If I am not wrong it was in a Pierre Bourdieu book where I read that understanding a society should imply that sociology study not only a specific society but also study the sociologists who analyze that society. This statement is formulated according to what I remember of what I have read; the original might be (significantly) different. Nevertheless, I start this blog in this way because of the following: after watching one of the most important scenes (according to the critics) of the film También la lluvia (Even the Rain), the first thing I thought was that considering the perspective from which a specific historical fact is told is not enough to analyze that perspective. Attention to the epistemology that supports it might also be important. It is so, above all, when a historical fact is told from a non-Western perspective while the epistemology is in fact Western.
También la lluvia is a Spanish film, directed in 2010 by Icíar Bollaín. The subject of this film is threefold: a film production team that travels to the Bolivian valleys in order to make a film about the colonial period, the violence suffered by the indigenous people during the sixteenth century and the Water War that took place in Cochabamba (Bolivia) at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The strategy used in the film, with the objective of telling us the three stories at the same time, is as follows: while producing a film about violence against Indians in the sixteenth century (which includes Las Casas’ discourses in the script), the film production team that carries out this adventure has to deal not only with filmography of colonial issues but also with specific Bolivian political conflicts. The subject of these conflicts was what sociologists and historians have called the Water War. In 1999, the law was approved to privatize the public water service in Cochabamba. This implied an increase in the price of water to more than one hundred percent of the original price, which meant that a high percentage of Cochabamba inhabitants as well as peasant communities would be not able to pay for it. For this reason, sectors affected by the unfair measure organized in order to fight against a policy that, in some way, was forbidding the poorest access to the most vital resource. In less than six months, the privatization contract was broken and the corresponding law modified.
To say it shortly, También la lluvia combines two tales—one colonial and the other contemporary—in a third one (regarding the obstacles the film production team has to deal with) in order to show us that things did not change: exploitation and violence against Indians as well as indigenous uprisings to gain justice and rights are the two constants of a reiterative story. This blend reaches its consolidation in a scene that can be described in the following way: The sixteenth century Indians raise the name of their leader—Hatuey—while he is being burned at the stake by Spaniards. Afterwards, a twenty-first century police car burst onto the place to imprison Daniel (the actor who plays Hatuey), since he is the leader who leads people to fight against the privatization of water. As a reaction against this, the Indian actors, wearing their pre-Columbian cloths, pounce on the police car to stop the police officer from taking Daniel with him. Thus, in this scene, a sixteenth century historical event is combined with a twenty-first century one. This tale of two combined stories implies that Juan Carlos Aduviri, the real actor, plays, at the same time, both the Indian actor who plays the colonial Indian leader and the contemporary Indian leader who is the Indian actor. Hatuey-Daniel becomes the same person not only because both characters are played by the same actor, but also because one of them is repeating the repression suffered by the other five hundred years beforehand.
Perhaps, this way of making these two different historical periods appear contemporary works in this film as a productive cinematographic technique. Indeed, it does not only concentrate in one scene what the whole film is trying to show us (a sort of colonial system being reactivated by relations of power during the last five hundred years), but it also turns this tale into an image with which spectators become affectively involved. Nevertheless, what makes this scene problematic―I think―is the fact that, although it is meaningful, and told from an affective perspective, it responds to a Western epistemology that presumes a colonial difference (which constructs the One as different from the Other in order to demonstrate the superiority of the former). In the film, this colonial difference does not exist only between Spaniards (or the Bolivian State) and the Indians―and it does not exist just between the film production team that is part of this threefold tale and the indigenous actors―but it also exists between Icíar Bollaín and the indigenous actors that played in her film.
In the whole film, but above all, in the aforementioned scene, the main factor that makes spectators become affectively involved with the Indians fight is that they look like “real” Indians. By combining the sixteenth century with the twenty-first, Bollaín could bring what makes Indians exotic to a contemporary situation. They might look like the West expects them to: almost naked, painted faces, handmade clothes, warriors with a bow and arrow, etc. In this sense, the strategy, in order to create an affective perspective from which the tale is transmitted and received, implies showing the Otherness. Here is the Other―different (vulnerable and poor) from the One―who fights for his right to life. Once more, although También la lluvia can be watched as a film that questions the ongoing operation of a colonial system, in some way, it itself repeats this system by having to make up the Otherness for the sake of the film’s effectiveness.
This brings to mind the fact that the film’s gesture is just repeating what became a constant in the relationship between the West and the rest of the world. Does this not have to do, for example, with the “The Casting System” Emma Freeman talks about in her post? Or with the consideration of women “as just women and not as humans” that cmolldrem highlights while discussing Corazón de Manzana? Or does it not have to do with “the representation of Latina/o bodies” in Judge Marilyn Milian’s talk show that rldesoto brings up?
Gender, Performance and the Body in Contemporary Latin America 
This post reminds me of the 1998 U.S. film Krippendorf’s Tribe starring Richard Dreyfuss. Dreyfuss portrays a scholar, Dr. Krippendorf, who “discovers” a lost tribe of indigenous people right before his grant funding runs out of which the trip is named after Krippendorf in honor of his discovery. He creates this fictitious tribe by relying on stereotypes of indigenous bodies and is easily believed by his colleagues as well as the public community. While there are numerous problems with this narrative, what strikes me most is the “acting out” of the indigenous body that the film depicts in Dr. Krippendorf’s creation of video footage of the tribe. Dr. Krippendorf and his children dress in exotic attire, rub mud on their bodies, and “speak” gibberish in their portrayal of the tribe. While it may seem that the film is attempting a critique of Western stereotypes of indigenous bodies in the ridiculous depictions, the film ends with the discovery of the very tribe Dr. Krippendorf was imitating when an unconvinced colleague goes searching for “live” evidence. However, that tribe is also performing as the spectator learns that the daughter contacted a real indigenous tribe leader (who looks Western in dress, speech, and mannerisms) she had met on a humanitarian trip and asks him to act out the imaginary Krippendorf tribe. It seems that this film attempts to overcome the disparity in representing indigenous bodies but fails, echoing your sentiment that “the film’s gesture is just repeating what became a constant in the relationship between the West and the rest of the world.”