Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas - Cine-Lit: Mujer y Genero/Women and Genre, Jun 2022

Ciro Guerra’s La sombra del caminante/Wandering Shadows (2017), Los viajes del viento/The Wind Journeys (2009) and El abrazo de la serpiente/The Embrace of the Serpent (2015) address critical issues in Colombian history and avoid spectacularizing violence and poverty while dignifying many of the challenges faced by marginalized groups in Colombia. However, this trilogy of films is still characterized by a masculine presence and lacks female representation. From an intersectional perspective, this article connects the absence of feminine experiences in this set of films with the insufficient recognition that has historically been given to women’s contributions and participation in the construction of historical memory, artistic creation and preservation of ancestral knowledge in Colombia

La sombra del caminante (2017), Los viajes del viento (2009) y El abrazo de la serpiente (2015) del director colombiano Ciro Guerra abordan temas álgidos de la historia colombiana, evitando convertir la violencia y la pobreza en espectáculo, a la vez que dignifican varios de los desafíos enfrentados por grupos marginados en situaciones tan actuales para la sociedad colombiana. Sin embargo, esta trilogía de películas caracterizada por el protagonismo masculino carece de representaciones femeninas. Desde una perspectiva interseccional, este artículo conecta la ausencia de experiencias femeninas, en este conjunto de filmes, con el escaso reconocimiento que se ha dado históricamente a la participación femenina en la producción de memoria histórica, creación artística y preservación de conocimiento ancestral, en Colombia.

This article analyses the cinematographic strategies in Carmen Castillo’s documentary La flaca Alejandra, vida y muertes de una mujer chilena (‘Skinny Alejandra, life and death of a Chilean woman’) (1994) that represent the experience of betrayal, including forked narration and temporal simultaneity through spectral figures. The reading proposes that the documentary, while erasing binaries and attempting an ‘ethical neutrality’, subjects the brutal particularities of torture and sexual violence to moral judgements that perpetuate a dualistic vision of the hero and the traitor.

Este artículo analiza distintas estrategias cinematográficas que el documental de Carmen Castillo La flaca Alejandra, vidas y muertes de una mujer chilena (1994) utiliza para representar y comprender la experiencia de la traición entre las que se cuentan la narración bífida y la simultaneidad temporal a partir de figuras espectrales. La lectura propone que el documental, a la vez que borra binarismos e intenta una ‘neutralidad ética’, supedita las brutales particularidades de la tortura y la violencia sexual a juicios morales que perpetúan una visión dualista del héroe y el traidor.

In his lifelong career as a film director, Ventura Pons has been praised for his unique and consistent approach to female roles. Between 1978 and 2018 he worked with virtually all of the most important Catalan actresses and developed a special affinity with some of them, such as Rosa Maria Sardà and Amparo Moreno. The extraordinary interpreting palette of both Sardà and Moreno provided Ventura Pons with a powerful repertoire of acting tones and hues, most notably in comedic genres. This article explores Pons’s construction of national discourses through the roles and performances of Sardà, focusing on the interrelated issues of self-image and national allegory. The notion of self-image, as developed by imagologists Beller and Leerssen (2007), is most relevant in the context of the Catalan nation-building project, which runs in parallel to the othering of aspects of Catalan identity that are increasingly felt as alien.

The article examines the documentary work of British–Mexican filmmaker Trisha Ziff. It focuses on three films: Chevolution (2008), an examination of the iconic image of Che Guevara by Cuban photographer Korda; La maleta Mexicana/The Mexican Suitcase (2012), about a trove of negatives taken by war photographers Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour during the Spanish Civil War and found in Mexico City decades later and El hombre que vio demasiado/The Man Who Saw Too Much (2016), a documentary that follows the life and work of Mexican tabloid photographer Enrique Metinides. The article show how Ziff examines issues around the moral and legal implications in the way images are disseminated and used, the power of photography to evoke and shape historical memory, and the shock value of images of violence. It argues that the three documentaries are valuable contributions to an archaeology of modernity’s visual media, looking back at a recent period where illustrated journalism was the foremost medium of information. Taking a cue from Cornell Capa’s notion of the ‘concerned photographer’, the article shows how, underpinning Ziff’s documentaries, the notion of the ethical mission of the photographer in an age increasingly dominated by the moving image, information overload and historical amnesia is paramount.

This article examines cinematic representations of the vast rural-to-urban migration that affected Spain in the 1950s. Madrid, which began its time as capital of Franco’s Spain as a city that had to be purged of its sins, became crucial to the hierarchical, centralized control of the nation, and thus was prioritized over the countryside and provincial capitals. As a result, the segmented, ordered space of Madrid’s urban planning was quickly overwhelmed by the number of arriving migrants who moved from the periphery of the nation to the periphery of the capital. Two films from opposite ends of the decade and of the political spectrum, José Antonio Nieves Conde’s Surcos/Furrows (Nieves Conde 1951) and Carlos Saura’s Los golfos/The Delinquents (Saura 1959), highlight the plight of both recent and more-established migrants to Madrid. The methods that the characters in these films use to gain access to the centre of Spanish social imaginary (i.e., crime and spectacle) are doomed to failure because they are inherently marginal activities. The films frame their protagonists’ movement through urban space to show that the economic modernization of the Franco regime in the 1950s failed to live up to expectations for improving the social well-being of the city’s inhabitants.

Review of: The Child in Contemporary Latin American Cinema, Deborah Martin (2019)

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 245 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-13753-060-8, h/bk, £95.00

ISBN 978-1-13752-822-3, e-book, £76.00

Review of: Tras las lentes de Isabel Coixet: Cine, compromiso y feminismo, Barbara Zecchi (ed.) (2017)

Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 500 pp.,

ISBN 978-8-41693-573-4, p/bk, €22

ISBN 978-8-41735-816-7, e-book, €10.45

Review of: Remapping Brazilian Film Culture in the Twenty-first Century, Stephanie Dennison (2019)

Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 220 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-13811-992-5, p/bk, £27.99

Review of: The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel, Deborah Martin (2016)

Manchester: Manchester University Press, 160 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-71909-034-9, h/bk, £80.00

ISBN 978-1-52613-942-9, p/bk, £20.00

ISBN 978-1-78499-792-2, e-book, £18.24

Review of: Film Festivals: Cinema and Cultural Exchange, Mar Diestro-Dópido (2021)

Oxford: Legenda, 240 pp.,

ISBN 1781887055, h/bk, £75.00