Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2018

In El próximo oriente/The Next Orient (2006), director Fernando Colomo takes on the always controversial issue of immigration from Muslim countries and the European struggle to understand and come to terms with its new multilingual, multicultural reality. In this case, the focus is on the once-again multicultural Spain, which has been dealing in healthy and unhealthy ways with the twin challenges of a high immigration rate and a very low native birth rate. Rather than focusing on the banal plot, however, we think about the importance of the sound track in this film, both spoken and musical (including the Goya-nominated Bengali song, ‘Shokal Fire Ashe’/The Morning Returns, and the crucial information provided in the nonsubtitled exchanges in Bengali by the Bangladeshi immigrant characters.

Previous readings of Glauber Rocha’s Barravento/The Turning Wind (1962) have generally focused on Marxist rhetoric or on the film’s treatment of Candomblé. Through a close reading of the film, this article proposes an interpretation that foregrounds the film’s depiction of sexuality and sexual identity, which helps illuminate to a greater degree the film’s potential to challenge the status quo. Coupling a queer theoretical framework with attention to the specificities of contemporary Brazilian sexual culture, this article suggests that the film’s more ambivalent or contradictory aspects often relate to how it constructs sexuality and sexual identity. Furthermore, it suggests that tensions around sexual identity can be traced to the heart of the political problem Rocha explores in Barravento, and that the resolution of these tensions is key to the development of a liberated, non-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian community.

This article examines how Matías Piñeiro’s films El hombre robado/The Stolen Man (2007) and Todos mienten/They all Lie (2009) critically redeploy foundational figures and rhetorical devices that structure the dominant narratives of Argentine national history. Both films take lesser-known writings of the nineteenthcentury intellectual and statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, best known for Facundo: Civilización y barbarie/Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (1845) (1845), as the point of departure for intricate plots involving the romantic intrigues of young people in twenty-first century Buenos Aires. Contrary to the teleology integral to official versions of national history, which have been conspicuously on display during the Bicentennial celebrations of Latin American independence in recent years, Piñeiro’s films posit a more porous and more unstable relationship between the present and history, in which the ruins of the latter persistently, if intermittently, and fragmentarily inform everyday life, and vice versa. Thus, through the insistent repetition of the basic components of foundational myths of Argentine identity, El hombre robado and Todos mienten redirect a force of habit to restore the polysemy of the commonplace tropes of national history.

This article looks at visual configurations of border landscapes and Central American migrant trajectories in three recent documentaries: Which Way Home (Cammisa, 2009), De Nadie/No One (Dirdamal, 2005) and Who is Dayani Cristal? (Silver and García Bernal, 2013). It examines elements pertaining to the representations of borders, space and identity to expand Shaw’s classification of the new sub-genre of migration films within the documentary. It also highlights the social configuration of space because of its relational construction and its production through practices of material engagement: ‘if time unfolds as change then space unfolds as interaction’. To this end, the spatial metaphor of the paratopia designates a negotiation of material and human relationality away from essentialist place/non-place thinking. This additionally leads to an examination of the migrant body as a depoliticized subject of which the visualization counters the stereotypical discourse of the migrant as a delinquent.

This article examines a small corpus of Argentine documentaries from the 1950s–70s to analyze the role of the representation of children. The inclusion of the voices of the subjects featured, the observational function of the camera and the framing, the spontaneity of the gaze and the use of montage (appropriated from foreign films) came together in this period in these documentary shorts. Thanks to their brief duration, the effectivity of their relationship with spectators and the aesthetic freedom from economic constraints, these documentary shorts became the principal communicative tool for efforts to transform society. The aesthetic figuration of children worked hand in hand with larger political objectives given its ability to move spectators and lead them to reflection, as well as promoting the renovation of domestic filmmaking.

Este artículo examina un corpus de cortometrajes documentales argentinos entre finales de la década del cincuenta y mediados de los años setenta para analizar el rol de la figura del niño en la imagen cinematográfica. La inclusión de las voces de los sujetos retratados, la funcionalidad observacional de la cámara y el encuadre, la espontaneidad de la mirada y el uso marcado del montaje (procedimientos reapropiados de corrientes fílmicas foráneas) hicieron su eclosión en el corto documental local de este período. Gracias a la breve duración, la efectividad en la relación con el receptor, la marginalidad y la libertad estética que deriva de la ausencia de trabas económicas, el cortometraje se convirtió en la principal herramienta de comunicación y transformación de la realidad, en favor de los sujetos y actores sociales marginados. La figuración estética del niño colaboró con los objetivos políticos estipulados mediante la capacidad de sensibilizar al receptor y convocarlo a la reflexión, al tiempo que participó de la modernización fílmica local.

Miradas al cine mexicano, Aurelio De Los Reyes García-Rojas (ed.) (2016) Mexico City: Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía, 853 pp., ISBN: 9786079652838, (hbk), 334 MXN

La masificación del cine en Chile, 1907–1932: La conflictiva construcción de una cultura plebeya, Jorge Iturriaga (2015) Chile: Lom Ediciones, 324 pp., ISBN: 9789560006219, pbk, 14,000 CLP.

Contemporary Spanish Gothic, Ann Davies (2016) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 208 pp., ISBN: 9781474402996, h/bk, £70.00

Sex, Sadism, Spain, and Cinema: The Spanish Horror Film, Nicholas G. Schlegel (2015) Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 205 pp., ISBN: 9781442251151, h/bk, $85

Global Genres, Local Films: The Transnational Dimension of Spanish Cinema, Elena Oliete-Aldea, Beatriz Oria and Juan A. Ta rancón (eds) (2016) London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, xxiv + 270 pp, ISBN: 9781501302985, h/bk, £72

Más allá del pueblo: imágenes, indicios y políticas del cine, Gonzalo Aguilar (2015) Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 357 pp., ISBN: 9789877190823, $22.99 (p/bk)

De la foto al fotograma. Relaciones entre cine y fotografía en la Argentina (1840–1933), Andrea Cuarterolo (2013) Montevideo: Ediciones CdF, 260 pp., ISBN: 9789974600904

Latin American Cinema: A Comparative History, Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez (2016) Berkeley: University of California Press, 376 pp., ISBN: 9780520288638, p/bk, $41.95

Mexican Melodrama. Film and Nation from the Golden Age to the New Wave, Elena Lahr-Vivaz (2016) Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 218 pp., ISBN: 9780816532513, h/bk, $55.00