In the current "global" moment, the study of Latin American cinema has become insistently national -- a phenomenon fully explored in this collection of essays by some of the most interesting and innovative scholars of media and Latin American culture working today.The contributors to Visible Nations consider different national film and video histories in Latin America since the silent period. From the perspectives of feminism, psychoanalysis, new historicism, and reception theory, among others, they consider the styles through which -- and the ends toward which -- the nation has been represented, desired, and contested in films, film industries, and alternative video work in Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, and Cuba. The result is nothing less than a rewriting of Latin American film history.