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- Volume 6, Issue 1, 2009
Studies in Hispanic Cinemas (new title: Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas) - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2009
Volume 6, Issue 1, 2009
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Mask and Masculinity: Culture, Modernity, and Gender Identity in the Mexican Lucha Libre films of El Santo
More LessThough ignored or reviled by critics of the Mexican cinema because of their folkloric character, the films of lucha libre star El Santo are important texts for understanding the transitions taking place in Mexican culture in the 1960s and 1970s. The Santo film's representations of technology, modernity, and most significantly gender relations mark a decisive shift away from traditional formulations to point towards a contemporary engagement of these issues that, contrary to the claims of most scholars, acutely reflect the social dynamics of this turbulent period in Mexico's development.
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The saint and the general: Buuel cocks a snook at authority on the Road to Santiago
By Julie JonesThis reading of Luis Buuel's La Voie Lacte/The Milky Way (1969) involves the director's response to General Franco's appropriation of Santiago (St. James) as his alter ego during the Civil War and his later exploitation of the Camino de Santiago (Road to Santiago) as a source of revenue. I explore the problem of uneven development between Spain and France in 1969 (the film starts in one and ends in the other). I argue that the film undermines any assertion of essential national identity; indeed, it undermines the sense of identity altogether with a transgression of the bounds of time and space and a self-conscious theatricality that mock Franco's reinvention of St. James and the rapture of fanatics of all stripes. Following the map with which it begins, the film ironically emulates the very pilgrimage it sends up and, relying on the arms of Surrealism, suggesting finally that the real revelation is that which opens the mind to other ways of seeing.
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Regarding the pain of others: The art of realism in Icar Bollan's Te doy mis ojos
By Paul BeginIcar Bollan's Te doy mis ojos (2003) has already attracted substantial critical attention for its timely depiction of domestic abuse in Spain. Scholarly criticism is generally interested in two primary issues: (1) the correlation of events and attitudes in the film to the realities of domestic abuse in Spain (a sociological approach); (2) its use of painting as a key intertext in the film (a formalist approach). What is lost between these two approaches is the art of realism, namely, the way in which Te doy mis ojos combines insightful content with a suggestive film language in an effort to stimulate public discourse surrounding the social ill of gender-based domestic abuse in Spain. This essay seeks to bridge the gap between sociological analysis and formalist analysis, first, by examining the way in which Te doy mis ojos is constructed so as to offer a more penetrating analysis of domestic abuse in Spain and, second, by exploring the way in which Bollan's film engages the very notion of art and its social function.
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Blood of an innocent: Montxo Armendriz's Silencio Roto (2001) and Guillermo del Toro's El laberinto del fauno (2006)
More LessGuillermo del Toro's El laberinto del fauno/Pan's Labyrinth and Montxo Armendriz's Silencio roto/Broken Silence foreground the desertion of the Spanish maquis by international forces and the important role played by those supporting the guerrilla: their puntos de apoyo or enlaces. Through the characterization of enlaces, such as Mercedes and Luca, these films pay homage to those whose resistance to fascism was traditionally backgrounded. At the same time, the viewers' empathy with these women enables the directors to vindicate the dislocated memories of their real-life inspirations: the campesinos who were tortured and murdered for offering support to the maquis. Above all, the use of Luca or Mercedes as points of identification for the audiences enables the directors to reconcile both militant and pacifist views of the guerrilla. The courage and dignity of these characters, as well as their broken silences, vindicate them as the unsung heroes of the war's aftermath.
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Ventura Pons's Barcelona (un mapa): Trapped in the Crystal
By Antn PujolVentura Pons' Barcelona (un mapa)/Barcelona (a map) (2007) is the director's bold adaptation of Llusa Cunill's play Barcelona, mapa d'ombres/Barcelona, map of shadows. The play takes place in a claustrophobic flat where six nameless characters engage in strange dialogues during five succinct two-character scenes. Pons's adaptation follows the same sequence, including the closely transcribed characters' exchanges, but amplifying them by establishing another dialogue, visually and textually, with Catalan history. Accentuating the multiple themes that inform the play, he filters the whole narrative through a crystal rgime, a cinematic style that, as Gilles Deleuze describes in The Time-Image (1985), coalesces actual and virtual images. The identical opening and closing shots delineate a continuum that fuses the historical past and the present in perpetual exchange. The crystal effect becomes a visual refrain as Pons's images merge sheets of time into an indiscernible flux, and the mise-en-scne injects crystals that both capture and affect the six characters, their dwelling, and, inexorably, history. Ultimately, the movie's conflicting chronology and maze-like composition question the state of a dying community; an issue that has always been the backdrop of Pons's works now takes center stage.
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Reviews
Authors: Jorge Prez, Tatjana Pavlovic, Jaume Mart-Olivella, Ernesto R Acevedo-Muoz and Gerard DapenaContemporary Cinema and Genre, Jay Beck and Vicente Rodrguez Ortega (2008), Manchester: Manchester University Press, xviii 310 pp., ISBN 978-0719077753, Hardback, 55
A Companion to Spanish Cinema, Bernard P. E. Bentley (2008) Woodbridge, Suffolk: Tamesis, 513 pp., ISBN 978-1855661769, Hardback(hbk), 60
Daniel Calparsoro, Ann Davies (2009) Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 208 pp., ISBN 978-0-7190-7364-9 (hbk), 50
Queering Buuel: Sexual Dissidence and Psychoanalysis in His Mexican and Spanish Cinema, Julin Daniel Gutirrez-Albilla (2008) London: Tauris Academic Studies, 304 pp., ISBN 1845116682, Hardback, 49.95
Midday with Buuel: Memories and Sketches, 19731983, Claudio Isaac (2007) Chicago: Swan Isle Press, 180 pp., ISBN: 978097488132, Hardback, 28.00
On location in Cuba: Street film-making during times of transition, Ann Marie Stock (2009) Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009, xxvi 342 pp., ISBN 978-0807859407, Hardback (pbk), 59.95
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