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- Volume 13, Issue 3, 2016
Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas - Volume 13, Issue 3, 2016
Volume 13, Issue 3, 2016
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Accented cinema and beyond: Latin American minor cinemas in Sweden, 1970–1990
Authors: Lars Gustaf Andersson and John SundholmAbstractThe aim of this article is to map and present professional and non-professional Latin American film-making that took place in Sweden from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. Most of the films from this period have been excluded from the established, canonical film history, both nationally and internationally. Another aim of the article is to argue for the importance of the concept of ‘minor cinemas’. This concept has the benefit of overcoming generalizing and reductive models of analysis and the historiography of Latin American film-making beyond that continent. Owing to an extensive focus on political documentary, third cinema, or the aesthetics of accented cinemas, the diversity of Latin American film-making in countries like Sweden has been neglected. Thus, this article calls for a transnational historiography that also encompasses minor histories and presents a critique of Hamid Naficy’s seminal theory of an accented cinema. In terms of theory, the article argues for a return to the theoretical interventions of the concept of minor cinemas made by David E. James and for a reactualization of Zuzana M. Pick’s early study on exilic Chilean cinema.
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Un/framing identity: Space and colour in Pedro Almodóvar’s Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón/Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom (1980)
By Vanessa CeiaAbstractPedro Almodóvar’s Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón/Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom (1980) is considered by many critics as a chronicle of the Movida madrileña, a social and cultural renaissance that materialized shortly after the death of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. Despite the film’s much-discussed underground beginnings and prioritization of alternative and once-marginalized social groups and sexual practices, less frequently discussed is Almodóvar’s questioning of the dichotomy between institutionalized and alternative social identities in post-authoritarian Spain. Through his use of negative and positive space, terms akin to background and foreground, Almodóvar demonstrates how, just as bodies can be individualized and semanticized, they can be de-scribed of meaning, de-individualized and banalized. Almodóvar’s manipulation of space reveals the film-maker’s agenda to not only neutralize and critique the uniformity of stereotypical and traditional Spain but to do so with all collectivities, including those as cutting-edge as those of the Movida. In this way, Almodóvar’s film proposes a visually utopian agenda whereby social differences are impossible to fix and social hierarchies impossible to maintain.
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Remembering in ruins: Touching, seeing and feeling the past in Nostalgia de la luz/Nostalgia for the Light ([2010] 2011)
More LessAbstractIn the wake of the atrocities of the twentieth century in countries across Latin America, the question of how to reconcile with past trauma and move towards a more peaceful future has often been fraught and divisive, with little consensus as to how and what to remember or whether to even remember at all. In Chile, the 1990 transition from dictatorship to democracy is several decades in the past, yet debates about memory and justice, and the quest to find the bodies of those disappeared by the State during the dictatorship, continue unresolved. This article examines the documentary film Nostalgia for the Light ([2010] 2011), made by Chilean film-maker Patricio Guzmán and asks: How is memory documented, preserved, constructed and transmitted through documentary film? Can and how does the very materiality of memory become a historiographical strategy? What is the relationship between materiality and memory? Ultimately, the article argues that the film performs an affective, polyvocal, temporally layered memory mapping that both works to explore and elucidate the ongoing influence of the past in the present, and to intervene in the contemporary memory landscape.
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(In)visible bodies and cultural imperialism: Jalisco canta en Sevilla/Jalisco Sings in Sevilla, Teatro Apolo/Apollo Theatre and the star discourse of Jorge Negrete in Spain
By Diana NortonAbstractIn his two Spanish films – Jalisco canta en Sevilla/Jalisco sings in Sevilla (1948) and Teatro Apolo/Apollo Theatre (1949) – Jorge Negrete plays characters that travel to Spain for financial reasons and remain for love of a Spanish woman. This discourse legitimizes a criollo identity that removes him from the discourse of mexicanidad as defined by mestizaje. While it has been argued that the romantic relationships of these films represent a convivencia [coexistence] between Mexico and Spain, such a reading does not account for the complex identity constructions of Golden Age Mexican cinema. As Mexican identity consolidated around mestizaje, industrialization, urban migration and social mobility, Negrete’s Spanish films ignore this discourse and exclude his participation within it. I will use Said’s ‘structures of attitude and reference’ to illuminate the discourse of Hispanidad that marked the creation of these films. I aim to reveal the invisibility of the industrializing Mexican nation within them and propose that Jorge Negrete’s unique position within the discourse of Hispanidad has led to his invisibility in the scholarship of male Mexican film stars of the 1940s.
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‘I haven’t done anything wrong!’ Melodrama and victimization in Las 13 rosas/13 Roses (2007) and La voz dormida/The Sleeping Voice (2011)
More LessAbstractThis article examines two films about the Spanish Civil War that feature victims as protagonists: Las 13 rosas/13 Roses (Martínez Lázaro, 2007) and La voz dormida/The Sleeping Voice (Zambrano, 2011). Drawing from studies of melodrama, the article offers an examination of the representation of Francoist repression through visual narration in these films, suggesting they use an affective filter that impedes audience’s critical reflection. The article ends by discussing victimization and spectatorship in relation to Rancière’s ideas of the emancipated spectator. It explores how the audience’s experiences might have been affected by the fact that debates on historical memory, which were prominent at the time of the release of these films, were downplayed in both films.
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Buñuel’s social close-up: An entomological gaze on El ángel exterminador/The Exterminating Angel (1962)
By James RameyAbstractThis article proposes a new interpretation of Buñuel’s film-making strategies by examining his training in entomology and his early theorization of the Griffithian close-up as a technique whereby edited film-making can be made to conceive in a way that simple images or continuous shots cannot. This technique, I argue, implies the opposite of Auerbach´s unipersonal subjectivism in modernist literature, requiring a cinematic multipersonal subjectivism that is covalent with Bakhtinian dialogism. In developing his multi-personal subjectivism into a rational tool for opening a window on the irrational world of the unconscious, I believe Buñuel´s entomological training led him to conceive and represent a dialogical parasitism, similar to the posthumanist philosophy of Michel Serres decades later, as being inherent in all human relationships, a view most clearly conveyed in El ángel exterminador/The Exterminating Angel (1962).
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Reviews
AbstractNEW ARGENTINE CINEMA, JENS ANDERMANN (2012) New York: I.B. Tauris, 209 pp., ISBN: 9781848854635, p/bk £17.99
IMAGEN, CUERPO Y SEXUALIDAD: REPRESENTACIONES DEL CUERPO EN LA CULTURA AUDIOVISUAL CONTEMPORÁNEA, FRANCISCO A. ZURIÁN (2013) Madrid: Editorial Ocho y Medio, 241 pp., ISBN: 9788496582873, p/bk, €25.00
CUESTIÓN DE IMAGEN: CINE Y MARCA ESPAÑA, ALFREDO MARTÍNEZ EXPÓSITO (2015) Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 291 pp., ISBN: 9788416187065, p/bk, €39
SCREENING MINORS IN LATIN AMERICAN CINEMA, CAROLINA ROCHA AND GEORGIA SEMINET (EDS) (2014) New York: Lexington Books, 224 pp., ISBN: 9780739199510, h/bk, $90.00; ISBN: 9780739199527, e-Book, $89.99
IMMIGRATION CINEMA IN THE NEW EUROPE, ISOLINA BALLESTEROS (2015) Bristol, UK; Chicago, USA: Intellect, xv + 265 pp., ISBN: 9781783204113, p/bk, £28
A HISTORY OF SPANISH FILM: CINEMA AND SOCIETY 1910−2010, SALLY FAULKNER (2013) 1st ed., London: Bloomsbury Academic, 314 pp., ISBN: HB 9780826416667, p/bk, $15.21
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