Liberarte_Vol_1_No_2_Septiembre_Diciembre_2005

These are movies that have not been seen by the new generations of filmmakers and the public at large and which have been black-listed because of their “commercial” nature in the few Periodicals or Journals that have published articles concerning Ecuadorian film (Revista Cultura, Cuadro a Cuadro). What is interesting about them, and especially in regard to this paper is that they were mostly (7 of the 11 movies) co-productions with Mexico, as is “Crónicas” . Now, if there exist no national referents, if an “Ecuadorian filmic tradition” is not in place; when representing the country on screen, who does the filmmaker dialogue with? Whose gazes does she or he confront?

Rey Chow points out that, “Like writing, filmmaking, too, is conditioned by the utterances of others, the references other made in and of the past” (Chow: 2000, 176). She goes on to argue that “a film about one's own culture is a certain kind of homecoming, how does one go about mediating between the desire for portraying that “home” exactly as one thinks one knows it and the allure of multiple images that are already made by others and seen…by others? (177).

Authentic, in many ways, can be defined as anything that is untainted by the gaze of others. With this in mind, let us return to how Ecuador has been perceived on screen in more recent times; those gazes that have reached Cordero's generation and those following his. The only national reference would be Camilo Luzuriaga's oeuvre, composed to this day of 4 films (La Tigra, Entre Marx y una mujer desnuda, Cara o Cruz and Mientras llega el día), three of which are based on adaptations of canonized works of literature and all of which relate to the construction of a national identity and which, esthetically, pertains to “auteur” cinema. One of the movies is a historical piece set in the XIXth Century, the other is set in the idealic and nostalgic past of the 1930's, another in the turbulent years of the 70s in Ecuador and, finally, the last is set in the early XXIth century. The central characters of all of Luzuriaga's films are middle class intellectuals and it is in this locus: that of the middle class, that we see represented on film.

The “Other” gaze, that of the international representation of Ecuador on screen since the 1980s till this day is pregnant with contradiction: Ecuador has served as a sort of empty signifier, a void to be filled. When in the late 80s, Ken Kwapis, hanging on the tail of the highly successful “Indiana Jones” series -shot in exotic locals around the world- looked for a fantasy El Dorado, where Cindy