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- Volume 12, Issue 3, 2015
Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas - Volume 12, Issue 3, 2015
Volume 12, Issue 3, 2015
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Rupture and reparation: Postmemory, the child seer and graphic violence in Infancia clandestina (Benjamín Ávila, 2012)
By Sarah ThomasAbstractAlthough films representing violence through a child’s eyes have become increasingly commonplace in Latin American cinema of the last three decades, this article proposes that Bejamín Ávila’s 2012 Infancia clandestina provides an innovative approach. The film emphasizes ruptures – aesthetic, thematic and spectatorial – as well as gestures towards their repair in an attempt to represent the child’s perspective and engage the viewer in approaching the nation’s violent past. These forms of rupture and reparation, along with oscillations between identification with and distance from the protagonist’s perspective, draw attention not only to the complexities of representing the child’s subjective viewpoint but also of representing the violence of state repression. After examining the film’s treatment of postmemorial generational rupture, the article explores the mechanisms by which the film aligns the viewer with the perspective of its child protagonist while refusing complete identification with his subject position. Finally, it demonstrates how the child’s perspective of violence is cast as unique – underscoring his difference and questioning the possibility of representing ‘realistically’ the violence of the Dirty War years.
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Aproximación a la distribución internacional de cine español en los inicios del siglo XXI
More LessAbstractThe internationalization of Spanish cinema has come to form part of the public and private policies of the film industry in this new century. The presence of Spanish cinema in international festivals and markets, as well as the recognition some of its directors and stars enjoy, make it possible to create a map of the organization of Spanish and European promotional politics as well as of the elements that can be connected to their brands within the industry. The rise of sales agents in this context speaks to the privatization of this space in which certain elements are formulated to make Spanish cinema visible. Its characterization as a national cinema should be redefined in a context of globalization.
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Arturo Ripstein’s and Paz Alicia Garciadiego’s Lucha Reyes and the aesthetics of Mexican abjection
More LessAbstractThis article explores questions of representation and reception of Arturo Ripstein’s biopic La reina de la noche/The Queen of the Night (1994), loosely based on the life of the pioneer Mexican ranchera music performer Lucha Reyes (1906–1944). Reyes created the sound of ranchera singing as we understand it today: simultaneously aggressive, pained, festive. Her troubled and controversial career is examined in light of the film’s mixed reception, notably the unfavourable reception in Mexico due to the irreverent treatment of this national icon. The divisive representation of Reyes’s alcoholism, mental illness and bisexual lifestyle opens a window into exploring how Reyes’s non-conformist agency rubbed uneasily against dominant society. Yet, despite this critical edge, the focus on Reyes as a tragic and abject victim and her rendering as a queer icon register the multiple layers of ambiguity that made the film so problematic for audiences and critics.
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Once more into the crypt: A geocritical approach to Luis Buñuel’s Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pan
More LessAbstractLuis Buñuel’s short documentary film, Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pan/Las Hurdes: Land without Bread (1933) has long frustrated critics, who have variously categorized it as a socialist-realist call to arms, a brutal parody of ethnography and a flirtation with sadism. Some question whether the film is a documentary at all. By examining the film in light of not only its historically immediate predecessors, but also an often-neglected one – Lope de Vega’s play, Las Batuecas del Duque de Alba/The Duke of Alba’s Las Batuecas (Lope de Vega, 1604–1614) – I will account for the facet of Las Hurdes that these disparate characterizations fail to include. To do so, this investigation engages in what Bertrand Westphal calls ‘geocriticism’, a critical practice that ‘studies the literary stratifications of referential space’. Here, the space in question is the valley of Las Batuecas/Las Hurdes, and the key strata are Lope’s play and Buñuel’s film the former text casts the region as a ‘crypt space’ for Castile, and the latter recapitulates and critiques that role in a new temporal context. By scrutinizing these textual reconfigurations of the region as part of the same broader phenomenon, I will elucidate the aesthetically and politically contentious relationship of Las Hurdes’ diegetic content to its human and geographical referents.
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Book Reviews
Authors: Duncan Wheeler, Cristina Venegas, Marina Díaz López, Dolores Tierney, Cacilda M. Rêgo and Lynn HealyAbstractEl documental Cinematográfico y Televisivo Contemporáneo: Memoria, Sujeto y Formación de la Identidad Democrática Española, Isabel M. Estrada (2013) Woodbridge: Tamesis, 196 pp., ISBN: 9781855662513, h/bk, £60.00
La Televisión Durante La Transición Española, Manuel Palacio (2012) Madrid: Cátedra, 453 pp., ISBN: 9788437630687, h/bk, €23.40
El Cine Y La Transición Política En España (1975–1982), Manuel Palacio (ed.) (2011) Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 271 pp., ISBN: 9788499402987, p/bk, €16.00
Indianizing Film: Decolonizing, The Andes, and The Question of Technology, Freya Schiwy (2009) New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 282 pp., ISBN: 9870813545400, p/bk, US $24.95; ISBN: 9780813547138, web pdf, US $24.95
All about Almodóvar. A Passion for Cinema, Brad Epps and Despina Kakoudaki (eds) (2009) Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 496 pp., ISBN: 9780816649617, p/bk, US$18
Screening Cuba: Film Criticism as Political Performance during the Cold War, Hector Amaya (2010) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 222 pp., ISBN: 9780252035593, cloth, US $80.00; ISBN: 9780252077487, p/bk, US $30.00; ISBN: 9780252090028, e-book
Brazilian Women’s Film-making: From Dictatorship to Democracy, Leslie L. Marsh (2012) Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: Illinois University Press, 248 pp., ISBN: 9780252037252, cloth, US $85.00; ISBN: 9780252078736, p/bk, US $28.00; ISBN: 9780252094378, e-book
Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas and Latin America, Victoria Ruétalo and Dolores Tierney (eds) (2009) New York: Routledge, 328 pp., ISBN: 0415993865, p/bk, US $54.95
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