Decolonizing the Frame: Indigenous Video in the Andes

Author(s): Freya Schiwy

Source: Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media , SPRING 2003, Vol. 44, No. 1,
Latin American Film and Media (SPRING 2003), pp. 116-132
Published by: Drake Stutesman; Wayne State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41552357

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Wayne State University Press and are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media

This content downloaded from

175.159.181.254 on Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:57:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Decolonizing the Frame:
Indigenous Video
in the Andes
Freya Schiwy

During the presidential elections of June 2002 in Bolivia, the Aymara

Indian Evo Morales, leader of the coca growers in the subtropical region of
the Bolivian Chapare, gained 20% of the national vote. His success height-
ened existing anxiety among the ruling Bolivian elite as well as in the US
embassy over the protests by indigenous movements in the Andean region.
These movements have shaped the recent redefinition of countries like
Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia as 'pluri-cul turai' nations. They also articu-
late positions opposed to neoliberal global politics that have turned multi-
culturalism into a commodity. In March and April of 2000, for instance, sev-
eral highland indigenous communities joined the protests against the
privatization of water in Bolivia and blockaded the principal highways.
In September 2000 the scenario repeated itself, each time with violent
clashes between the indigenous organizations and the Bolivian State. Evo
Morales's electoral gains in 2002 show that the social and economic prob-
lems coming to the forefront in these uprisings are still unresolved. Indig-
enous video production forms part of these movements, sometimes
more and sometimes less closely tied to political indigenous movement
organizations.1
The protests in Latin America are an expression of a renewed struggle
by indigenous organizations against a long colonial history and its current
expression in terms of neoliberal globalization. The movements are orga-
nized locally and have their own particular histories, reaching back to the
moment of conquest. But they are also connected through old and new
technologies. Video technology plays an important part in documenting

Framework Spring 2003 Vol. 44, No. 1, pp. 116-132

Copyright ©2003 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309

This content downloaded from

175.159.181.254 on Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:57:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Decolonizing the Frame

these events but also in maintaining the links between diverse indigenous
communities. Indigenous videos also suggest that the current movements
are not only about territorial claims, environmental pollution and demo-
cratic representation.
Video becomes a crucial technology for the reinvention of indigenous
cultures, directed against the effects of the long-standing discrimination of
indigenous people, languages, medicinal practices, as well as their social
and economic relations. The effect of this colonization takes the form of
overt discrimination but has also produced a 'colonization of the soul'
(Rivera Cusicanqui 1991; 1993): the negative self-image of the colonized
that Frantz Fanon had described in Black skin white masks. For indigenous
movements, Latin America is not post-colonial, despite most of the coun-
tries in the continent gaining independence early in the 19th century. The
legacies and transformations of colonialism have exacerbated the colo-
nization of the mind through the increased pressure to assimilate by ways
of migration, the promises of development, and the spread of literacy pro-
grams. Videomakers are then also involved in what might be called a
'knowledge revolution', an effort at decolonizing the mind, the way indige-
nous peoples think and know, and how they have been represented by the
West.

Audiovisual technology, however, is itself a product of western capital-

ism that has been deeply involved in producing the presumed 'superiority'
or 'decadence', as some might rather put it, of western culture. How can it
then contribute to a decolonization of the mind?
Some academics are optimistic about the potentialities of internet
and video,2 a position that resonates with that of indigenous videomakers
themselves. In opposition to these analyses are those who have argued that
the technologies of capitalism themselves reproduce the dominant order.
With respect to cinema, for instance, Stanley Aronowitz (1979) asserted in
the late seventies that cinema not only mirrors but also reproduces the cap-
italist experience and mode of production. A few years ago the anthropol-
ogist James Weiner (1997) suggested that video, as part of the western soci-
ety of the spectacle could only reproduce the alienation of the West instead
of preserving indigenous cultures. Teresa de Laure tis (1984), following
Laura Mulvey, mapped out the challenges for a feminist cinema to inter-
rupt patriarchal designs coded into the products of cinematic technology
and its reception. Catherine Russel (1999), in turn, explored the difficul-
ties of producing ethnographic film that could break with its own colonial
legacies.
These challenges entail attention to the production of the gaze, that is,
to camera work, editing, and narrativity, to the plotting of protagonists and
the creation of empathy. Hollywood, which, although not the largest pro-
ducer of film, is certainly the most influential, forms the point of reference
for these critiques, just as it did for New Latin American Cinema. The solu-

1 17

This content downloaded from

175.159.181.254 on Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:57:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 44. 1

tion is seen throughout as a conscious subversion of dominant cinemato-

graphic codes. In the 1960s and '70s filmmakers such as Fernando Solanas,
Octavio Ge tino, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Miguel Litin, Fernando Birri, Jorge
Sanjinés and others, who came to be associated with the term New Latin
American Cinema, created not only a counter-aesthetics. These filmmakers
and their production groups also transformed the mode of production of
cinema itself, seeking to develop the collective process of cinematography
into a revolutionary project (Chanan 1983).
Indigenous video shares some of New Latin American Cinema's strate-
gies. However, if the subversion of the dominant codes of cinema depends
on a radical experimentalism with its form, the vast majority of indigenous
videos in Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia are not experimental in this
sense.3 Nevertheless, by analyzing the production process and aesthetics of
indigenous video in Bolivia, I will argue that these videomakers do achieve
a decolonization of audiovisual technology by 'indianizing' the medium. At
the same time, this use of audiovisual technology, usually identified as a
western technology, for the project of decolonization and revalorization of
indigenous social practices and systems of knowledge, suggests reconsider-
ing commonly held notions about orality and literacy, that is, about the
relationship between knowledge and technology.

Ukamau' s Cinema with the People

The Bolivian Ukamau group (directed by Jorge Sanjinés) responded to the
hegemony of Hollywood cinema (a capitalist and imperialist art form, as it
was articulated in the 1960s and '70s) not only by subverting its aesthetics
(e.g. Chanan 1983; Burton 1990). Ukamau also radically altered cinema as
a production practice. It adapted the socialist model of collective produc-
tion to the group's perception of indigenous communities as collectivities
(Sanjinés 1979, 1997).
Sanjinés's account of what went wrong in the filming of one of Uka-
mau's perhaps most famous works, Yawar malíku/ Blood of the Condor (Jorge
Sanjinés, Bolivia, 1969), illuminates part of this problem. Yawar malíku is a
denunciation of the practices of the Peace Core in the Bolivian Andes dur-
ing the 1960s. Ukamau's representation of the Peace Core's sterilization of
indigenous women without their consent (but possibly with the knowledge
of the military government) caused international outrage and led to the
expulsion of the Peace Core from the Andean countries. However, regard-
ing the filming, Sanjinés expressed that the aesthetics of the film (non-
chronological narrative, estrangement effects in the soundtrack, the use of
close-ups) did not correspond to Quechua representational strategies and
could not achieve an indigenous point of view (López 1990). The film may

118

This content downloaded from

175.159.181.254 on Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:57:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Decolonizing the Frame

have managed to bring the problems of indigenous populations closer to a

non-indigenous audience but it did not manage to become a tool for
indigenous communication and for raising political consciousness, even
though the Ukamau group made an effort to show their films in rural com-
munities in the region. Just as serious, however, was the failure of the film-
makers to achieve a true collaboration with the Quechua community where
Yawar malíku was filmed. As they failed to consult the proper authority fig-
ures in the Quechua community the members of the production crew pro-
longed internal colonialism, that is, racial discrimination towards indige-
nous populations.4
After filming Yawar malíku at the end of the 1960s Ukamau significantly
changed both their social and aesthetic cinematic practices. Fundamental
to this change was also an interpretation of the social structures of the
Quechua community that reflected both literary indigenismo s representa-
tion of indigenous collectivities and the romantic desires of the socialist
search for a non-individualist subjectivity. As Sanjinés expressed:

the Indios , because of their social traditions, tend to conceive of themselves as

a group rather than as isolated individuals. Their manner of existence is not
individualist. The individualist is opposed to the other; the Indio , however,
exists only when he is integrated with the rest of the community (Sanjinés
1979, 65, author's translation).

As we will see, indigenous videomakers have a more nuanced take on the

tension between community responsibilities and individualism. If Ukamau
recognized 'the community' as an important reference and socio-political
institution, their role was to be privileged not only in the cooperation
between filmmakers and actors but also in terms of narrative and framing
(62-65) . In films like El coraje del pueblo /Courage of the People (Jorge Sanjinés,
Bolivia, 1971) the cinema crew and 'the people' were seen as equal part-
ners in the elaboration of narratives and dialogues.
This approach led to a transformed aesthetics where close-ups were
avoided. Jorge Sanjinés emphasized that in these films the group preferred
medium close-ups so as not to offer an unnaturally close view of protago-
nists, as well as long shots in order to contextualize individual action
instead of isolating it. At the same time, the Ukamau group believed that
the length of the shots provided the intellectual distance necessary for crit-
ical thinking, both for the spectator and for the collective protagonist at the
center of the screen, now free to act and reinvent (Sanjinés 1979, 64).
Similarly, the narrative focus on individualizing emotionality that had
characterized earlier films like Ukamau (Jorge Sanjinés, Bolivia, 1966) and
Yawar malíku gave way to framing collective revolutionary action and the
construction of epics of resistance to contemporary forms of colonialism.

119

This content downloaded from

175.159.181.254 on Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:57:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 44.1

Sanjinés and the Ukamau group thus saw themselves moving from a cin-
ema for the people to a cinema with the people:

We, the components with film equipment, became the instruments of the
people who were expressing themselves and fighting through our medium!
(Sanjinés 1997, 64).

The Social Practice of Indigenous Video

There are two principal differences between the collective practice of the
Ukamau group and indigenous video productions. Firstly, video produc-
tions are now grounded in the idea of indigenous people taking charge not
only of the dialogue and acting but also of the camera and the production
process itself. Secondly, individuals, not the collective, are in the center of
the frame. That is, the heterogeneous body of documentaries, docudra-
mas, pedagogical narratives, and fiction pieces produced jointly by
CEFREC (Center for Cinematographic Training) and CAIB (Organization
of Indigenous and First Nation Audiovisual Communicators) in Bolivia,
center on the quotidian; their fiction pieces plot individuals into narratives
of suspense that often contain horror and humor and that do not at all shy
away from close-ups.5 Sometimes, as in the video El oro maldito /Cursed Gold
(responsable Marcelino Pinto, produced by CEFREC/ CAIB, Bolivia 1999),
extreme close-ups of the eyes create tension in a way reminiscent of the
framing of Jorge Sanjinés' s early feature Ukamau , as well as of Hollywood
cinema. Before exploring the aesthetics of indigenous video images and
their implications, it is necessary to see what happens to the potential of
film production as a social practice itself.
Similar to the later work of the group Ukamau, and although the frame
does not privilege a collective protagonist, the production of indigenous
video by CEFREC/CAIB in Bolivia is envisioned as a communal effort.6 The
videos usually do not have a 'director' but a responsable , one person who
assumes responsibility for the final cut and is usually also the principal
'scriptwriter'. The process indeed relies minimally on alphabetic literacy
(film scripts can be drawn, or as in the case of Julia Mosúa, conceived of
mentally and memorized.)7 Videomakers like Reynaldo Yujra, Alfredo
Copa, Julia Mosúa, Marcelino Pinto and Faustino Peña have emphasized
on numerous occasions that decisions about the selection of scripts, fram-
ing strategies, soundtrack, and so on, are made collectively.8 In some cases
this collective is restricted to the film crew, made up of the diverse indige-
nous members of CAIB and outside advisors who are often but not always
members of CEFREC or CLACPI (Latin American Council of Indigenous
Film and Video).9 In other cases, as in Desempolvando nuestra historia. /Dust-
ing off our History (responsable Alfredo Copa, Bolivia, 1999), members of the
community itself co-determine the topic and the content of the video.

120

This content downloaded from

175.159.181.254 on Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:57:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Decolonizing the Frame

Sometimes, but again not always, the community is presented with the
video material before the final cut (Mosúa et al. 2000) .
The training workshops offered by CEFREC (as part of the long-term
strategic 'Indigenous National Plan for Audiovisual Communication') are
aimed at providing everyone involved in CAIB with the fundamental skills
in each area of videomaking, from sound and lights to camera and editing.
This also includes acting. The principal actors are part of the CAIB crew,
but the community in which the video is produced participates in the film-
ing and does not receive financial remuneration for the film.
There are thus certain parallels with the production philosophy of New
Latin American Cinema and Ukamau in particular, but the involvement of
indigenous communicators and their communities in videomaking goes
beyond the sporadic, event-centered cooperation of Ukamau's cinemato-
graphic productions, while intellectual agency no longer lies with the van-
guard filmmaker (Sanjinés 1979, 46). 'Critical distance', as a necessary
means of reflection that could be related to strategies of representation, is
discarded, not only philosophically (in the relation between realism and
'objectivity'), but also in terms of the use of frames and the length of shots.
Intellectual agency is transferred explicitly to the communities and to the
process of intercultural communication which video enables and from
which it emerges.
As indigenous movements protest neoliberal policies, videomakers
make an effort to disconnect video from capitalist production systems,
from individual ownership and from commodification. This is not to say
that all indigenous people are against capitalism, nor that indigenous
videomakers eschew the market. Rather, the promises of capitalism and of
indigenous economic traditions such as reciprocal economy ( economía de la
reciprocidad , Rivera Cusicanqui 1996, 168) are at the center of debates, both
on and off screen. The videos themselves are not freely for sale. Prices and
availability depend on the origin of the person purchasing. As CEFREC/
CAIB credit their funding sources, they move away from a socialist logic of
production and consumption.10 Instead CAIB attempts to inscribe video
into reciprocal notions of property and exchange. The financing and dis-
tribution, just like the filming itself, become part of relationships that
include further obligations and responsibilities with the communities, and
sometimes also between academics and videomakers. Since indigenous
videos were sold during the 2002 Eye of the Condor Bolivian Video Tour, these
requirements, however, may have softened.11
One dimension of this effort to adjust capitalist market relations to a
market of reciprocity regards the distribution and ownership of the video
images. In contrast to the Ukamau productions, the property rights to the
images in indigenous videomaking are a highly sensitive and contested ter-
rain. Usually they are considered the property of the community itself.
Alfredo Copa (a Quechua from Potosí) considered the video Desem-

121

This content downloaded from

175.159.181.254 on Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:57:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 44ě 1

polvando /Dusting off'Q be the property of CEFREC/CAIB, obtained on the

grounds of reciprocal relations ( ayni) that affirm his ties with his rural com-
munity of origin. He is required to reciprocate with manual labor (to par-
ticipate in the construction of houses, for instance) as well as in his intel-
lectual capacity. He may be called upon to mediate administrative issues
with the State, to help voice the community's demands in the outside
world, and to continue to make video available for the perceived needs of
the community (Mosúa et al. 2000).
Julia Mosúa from San Francisco de Moxos in the Bolivian Beni insists
that many members of the community who participated in the acting and
oral history gathered for her docufiction Nuestra palabra : historia de San
Francisco de Moxos/ Our Word: History of San Francisco de Moxos {responsable
Julia Mosúa, Bolivia, 1999) regard these images as their property. They view
her travels to film festivals with suspicion. Some community members, but
not all, insistently argue against her or CEFREC's right to sell the videos,
raising the issue of financial reimbursement for their participation in the
filming, or simply denying CEFREC the right to circulate the images
beyond circuits approved by the community (Mosúa et al. 2000). 12
CEFREC/ CLACPI seek to respect these restrictions while building an
archive that documents not only the experiences represented in the videos
but also the process of videomaking and the implementation of the 'Indige-
nous National Plan for Audiovisual Communication' itself. Although many
of these videos are for sale, they are not sold to everyone. The issue of how
the images may be distributed is therefore not completely resolved. The dis-
cussions differ according to indigenous cultural practices in the high and
lowlands, and they will certainly be complicated further now that produc-
tions are selected to be aired on television.
If Solanas and Getino (1973) proposed recuperating costs by entering
their films into commercial viewing contexts (parallel to alternative screen-
ing sites), Ukamau, in contrast, resisted the commodification of their films,
and continues to do so. They can, however, be seen at screenings in Uka-
mau's cinema in La Paz. As indigenous video producers, in Bolivia and
beyond, increasingly seek to make their gaze part of national and interna-
tional vision-scapes, they certainly take advantage of the marketability of
their videos, among indigenous communities worldwide, social activists
and some academics. However, this partial commodification of some
videos cannot be reduced to an easy co-existence with the global capitalist
market. Videomakers might better be understood as using the market and
transforming part of it, even if the multicultural market might be using
them. The logic of profit maximization is held in check, questioned and at
least partially disrupted through the rural circulation plan and the pro-
duction practice itself. If New Latin American Cinema aimed to transform
cinema from an art form of late capitalism into a socialist and revolution-

122

This content downloaded from

175.159.181.254 on Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:57:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Decolonizing the Frame

ary practice, Bolivian videographers are transforming the medium into an

epistemic tool grounded in and reproducing socio-economic relations that
are constructed as alternatives to capitalism as we know it.13

Knowledge and Technology

When Aronowitz (1979) spoke of cinema being the paradigmatic art form
of late capitalism, he was not only referring to production and distribution
processes. His critique implied the very technology itself, the succession of
images in time that replicated and helped to constitute the rhythm of cap-
italist production. That is why the aesthetics themselves had to interrupt
this sensation. Weiner (1997) pronounced a similar judgement about the
possibilities of indigenous video. Since the audiovisual medium constitutes
the western society of the spectacle, its use by indigenous peoples can
only lead to the destruction of their original cultures. That is, it can only
convert societies that are based on 'real' relations, not mediated ones, into
cultures of the simulacrum. No matter how uninformed and crudely eth-
nocentric Weiner's statement was, it resonates with the widely held belief
that the society of visual technology is also the society of literacy and criti-
cal production.
Indigenous video is funded with grants that promote the project in
order to foster multiculturalism. Faustino Peña, an indigenous video-
maker from the tropical Bolivian Moxos who was responsible for the fiction
piece El espíritu de la selva/ Spirit of the Forest (Bolivia, 1998), asserts that the
'Indigenous National Plan' allows for the 'expression of our forms of life
and our culture through video' (Peña, 2000, quoted in CEFREC 2001b).
However, the Bolivian video project from the very beginning has been
framing a concern over 'culture' as a problem of 'knowledge'.14 The use of
video technology by indigenous communicators involves more than a cul-
tural revival. It is an effort at establishing the grounds for a discussion that
would allow indigenous peoples to co-determine the kind of society and
economic order they wish to inhabit. The project involves decolonizing
the mind of indigenous people and mixed-race mestizos or whites alike. It
seeks to unhinge those legacies of colonialism that make it so difficult to
perceive as sustainable knowledge that does not emerge from accredited
research sites.15
It is obvious that Weiner's argument relies on a Utopian western desire,
the need to define an absolute alterity to the West, an oral culture orga-
nized on the basis of ritual. Ritual is here understood as the invocation and
production of immediate social relations instead of a complex semiotic
form that destabilizes the difference between ontology and representation.
Catherine Russel (1999) calls this desire the 'ethnographic pastoral', itself
a result of film as it replicates a temporal lapse between filming and view-

123

This content downloaded from

175.159.181.254 on Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:57:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 44.1

ing. This effect indeed helped to construct the modern sensation of wit-
nessing two different temporalities, one pre-modern and the other devel-
oped. The negation of coevali ty, of living in the time of global capitalism
albeit with different socio-economic consequences, forms part of the teleo-
logical vision of eurocentrism. It erases the intimate dependence of capi-
talism on the societies it has exploited (Coronil 1996; Quijano and Waller-
stein 1992). It proposes that the European model of development is the
only viable one (Mignolo 2000).
Weiner's argument entails at the same time a vindication of critical
thinking as the outcome of critical distance - mediation. Thus the society of
the spectacle is at once the site of western decadence and the site of anthro-
pological criticism, two sides of the same technological coin. The problem
with this notion of critical thinking is that it assumes alphabetic literacy, the
technology of the intellect, as Jack Goody (1977) called it, to create the con-
ditions of reflexive thought that supposedly do not exist in orality, a state
that is seen as prior to the technology of alphabetic literacy. This teleologi-
cal conception provides a grid that allows for the hierarchical ordering of
cultural differences. Thus if video could potentially be perceived as a cul-
tural tool (if it manages to subvert ethnographic cinema's hegemonic
codes) it could not, according to such a logic, be a tool of sustainable knowl-
edge production.
As stated earlier, the majority of indigenous productions are not exper-
imental in Russel or Weiner's sense, but they do claim to be a tool for crit-
ical thinking. The documentaries follow largely conventional formats. Fic-
tion pieces like Qulqi chaliku/The Silver Vest ( responsable Patricio Luna,
Bolivia 1998), El oro maldito or the now famous Qati qati /Whispers of Death
(responsable Reynaldo Yujra, Bolivia, 1999), that have won prizes at interna-
tional indigenous film and video festivals, privilege exemplary individual
protagonists instead of collective ones, who are framed within suspenseful
personalized narratives. The videos contain moments of terror and humor
and make wide use of the close-up. All these are solutions that the anti-
imperial cinema of Ukamau had denounced. However, from these fiction
pieces emerges a subtle transformation of the medium. Indigenous video
indeed decolonizes the frame of knowledge by transforming Hollywood
aesthetics.

4 Indianizing 9 the Gaze

Qulqi and El oro are not representative of Aymara or Quechua culture, in
the sense of constituting some kind of mimesis or reflection of culture as a
given. Instead they form two attempts to articulate the problem of colo-
nization that indigenous communities across Bolivia confront. It is true that
high- and lowland regions or coca growing populations do not respond
identically to the hegemony of the West. However, insofar as the videoproj-

124

This content downloaded from

175.159.181.254 on Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:57:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Decolonizing the Frame

ect is a collective endeavor that brings high- and lowland videomakers

together in the making of each video, the decisions about thematic and aes-
thetic strategies do reflect a pan-indigenous analysis, involving the video-
makers and their diverse communities of origin.
Both Qulqi and El oro criticize behavior that is deviant from traditional
community values. Or perhaps it might be better to say that they affirm the
value of traditions and legends by narrating exemplary stories of misfor-
tune and death.16 Qulqi frames a critique of greed and avarice, employing
a chronological narrative structure and male protagonists to construct val-
ues of social responsibility and reciprocity as indigenous and as opposed to
the individual pursuit of wealth. The video deploys striking camerawork to
reframe the Andean highlands that literature and film had coded as a site
of melancholy, a place of suffering, oppression, and epic struggle. Qulqi
renders instead beautiful landscape and marketplace images and turns the
highlands into a place of critical self-reflection. It deploys an almost touris-
tic videography that introduces the setting slowly, through an ever-closer
approximation that ends with close-ups of the protagonists' faces. The indi-
vidual scenes are linked with iconographie takes, of the landscape, the vil-
lage church, individuals or small groups of people in conversation. These
takes follow each other in rapid succession and maintain a tension between
individual and collective responsibilities.
The use of Aymara and Spanish dialogue and of a soundtrack com-
posed on traditional highland instruments accompanies the creation of
meaning in the images. But even the dialogue functions more like an indi-
cator, a pointer that signals the existence of two languages, Aymara and
Spanish. The target audience might not be fluent in Spanish and might
not speak Aymara at all (but instead a different indigenous language) but
they will recognize and place the sounds geographically and historically.
The video thus creates sound-bites, audio-icons of a particular highland
context in order to mark a contribution to a much wider inter-indigenous
debate.

Instead of smoothly incorporating itself into the neoliberal logic of cul-

ture as folkloric difference, this space is claimed in order to articulate a dis-
course that is critical of capitalism, in this case represented on screen as Sat-
uco's (Reynaldo Yujra) and Cihaucollo's (Jesús Tapia) desire for the
accumulation of money and livestock. To be sure, market relations are
framed as an integral part of community life, and they do not exclude tech-
nological improvements. The critique is directed against a capitalist drive
for accumulation. Colonialism and knowledge are here negotiated at the
level of the quotidian. They have become a problem within the communi-
ties themselves, created by external forces that have now resulted in inter-
nal pressures to acculturate to western culture. This 'colonization of the
soul' entails a loss of respect for a 'traditional' regime of knowing and a cor-
responding ethics.

125

This content downloaded from

175.159.181.254 on Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:57:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 44. 1

At the same time, the videomakers' use of moving postcard images and
audio-iconography interrupts the teleological conception according to
which orality develops into literacy. It affirms the process of reflection as a
result of oral communication, in both the video and in the discussion
process that follows screenings. Qulqi thus proposes the insufficiency of the
ethnographic pastoral, the insufficiency of the separation between literacy
and orality.
Indigenous video decolonizes the frame of knowledge production and
of Hollywood aesthetics as it reinvents the indigenous oral-visual mode of
knowledge production that has been subalternized through the conquest
and the hegemony of literacy and eurocentrism (Mignolo 1995; Boone and
Mignolo 1994; Quijano 1997). The play between the visible and the invisi-
ble, the omnipresence of dreams, visual premonitions, and ghosts in all the
fiction pieces I have seen, here becomes paramount since it references sub-
alternized systems of knowing. Allegory comes to play a similar role. Con-
sider the following example.
El oro maldito /Cursed Gold is filmed in the subtropical Chapare region.
The video is marked by takes of lush vegetation and village life that a light
musical tune renders idyllic until the drama unfolds. El oro tells the story of
a gold-prospector whose greed and lack of belief in myths lead him to a vio-
lent death. The video frames this plot by recreating a televisual aesthetic. El
oro explicitly makes use of Hollywood conventions (extreme close-ups, trav-
elling shots, computer-generated sound effects) for the creation of sus-
pense and the composition of the shots, ' para darle más vida ('to make the
video more lively'), as videomaker Marcelino Pinto says (Mosúa et al.
2000). The choice is deliberate, as Pinto affirms, at the same time as he
insists that these dramatizing elements are inserted into critical thematic
contexts and into the indigenous practice of videomaking. With its melo-
dramatic personalization, this video lends itself to an allegorical reading,
where the protagonists represent the different social forces (local and
migrant coca growers producing for traditional consumption, the military,
and drugs traffickers) confronting each other in the Chapare. The video
thus denounces the violence in this region that has been defined by the
struggle between coca growers and a military power trained and supported
by the United States.17
The representation of the devil (Basilio Terrazas) in El oro might
explain best what I mean. In contrast to the theatrical make-up and staging
of the devil in one of CEFREC/CAIB's first-generation fictions, El
cazador /The Hunter (responsable Nicolás Ipamo, Bolivia, 1998), in El oro , the
visible (an old man) contains its trace of invisibility within the frame. His
appearance shifts as he exchanges the polyester shirt of the village for the
rags of a man living deep in the forest, but he is never explicitly made up as
the devil. As he eats and drinks in town, he seems invisible to everyone

126

This content downloaded from

175.159.181.254 on Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:57:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Decolonizing the Frame

except Tito (José Escalera), the gold-prospector. The allusion is subtle as

there are no cross-cuts of missed looks. The figure symbolizes the devil in a
manner not necessarily immediately obvious to an audience unaccustomed
to the trope.
The play between the visible and the invisible continues on a second
level, that of the spectator. It is both inside and outside the frame as the
camera eye defines the devil's gaze as the perspective of the viewers (pri-
marily indigenous communities in Bolivia, but also the international audi-
ence that the video has encountered at festivals). The devil thus symbolizes
the spectators.
If indigenous videos generally aim for clarity (chronological narratives,
explicitly moralizing summaries at the end) , El oro allows for an allegorical
reading beyond the denunciation of loss of beliefs, a reading that would
suggest a critique of coca production for drug trafficking, while vindicating
its traditional use and marketing. According to this allegorical reading, the
protagonist Tito who comes in search of gold may be seen to represent out-
side drug traffickers who arrive in the region in search of easy wealth. The
local population is represented byjuanita (Aidée Alvarez) whose day-to-day
production and marketing of coca has not led to wealth but to a relatively
dignified survival, while the devil incarnates the violence committed by the
military troops, whose lower ranks are filled by indigenous peoples them-
selves.

Whether this allegory is intentional or not,18 it is the form, the bor-

rowings from Hollywood cinema techniques and from melodrama, that
promote this interpretation, while at the same time allowing the video-
makers to deny any explicit denunciation of military violence, a visible
absence, nevertheless. At a third level, then, the possibility of reading the
devil as an allegory of military violence again frames the invisible and ren-
ders it partially visible.
The play on the image in videos such as Qulqi and El oro suggests that
indigenous cultures have always been oral-visual. Mediation is at the heart
of any thinking and representation process and is not a prerogative of west-
ern culture or part of a continuum where orality would evolve into literacy
alongside the transformation of 'primitive' cultures into 'civilized' ones.19
Indigenous videomakers indeed achieve a transformation of the concep-
tual framework of video technology, a strategy one might call 'indianiza-
tion'.20 In indigenous video the audiovisual medium and its western con-
ventions, on the material as well as on the aesthetic level, are incorporated
into indigenous oral-visual traditions, that is, into systems of knowledge
that are audio-iconographic, even if the particularities of their semiotic sys-
tems vary across regions. The audiovisual medium becomes a natural
extension of these traditions. The basic tool for this redefinition of literacy
and intellectual practice is the visual quality of the film itself. At the same

127

This content downloaded from

175.159.181.254 on Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:57:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 44.1

time, audiovisual technology is reclaimed as a technology of sustainable

knowledge (not a knowledge that is merely local but one that challenges
the reach of theory, be it economic or critical). These are the crucial ele-
ments of decolonization that both Qulqi and El oro achieve. Its limits, in my
view, lie in the videomaker' s engagement with the gender dimension of the
(post) colonial subalternization of indigenous knowledge and technologies
of representation.
The anthropologists Denise Arnold and Juan de Dios Yapita (1996,
376) highlight the survival of oral visual technologies of knowledge in the
highland villages, for instance in the iconographie tradition of weavings.
They also suggest that the subalternization of these technologies as tech-
nologies of knowledge is based on literacy as a power/ knowledge practice
that includes notions of race and gender. References to such 'traditional'
oral-visual technologies are rare in indigenous videos. This absence may
be a result of the association of weaving technology with women in the ayl-
lus (the highland communities) themselves. The lack of explicit references
to visual semiotic systems like weavings goes hand in hand with the privi-
leging of male producers and protagonists, as well as the resistance towards
explicitly thematizing spousal violence as it appears at the beginning of
Qulqi.
Nevertheless, these videos sensitize viewers, indigenous and otherwise,
to the re-inscriptions of hierarchies of race and gender in today's dis-
courses. At the same time, the videomakers are calling attention to the
dense relations between technology and its definitions. They transform not
only the use and product of technology but the very context of discourse
that defines what 'is' a technology of knowledge. Video finds its legitimiza-
tion as a technology of knowledge through the communities it manages to
communicate. It creates a parallel circuit to the intellectual and academic
production, where members of the indigenous movements are also increas-
ingly participating.
Video also creates a parallel circuit to the commodification of the mul-
ticultural in the mass media. It does not seek indigenous peoples' inclusion
into globalized projects of development but opens up spaces to discuss the
idea of development and the principle of profit itself. At the same time,
indigenous videomakers are therefore questioning the idea of inclusion.
They do not necessarily want to be included in the neoliberal marketplace
of products and ideas, but rather to create the grounds for re-imagining
both, where and how knowledge is produced, what market relations are
and what their goals may be. As I hope I have made clear, this is not to say
that all indigenous people are opposed to market relations. Rather,
whether or not it is possible to become part of neoliberal capitalism or how
this economy of the market could be transformed is part of the debate that
indigenous video production and distribution engages in.21

128

This content downloaded from

175.159.181.254 on Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:57:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Decolonizing the Frame

Frey a Schiwy holds a Ph.D. in Romance Studies from Duke University. She is Assis-
tant Professor in the Modern and Classical Languages Department at the University
of Connecticut. Her interests include Latin American Literature and Film , postcolo-
nialism and feminist and queer theory.

Notes

1 Many of the Latin American indigenous videos can be purchased by directly

contacting the producers. For Bolivian indigenous video see especially the
homepage of CEFREC, http://videoindigena.bolnet.bo. The National
Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) maintains a video archive and they
will occasionally lend videos for classroom screening. Sometimes Karen Ra-
nucci's Lava Video website can also facilitate access.

2 See for example Ginsburg 1994; Aufderheide 2000; and more cautiously
Turner 1991.

3 Although anthropologists and film critics have so far mostly paid attention
Brazilian indigenous video (Turner, Aufderheide) Bolivia occupies a centra
position in the efforts at communicating through video. The central vid
archive that houses a vast collection of indigenous films and videos from Sout
and North America is located in La Paz, in the offices of CEFREC (Center fo
Training in Cinematography) and CLACPI (Latin American Council o
Indigenous Film and Video, founded in 1985). The catalogue is located
http://www.iisg.nl/~sephis/. Bolivia has the most prolific and continuous pr
duction of videos, including now a third generation of fiction pieces.
4 Sanjinés's much criticized film Para recibir el canto de los pájaros/To receive the b
songs (Bolivia, 1995) revisits these problems of socio-cultural interaction.
Deploying aesthetic solutions akin to magical realism it frames the arrogan
of the white urban filmmaker in the countryside who becomes aware of h
complicity with racial discrimination with the help of a foreign anthropologis
(portrayed by Geraldine Chaplin) . Para recibir el canto itself is criticized becau
it again constitutes a fundamental change in production practices, aestheti
and casting with respect to the Ukamau productions after Yawar malíku.
5 These topics also dominate documentary productions by the indigeno
organizations CONAIE in Ecuador and CRIC in Colombia, while similar aes
thetic preferences can also be found in the P'urhépecha fiction short Xanin
Maiz (Dante Cerano, Mexico, 1999) shot in Michoacan, Mexico.
6 This production grows out of the 'Indigenous National Plan for Audiovisu
Communication of the Indigenous and First Nation People of Bolivia' that n
regularly communicates over four hundred communities in the highlands a
lowlands. The Plan was initiated in 1996 as a collaborative project between
CEFREC, the principal indigenous, peasant, and union organizations
Bolivia (CSUTCB, CSCB, CIDOB), and the newly founded organizational bod
of indigenous communicators, CAIB (Organization of Indigenous Audiovisua
Communicators of Bolivia). For more information see CEFREC's website at
http://videoindigena.bolnet.bo.
7 Personal conversation with Iván Sanjinés, Duke University, March 2002.
8 Videomakers expressed these views in personal conversations as well as duri
discussions of their videos at international film and video festivals, for instan

129

This content downloaded from

175.159.181.254 on Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:57:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 44.1

in Guatemala (1999) and New York (2000). See also Mosúa 2000, Flores
2001/2002.
9 Outside advisors have included for example Iván Sanjinés (director of CLACPI
and CEFRE), Alberto Muenala (a Quichua filmmaker from Ecuador), Fran-
cisco Cajias (Bolivia), Francisco Ormachea (Bolivia) and César Pérez (Peru).
10 The Bolivian video project is funded largely by AECI, a developmental agency
of the Spanish State and by Mugarik Gabe, a Basque NGO. The Dutch organi-
zation SEPHIS has also made funds available for the cataloguing of CEFREC's
central video archive in La Paz.

1 1 See Larson et al. (1995) for a detailed discussion of the long history of the cre-
ative adaptations to and transformation of global capitalism by Quechua and
Aymara communities. See also Rivera Cusicanqui (1996) who is not very opti-
mistic about the possibilities of maintaining an economy of reciprocity in the
face of the neoliberal market.

12 Julia Mosúa and Alfredo Copa discussed the issue of property rights and com-
modification of video with the Salvadorian filmmaker Daniel Flores in an inter-
view in November 2000. An edited version of this interview that I transcribed
(in Spanish) was published in English in the cultural magazine Bomb (Flores
2001/02).
13 The insertion of video into indigenous relations of labor and exchange occurs
not only extratextually, as I have explored elsewhere. Here the decolonization
of the 'coloniality of power' (Quijano 1997; 2000) reveals as well its gendered
intertext (Schiwy 2002).
14 According to the Manual para facilitadores (CEFREC/CAIB's internal manual
for the facilitators involved in distributing the productions) the purpose of the
video-project is to facilitate a community discussion, where 'the objective of
community self-diagnosis is that the community itself should prioritize its cul-
tural problems and solutions. That is, the principal decisions should be made
from within the community itself, through consensus. The goal of the com-
munity self-diagnosis is that the entire community participate in creating an
inventory of its cultural patrimony, in discussing the community's cultural
problems and in articulating the solutions' (CEFREC/CAIB, n.d., approx.
1997, author's translation).
15 See Quijano (1997; 2000) as well as Mignolo (2000) for an elaboration of the
collusion between colonial histories and epistemic regimes.
16 Qulqi Chaliku/The Silver Vest {responsable Patricio Luna, produced by CEFREC/
CAIB, Bolivia, 1998) is a twenty-five minute video shot in the Bolivian high-
lands. The dialogue is in Aymara and Spanish and was originally subtitled in
Spanish. The thirty-five minute El oro maldito /Cursed, Gold {responsable Marcelino
Pinto, produced by CEFREC/CAIB, Bolivia, 1999) is shot in the subtropical
Chapare region, the area where Evo Morales, the presidential candidate I men-
tioned at the beginning of this article, has his strongest following. This melo-
dramatic love-story is in Quechua and Spanish and was also originally subtitled
in Spanish.
17 The Bolivian intellectual Franco Gamboa suggests that the allegorical reading
of El oro would be clear to a Bolivian audience that has witnessed the struggles
and protests of the coca growers in newspapers and on the streets since the
beginning of the US-backed national policy of coca eradication by military
troops in 1998. Personal conversation with the author, February 2001, Duke
University.

130

This content downloaded from

175.159.181.254 on Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:57:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Decolonizing the Frame

18 In the interview with Daniel Flores (Mosúa, Entrevista), Pinto insists that,
despite the suggestive title, El oro is simply a legend where coca marketing and
consumption frames a cultural backdrop, and that a denunciation of human
rights violations in the region is impossible in the present political climate.
19 See Street (1984) for a detailed refutation of the binary between oral and lit-
erate cultures. See Mignolo (1995) and the articles in Boone and Mignolo
(1994) for detailed accounts of indigenous semiotic traditions and their subal-
ternization during and after the Conquest.
20 The term 'indianization' is borrowed from the Aymara Felipe Quispe, who calls
himself 'El Mallku'/The Condor' and who was also one of the indigenous
leaders involved in recent uprisings. Quispe, whose reversed racism and lead-
ership style are controversial among indigenous organizations themselves,
recently stated in a provocative interview with a Bolivian journalist that the
project of mestizaje , of integrating the Indio into western civilization under the
auspices of a homogenous nation state, was obsolete. The issue was rather to
'indianizar al q'ara,' to 'indianize' the whites (Sanjinés, 2002).
21 The VII International Indigenous Film and Video Festival is planned to be held
in Santiago, Chile in March of 2003.

References
Arnold, Denise and Juan de Dios Yapita. 1996. Los caminos de Qaqachaka. Ser mujer
indígena, chola o birlocha en la Bolivia postcolonial de los años 90. Ed. Silvia Rivera
Cusicanqui. La Paz: Ministerio de Desarrollo Humano, Secretaría de Asuntos
Etnicos, de Género y Generacionales, Subsecretaría de Asuntos de Género,
303- 391.

Aronowitz, Stanley. 1979. Film: the art form of late capitalism. Social Text 1: 1
129.
Aufderheide, Patricia. 2000. Grassroots video in Latin America. Visible nations: Latin
American cinema and video. Ed. Chon A. Noriega. Minneapolis: Univ. of Min
nesota Press, 219-238.
Boone, Elizabeth Hill. 1994. Introduction. Writing and recording knowledge. Writ-
ing without words: alternative literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Eds. Elizabeth
Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo. Durham, Duke UP, 3-26.
Burton, Julianne, (ed.) 1990. The social documentary in Latin America. Pittsburgh: Uni-
versity of Pittsburgh Press.
CEFREC 2001. 'Homepage', http://videoindigena.bolnet.bo. September 15, 2001.

tember 15, 2001.

Chanan, Michael (ed.). 1983. Twenty-five years of th

don: British Film Institute and Channel Four Television.

Coronil, Fernando. 1996. Beyond occidentalism: toward nonimperial geohistorica

categories. Cultural Anthropology 11 (1): 51-87.
De Lauretis, Teresa. 1981. Alice doesn't: feminism, semiotics, cinema. Bloomingto
Indiana UP.

Flores, Daniel. 2001/02. Bolivian links: indigenous media. Interview with J

Mosúa, Alfredo Copa and Marcelino Pinto. Transe. Freya Schiwy, transi. S
Brian te. Bomb 78: 30-35.

131

This content downloaded from

175.159.181.254 on Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:57:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 44.1

Ginsburg, Faye. 1994. Embedded aesthetics: creating a discursive space for indige-
nous media. Cultural Anthropology 9 (3): 365-382.
Goody, Jack. 1977. The domestication of the savage mind. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Larson, Brooke and Olivia Harris with Enrique Tandeter (eds.) . 1995. Ethnicities and
markets in the Andes. Durham: Duke UP, 5-53.
López, Ana M. 1990b. At the limits of documentary: hypertextual transformation
and the New Latin American Cinema. The social documentary in Latin America.
Ed. Julianne Burton. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 403-432.
Mignolo, Walter D. 1995. The darker side of the Renaissance: literacy, territoriality and col-
onization. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP.

thinking. Princeton Studies in Culture/ Power/ Histo

UP.

Mosúa, Julia; Alfredo Copa and Marcelino Pinto. 2000. Entrevista. Interview with
Daniel Flores. Audiorec. Transe. Freya Schiwy. International Indigenous Film
and Video Festival. New York, November, 2000.
Quijano, Anibal. 1997. Colonialidad del poder, cultura y conocimiento en América
Latina. Anuario Mariateguiano 9 (9): 113-21.

views from South 1 (3): 533-580.

Quijano, Aníbal and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1992
the Americas in the modern world-system. ZS
Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. 1991. Pachakuti: los aymar
de colonialismo. Chukiyawu: THOA.

las migrantes aymaras de La Paz y El Alto, Bolivia.

locha en la Bolivia postcolonial de los años 90. Ed.
Ministerio de Desarrollo Humano, Secretaría de
Generacionales, Subsecretaría de Asuntos de Género, 163-300.
Rüssel, Catherine. 1999. Experimental ethnography. Durham: Duke UP.
Sanjinés, Javier. 2002. Mestizaje upside down: subaltern knowledges and the known.
Nepantla: views from South 3 (1): 39-60.
Sanjinés, Jorge. 1997. Problems of form and content in revolutionary cinema.
Trans. Schaaf, Richard. Curbstone Press, 1989. New Latin American Cinema: the-
ory, practices, and transcontinental articulations. Ed. Michael T. Martin. Detroit:
Wayne State UP, 62-70.
Sanjinés, Jorge and Grupo Ukamau. 1979. Teoría y práctica de un cine junto al pueblo.
México: Siglo XXI.
Schiwy, Freya. 2002. Reframing knowledge: indigenous video, gender imaginaries,
and colonial legacies. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Duke University.
Solanas, Fernando and Octavio Getino. 1973. Cine, cultura y descolonialización.
Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI.
Street, Brian V. 1984. Literacy in theory and practice. London and New York: Cam-
bridge UP.
Turner, Terence. 1991. The social dynamics of video media in an indigenous soci-
ety: the cultural meaning and the personal politics of video-making in Kayapo
communities. Visual Anthropology Review 17 (2): 68-76.
Weiner, James F. 1997. Televisualist anthropology: representation, aesthetics, poli-
tics. Current Anthropology 38 (2): 197-235.

132

This content downloaded from

175.159.181.254 on Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:57:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms