Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

The documentaries of Julien Bryan, filmed in Latin America during the 1940s, contain early footage of the daily life in countries such as Chile, Peru, and Uruguay. Understudied and often misconceived, the work of Bryan is commonly attached to the state propaganda of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly for his documenting of war-torn European countries and for promoting inter-American cultural diplomacy and cooperation through his educational movies on Latin America during the era of the Good Neighbor Policy (1933-1945). Commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller, the first director of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, Bryan’s filmwork was in fact constitutive of a state-media project developed by the Roosevelt administration in response to the devastating effects of the Great Depression and the Second World War. However, a closer look into the filmmaker’s work, supported by relevant contextual analysis, uncovers further complexities behind the duality between political ideology and cultural representation. My study examines the content and aesthetics of Bryan’s film series of Latin America, and seeks to open a discussion on the distinct cultural codifiers that converged in his own interpretation of the South.