Jorge Ricardo Preloran (May 28, 1933 – March 28, 2009) was an
Argentine filmmaker and a pioneer in ethnobiographic film making.[1][2]
Life and career
Preloran was born in
Buenos Aires to an Argentine father and an
Irish American mother. He made a
short film, Venganza, in 1954, and left Argentina to enroll at
UCLA, graduating with a
film studies major in 1961. Holding
dual citizenship, he served with the
U.S. military in
West Germany.[3] He began a career as a filmmaker in 1961, when the Tinker Foundation offered him a grant to make several films on the
gauchos of Argentina.[4] Preloran sought to redefine the genre of ethnographic films, moving away from depicting their subjects as exotic or primitive, striving to make films that, as he told Americas magazine, "do not use the people about whom they are made."[1]
From 1963-1969 Preloran produced educational films and films on Argentine
folklife at the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán in
Tucuman, Argentina.[3] He also began to work in a style of
ethnographic film known as ethnobiography, in which "the filmmaker gets closer to the subject to give a portrait of the subject as well as their culture and practices."[5]
His 1969 film Hermógenes Cayo (Imaginero) was recently listed as one of the ten best Argentine films of all times.[1] In making this film, he spent months with the subject (artist Hermógenes Cayo) prior to shooting, and followed many of the subject's suggestions in the actual film-making. This relationship between filmmaker and subject was to be repeated through his career. Preloran made over 50 films in his lifetime, working in Argentina, the United States, Ecuador, and elsewhere.[6][7][8]
^Rossi, compilación y comentarios, Juan José (1987). El Cine documental etnobiográfico de Jorge Prelorán (1a ed.). Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones Búsqueda. pp. 191–193.
ISBN9505600488.{{
cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (
link)
^Taquini, Graciela (1994). Jorge Prelorán, Volume 19 of Directores del cine argentino. Centro Editor de América Latina.
^Foley, Karma (June 2012).
"Guide to the Jorge Prelorán films". sova.si.edu. Smithsonian: National Museum of National History. p. 22. Retrieved 2021-04-27.
Further viewing
Rivera, Fermín. (Director). (2009). Traces and Memory of Jorge Prelorán [Video file].
Documentary Educational Resources. Retrieved June 23, 2021, from
Kanopy.