Amateur Cinema as Documentary Source: Juan Pérez Clavero in 1960’s Chile

Abstract

Juan Pérez Clavero (1924-2004), an amateur filmmaker from the peasant town of Peñaflor (Chile), made numerous amateur documentaries in the 1960s, coinciding with the flourishing of the renewal trends of national and Latin American cinema. His unknown work has the particularity of being built from within rural communities, moving away from formalities and sharing the intention to address the current problems of the period, such as the representation of the popular world. The present work proposes that Pérez Clavero's work, when filming in non-professional codes and outside the margins of commercial or professional cinema, becomes an important historical documentary source that travels along two lines. The first, by allowing possible readings of a visual culture not subject to the intellectualized interests of the period. The second, how amateur cinema and particularly the work of Juan Pérez Clavero give a new perspective to approach the cinema of the sixties.