The contemporary documentary road movie in Latin America: issues on mobility, displacement and autobiography

Abstract

Film genres have been historically defined in accordance with the territory of fiction, what used to be called plot cinema. In other words, melodrama, comedies or westerns, in their different versions, are all discursive constructions mainly associated with fiction, which have both concretized and evolved throughout time. Although it is not the goal of this text to elaborate on genre theory, I would like to suggest from the beginning that, as Rick Altman (1999) has mentioned, within the cinematic frame, as opposed to what happens in literature, genres carry out different tasks that connect the three basic components of the cinematic event: production, distribution and consumption. This means that genres have historically played a central role in the commercialization and standardization of cinema, as a product equally tied to mass culture and cultural industry.