Film narratives crossing time and space in the Americas: a comparative perspective os La Jaula de Oro (2013) and El Norte (1983); Rio (2011) and The Three Caballeros (1944)

Abstract

The essay discusses how frequent migratory currents of certain narratives and ideas within the Americas have formed clusters of knowledge and stimulated audiences’ imagination about specific cultures or nations. The essay presents the process of narrative continuity and displacement in recent films about immigration and travel within the Americas, as they can be read in relation to earlier films on the same theme, La Jaula de Oro (Diego Queimada-Díez, 2013) vis à vis El Norte (Gregory Nava, 1983), and Rio (Carlos Saldanha, 2011) vis à vis The Three Caballeros (Walt Disney, 1944). La Jaula de Oro presents the same border crossing as El Norte, from Guatemala to Mexico to the USA, but thirty years apart, whereas in Rio the contemporary narrative of a migrating little blue macaw, Blu, who moves from the USA to Brazil, readdresses another culturally and politically invested symbolic icon from the mid-1940s and the good neighbor policy—a parrot named José Carioca, whose role in The Three Caballeros goes much beyond the frames of the film. The essay aims at an analysis of the narrative and aesthetic frameworks of the films and their ideological resonances and displacements in terms of American hemispheric relations.