Studies in Hispanic Cinemas (new title: Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas) - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2011

This essay examines early Francoist cinema through a transnational perspective, shedding light on an understudied history of transatlantic crossings by Latin American-and Iberian directors and performers. Taking the musical Una cubana en Espaa (1951) as a case study, I seek to trace the transcultural relationships and translocations evoked by the film's title in the film's set design, costumes and musical score and in the characters' idiosyncrasies of speech. In the process, I investigate the ways in which bodies and voices, dialog, music, costumes and sets are dialectically invested in performing difference and likeness, alternately erecting and dismantling symbolic borders. In the end, Una cubana en Espaa strives towards the overcoming of conflict through an affirmation of underlying commonalities, a cornerstone of the rhetoric of Hispanidad endorsed by Franco's regime, thereby adumbrating a vision of community which superseded political and cultural difference.

Argentine horror cinema traditionally has not enjoyed ample state support, and several directors have turned to making films for the US low-budget horror DVD market. The films' content (English-language dialogue, both legible and anonymous depictions of Buenos Aires, and use of well-established horror conventions) often reflects its target audience in the United States. Likewise, US producers have gone to Argentina to make horror films aimed primarily at the US market. Jennifer's Shadow (2004) and Death Knows Your Name (2007) are two English-language Argentine horror films distinguished by their financing. Death Knows Your Name is a homegrown production, while Jennifer's Shadow was funded chiefly by a US-based company, Hybrid Pictures, using US and Argentine actors and Argentine directors and technicians. The films' English-language dialogues help them to overcome what Rutalo and Tierney call Latin American exploitation cinema's doubly marginalized status: first, as a film from the so-called Third World and, second, as belonging to the minor film genre of horror (2009: 6). Although an ostensible target audience lies beyond the country, Argentine horror films made for export are nevertheless viewed in Argentina through various channels of circulation, including film festivals, downloading and as DVDs sold at informal street markets. The multiple channels of circulation through which US and Argentine viewers see English-language Argentine horror films suggest a corrective to what Garca Canclini sees as globalization's asimetra de los flujos [asymmetry of flows] (1999: 54).

The Argentine economic and social crisis of 2001 generated a temporary rearticulation of certain ways of interaction among individuals, as exemplified by the emergence of public assemblies, the seizure of factories by workers and the creation of alternative solidarity networks. This proliferation of encounters among individuals from different class and cultural backgrounds produced a collapse of certain class roles and aspirations that can be seen at play in the films of the post-crisis period. Jorge Gaggero's Cama adentro/Live-in Maid (2004) and Vida en Falcon/Life in a Falcon (2004) are two prime examples of that subversion of class identification and its spatial representation. The activities of daily life, generally place-and-class-bound, are represented in these films as unstable categories that shift considerably after the events of December 2001. Private and public spaces are crossed and intertwined, mirroring the social rearticulation of the time. This article analyses Gaggero's construction of these social class displacements in Argentina and the spatial changes of everyday lives produced by the neoliberal crisis.

This article analyses the emotional appeals of Babel (Gonzlez Irruti 2006), a French-US-Mexican co-production about an accident that touches the lives of four families in Morocco, the United States, Mexico and Japan. In its discussion of how the Mexican film-makers infuse an English-language film with the sensibilities of the Mexican melodrama, the essay problematizes recent scholarship on the politics of compassion as well as theoretical propositions about Third World films' singular ability to cognitively map contemporary global relations.

Analysing two contemporary Brazilian films set in the Northeastern backlands and focusing on the films' use of spatial practices involving flight and migration, this essay argues that spatial practices are instrumental in articulating new narrative possibilities that imagine the backlands as a locus of change and destabilization. The essay outlines two cultural formations: first, the role of spatial practices (migration, flight, settlement and conquest) in processes of imagining Brazilian cultural identity and modernization, and second, the 1960s Cinema Novo movement's definition of a critical poetics by revisiting the role of love in mainstream cinema and its use of this element to create new narrative possibilities, a crucial but often overlooked aspect of the movement's subversion of social and cinematographic norms. This close reading of the films also historicizes them in relation to the Cinema Novo's approach to the Northeast.

El Cine De No-Ficcin En Martn Patino, Alberto Nahum Garca Martnez, (2008), Madrid: Ediciones Internacionales Universitarias, 326 pp., ISBN: 978-84-8469-245-4, Paperback, 19.00

Miradas Sobre Pasado Y Presente En El Cine Espaol (19902005), Pietsie Feenstra and Hub Hermans (eds), (2008), Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 295 pp., ISBN 978-90-420-2473-1, Paperback, $81.

Burning Darkness: A Half Century Of Spanish Cinema, Joan Ramon Resina (ed.), with assistance from Andrs Lema-Hincapi, (2009), Albany: SUNY, 310 pp., ISBN 978-0-7914-7504-1, Paperback, $27.95