mestizos in the Amerindian communities used cinematic forms of the ethnographic
film, direct cinema and even television reportage in an idyllic and mystifying
representation of Amerindians cultures. From our point of view, this representation

4
system is not comparable to the literary and artistic Indigenism form, from which it
takes its name. The reductive representation of Amerindians and their culture did not
represent the national organization process in this period that would lead to the
creation of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) in
1986 (nineteen eighty six).

The indigenist documentary breaks the tradition of Sanjinss Cinema with the
people and of New Latin American Cinema. The emergence of a new identity
paradigm of diversity is absent and only represented as a symptom of the mestizo
paradigms failure. The evidence that the symptom of the cultural diversity takes over
the national imaginary is represented in the unique famous indigenist documentary,
awarded at Locarno Film Festival, Los hieleros del Chimborazo (1980), by Igor and
Gustavo Guayasamn, in which a drunk Amerindian breaks the idyllic representation
of Amerindian culture, challenging new appropriation processes of the counterculture
film forms by the hegemonic culture. However, the historical rage of Amerindian
people is shown as a brute force and not as a potential force to achieve revolution.

Most of the Ecuadorian Cinematheque lost films, unknown to cinephiles,

academic researchers and the general public in Ecuador, are the videos produced by
political activists of the social movements in the late 80s and during the nineties,
especially by the Confederation of the indigenous nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE)
and urban leftists education organization Center for the popular Education (CEDEP).
These films achieve to represent all the complexity of the identity turn in the country.
The revival of the confluence between the urban leftists intellectuals and the
Amerindian leaders communities is represented in these videos.

I consider social movements film production as instruments of a counter-

history. In these films, Ecuadors historical structure of exploitation and exclusion is
made visible, as well as the complex procedures of construction of national culture.
These collective films represent a moment of historical interpretative turn and of
deferred national mourning. El Levantamiento del Inti Raymi, for instance, represents
the Inti Raymi Uprising two years before the celebration of the five hundred years of
the Spanish Conquest. It constitutes the first cinematic figuration of the genocides

5
trauma in Ecuador. During a period of political change, these new film forms are
deployed in Ecuadorian cinema to express the history and the memory of a
multissecular struggle.

The three moments of the Ecuadorian political cinema clearly represent the
respective identity paradigms in which they were made. The films of the dictatorship
represent the hegemonic culture while Sanjines cinema with the people represents the
resistance to hegemonic culture logic inside the mestizos nation paradigm. The
indigenist documentary made by the mestizo urban cineastes constitutes the turning
point from the mestizo nation paradigm to the emergence of the cultural diversity
paradigm. The video activism of social movements represents the beginning of the
multicultural paradigm of the multicultural and multiethnic state conformed in the
National Constitutional Assembly in 1998 nineteen ninety eight.

It is interesting to note that the concept of diversity continued in constant

reconfiguration since nineteen ninety-eight. Multiculturalism, the theoretical basis of
multicultural and multiethnic state, was questioned as a theory still having a
Eurocentric character. In multiculturalism, Western culture is the hegemonic culture
while the other cultures, although accepted, remain peripheral and subaltern. In this
sense, video activism is a clear indication that, despite the advances that occurred in
cultural studies, eurocentrism still remains in the cinematic forms. The decolonization
of the gaze proposed by Sanjins in Llocsi Caimanta is no longer present in the
indigenist film or in the video activism made by the Amerindians themselves. These
last two movements reflect an almost total influence of television codes moving away
the relationship between politics and aesthetic. The relationship with form and
content, that was the main preoccupation of all the movements that formed the New
Latin American Cinema in the sixties and seventies, was lost in the eighties and
nineties in Ecuador. The homogenization of the population and the hegemony of the
Western culture persisted in the multicultural identity paradigm. The political films
from the eighties and nineties in Ecuador reproduced the cinematic forms of the
hegemonic culture. This colonization of the gaze constitutes a part of a more vast
problematic, the epistemological colonialism.

6
 In 2008, after several years of political instability and social commotion, the
conditions were created to reform the Constitution through a new constituent
assembly in Ecuador. The country redefined institutionally once again the identity
paradigm now as an intercultural and multinational state, which differs from the
previous, because it proposes a nation of nations, where the intercultural space should
be a space of egalitarian relationships between different cultures. This new paradigm
opens new questions and new possibilities of implementation of new cinematic
representations and film theories of cultural diversity. We must examine if cinema
within this new paradigm may ultimately produce a process of decolonization of the
gaze over Ecuadorian society.

So, how were created cinematic practices of

decolonization of the gaze in Ecuador?

One possible answer to this question can arise from three theories of the
South: coloniality of power, a sociological theory by Anibal Quijano, Amerindian
perspectivism, an anthropological theory by Eduardo Viveiros do Castro, and, finally,
the ecology of knowledge, an epistemological theory by Boaventura de Sousa Santos.

The process of building national identity in Ecuador is closely linked to the

structural and discursive formations of the coloniality of power, in other words, of a
kind of power that comes from Hispanic colonialism. The coloniality of power
reproduces hierarchical social relations that retake the social stratification and racial
discrimination of Hispanic colonialisms system. It is an intersubjective construction
of power with an a-historical character. The social stratification divided in races and
crossbreeding levels the distribution of wealth and the accumulation of political
power worldwide. Coloniality of power mainly affects the sphere of knowledge
production, as well as the field of representation and self-representation, reflected on
national identity and the boundaries of class, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality and race,
the same social constructions that obsessed political cinema in Ecuador.

7
 The concept of coloniality of power allows us to understand the continuity
of the epistemological operative system characteristic of the colonial period in the
territory known today as Ecuador and also allows us to put the subject of identity and
race in the middle of the debate about knowledge production and cultural and
aesthetic forms. Hegemonic and subaltern representations of the nation give us the
possibility to study the historicity of cinematic forms of Ecuadorian film archives and
to analyze the colonialism cinematic influences in order to find the accumulation,
ownership, empowerment and appropriation of the cinematic forms in the three
moments that we've reviewed.

The European perspectivism introduces the problem of perspective in

philosophical and scientific knowledge. The Amerindian Perspectivism proposes that
every perception and every thought occurs from a perspective susceptible to change.
Questioning Eurocentrism, it has led to the appearance of multiculturalism. The
investigation of the Amerindian perspectivism revealed that the view of the Western
perspectivism still requires the dichotomy nature / culture in order to classify the
social subjects, in which the human body is universal, always the same, and the
culture is particular. On the other hand, in some Native American culture societies, the
culture is constant or universal and the body is diverse. The Amerindian perspectivism
theory, and its animism character, puts on hold traditional Western dichotomies such
as nature / culture, and shows that the objectivity of science is nothing more than a
possible form of organization and systematization of reality, which must cease to be
the privileged terrain of knowledge. This theory also puts on hold the objectivity of
the gaze of the cinematic apparatus and the objectivity of representation systems such
as documentary films. The Amerindian perspectivism puts at the center of the
representation of interculturality a cinema that allows intersections between the
narrative, documentary, experimental films, and so on. The representation of the
relationship between the subject who films and the object that is filmed is the main
problem to reach a possible aesthetic of interculturality.

Finally, the ecology of knowledge proposed the abolition of abyssal thinking,

which corresponds to a system of visibility and invisibility of knowledge based on the
differentiation between the world "on this side of the Equator line" and the world on

8
the other side of the equator line". Boaventura de Sousa Santos proposes an
epistemological practice of constant questioning and not totalizing answers to emerge
a cautious knowledge through a profound exercise of self-reflection. As knowledge,
cinema also crossed over a subjectivation process in the recent decades that enriches
their ability to represent reality. This process has made visible the merging between
fiction, documentary and other cinematic forms, a whole system of privileged
representations of various perspectives about the real. In this way, we defend a
conception of intercultural cinema as intercultural perspectivist representation system
that derives from the ecology of representation. The concept of ecology of knowledge
puts at the center of the problematic the construction of a culture of sharing that may
become possible the coexistence of different cultures, an exchange culture to allow
the passages of knowledge and expertise among all cultures. These archives, the
archives of the counterculture, the Indigenist films and especially the more than 500
films produced by the social movements in the eighties can be re-worked and
reconfigured in light of these theories, seeking new decolonization strategies, in
which the decolonization of the gaze and the refoundation of aesthetics from politics
is one of the biggest cultural challenges of our time.

d, Poland, 18-20 June

Jorge Flores Velasco