Enciclopedia del Glitch Latinoamericano
Enciclopedia del Glitch Latinoamericano
Latin American Glitch Encyclopedia
What is glitch cinema?
The term glitch, according to Rosa Menkmann, refers to “states of aggression, unaccepted sounds, disturbances.” As Menkmann explains, glitches “[a]re not a message, they don’t define, but, as silences, they can be used to re(define) its opposite, they exist as a regenerative device” (2010). Undesirable and inconvenient, the glitch allows the machine to do a performative act in the work of art, by showing its own imperfections.
In Latin America, from the late 1990s until now, we have participated in what Mónica Delgado calls a “culture of glitch.” Most of our film consumption, she argues, from Argentina to Mexico, has been through an informal market that began with pirated Betamax and VHS videos, then copies of black-market DVDs, and most recently, illegal downloads of movies as digital files.
During this time, the glitch has evolved from being an unintentional imperfection to be both an aesthetic concept and a deliberate technique that allows creators of experimental movies and short documentaries to playfully manipulate film for rhetorical purposes, usually as a form of social and political critique. The ludic character of these visual creations centers the filmmaking process itself and reclaims inferior production values as an essential part of the final product. Some of these shorts reinterpret classical films, like Sergio Pinedo’s Volivia, (2014, ), or the work of the Peruvian Illich Castillo in Qué tan lejos está el triunfo de la voluntad (). Other experimental filmmakers appropriate, combine, and alter material from YouTube, such as the Venezuelan short Se los bailan a todos/ Follow your leader (2014, ) by The Dataïsts, Maggy Almao and Antoine Marroncles, which parodies world leaders through manipulated footage of them dancing. The recovery and reinvention of Indigenous cultural tradition is also of interest of some filmmakers, as evidenced, for instance, by Oscar Nodal’s short Codex Remix (), a short film that uses pop culture elements to engage with and reinterpret the Codex Fejervary Mayer, a rare pre-Hispanic pictorial manuscript.
"Volivia" (Sergio Pinedo, 2014) Bolivia
Sǝɭ°s bΛïɭΛʁ°N a t°doS - F°ll°w your ɭeΛders" (The Dataïsts: Maggy Almao y Antoine Marroncles 2014) Venezuela
"Codex Remix" (Óscar Nodal, 2014) México
"Videofilia y otros síndromes virales" (Juan Daniel Molero, 2015) Perú
Project Leader
Dr. Andrea Adhara Gaytan Cuesta is a Mexican and Latin American Studies specialist. Her research includes 20th and 21st Latin American literature, film, and other cultural productions that draw from interdisciplinary studies like Disaster and Catastrophe Studies, Science Fiction, and Border and Urban Studies. Her work interrogates the representations of Mexican and Latin American cultural artifacts that derive from social, indigenous and environmental movements, by illuminating and exploring the trauma, fear and anxieties created by satire and horror in apocalyptic imaginaries.
Some of her recent publications comprise “Penta-pandemic: Covid 19” MARLAS, Poetry about the Pandemic. In Roof, M., 2020. Sacudidas privadas compartidas: poesía de la pandemia. Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies; “Of Mexican Masks and Pandemics: Protest, Culture and Identity” in Reimaging Latin American Studies; “From Narcozombies to Aztec Cannibals: The (Re)Invention of the Zombie in Contemporary Mexican Narrative An-Other Zombie, Routledge (upcoming), and as a translator in Pasado de moda. Expresiones culturales y consumo en la Argentina. [Out of Style. Cultural Expressions and Consumption in Argentina] Ampersand, Argentina, 2016 and Elvir, Lety y María Roof, eds. Women's Poems of Protest and Resistance: Honduras, 2009-2014. Bilingual edition. [Honduras, golpe y pluma. Antología de poesía resistente escrita por mujeres (2009-2014)] Casassola, Washington D.C., 2015.
Campus Partners
In México, I will conduct research and interviews with individual creators and diverse institutions, including the Centro de Experimentación Cinematográfica (CEC), Cineteca Nacional, Filmoteca de la UNAM, Instituto de Artes Estéticas (UNAM) México, and the Workshop for Experimental Cinema of the Morelia Film Fest. As a member of the 成人AV视频 Film Studies Committee, I would like to collaborate with Movies on the House, as well as with Dr. Nick de Villiers and Dr. Alison Bruey, whose expertise in film history, film technique and theory would be invaluable for my project.
International Partners
In México, I will conduct research and interviews with individual creators and diverse institutions, including the Centro de Experimentación Cinematográfica (CEC), Cineteca Nacional, Filmoteca de la UNAM, Instituto de Artes Estéticas (UNAM) México, and the Workshop for Experimental Cinema of the Morelia Film Fest.