Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2013

This essay offers a theoretical approach to reading the relationship between narrative, image and temporality in Carlos Saura’s intensely philosophical yet understudied film Elisa, vida mía (1977). Through close readings, I analyse how the film creates a series of openings or spaces from which to reflect on cinematic time as a reciprocal process of folding and unfolding, entangled with cycles of arrivals and departures, experience and perception, memories and dreams, and illuminance and violence. I also explore the visualization of loss as an essential aspect of Saura’s cinematic construction of subjectivity and spectatorship. Ultimately, this article argues that in Elisa, Saura breaks with a system of suture to establish a cinema of loss or ‘cinema of wounds’ that not only depicts loss as a narrative element, but also integrates a structure of loss into the film’s temporal and visual composition. This loss constitutes a vital form of possibility when it, in turn, becomes part of the spectator’s viewing experience.

This article examines discourses and elaborations of a Hollywood-inflected stardom in 1920s’ Brazilian cinema, focusing in particular on a new generation of female stars who emerged during this decade. It does so by tracing the elaboration of this American-style star system in the context of a vibrant urban consumer culture, one that depended on women. The discussion centres on two intersecting lines of enquiry. First, it explores how the development of female star texts was inextricably related to an urban mass culture that emerged in early-twentieth-century Brazil. In doing so, it highlights stardom’s dialogue with the figure of the melindrosa, Brazil’s own ‘new woman’. A symbolic and spectacular embodiment of urban modernity and women’s new public role in it, by the start of the twentieth century, the melindrosa proliferated in the country’s magazines and popular novels and became a key intertext for films of the period and especially their stars. Second, the article relates this complex and contradictory embodiment of female stars to discussions concerning Brazilian cinema itself. It explores the ways in which female stardom of the 1920s and, by extension, women’s consumer culture played a key role in forging a Brazilian film industry.

Carlos Serrano de Osma is one of the more unclassifiable Spanish film-makers from the Francoist era. His troubles with censorship, critics and post-Civil War Spanish audiences forced him into retirement in 1960 when he had only directed eight films. In the following decades, his work hardly stirred the interest of film historians. In recent years, however, academic interest has grown. This article analyses the last of his films from a historic and textual perspective. Even if La rosa roja/The Red Rose (1960) is apparently a fairly conventional film, its numerous interesting features render it one of the more attractive and singular films in its genre: the españolada.

This article explores the special challenges inherent in filmic depictions of New World slavery, and examines how directors Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Gillo Pontecorvo address these obstacles respectively. Through explicit and implicit recourse to narrative and factual falsehoods, The Last Supper and Burn! both attempt to correct the partial text of history by situating their enslaved characters at the centre of the action and providing them a space in which to express resistance through voice, gesture and determined silence. While each author works from an anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist political stance characteristic of revolutionary film-making in the 1960s and 1970s, significant differences in production environments and directorial decisions regarding the historical record affected each film’s ability to convey the ‘truth’ of Caribbean slavery. Despite the relative successes and failures of each film, I argue that both remain useful tools for fleshing out a textual history in which the enslaved are rarely portrayed as the principal actors of historical events.

Only recently have some critics started challenging the image of an elitist New Spanish Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, disconnected from the general public and in indirect complicity with Francoist strategies of international self-promotion. Within that trend, the fact that the most important names of the New Spanish Cinema were simultaneously working as publicists, scriptwriters or TV directors allows us to map a more complex reality. Fascinated with a new medium full of unknown possibilities, those directors assimilated new techniques and the possibilities of dealing with a different and much bigger audience. The TV experience was not only the point of departure for a renewed aesthetic, but also for a more complex positioning of film as a political tool that was conceived then not in radical opposition to Francoist mass media but as strategically linked to them. This analysis of a paradigmatic film of the period in dialogue with TV aesthetics, Martín Patino’s Canciones para después de una Guerra/Songs for After a War (1976), opens the possibility of a re-contextualization of TV ‘cursilería’ and its transformation into modern kitsch as an innovative aesthetic and, simultaneously, an oppositional discourse.

In Un cuento chino/Chinese Take-Out (Borensztein, 2011), the protagonist, Roberto, is a misanthropic character who unexpectedly has an encounter with the Other: Jun, a Chinese immigrant who enters his life. Unlike other migration films, the emphasis here is on the Argentine protagonist. Communication is a key theme on multiple levels, and the interaction between Roberto and Jun results in transculturation. The lack of subtitles for the Chinese immigrant means that both the Argentine characters and the audience have to understand his non-verbal communication. Roberto and his friend Mari also use this type of communication with Jun and between themselves. Non-verbal communication theories (kinesics, vocalics, oculesics, proxemics and haptics) give us deeper insights into how this communication functions. Besides the gestures, body movement, eye behaviour and voice behaviour, two other non-verbal forms of communication with connotative meaning – photography and painting – are crucial to the film. The polysemic image of the cow initially represents death for Jun, but then life and love for both him and Roberto. Ultimately, this intercultural encounter causes Roberto to undergo a change in character. Communication, intercultural and otherwise, turns out to be the key to happiness.

Child star Marisol’s (Pepa Flores) third film, Tómbola (Lucía, 1962), is a retelling of Aesop’s ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ with a sinister subtext that reveals Francoism’s political use of children and the biography of the niña prodigio. Interpreting the character of the ventriloquist kidnapper in Lucía’s film, this article explores ventriloquism as a metaphor of power and the appropriation of the child’s voice, body and subjectivity. Tómbola and Marisol epitomize the greater biopolitics of Franco’s regime as they champion and suffer, respectively, the child’s curbed and directed vocality. This counter-hegemonic reading of the Spanish popular film focuses on how the feature exposes its own biopolitical machinations and, in doing so, dramatizes and reveals the nefarious indoctrination of children by a regime that prescribed child abduction for re-education.

Cine, Género y Jóvenes: El Cine Mexicano Contemporáneo y Su Audiencia Tapatía, Patricia Torres San Martín (2011) University of Guadalajara, Guadalajara, Mexico. Collection of the Center for Gender Studies, 230 pp., ISBN: 9978-60-450-404-0, Paperback, $34.95

Themes in Latin American cinema, Keith John Richards (2011) Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 232 pp., ISBN: 978-0-7864-3538-8, Paperback, $40.00

New trends in Argentine and Brazilian cinema, Cacilda Rêgo and Carolina Rocha (eds) (2011) Chicago: Intellect, The University of Chicago Press (274 pp.), ISBN 978-1-84150-375-2, Paperback, $35