Studies in Hispanic Cinemas (new title: Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas) - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2009

For as much as the audiovisual linkages between Victor Erice and Abbas Kiarostami have merited critical attention since the 2006 Barcelona exposition Erice-Kiarostami: Correspondencias, there have been few efforts to reconstitute the notable affinities between these two film-makers beyond the explicit convergences in their respective works. Nonetheless, numerous underlying similarities are to be discerned from the earliest stages of their respective careers, particularly in relation to their concerns for ways of seeing and the peculiar manner in which the two artists relate both to the audiovisual culture that nourishes them and, ultimately, to the very history of cinema. A review of the fascinating points of connection between Erice's and Kiarostami's respective cinematic projects is the object of the present study.

This article argues that Ral Ruiz's Palomita Blanca (1973), a lost film rediscovered in 1992, constitutes a unique experiment in Chilean cinema, combining elements of avant-garde cinema with concerns about national identity and cultural decolonization. By means of an analysis of Ruiz's strategies for multiplying perspectives and complicating narrative time in the film, the article examines how the film provides the basis for a novel conception of memory in Chilean cinema and for a renewed understanding of politics and aesthetics during Allende's Popular Unity period (197073).

This article argues that Fernando Solanas's documentary production in the wake of the 2001 Argentine institutional crisis (especially his 2004 film Social Genocide Memoria del saqueo) should not be straightforwardly paired with his 1960s' film The Hour of the Furnaces, nor to the project of Third Cinema as it was fostered by Solanas' and Getino's theorization of the relationship between cinematic practice and national liberation. Close comparative examination points to a series of differences in the rhetorical structure of the films as well as in the political proposals at stake. Among the most important differences is the way each film relates to and constructs a historical sequence. This methodological transformation in the narration of history accounts for a radically different conceptualization of agency and the role of the subject, which conflicts with recent statements on the return of the political to Latin America.

Challenging the presumed bankruptcy popularly ascribed to horror and its parodic offshoots vis--vis matters of social consciousness, La Cuadrilla's low-budget, Goya-winning Justino, un asesino de la tercera edad/Justino: A Senior Citizen Killer (1994), foregrounds the issue of aged-based, forced retirement at a time when youthful exploits and images dominate much of mainstream Spanish cinema. The film ideographically links imposed retirement to the surrendering of adulthood and of life itself, thus forging a discourse that places this quirky comedy in conversation with an emerging body of social theory on aging (precisely as demographic studies signal unprecedented growth in Spain's senior-citizen population). At the level of representation, Justino's deadly performance of resistance flips onto its head a deep-seated element of victimhood that has often characterized on-screen senior identity. The peculiarities of the protagonist's subject position raise, in an otherwise light spoof on the slasher genre, some unexpectedly heavy questions concerning the politics of age and generation in early 1990s' Spain.

This article focuses on a group of bilingual documentaries produced in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century that present stories of Cuban exile homeland return. These films are unique in that they turn away from the duelling narratives of revolutionary Cuba and exile nationalism to express the interstices in which a more subtle and complicated Cuban transnationalism is being expressed. Attentive to the policies and attitudes that regulate U.S.Cuban exchange and its representation, the article offers contextualized readings of Our House in Havana, Cuban Roots/Bronx Stories and 90 Miles. These documentaries challenge the exilic investment in a Cuba locked in the past, or in a dystopian/utopian anti-time, representing nuanced perspectives on CubanAmerican identity evolving in relation to contemporary Cuba, not in opposition to it.

In Excess. Sergei Eisenstein's Mexico, Masha Salazkina (2009) Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 232 pp., 40 halftones, ISBN-13: 978-0-226-73414-9 (cloth); ISBN-10: 0-226-73414-5 (hbk), US$40.00

El nacimiento de Que viva Mxico!, Aurelio de los Reyes (2006) Mxico: Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, Instituto de Investigaciones Estticas, 396 pp. 124 ill., ISBN 970-32-2363-x (hbk), $24.00

Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Film and TV Stardom, Mary C. Beltrn (2009) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 212 pp., ISBN 978-0-252-07651-0 Paperback, 18.99

Zoom In, Zoom Out: Crossing Borders in Contemporary European Cinema, Sandra Barriales-Bouche and Marjorie Attignol-Salvodon (eds) (2007) Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 218 pp., ISBN 1-84718-135-X, Hardback, 34.99

100 Years of Spanish Cinema, Tatjana Pavlovi, Inmaculada Alvrez, Rosana Blanco-Cano, Anitra Grisales, Alejandra Osorio and Alejandra Snchez (2008) Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 296 pp., ISBN 978-1-4051-8419-9, Paperback, 19.99.