Studies in Hispanic Cinemas (new title: Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas) - Current Issue

This introduction to a special volume dedicated to translations of recent writings from underexamined cinematic traditions in Latin America (such as Bolivia, Cuba, Colombia, Peru and Puerto Rico) argues for the amplification of voices from 'small' cinemas as essential to understanding contemporary cinema from the region as a whole.

This seminal essay interrogates whether the utopian potential of the post-revolutionary Cuban cinema has been lost in the 1990s. After identifying some of the institutional and sociopolitical changes that encouraged aesthetic renovation in the late 1980s (evident in films by Orlando Rojas, Juan Carlos Tabío, Daniel Díaz Torres, Fernando Pérez and others), García Borrero outlines various factors (including the crisis of the Left, Cuba's economic plight and institutional paralysis) that have led to an increasing level of atomization among younger film-makers (from Arturo Sotto and Humberto Padrón to Miguel Coyula, Jorge Molina, Pavel Giroud and others). The essay praises the work of younger film-makers as provocative while lamenting its lack of subtlety and self-reflection. Calling for more debates and more collaboration among film-makers in order to forge the type of collective poetics that undergirded Cuban cinema at its height, the essay claims that Cuban cinema's utopian promise can be recaptured.

In this classic essay, scholar and film-maker Frances Negrón-Muntaner examines four key films by Jacobo Morales, Puerto Rico's most influential film director of the twentieth century. First published in 2002 and the only extensive engagement with Morales' work to date, Negrón-Muntaner argues that the director's founding corpus can be analysed as part of a single effort to provide a narrative solution to the contradictions of segments of Puerto Rico's urban middle class, a group that has tended to culturally identify with the island's rural Spanish past while viewing its future as economically tied to the United States.

In 2004, political and economic negotiations discussing free trade agreements between the United States and several Latin American countries were rapidly progressing, starting with an agreement with Chile at the beginning of the year. Many film-makers and aficionados throughout the continent expressed sincere concern about local production if industries were not granted certain protections put in place within the General Agreement on Taxes and Tariffs (GATT) concerning audiovisual production in 1994. This particular agreement, propositioned by Canada and France, had been agreed to by all participating nations except the United Statesand Israel. This selection encompasses two short articles by critic and scholar René Weber concerning how the situation would affect local Peruvian production, and a third 'round-table' discussion between critics and industry executives in Peru. The articles were published in the monthly film journal Butaca sanmarquina, a monthly publication from the Cultural Institute of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.

Although this debate shows genuine concern for what would happen to the Peruvian industry, articles like this did little to stop policies from occurring. According to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, the United States entered into talks with Peru, Ecuador and Colombia concerning an Andean Free Trade Agreement in May 2004. Peru was the only one of the three countries to sign such an agreement in December 2005; Colombia eventually negotiated a similar agreement in February 2006.

Some of the most vibrant and polemic discussions in the early twenty-first century concerning cinema on a local level happen in cyberspace. With little editorial boundary, opinions on the Internet concerning cinema come quickly and passionately, privileging the robust immediacy of a particular moment in cinema. We would be remiss to not document such an account in these pages. The context for this humorous take on the contemporary context on 'Peruvian cinema' dovetails growing concern over the spread of the H1N1 virus (dubbed with the national term 'Mexican swine flu') with a furious cultural debate over the local release of Chicho Durant's 2009 film El premio/The Prize. As one of the first major Peruvian features released on native soil after the Oscar-nominated attention generated by the release of Claudia Llosa's La teta asustada/The Milk of Sorrow (2009), the film was met with a sizeable audience and relatively positive reviews. Alfonso Izaguirre, critic at the newspaper Perú.21, published a scathing review, which prompted a letter to the editor signed by eighteen Peruvian film-makers, including directors Augusto Tamayo, Francisco Lombardi, Álvaro Velarde, Fabrizio Aguilar and Aldo Salvini, coming to Durant's defence in the name of locally produced cinema. This, in turn, prompted an equally strong (and unusually unified) response by the Peruvian film critic community, across several prominent blogs, including Ricardo Bedoya's Páginas del diario de Satán/Pages from Satan's Diary and the group blog 'La cinefilia no es patriota' (Cinephilia Is Not Patrotism). The most prominent film blog, which serves as an aggregator for all film cybertraffic in Peru, is called Cinencuentro (Cinencounter), where critic Juan José Beteta often writes thoughtful essays about Peruvian film.

Since its 1970s' association with radical politics in a rural setting, Bolivian cinema has moved into other areas and fresh themes. This article examines the country's recent developments in film culture, and the far from close relationship between film and current political authority. It discusses the effects on the country's output by the advent of digital technology, resulting in increased volume but uneven quality. The regionalist tendency brought by the new availability of film-making technology in places like Cochabamba and Tarija is accompanied by a new generation of film-makers and the intriguing movement towards self-expression for indigenous communities now able to represent themselves and communicate with other, once remote, peoples. Elsewhere, a notable factor is the switch from a rural and collective focus to a concentration on urban, individualist and less stereotypically 'Bolivian' themes. In all, film in this country is remarkable for its very lack of any central homogenizing aesthetic or discursive tendency.

This is an abridged and edited version of a longer, unpublished text written and assembled by the veteran Colombian documentary film-maker Marta Rodríguez, based on her long experience of making films about and alongside indigenous and other marginalized communities throughout Colombia. Just as Rodríguez' documentary practice seeks to devolve audiovisual production to her indigenous collaborators, in the following text Rodríguez' own authorial voice is interspersed with the testimonies of indigenous video-makers collected over time, transcribed and edited by Rodríguez herself. The text offers an insight into audiovisual practices and attitudes towards evolving communications technologies in Colombia during the 1990s, a historical juncture at which a combination of political and technological factors gave rise to a flourishing of increasingly autonomous video production on the part of indigenous communities.

FROM SILVER SCREEN TO SPANISH STAGE: THE HUMORISTS OF THE MADRID VANGUARDIA AND HOLLYWOOD FILM, STUART GREEN (2011) Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 216 pp., ISBN 978-0-7083-2343-4, Cloth, $150.00; E-book $150.00

THE POLITICS OF AFFECT AND EMOTION IN CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN CINEMA, LAURA PODALSKY (2011) Palgrave Macmillan, 218 pp., ISBN 0230109551, (hbk), $85.00

PEDRO ALMODóVAR, O LA DERIVA DE LOS CUERPOS. ENSAYO, JEAN-CLAUDE SEGUIN VERGARA (2009) Murcia: Tres Fronteras Ediciones, Consejería de Cultura y Turismo, Región de Murcia, 286 pp., ISBN 978-84756-4485-1, (pbk) €18.00

CRISIS AND CAPITALISM IN CONTEMPORARY ARGENTINE CINEMA, JOANNA PAGE (2009) Durham and London: Duke University Press, 233 pp., ISBN 978-08223-4472-8, (pbk) $23.95