Document Type
Review
Disciplines
Studies on Film
Abstract
Stephanie Pridgeon’s Revolutionary Visions, a book that deals with the intersection of Jews and revolutionary politics in films from Latin America, is a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on Latin American Jewish studies. As the author herself notes, the cinematic depiction of Jewish experiences with revolutionary movements in Latin America has not received, until now, the scholarly attention it deserves, a neglect that Pridgeon has set out to remedy in her volume. The book brings to our attention the significance of the Latin American revolutionary culture of the 1960s and 1970s not only to Jewish life in the region but also to Latin American cinema from the 1990s onwards. Grounded on the detailed analyses of eight films (both documentary and fictional) released between 1993 and 2013, the author convincingly makes the argument that participation in revolutionary politics is depicted as vital but, at the same time, as an incomplete process for Jews in 20th-century Latin America. Pridgeon expands on this point when she explains that, on the one hand, “Jewish identification with leftist revolutionary movements in Latin America is represented as being, to some extent, a natural progression of the political affinities long understood to be part and parcel of Jewishness, such as responses to Zionism, the Russian Revolution, and the Holocaust” (153). On the other hand, she holds that “the extreme nature of many of these activist groups (particularly the armed movements), the embrace of Palestine, and the heavily Catholic concepts of martyrdom and the New Man created a conflict for some Jews and thus a barrier to their full identification with revolutionary politics”.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.25364/05.8:2022.2.13
Recommended Citation
Vohnsen, Mirna, "Revolutionary Visions: Jewish and Politics in Latin American Film" (2022). Articles. 61.
https://arrow.tudublin.ie/aaschlanart/61
Funder
This research received no external funding
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Included in
Film and Media Studies Commons, Jewish Studies Commons, Latin American Languages and Societies Commons
Publication Details
Vohnsen, Mirna: Book Review. Stephanie Pridgeon, Revolutionary Visions. In: Journal for Religion, Film and Media. Academic Teaching with Short Films in Religion and Ethics, Jg. 8 (2022), Nr. 2, S. 136– 140.
https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/19599.