Dolores Tierney JOSE ´ MOJICA MARINS AND THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF MARGINALITY IN THIRD WORLD FILM CRITICISM 1 This article seeks to revise and question the cultural politics through which Third World film criticism has historically constructed Latin American continental and national film canons. Until recently the coordinates of Latin American film criticism have been fixed by the explicitly anti-imperialist, often militantly political New Latin American Cinema movements of the 1960s and 1970s; Brazil’s Cinema Novo, Cuba’s imperfect cinema and Argentina’s third cinema (King, 2000: 2; Noriega, 2000: xxii). That these ‘New Cinema’ movements have represented the dominant tendency in Latin American film criticism is not surprising given the continent’s immediate problems, i.e. the massive sociocultural impact of colonialist domination in both the region and its film industry. This focus on Latin America’s aesthetically and politically radical cinemas of the 1960s is further determined by film studies’ investment in avant-garde cinemas that challenge the status quo by offering an alternative to Hollywood/dominant aesthetics, or to the dominant mode of production or even to dominant ideology. 2 However, in line with changing cultural and discipline related imperatives, i.e. globalization and its attendant issues as well as the move from film theory per se into emerging fields such as ‘cultural studies’ and ‘postcolonial theory’, the coordinates of Latin American film criticism have shifted. This has produced a drastic re-evaluation of the commercial classical cinemas of 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. No longer eclipsed by the obvious militancy of new cinemas, Mexican classical cinema has been re-examined to reveal resistive possibilities in its popular strategies such as music, dance and melodrama. 3 The work of Cuban critic Juan Antonio Garcı ´a Borrero also evidences this revisionist tendency in Latin American film criticism. His recent Guı ´a Crı ´tica Del Cine Cubano de Ficcio ´n challenges the ICAIC (Cuban Institute of Cinemato- graphic Art and Industry)-centric history of Cuban cinema that has historically focused on only those films made post the 1959 revolution by ICAIC and called attention to Cuba’s pre-revolutionary commercial cinema, to amateur film clubs, to the products of the San Antonio de los Ban ˜os film school and to films produced by regional television companies. He calls these cinemas Cuba’s cine sumergido or submerged cinema (Borrero, 2001: 19 – 20). The way forward therefore in Latin American film criticism according to Borrero and others is to explore what other cinemas remain submerged by institutional and Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies Vol. 13, No. 1 March 2004, pp. 63–78 ISSN 0958-9236 print/ISSN 1465-3869  2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1356932042000186497