Name: Film & Literature: Crash Course Latin American Literature #12
Uploaded: 2026-02-22T21:37:21.000Z
Duration: 10 min 56 s
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In 1930s Argentina, a young boy grew up going to his local movie theater, sitting in the same seat five nights a week for 10 years.

It was there, in front of the silver screen, from a seat perfectly shaped to his bumpies, that he fell in love with the glamour of it all.

And do you know who that little boy turned out to be?

The boy turned out to be a beloved novelist.

I was just making sure you were paying attention.

Hi, I'm Curly Velazquez and this is Crash Course Latin American literature.

Does art imitate life or does life imitate art?

These are some of my favorite questions, because there's no one way to answer them.

Art and life imitate each other in countless ways that span the entire globe.

And all of human history and literature is no exception.

It's influenced by history, politics, science, even other kinds of art.

And on the flip side, literature influences life and culture right back.

So today we'll zoom in and look at one very special relationship, the one between film and literature.

You've probably seen your share of book to screen adaptations, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but

What's often considered far less is the way that movies show up in books.

Which brings me back to that little boy in the theater.

he went on to become a huge name in Latin American literature after his filmmaking career flopped.

But despite switching from film to books, he found a way to meld the two by infusing his love for cinema into many of his novels.

Puig's novel El Beso de la Mojer, the Kiss of the Spider Woman, is set in 1970s Buenos Aires and tells the story of two men sharing a prison cell.

Valentin, a political prisoner, and Molina, a gay man arrested for allegedly corrupting a minor.

And it sort of resembles a screenplay in that it's written mostly in dialogue.

Aside from their dismal situation, the two men don't have much in common.

So to pass the time, Molina recounts his favorite Hollywood movies to Valentin.

And like a movie cuts between scenes, Buig weaves these stories with scenes of the men's daily lives in prison and their growing closeness.

For Molina and Valentin, films become an escape from their confinement.

And Fuik really believed in this ability of films to help us transcend reality.

He told a New York Times reporter that movies help you to not go crazy.

It doesn't matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony.

Like Molina, Puig was a gay man who turned to movies for inspiration and relief from his homophobic upbringing and culture.

As a child, he dressed up as the Hollywood starlets he adored, an activity his father punished him for.

But for Puig, movies and novels were about even more than escapism.

They were also about change, real social change in the real world.

Kiss of the Spider Woman was published in 1976, the same year that he left Argentina in exile, and

it was immediately censored by the military dictatorship it boldly critiqued.

The Uruguayan American author Caro de Robertis writes that Kiss of the Spider Woman was the first Latin American novel to directly link political liberation with the dignity of queer love.

Two men in a room talking to each other becomes a microcosm of a dialogue that the culture desperately needs to have with itself, without which no one will be free.

And to tie it all in a bow, Kiss of the Spider Woman has been adapted to film twice and total humble brag.

My friend Donatio is in the remake with J.

But Puig was far from the only Latin American author to take meaning and inspiration from movies.

In fact, Chilean writers Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gomez started a whole pop culture inspired literary movement in the 90s.

The story behind it, it's brilliant, but it's also petty.

Back in the 1970s, a genre called magical realism put Latin American literature on the map.

Readers around the world and the publishing gatekeepers who decided which books would get translated and sold in their countries couldn't get enough of books like 100 Years of Solitude and the way that Gabriel Garcia Marquez infused the ordinary with the magical.

But by the 1990s, the magical realism label was weighing heavily on Latin American writers.

It painted only one image of Latin America, and it was how they were all expected to write.

As the story goes, he received a pretty brutal rejection from a US editor who dismissed his work because it didn't engage with magical realism, shunned Marquez and challenged the idea that in Latin American literature and everyone wears sombreros and lives in trees.

It's enough to make you want to start a whole new literary movement as petty revenge.

It all kicked off with a short story anthology that Fouguet and Gomez published in 1996 named Macondo, which featured not a drop of magical realism.

Macondo, which became the name of a literary movement, was a reaction to the assumption that Latin American literature could be boiled down to one thing.

But it wasn't a mere refusal of what came before them.

It was an expansion of what Latin American lit could look like.

Rather than telling stories of yellow flowers raining down from the sky, Mecondo literature was devoted to exploring gritty modern day realism with pop culture references and hallmarks of the modern urban experience.

Even the name Mecondo is a pun on Garcia Marquez's legendary Macondo.

The setting of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Fugue writes, In Mecondo, there's McDonald's, Mac, computers and condos.

In other words, nothing magical but the stuff of everyday culture.

And as the poet Beyonce says, the best revenge is your paper.

The Mecondo movement led to some incredible work like Fuguet's 2002 novel Las Pelliculas de Mi Vida the Movies of My Life.

It's written from the point of view of a seismologist, Beltran Soler, as he looks back on his life through the lens of movies.

Fuguet divides the middle section of the novel into 50 chapters, each dedicated to a specific film and moment.

In Beltran's youth, Dumbo is the backdrop for his fears of maternal abandonment, Close Encounters of the Third Kind explores complex feelings towards his father, Oliver encompasses the family's struggles with homelessness, B movie disaster films underscore his journey to his chosen profession, and

Soylent Green is a vehicle for understanding Beltran's shock at moving back to Chile from Southern California.

These cultural touchstones not only help Beltran make sense of his life, but

they bring us into his world, acting as a sort of shortcut to emotional and thematic understanding.

And for readers like me, pop culture references in books can help us relate more deeply to the story.

Characters who watch the same movies, I do feel familiar, even if their situations and storylines aren't like the protagonist of Clarissis Lispector's novel, the Hour of the Star, is obsessed with Marilyn Monroe.

Kind of like how I'm obsessed with Selena.

But like I said at the start, all of this artistic and cultural exchange, it doesn't just flow in one direction.

Books are a huge source of inspiration for filmmakers too, sometimes indirectly, like how Christopher Nolan cited Jorge Luis Borges as an inspiration behind his blockbuster film Inception, and

sometimes directly, like when a filmmaker adapts an author's text for the screen.

Now, if you've ever found yourself in a heated debate about which did it better, the book or the movie, I feel you a bad adaptation of a beloved Text is one of my biggest pet peeves, but

I'm also not a reader who demands word for word faithfulness in an adaptation, because when you're adapting a written work into a film, it's more about capturing a vibe.

The translator Ros Schwartz, likens it to translating a text from one language to another.

The goal isn't literal accuracy, it's to distill the spirit of the original.

Few adaptations are more vibey than Blow Up, Michelangelo Antonioni's take on Julio Cortazar's short story Las Babas del Diablo, the Devil's Drool.

It's set in the swinging London of the 1960s and follows a fashion photographer named Thomas who maybe catches a crime on camera.

And a lot changed in the move from page to screen.

In Cortazard's story, the protagonist is named Michel and he's an amateur photographer and translator in Paris, a lot like Cortazarcel, and

what he accidentally captures on camera is a much different act.

But at their core, both stories are exploring the photographer's relationship with reality, as one film critic put it.

not the book, further entrench Cortazar's ideas, but with Antonioni's flair.

When Cortazar saw Blow up for himself, he said he had the feeling that Antonioni was winking at me and that we were meeting above or below our differences.

Of course, Ortazar's story is far from the only work of Latin American literature that scored a famous adaptation.

Tons of the novels we've talked about in this series have their own, like in the Time of the butterflies, 100 Years of Solitude, the House of the Spirits and Fever Dream.

So keep your popcorn buttered for Latin American movie night.