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- Volume 14, Issue 3, 2017
Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas - Volume 14, Issue 3, 2017
Volume 14, Issue 3, 2017
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Naïve and sophisticated long-term readings of foreign and national films viewed in a Mexican northern town during the 1930–60s
Authors: José Carlos Lozano, Daniel Biltereyst and Philippe MeersAbstractThe memories and recollections of films viewed in the past have not been as frequently and as comprehensively examined as the decoding and appropriation of contemporary movies by media and cultural studies scholars, despite the value of gathering long-term evidence of accumulated readings and meanings audiences attach to specific types of contents or media experiences. By analysing the recollection of 28 Mexican elders about foreign and national films seen when they were kids or youngsters, this article evaluates their degree of acceptance, negotiation or rejection not of single movies but of types of films according to their origin or genre.
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Mother of pearl, song and potatoes: Cultivating resilience in Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada/Milk of Sorrow (2009)
More LessAbstractThis article explores postmemory and the themes of transgenerational trauma and resilience in La teta asustada/The Milk of Sorrow by Claudia Llosa (2009), a film that suggests that the Peruvian internal conflict of the 1980s and the 1990s created a primal scene in collective memory, but departs from conventions of trauma narratives. Traumatized by the story of her mother’s rape, Fausta struggles to commemorate her dead mother’s experiences and bury her during a time meant for weddings. With help from her community, Fausta learns to cultivate resilience and develop personal agency. The use of song and the potato and pearl metaphors demonstrate how Fausta honours her mother’s memory and breaks from her mother’s narrative in order to formulate her own identity. Thus the film represents the cultural resilience of the postgeneration in renegotiating their identity after fleeing from mass violence.
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Savages and saviours in Icíar Bollaín’s También la lluvia/Even the Rain
More LessAbstractAcclaimed Spanish director Icíar Bollaín’s También la lluvia/Even the Rain (2010) is a fictionalized account of the Cochabamba Water Wars of 2000, whose title alludes to local protestors’ claim that the US-based corporation Bechtel sought to control and tax even the rain water that peasants collected. While También la lluvia may be a thoughtful attempt to denounce the oppression of native peoples, it in fact epitomizes the white saviour trope that has been prevalent in American and British cinema for years. In this study, I argue that the film adheres to what sociologist Joe Feagin calls a ‘white racial frame’ that perpetuates the perceived universality of the white European gaze by depicting fictional filmmakers Costa and Sebastián as ‘white saviour’ figures and indigenous community leader Daniel as a ‘noble savage’. The result is a film made by and for white westerners that replicates traditional western ways of portraying racial and cultural difference.
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The everlasting Sleep Dealer: Alex Rivera’s visionary mind and fantasy nightmares in present times
More LessAbstractStudies of Sleep Dealer (Rivera, 2008) have focused on its transnationality and how the film mixes the iconography of US sci-fi/cyberpunk and Latin American sociopolitics. While dialoguing with the work of other scholars, this study engages with new perspectives. First, it brings to the fore the director’s early personal experiences that later prompted his preoccupations with the presence and impact of technology in remote and rural areas of the Global South. Second, it engages in an in-depth analysis of sci-fi and dystopian motifs and symbols not wholly analysed in earlier studies that uniquely connect the actions and flows in the film with current global matters. Specific topics are nodes as dialectical images (Benjamin), the blindness of the sleep dealer (or infomaquila) workers, racism/nativism and robots as enslaved hybrid beings. Third, this study shows instances of how Rivera’s concerns regarding future ‘fantasy nightmares’ in the second decade of the twenty-first century could become (or have become) a part of life, threatening social and economic stability. Two main foci are the wall along the border with Mexico that President Trump has threatened to build and other recent political discourses in the United States, seen as abstractions or alternate realities. The article stresses the everlasting nature of Sleep Dealer as Rivera’s premonitions continue to take form in the present and, possibly, in the future.
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Copycat television? Gran Hotel/Grand Hotel (2011–13) and El hotel de los secretos/The Hotel of Secrets (2015–16)
More LessAbstractThis article examines a unique case of format translation in quality television: Mexican free-to-air broadcaster Televisa’s remake in 2015–16 of a period romance-cum-mystery series originally shown by the Spanish private network Antena 3. The article begins with an account of Copycat Television, Albert Moran’s pioneering study of transnational remakes, which defines the format not as a blueprint but as a loose and expanding set of programme possibilities, and goes on to explore tensions around genre, TV ecology and audience in both countries and series. Offering a close account of production, reception and textual detail, the article demonstrates that the Mexican version of the format is at once more politicized and more romantic than the Spanish original. Finally, both productions, broadcast as they were at a time of rapid technological change in their respective audio-visual industries, attempt to create an imaginary national harmony that is projected into the past and yet adapted to new contemporary audiences.
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Melancholia and memory in Ciudad Juárez: Lourdes Portillo’s Señorita Extraviada/Missing Young Woman (2001) and the communal mourning of feminicide
More LessAbstractEngaging with the sizeable scholarship on Lourdes Portillo’s 2001 documentary Señorita Extraviada/Missing Young Woman, this article investigates the potential of the visual image to create a form of radical melancholy that resists containment by the persistent patriarchal frameworks used to interpret the Juárez feminicide. Taking Señorita Extraviada as a historically important feminist text documenting a crucial moment in grassroots women’s activism against the gender violence systematically expressed in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, this article discusses the film’s resistant potential. Engaging with Rosa Linda Fregoso’s measured praise and critique of the film, the article proposes other vantage points through which to interpret the film to highlight some of Portillo’s affective and abstracting techniques that undermine the patriarchal meanings underlying the religious iconography used by grassroots women’s groups to protest the violence and impunity. By putting Fregoso into dialogue with theoretical concepts from Alicia Schmidt Camacho and Laura Marks on memory and melancholia, this article argues for an affective reading of Señorita Extraviada as a politicized narrative expressing feminicidal melancholia through depictions of rituals of mourning, mobilizations of activism and the production of liminal space between presence and absence, life and death.
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Book Reviews
AbstractScreening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema 1988–2012, Ignacio Sánchez Prado (2014) Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 291 pp., ISBN: 9780826519658, h/bk, $79.95; ebook, $9.99
Mexican Screen Fiction: Between Cinema and Television, Paul Julian Smith (2014) Cambridge: Polity, 296 pp., ISBN: 0745680798, h/bk, $69.95; p/bk, £17.99/$24.95; eBook, $69.95
Revolution and Rebellion in Mexican Film, Niamh Thornton (2015) New York, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 213 pp., ISBN: 9781501305702, h/bk, $110, p/bk, £ 20, $39.66, e-book $34.99
Critical Approaches to the Films of Robert Rodriguez, Frederick Luis Aldama (ed.) (2015) Austin: University of Texas Press, 253 pp., ISBN: 9781477302408, p/bk-ebook, $24.95
Performance and Spanish Film, Dean Allbritton, Alejandro Melero and Tom Whittaker (eds) (2016) Manchester: Manchester University Press, 381 pp., ISBN: 9780719097720, h/bk, $110.00
Journeys in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema: Road Films in a Global Era, Natália Pinazza (2014) New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 187 pp., ISBN: 9781137336033, h/bk, $100; p/bk, $95.00; eBook, $69.99
New Maricón Cinema: Outing Latin American Film, Vinodh Venkatesh (2016) Austin: University of Texas Press, 252 pp., ISBN: 9781477310144, h/bk, $95
New Documentaries in Latin America, Vinicius Navarro and Juan Carlos Rodriguez (eds) (2014) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 287 pp., ISBN: 9781137291332, h/bk, $100.00
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