Audiovisual Educational Practices in Latin America’s Peripheries

Abstract

When I first conceptualized this study, I called it “Community Audiovisual Production.” Some of the experiences that I refer to, however, are not necessarily communitarian, although many are. I have chosen the word “peripheries” because it refers not only to marginalized communities, like favelas,¹ on which much of my research focuses, but also to experiences that are not dominant or central in the sense of commanding large-scale resources, venues, contacts, policies (both explicit and implicit), the law, and often coercion. This is the primary sense in which I am using this term, for there is nothing essentially peripheral about the diverse experiences that I will speak about, especially not to the protagonists of these experiences, who reject the idea that they are somehow lesser because they do not inhabit or aspire to the current professional-industrial mainstream. Moreover, these diverse protagonists increasingly have the sense that they form part of an emergent plurality. It could be said that these peripheral practices constitute an emergent field of audiovisual production that challenges and reformulates the dominant field, composed largely of educated, professional middle-class filmmakers and producers who see the narrative feature film as the most valued kind of audiovisual product and the movie house as the appropriate venue for cinematic experience. The field of peripheral audiovisual production, while not neglecting these criteria, nevertheless prioritizes other practices and formats such as collaborative production, documentaries, shorts, activist video, and so on; circulation in community settings, informal markets, public TV, and Internet portals and sites like YouTube and Vimeo, and so on; and education in community workshops, through viewership and discussion in local settings, civic organizations, and cineclub networks, all of which generate new kinds of cinephilia.