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- Volume 18, Issue 2, 2021
Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas - Volume 18, Issue 2, 2021
Volume 18, Issue 2, 2021
- Articles
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Del mito gaucho al mito peronista: la decadencia del cine criollista en La cabalgata del circo (Soffici 1945)
More LessThe article explores the decline of Criollista cinema during early Peronism, based on the study of Mario Soffici’s 1945 film La cabalgata del circo/Circus Cavalcade and the political circumstances around it, including Eva Duarte’s performance, the violent incidents during the premiere and the role of the censorship. The central hypothesis is that the film inaugurates a kind of symbolic relay: Peronism appropriates nineteenth-century emblems such as the gaucho myth or the romantic woman, and incorporates them into the emerging Peronist myth. This gives the Criollista cinema of the time the tone of a retreating criollismo, which is articulated as a second degree nostalgia: if criollismo was always marked by nostalgia for a pre-modern golden age, La cabalgata del circo reveals a nostalgia for that nostalgia, given that it is not only a Criollista story but also a history of criollismo. The research is based on the analysis of the film, its links with the historical-political context and the way it adapts the Criollista novel Juan Cuello, written by Eduardo Gutiérrez in 1880.
ResumenEl artículo explora la decadencia del cine criollista durante el primer peronismo a partir del estudio de La cabalgata del circo (Soffici 1945) y las circunstancias políticas que la rodearon, desde la actuación de Eva Duarte hasta los incidentes violentos durante el estreno y las intervenciones de la censura. La hipótesis central es que con esta película se inaugura una suerte de relevo simbólico: el peronismo se apropia de emblemas decimonónicos como el mito gaucho o la mujer romántica, y los incorpora dentro del emergente mito peronista. Esto confiere al cine criollista del período el tono de un criollismo en retirada, que se articula como una nostalgia de segundo grado: si el criollismo siempre estuvo marcado por la nostalgia de una edad dorada pre-moderna, La cabalgata del circo manifiesta una nostalgia de esa nostalgia, dado que se trata no solo de un relato criollista sino también de una historia del criollismo. La investigación se basa en el análisis del filme, su relación con el contexto histórico-político y la lectura que propone de la novela criollista Juan Cuello ([1880] 1895) de Eduardo Gutiérrez.
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Narcos in Jesús María: Dystopian empowerment in the amateur exploitation film Corazón cubano/Cuban Heart (2014)
More LessThis article analyses the film Corazón cubano/Cuban Heart (Liyuen Valdés 2014), a story about drug traffickers in the Jesús María neighbourhood of Havana, circulated only through the Paquete Semanal (Weekly Package). Examining the creators’ symbolic identification with the figure of the narco, this article explores Corazón as an example of amateur, alternative and informal media within the Paquete and its relationship with exploitation, cult and trash cinema. It argues that Corazón’s appropriation of narconarratives through reparteros (the inhabitants of Havana’s peripheric and poorest neighbourhoods) is linked to the relationship between reparteros, rap and reggaeton and points to the filmmakers’ will to combine social criticism and entertainment. Corazón also reproduces controversial practices and discourses like ‘necroempowerment’ (Valencia) or ‘fascinating violence’ (Valencia and Sepúlveda), developing dystopian empowerment by appropriating the narco as a ‘cultural persona’ (Edberg).
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El cambio/The Change Joskowicz ([1971] 1975): Mexican counterculture and the futility of protest in the 1970s
More LessThis article analyses the representation of the 1970s countercultural movement in Alfredo Joskowicz’s film El cambio/The Change ([1971] 1975). It shows how the film portrays its protagonists as part of the Mexican countercultural movement, even as it adopts a critical view of that movement. Not only are the protagonists unsuccessful with their single action of protest, they are also engaged in problematic relationships with female and Indigenous characters. The ambivalence towards counterculture in El cambio is similar to the portrayal of leftist protest movements in other films by the same director. This article expands on the recognized relationship between this film and the director’s oeuvre. It demonstrates that the problematic portrayal of relationships between the protagonists and Indigenous and female characters relates to its historical context and other films from the time period. In particular, it shows that these interactions correspond with some of the ways that the Mexican state and the countercultural movement adopted paternalistic views of Indigenous people and replicated patriarchal relationships between men and women.
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The inheritance of silence in Cría cuervos/Raise Ravens (Saura 1976) and Julieta (Almodóvar 2016)
By Mai HuntLooking specifically towards child figures who serve as witnesses of death and its afterlives, this article mobilizes Esther Rashkin’s psychoanalytic work on the phantom to analyse the inheritance of silence as trauma between the mother/daughter pairings presented in Carlos Saura’s Cría cuervos/Raise Ravens (1976) and Pedro Almodóvar’s Julieta (2016). As Ana in Cría cuervos and Antía in Julieta both grow up in the shadow of a parent’s death, they are forced to confront the haunting legacy of premature death and the paralysing presence of silence in their family histories. Saura’s Ana and Almodóvar’s Antía must challenge the previous generation’s secrets, which have shaped their upbringings, through the use of imagination and fantasy in order to combat the silences they were raised in, with the ultimate goal of constructing a new family narrative. By forging a new female voice through these child protagonists, Saura and Almodóvar present an enduring intergenerational project for redefining maternity and femininity in the post-Franco era.
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A re-visionist Her-story of De cierta manera ([1974] 1977): Reading Yoruba myth in Sara Gómez’s revolutionary classic1
More LessRecent scholarship on Sara Gómez has expanded upon existing discourse on her work beyond her singular feature film, De cierta manera/One Way or Another ([1974] 1977) to examine not only her earlier documentary shorts of the 1960s, but to demonstrate the impact that her body of work has had on a subsequent generation of Cuban filmmakers who continue her mission to critique the Revolution through an antiracist and feminist lens – contemporary filmmakers such as Gloria Rolando, Sandra Gómez and Susana Barriga. This article seeks to push this conversation forward by arguing several interrelated points: (1) that De cierta manera contains symbolic, visually embedded references to a specific patakí (myth) about the Afro-Cuban orishas Ogun and Ochún; (2) that De cierta manera holds this in common with Gloria Rolando’s Oggun: An Eternal Presence (1991), which tells the patakí in a more explicit manner, and therefore the two films warrant comparison and (3) lastly, that this interpretation of De cierta manera offers a novel take on a ‘classic’ Cuban revolutionary film, offering additional interpretive layers that do not change the message of the film, per se, but complicate it by adding an additional filter through which to view and interpret it: that of Yoruba moral philosophy. The Afro-Cuban word patakí in Cuban Lucumí liturgical speech refers to a parable with a moral lesson, and is derived from the word pàtàkì, which means ‘[something] important’ in the Yorùbá language of West Africa. This article will attempt to answer how and why this particular myth is ‘important’ (pàtàkì) to the reading of De cierta manera and argue for a broader re-centring and privileging of African-derived philosophical frameworks within Cuban intellectual history and popular culture.
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El narcotráfico en el cine mexicano: arquetipos desde 2010 a 2017
Authors: Elba Díaz-Cerveró and Gabriel Domínguez-PartidaThis article studies the archetypes and the iconography in contemporary Mexican films that deal with drug trafficking in order to examine the evolution of the narco cinema subgenre and changes in the representation of the narcocultura. The corpus is constituted by the biggest box office hits each year between 2010 and 2017, which are analysed thematically. This study suggests that the characteristics of the narcocultura continue circulating within Mexican cinema, but it does not point to a subgenre’s existence. The genres circumscribing the films analysed promote the narcos’ heroism via archetypes and iconography, which symbolize how narcos overcome their modus vivendi to stand as a legitimate authority against a corrupt government. Alongside this representation of narcos, these films also present objectified women and promote values such as loyalty and family. The aforementioned archetypes and iconography offer a view of life in which violence is normalized, and crime is seen as a legitimate lifestyle.
ResumenEsta investigación estudia los arquetipos y la iconografía presente en el cine mexicano contemporáneo de ficción que ha abordado el tema del narcotráfico, con la finalidad de analizar la evolución del subgénero del narco cine, así como de identificar los cambios o la permanencia de las representaciones de la narcocultura. Para ello, se han tomado en cuenta los títulos nacionales de ficción que han formado parte del listado de películas con mayor recaudación en taquilla de cada año, desde 2010 hasta 2017, y se han examinado a través de un análisis temático. Los resultados sugieren que las características de la narcocultura continúan presentes en el cine comercial mexicano, sin que esto indique la prevalencia de un subgénero. Los géneros que configuran las cintas analizadas promueven el carácter heroico del narcotraficante, a través de arquetipos e iconografía que muestran la superación de su propio modus vivendi y hacen que se erija en autoridad legítima frente al gobierno corrompido. Todo ello, unido a una representación de las mujeres como objeto y a la promoción de valores como la lealtad y la familia, propone entre los espectadores un estilo de vida en el que la violencia se relativiza y el crimen se legitima como estilo de vida válido.
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- Book Reviews
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Disability in Spanish-speaking and U.S. Chicano Contexts: Critical and Artistic Perspectives, Dawn Slack and Karen L. Rauch (eds) (2019)
More LessReview of: Disability in Spanish-speaking and U.S. Chicano Contexts: Critical and Artistic Perspectives, Dawn Slack and Karen L. Rauch (eds) (2019)
Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 224 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-52752-750-8, h/bk, £61.99
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Ciudad y fantasmagoría: dimensiones de la mirada en el cine urbano de Latinoamérica del siglo XXI, Carolina Rueda (2019)
More LessReview of: Ciudad y fantasmagoría: dimensiones de la mirada en el cine urbano de Latinoamérica del siglo XXI, Carolina Rueda (2019)
Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 392 pp.,
ISBN 978-956-396-046-4, p/bk, Chilean pesos 15.00
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La conquista del espacio: cine silente uruguayo (1915–32), Georgina Torello (2018)
More LessReview of: La conquista del espacio: cine silente uruguayo (1915–32), Georgina Torello (2018)
Montevideo: Editorial Yaugurú, 276 pp.,
ISBN 978-9-97489-027-5, p/bk
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The Spanish Quinqui Film: Delinquency, Sound, Sensation, Tom Whittaker (2020)
By Susan LarsonReview of: The Spanish Quinqui Film: Delinquency, Sound, Sensation, Tom Whittaker (2020)
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 248 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-52613-177-5, h/bk, £80.00
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Cinema against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History, David Martin-Jones (2019)
By Luis FreijoReview of: Cinema against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History, David Martin-Jones (2019)
London and New York: Routledge, 258 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-13890-795-9, pbk, £27.99
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The Two cines con niño: Genre and the Child Protagonist in Over Fifty Years of Spanish Film (1955–2010), Erin Hogan (2018)
More LessReview of: The Two cines con niño: Genre and the Child Protagonist in Over Fifty Years of Spanish Film (1955–2010), Erin Hogan (2018)
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 236 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-47443-611-3, h/bk, £75.00 and p/bk, £19.99
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The Making and Unmaking of Francoist Kitsch Cinema: From Raza to Pan’s Labyrinth, Alejandro Yarza (2018)
By Ann DaviesReview of: The Making and Unmaking of Francoist Kitsch Cinema: From Raza to Pan’s Labyrinth, Alejandro Yarza (2018)
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 322 pp.,
ISBN 978-0-74869-924-7, h/bk, £63.88
ISBN 978-1-47443-185-9, p/bk, £22.48
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