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- Volume 14, Issue 1, 2017
Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas - Volume 14, Issue 1, 2017
Volume 14, Issue 1, 2017
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Playing in public: Domestic politics and prosthetic memory in Paula Markovich’s El premio/The Prize (2011)
More LessAbstractReleased in 2011, Paula Markovitch’s semi-autobiographical film revolves around the life of 7-year-old Cecilia and her tense negotiation of the ‘adult’ world of public militancy in 1970s Argentina. The film destabilizes the traditional boundaries between childhood and adulthood, exposing the profound politicization of the child’s domestic spaces as her parents’ political choices are thrust into every aspect of her daily life. This article argues that, by affording the child a greater sense of agency within these home spaces, the director of El premio/The Prize (2011) refuses to perpetuate the discourses of passive victimhood that are conventionally associated with the hijo/child in contemporary Argentina. Instead, Markovitch rethinks the domestic sphere as a site for political confrontation both between and within generations. By inhibiting the spectator’s potential to ‘prosthetically’ identify with the experience of the child victim, El premio surfaces as a paradigmatic example of a growing trend in contemporary Argentine film which seeks to expose, explore and impede society’s ongoing and pervasive gaze into the lives of the children of the disappeared.
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The blind gaze: Visual impairment and haptic filmmaking in João Júlio Antunes’ O jogo/The Game (2010)
More LessAbstractThis article contrasts two works that engage the concept of blind filmmaking. Woody Allen’s dramatized portrayal of a blind director in Hollywood Ending (2002) displays ableist attitudes in both its form and content. João Júlio Antunes’ O jogo/The Game (2010) exemplifies how cinema by a blind director might differ from sighted filmmaking through its formal characteristics and in its representation of disability. Analysing these films elicits significant critical questions: can there be a ‘blind’ cinematic style? If so, how might ‘blind cinema’ augment the sensory experience of both sighted and non-sighted spectators? Antunes expands his film into a multi-sensory experience that seeks to defamiliarize by deploying a ‘tactile visuality’, as first described by film theorist Laura Marks. The article proposes a shift towards a tactile way of seeing – a ‘blind gaze’ – and advocates for more inclusive filmmaking.
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Sounds of absence: Aurality and silence in Chile’s Mi vida con Carlos/My Life with Carlos (2010) and El eco de las canciones/The Echo of the Songs (2010)
More LessAbstractThis article analyses the role of silence, sound and voice in two Chilean documentaries, Mi vida con Carlos/My Life with Carlos directed in 2010 by Germán Berger-Hertz and El eco de las canciones/The Echo of Songs in 2010 by Antonia Rossi, as examples of ethically engaged cinema that move the spectator to contemplate dictatorship and post-dictatorship from the perspective of the children of exile. In particular, natural soundscapes, silences, voice-overs and diegetic sounds and music from official media clips and found footage simultaneously signal presence and absence as related to the violence of the dictatorship and its lingering marks in the present. Building on the previous generation’s publication of literary testimonios, the aural features of both films move the audience to question discursive constructions and ultimately create an embodied viewing experience that asks the viewer to recognize the experience of other subjects and to be attune to on-going injustices.
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Local filmmaking in Brazil: Place, politics and Pernambuco’s new cinema
More LessAbstractThis article looks at the recent cinema from the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, arguably the most visible of the local cinemas that have gained prominence in Brazil in the last two decades. For most of the twentieth century, local filmmaking remained somewhat marginal to Brazilian cinema, often overshadowed by metropolises such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. By contrast, the surge of local filmmaking in recent years has been key to the growth of Brazilian cinema after a period of near stagnation in the early 1990s. This article offers a partial survey of Pernambuco’s new cinema, focusing specifically on the notion of place. Drawing on the work of Doreen Massey, it proposes a relational reading of locality that de-emphasizes territorial fixity and associates place with social experience. The article relies on this relational approach to argue that Pernambuco’s cinema has revitalized Brazil’s tradition of political filmmaking.
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Carlos Reygadas’ Batalla en el cielo/Battle in Heaven (2005): Disarticulating the brown male body from myths of Mexican masculinity
More LessAbstractThis article examines questions of masculinity in Carlos Reygadas’s film Batalla en el cielo/Battle in Heaven. Using a comparative approach to address Reygadas’s allusions to the melodramas of Mexico’s cinematic Golden Age, the discussion shows how the model of mestizo masculinity established in the post-revolutionary period remains prevalent in contemporary society as depicted in the film, despite its detrimental effects on the lived experiences of actual Mexican males. Close examination of the main character, Marcos, offers a perspective on how the state’s centring of the male mestizo’s social and economic agency has continued to uphold the established racial hierarchy and traditional relationships of exploitation in Mexico, despite the most recent reconfigurations of the national political economy under neo-liberalism. With particular attention to Reygadas’s aesthetics of realism and the prominent juxtapositions of European oil paintings in the mise-en-scène, the argument contends that Batalla en el cielo denounces the contradictory national model of masculine identity by revealing its effects on the racialized bodies of brown males.
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Queer-haptic aesthetics in the films of Lucrecia Martel and Albertina Carri
By Missy MolloyAbstractLucrecia Martel and Albertina Carri are contemporaneous Argentine directors whose films are frequently included in the category ‘New Argentine Cinema’. Often interpreted as indictments of bourgeois cultural values, Martel’s La ciénaga/The Swamp (Martel, 2001), La niña santa/The Holy Girl (Martel, 2004) and La mujer sin cabeza/The Headless Woman (Martel, 2008) spotlight sexual, racial and economic inequalities that manifest in unconventional desires and sudden violence. Although more explicitly sexual and violent, Géminis/Geminis (Carri, 2005) and La rabia/Anger (Carri, 2008) similarly undermine heteronormative social conventions, the former film depicting sibling incest and the latter displacing idealized representations of rural life with images of sexual deviance and animal cruelty. This article presents haptic and queer analyses of these filmmakers’ works to reveal overlaps in their sociopolitical critiques. The interpretations also demonstrate the utility of queer-haptic cinematic strategies, through which Martel and Carri expose alternative vantages on queer desires.
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Reviews
AbstractMotherhood in Mexican Cinema, 1941–1991: The T ransformation of Femininity on Screen, Isabel Arredondo (2013) Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 222 pp., ISBN: 9780786468041, p/bk, $45.00; eISBN: 9781476602387
Making Cinelandia: American Films and Mexican Film Culture before the Golden Age, Laura Isabel Serna (2014) Durham and London: Duke University Press, 317 pp., 46 illustrations, 3 maps, ISBN: 9780822356530, p/bk, $27.95
Humor in Latin American Cinema, Juana Suárez and Juan Poblete (eds) (2016) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, xi + 279 pp., ISBN: 9781137549457, h/bk, £63
Basque Cinema: A Cultural and Political History, Rob S tone and María Pilar Rodríguez (2015) London: I.B. Tauris, 249 pp., ISBN: 9781780769820, h/bk, £59.50
The Classical Mexican Cinema: The Poetics of the Exceptional Golden Age Films, Charles Ramírez Berg (2015) Austin: University of Texas Press, 240 pp., ISBN: 9781477308059, p/bk, $24.95
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