A Cinema of Free Association: Counter-Institutional Film Cultures of the Hispanic Caribbean, 1952-1968

A Cinema of Free Association: Counter-Institutional Film Cultures of the Hispanic Caribbean, 1952-1968," re-routes the global film cultures and currents of the midcentury through Puerto Rico's Division of Community Education (DivEdCo) to retroactively map a Caribbean presence in the emergence of the cinematic new waves of the 1960s. Modeled after other liberal-internationalist state film initiatives, the DivEdCo was a public pedagogy project established shortly before the ratification of Puerto Rico's current colonial relationship to the U.S. in 1952—the Free Associated State—and envisioned as the cultural companion to rapid changes to the island's social life and industry. Contrary to the established history, my project examines how individual artists worked through and at the margins of their institution's demands to make an internationalist, pan-American cinema. Each case study activates archival material and oral histories gathered in the Hispanic Caribbean and New York City to show the hemispheric flows of midcentury Caribbean film, positioning the island of Puerto Rico as a central node. For example, the opening chapter reconstructs the cinema unit's participation in the first few Flaherty Film Seminars beginning in 1955, which I treat as a cinematic contact zone between the documentary conventions of the first world and the third. Another chapter reconnects the parallel film-cooperative movements between the New York avant-garde and members of the Division in the 1960s to examine why the newest Americans were ultimately left out of the New American Cinema. The final chapter retraces the transnational career of Oscar Torres, a queer Dominican filmmaker who was the lone DivEdCo figure to join the Cuban Revolution and, thus, to actively contribute at this early stage to what would soon become a Third Cinema. Ultimately, my thesis proposes that useful cinemas have always been global; the task of the historian is to look beyond the institutions and read cinema against its usefulness to the colonial project.