Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas - Volume 19, Issue 1, 2022

This article argues that non-theatrical films made about East Los Angeles contain decolonial elements, even though the films were produced under various contexts to educate general audiences. It draws on archival material to examine films and English-language press articles and communiqués to chart a history of how Chicanas/os resisted against police brutality while engaging in anti-colonial and decolonial critiques.

This article was recipient of the 2021 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Latino Caucus Graduate Student Writing Award.

This article explores the intersection among masculinity, racialization and nationhood in Una cubana en España/A Cuban Woman in Spain (Bayón Herrera 1951). I examine the figure of Miguel, a White Spaniard who disguises himself as an Andalusian Gypsy to win the love of the Cuban celebrity Blanquita. Miguel seeks to accentuate ‘Gypsy’ stereotypes to hypermasculinize himself, also contributing to dissolving the very rigid limits of White, western masculinity. Andalusian folkloric behaviour provides Miguel with a hint of Blackness, and his ability to pass as White and non-White functions as a legitimation of ‘the other Spain’. This portrays Spain as a culturally conflicted nation, suggesting an inclination to reconcile not only with the formerly colonized but also with ‘the other’ inside each Spaniard. ‘Gypsification’, in conjunction with the characters’ heterosexual union, prompts manners of cultural coexistence with Cuba, as it reconfigures Spanish national identity within a broader transatlantic context.

This article examines how Crónica de una fuga/Chronicle of an Escape (Caetano 2006) uses Gothic horror conventions, particularly the haunted house, to represent the experiences of political prisoners at a clandestine detention centre under the last Argentine dictatorship (1976–83). Though understudied until recently, the Gothic and the haunted house in Latin America have a long cultural history in which their transnational meanings have been adopted, adapted and expanded to suit local contexts, thus evoking both buried pasts and traumatic origins, such as the legacies of colonialism or dictatorial violence, as well as contemporary crises. This article demonstrates how Crónica de una fuga utilizes a Gothic aesthetic to reflect political terror’s effect on space and time, representing the clandestine detention centre as haunted house in order to make legible the oft-suppressed experience of state-sponsored political terror under the Argentine dictatorship. Moreover, the film reveals the Gothic nature of the military government’s strategies to instil fear in the populace. By aiding us to understand the political terror of the past, Crónica’s haunted house also helps its viewers contend with and memorialize its ongoing legacies.

The first episode of Narcos, the Netflix TV series inspired by the life of Pablo Escobar, begins with the programmatic intertitle: ‘Magical realism is defined as what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe. There is a reason why magical realism was born in Colombia’. It is this ‘too strange to believe’ philosophy of the gaze that underlies the United States–Brazil–Colombia co-production series echoing the Drug Enforcement Administration version of events, commodifying the rise of Colombia’s drug economy for global audiences. Narcos places more value on realism than it does on the magical (although the two poles of attraction are inseparable, mutually enriching each other). The shift towards the insertion of heavy doses of non-fiction in the TV series is worth the utmost attention because it opens the way to a consideration of the differences between outsider and insider perspectives on culture and race, and the way they emerge on-screen. Magical realism in Narcos is also a tool to unmasks the war on drugs as a US hidden agenda to create antagonism. After 1989, an intensification of the rhetoric against narco-traffic became a pretext to respond to the upcoming geopolitical tensions, while simultaneously perpetrating the structural domination typical of the Cold War era.

This article analyses the relation between the Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía (EOC), censorship and the Spanish filmmaking industry during the Franco dictatorship. Founded in 1947, the EOC was an oasis in which students saw, were taught and made films that could never be shown on Spanish screens at the time. Nevertheless, in the last years of the dictatorship, the students of the school were subject to harassment that ended up curtailing their careers. Based on archival research (files about the censorship and scripts, as well as interviews), this article offers a historical analysis of censorship and the EOC that has not been previously explored.

Este artículo aborda la relación entre la Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía (EOC), la censura y la industria cinematográfica española durante la dictadura franquista. Fundada en 1947, la Escuela Oficial de Cine fue, durante la mayor parte de sus casi treinta años de vida, un oasis en el que – sin que la censura interviniera prácticamente – se veía, se enseñaba y se hacía un tipo de cine impensable en las pantallas españolas. Sin embargo, durante los últimos años de la dictadura – y de la institución – los y las estudiantes de la Escuela se vieron sometidos a un acoso que terminó por cercenar la carrera profesional de muchos de ellos. Partiendo de una investigación original sobre documentos de archivo, esta contribución plantea una reflexión histórica basada, fundamentalmente, en el análisis de expedientes de censura y guiones cinematográficos, así como en entrevistas, con el propósito de arrojar luz sobre una parte de la historia de la censura española y de la EOC prácticamente inexplorada.

Review of: Contemporary Peruvian Cinema: History, Identity and Violence on Screen, Sarah Barrow (2018)

London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 342 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78453-821-7, h/bk, £69.00

Review of: Casting Masculinity in Spanish Film: Negotiating Identity in a Consumer Age, Mary T. Hartson (2017)

New York: Lexington Books, 214 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-49853-711-7, h/bk, $95

ISBN 978-1-49853-712-4, e-book, $90

Review of: Multiplatform Media in Mexico: Growth and Change Since 2010, Paul Julian Smith (2019)

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 204 pp.,

ISBN 978-3-03017-539-9, p/bk, £20.29, e-book, £21.84

Review of: Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century: Dynamic and Unstable Grounds, Cynthia Vich and Sarah Barrow (eds) (2021)

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 356 pp.,

ISBN 978-3-03052-511-8, h/bk,

ISBN 978-3-03052-512-5, e-book, $50.00

Review of: Latinas and Latinos on TV: Colorblind Comedy in the Post-Racial Network Era, Isabel Molina-Guzmán (2018)

Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 137 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-81653-724-2, p/bk, $19.95

Review of: Documentary Filmmaking in Contemporary Brazil: Cinematic Archives of the Present, Gustavo Procopio Furtado (2019)

New York: Oxford University Press, 265 pp.,

ISBN 978-0190867041, h/bk, £64.00

ISBN 978-0190867058, p/bk, £25.99

Review of: Inhabiting the In-Between: Childhood and Cinema in Spain’s Long Transition, Sarah Thomas (2019)

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 240 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-48750-488-5, h/bk, $77.00