Abstract
This chapter analyzes a sector of ultra-low-budget filmmaking in the Ecuadorian coastal town of Chone. “Chonewood” is considered a small cinema in that it defies the quitocentrismo of Ecuador’s “official cinema.” The characters who comprise “Chomewood” movies tend to be Montubio (coastal peasants) in contrast to the light-skinned, middle-class urbanite characters that comprise the country’s film board-backed cinema. The author situates Chomewood filmmaking in the context of two imaginaries specific to the Montubio experience. First, there is what he refers to as “pirate modernity,” a collectivistic defiance of Ecuador’s audiovisual divide. Second, this small cinema sector has revitalized the nineteenth-century notion of “radical modernity,” an alternative notion of Ecuatorianidad, which took form during the Liberal Revolution (1895–1920). The author’s examination of various Chonewood films demonstrates that they are complex, multivalent texts through which local subjectivities of the Ecuadorian negotiated and reimagined.
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Notes
- 1.
This notion of “guerrilla” cinema here is a far cry from the often-discussed guerrilla filmmaking from Latin America. See footnote 8.
- 2.
In 2007, Ecuador created both the Ministerio de Cultura y Patrimonio (Ministry of Culture and Heritage) and the Consejo Nacional de Cinematografía (National Film Council, CNCinc), which was a product of the Ley de Fomento del Cine Nacional (National Film Development Law) of 2006. CNCine played a key role in maintaining Ecuador’s cinema boom. In 2016, the government implemented a new Ley de Cultura (Organic Law on Culture), which, among other things, transformed CNCine into the Instituto de Cine y Creation Audiovisual (Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Creation, ICCA).
- 3.
However, it should be noted that this is changing. At the time of writing, the Instituto de Fomento a la Creatividad y la Innovación (Institute for the Promotion of Creativity and Innovation), which replaced CNCine, is funding Indigenous and regional cinema projects.
- 4.
In fact, in 2009, there was an attempt to bring this underground cinema to audiences in Guayaquil and Quito in the form of the film festival Ecuador Bajo Tierra. Although this series had four editions, it ceased operations in 2012, and the quitocentrismo in Ecuador’s audiovisual sector remains acute.
- 5.
This practice has antecedents in Mexican narco films of the 1970s (Vincenot 2010).
- 6.
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are by the author.
- 7.
Starting in the mid-2010s, discs, whether pirated or in the form of legitimate distribution, have been in the process of decline and are increasingly being replaced by streaming services and social networks. This chapter focuses on the rise of Chonewood, which took place when DVDs were the main form of delivery. But the presence of these films on social media sites, the subject for future study, changes the dynamic of pirate modernity: by directly controlling the circulation of their films on social media channels, this gives these artists direct contact with their followers.
- 8.
At the time of writing, the video of Sicarios Manabitas on YouTube has received 1.6 million views.
- 9.
The imaginary of Alfarismo has lingered into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For example, in the 1980s, the militant organization Alfaro Vive Carajo, using Alfaro as an ideological referent, adapted armed struggle to pressure the conservative government of León Febres Cordero (1984–1988) to reduce inequalities.
- 10.
In the mid-twentieth century, filmmakers of the so-called third cinema movement espoused a romantic, collectivized model of filmmaking in which the camera was seen as an anti-colonial weapon in the third world. This historical context begs the question of the relevance of a “third,” “guerrilla” or “militant” cinema well into the twenty-first century when despite the Cold War-influenced, anti-imperialist grandstanding of self-described leftist heads of state, today’s geopolitics are increasingly multipolar and there are multiple imperialisms.
- 11.
Chalacamá started work on El destructor invisible in 1998. But having run out of money, he would not finish until 2005. The broke Chalacamá came up with a plan in which he would through clever editing tell the story he had envisioned combining extant footage from previous projects with what he already had from the unfinished film. Throughout the final film, it is not clear what footage is past and what is present.
- 12.
Gutiérrez was the third Ecuadorian president to be ousted in a decade, in the context of contemporaneous political and economic turmoil.
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Zweig, N. (2023). Rethinking Subaltern “Modernities:” El Cine Chonero Popular, 1994–2015. In: Coryat, D., León, C., Zweig, N. (eds) Small Cinemas of the Andes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32018-7_13
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