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- Volume 8, Issue 1, 2012
Studies in Hispanic Cinemas (new title: Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas) - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2012
Volume 8, Issue 1, 2012
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Remembering the present: Iñaki Arteta's Trece Entre Mil and the transmission of grief
More LessAmongst recent documentary films portraying the Basque conflict, Iñaki Arteta's Trece Entre Mil/Thirteen Amongst a Thousand (2005) stands out as a significant contribution to the construction of collective memory. Its compilation of testimonies from thirteen families left bereaved by political violence develops a sustained, cumulative reflection on the nature of grief and personal loss. At the same time, in its seeking out of the communal via the individual and in its engagement with acutely contemporary issues, the film also constitutes a courageous political intervention, one that bears comparison with the testimony-based documentary work of Peter Davis, Claude Lanzmann and Marcel Ophüls. The film's harrowing interview sequences exploit subtle variations in filmic texture, interwoven with fragments of home video and snatches of news media coverage, to achieve what Lanzmann conceptualizes as 'transmission'; that is, for Arteta's audience, interpellated as members of civil society, to gain an empathetic, empirical appreciation of the human dimension of political violence.
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Love Goddesses: angels and demons in Mexican cinema
More LessThis essay analyses two important Mexican urban melodramas of the 1940s: La devoradora/Devourer of Men by (Fernando de Fuentes 1946) and La diosa arrodillada/Goddess on Her Knees (Roberto Gavaldón 1947). Both films are structured according to the canons of film noir and extol the figure of the femme fatale, the 'Love Goddess'. As such, these films are representative of myths created in the 1940s, which determined cultural perceptions and structured different ways of seeing and understanding the gendered world. The analyses respond to fundamental questions regarding the representation of women generally and the femme fatale in particular in Mexican cinema: how do these feared women, with sexual and economic power, and who disrupt moral values, actually reinforce traditional moral values? What is behind these gender representations that established some ideals of femininity and masculinity in Mexican cinema?
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Revolution, ideology and the eye of cinema: El cometa as mise en abyme
More LessAmong the many films made about the Mexican Revolution, El cometa embeds a retrospective look at this historical event within what Walter Benjamin calls the fore- and after-histories that surround it, revisiting what the term 'revolution' might imply for the twenty-first century. Deploying innovative technologies of image making as well as citations of previous productions, the directors juxtapose what Benjamin explores as the transfixing aura of the photograph with the decay of aura produced by the cinema to give spectators privileged insight into Mexico's precarious transition into modernity through war and technology or, for some, a war with technology. The cinematograph, marketed by the Lumière brothers for the entertainment of the masses and crucial in the shift to a potentially radical form of documentation, is the fascinatingly powerful object of material culture through which the political and technological torches are passed between generations. The ideals, myths and symbols of a social class that have become the 'normal' way of seeing things then might be viewed differently, as what is politically and aesthetically 'revolutionary' provides new forms of knowledge for audiences.
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The cinema of Sáenz de Heredia and the transition (1969–75): Images of women and the dialectics between tradition and modernity
Authors: Manuel Palacio and Carmen CillerThis essay presents an overview of the films that Sáenz Heredia made when his idol, Francisco Franco, had already appointed his successor and the machinery of the transition conceived by the dictatorship was already in motion. In the six years spanning the second half of 1969 and November 1975, Heredia released ten feature-length films, more than a quarter of his entire filmography. This essay will take a close look at his filmography in relation to two thematic poles: images of women and the dialectics between tradition and modernity and, arising from these themes, the unprecedented appearance of new social subjects in Spanish cinema.
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Are we global yet? New challenges to defining Latin American cinema
More LessA proliferation of exchanges between film industries in the United States, Europe and Latin America are redefining the Latin American film industry in the twenty-first century. This article considers how these cross-border and cross-cultural flows may inform new ways for understanding national and regional cinemas. In the following discussion, I analyse emerging industrial practices and producers' responses to the new transnational alliances. I follow this by examining the critical debates over the effects that such structural changes may be having on the diversification of narratives and their contribution in the articulation of transforming national and regional identities.
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Ethics, silence and the gaze in two films by Isabel Coixet
More LessThe Secret Life of Words and Elegy by Isabel Coixet are chosen here as examples of the ethical attitudes and concerns of the director. Special attention is paid to the possible meaning of silence in the case of The Secret, and to the transformation of the male gaze in Elegy. In both cases, Coixet expresses her ideas through affects as a way to reach the kind of consciousness that links emotions and ethics.
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Report on Guadalajara: Art and industry
More LessThis article is a report on The Festival Internacional de Cine en Guadalajara, generally held to be the most important in Latin America, whose 26th edition took place from 25 March to 1 April 2011. After a general survey of the festival (including reference to a vampire strand curated by Guillermo del Toro), the article offers a full account of the festival's forum on the Present and Future of Mexican Cinema, addressed by industry and government delegates, which stressed the three themes of distribution, audience development and the relationship of cinema to television. The article then goes on to analyse four of the fourteen Mexican fiction features premiered at the festival: a comedy, two thrillers and an auteurist film (by established director Maryse Sistach). These films are representative of current production in Mexico. Although they vary in genre, their common bourgeois setting coincides with the new constitution of cinema audiences in Mexico, where the increase in ticket price means that only the wealthy can afford regular attendance at cinemas.
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Reviews
Authors: Chris Perriam, Gerard Dapena and Javier HerreraPLACERES OCULTOS: GAYS Y LESBIANAS EN EL CINE ESPAÑOL DE LA TRANSICIÓN, ALEJANDRO MELERO SALVADOR (2010) Madrid: Notorious Ediciones, 278 pp., ISBN: 978-84-937148-8-8 (pbk), €18.95
DESINTEGRACIÓN Y JUSTICIA EN EL CINE ARGENTINO CONTEMPORÁNEO, GABRIELA COPERTARI (2009) Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis, 186 pp., ISBN 978-1-85566-187-5 (hbk), $90.00
EL ERMITAÑO ERRANTE. BUÑUEL EN ESTADOS UNIDOS, FERNANDO GABRIEL MARTIN (2010) Murcia: Filmoteca Regional Francisco Rabal, 902 pp., ISBN 978-84-7564-534-6 (pbk), €19.00
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