Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas - Current Issue

This article explores the links between memory and materiality in the Argentine film La idea de un lago/The Idea of a Lake. It assumes that material memory, understood as the process of remembrance that results from the engagement with material traces of the past (objects, places, landscapes), is a recurrent trope by which contemporary documentary filmmakers criticize official discourses on memory from the Kirchners’s era. In this context, it reads La idea de un lago as a fictional text that performs this mode by using photographs and landscape – as those traces of the past that bring it to the present – to embody the conflicting relationship that children of the disappeared hold with the traumatic absence of a parent. At the level of cultural memory, this translates into a narrative of the dictatorship that does not problematize – as non-fictional work did – but rather reinforces kirchnerist politics of memory.

This article analyses the spatial logic of the Argentine film El hombre de al lado/The Man Next Door (2009) directed by Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat by using Marc Augé’s categories of place and non-place. In the film, neighbours Leonardo and Víctor fight over the building of a window in Víctor’s apartment that will face Leonardo’s home and modern architecture exemplar, the Curutchet House – a house built by renowned architect Le Corbusier. The tension between Leonardo and Víctor can be better understood as a tension between the global and the national, and how their particular perspectives match how they see the Curutchet House itself, either as non-place or place. The article proposes the non-place/anthropological place entanglement as a useful tool to understand how subjects interact with a given space, and how such interactions can be read as favouring one type of relationship or another, space as place or space as non-place, in practices of textual critique. Reading El hombre de al lado, this article pays close attention to how the protagonists, Víctor and Leonardo, occupy space in the film, whether as place or non-place, and read this contingent relationship as a commentary on the tension between the global and the national.

This article is the winner of the 2021 SCMS Latinx Caucus’s Graduate Student Award. It focuses on the mid-century fictional and documentary films on the Black cultural practice of Loíza produced by Puerto Rico’s Division of Community Education (DivEdCo) and addresses the pedagogical film’s role in promoting its attendant cultural-nationalist project. It analyses the DivEdCo period of Oscar Torres, a pioneering presence in the national cinemas of all three Hispanic Caribbean islands. Torres was an artist twice exiled; banished from the Dominican Republic for decrying the oppressive policies of the Trujillo regime and later forced out of Castro’s Cuba under mysterious circumstances. Torres’s lone stint of creative stability – though not of complete creative freedom – came in the intervening years of the 1950s, at DivEdCo, where he directed a series of films that represent the role of Puerto Rico’s working poor in the face of rapid modernization initiated by the new political and social relationship with the United States. Torres’s Nenén de la ruta mora/Nenén of the Moorish Way (1955), an exploration of film Blackness in Puerto Rico, has elicited claims of trafficking in extractive modes of ethnography, but may reveal his commitment to transnational solidarities across the greater Caribbean.

In 1968, the Cuban government led by Fidel Castro prepared the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the country’s independence wars marked by a notion of history conceived as a teleological process of which the revolution was the culmination. However, in Desde La Habana ¡1969! Recordar/From Havana 1969! To Remember (Guillén Landrián 1970), Landrián replaced the dominant conception of history with a fragmented and immersive sensorial experience. I argue that Landrián’s film staged a radical resistance to the homogenizing enterprise carried out by the official cultural policies in post-revolutionary Cuba. Contrary to the epic tone of Cuban cinema in the 60s, the revolution’s leaders in Landrián’s film are always deframed and displaced towards the margins of the shot, merged into a larger context of chaotic events. Hence, Landrián’s framing produced a dissident practice that introduced alternative temporalities, subjectivities and a unique cinematic experience in Cuban cinema.

This article examines Psexoanálisis/Psex-analysis directed by Héctor Olivera (1968) and Heroína/Heroine directed by Raúl de la Torre (1972) as paradigmatic examples of the cultural relevance of psychoanalysis in Argentina. The depiction of psychoanalytic treatments in these films shows how cinema has been instrumental in turning psychoanalysis into a widespread sociocultural phenomenon beyond the consultation room. Both films turned psychoanalytic themes and motifs into narrative devices and interpretative tools useful to address periods of intense social transformation. While Psexoanálisis’s playful depiction of avant-garde art and the psychoanalytic boom was archetypal of the process of cultural modernization experienced in the mid-1960s, Heroína participated in the broader political radicalization of Argentine society in the early 1970s.

Review of: Spanish Cinema against Itself: Cosmopolitanism, Experimentation, Militancy, Steven Marsh (2020)

Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 256 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-25304-630-7, h/bk, $80.00

ISBN 978-0-25304-631-4, p/bk, $32.00

ISBN 978-0-25304-633-8, e-book, $16.99

Review of: Subversive Spanish Cinema: The Politics of Performance, Fiona Noble (2020)

London: Bloomsbury Academic, 218 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-35015-247-2, h/bk, £20.87

Review of: Esa Pareja Feliz: Inventos, Concursos y Verbenas, Marina Díaz López (ed.) (2021)

Málaga: Festival de Málaga, 246 pp.,

ISBN 978-8-40930-731-9, p/bk¹

Review of: El legado Cinematográfico de Bigas Luna, Santiago Fouz Hernández (ed.) (2020)

Valencia: Tirant lo Blanch, 346 pp.,

ISBN 978-8-41815-595-6, p/bk, €25.65

ISBN 978-8-41815-596-3, e-book, €16.20

Review of: Woman-Centered Brazilian Cinema: Filmmakers and Protagonists of the Twenty-First Century, Jack A. Draper III and Cacilda M. Rêgo (2022)

Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 288 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-43849-025-0, h/bk, $95.00