Cinema and Urbanías: Translocal Identities in Contemporary Mexican Film (original) (raw)
Related papers
The cinematic mode of production: towards a political economy of the postmodern
Culture, Theory and Critique, 2003
Cinema marks a profound shift in the relation between image and text-indeed it is the watershed of the subjugation of language by image. Cinema as an innovative shift in both industrial capitalism and cultural practice marks, therefore, the restructuring of language function in accord with the changing protocols of techno-capitalism. The 'talking cure', otherwise known as psychoanalysis, is itself a symptom of cinema. As a precursor for TV and computing and Internet, cinema transacts value transfer across the image utilising a production process that can be grasped as founded under the rubric of what I call 'the attention theory of value'. The deterritorialised factory that is the contemporary image, is an essential component of globalisation, neo-imperialism, and militarisation, organising, as it were, the consent (ignorance of) and indeed desire for these latter processes. Thus 'cinema', as a paradigm for image-mediated social production, implies a cultural turn for political economics. It also implies that it is the interstitial, informal activities that transpire across the entire surface of the socius as well as in the vicissitudes of the psyche and experience that are the new (untheorised) production sites for global capital-and therefore among the significant sites for the waging of the next revolution. But all the story of the night told over, And their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancies images, And grows to something of great constancy; But, howsoever, strange and admirable. (A Midsummer Night's Dream (the movie)) The Cinematic Mode of Production The term 'Cinematic Mode of Production' (CMP) suggests that cinema and its succeeding, if still simultaneous, formations, particularly television, video, computers and Internet, are deterritorialised factories in which spectators work, that is, in which they perform value-productive labour. In the cinematic image and its legacy, that gossamer imaginary arising out of a matrix of sociopsycho-material relations, we make our lives. This claim suggests that not only do we confront the image at the scene of the screen, but we confront the logistics of the image wherever we turn-imaginal functions are today
Film in the Post-Media Age (ed. by Ágnes Pethő, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012)
Ever since the centenary of cinema there have been intense discussions in the field of film studies about the imminent demise of the cinematic medium, endless articles championing the spirit of genuine cinephilia have proclaimed the death of classical cinema and mourned the end of an era, while new currents in media studies introduced such buzzwords into the discussions as “remediation” (Bolter and Grusin), “media convergence” (Jenkins), “post-media aesthetics” (Manovich) or “the virtual life of film” (Rodowick). By the turn of the millennium, the whole “ecosystem” of media had been radically altered through processes of hybridization and media convergence. Some theorists even claim that now that the term “medium” has triumphed in the discussions around contemporary art and culture, the actual media have already deceased, as digitized imagery absorbs all media. Moving images have entered the art galleries and new forms of inter-art relationships have been forged. They have also moved into the streets and our everyday life as a domesticated medium at everybody’s reach, into new private and public environments (and into a fusion of both via the Internet). Consequently, should we speak of an all pervasive “cinematic experience” instead of a cinematic medium? What really happens to film once its traditional medium has shape shifted into various digital forms and once its traditional locations, institutions and usages have been uprooted? What do these re-locations and re-configurations really entail? What are the most important new genres in post-media moving pictures? Is it the web video, is it 3D cinema, is it the computer game that operates with moving image narratives, is it the new “vernacular” database, the DVD, or the good old television adjusted to all these new forms? How does theatrical cinema itself adapt to or reflect on these new image forms and technologies? How can we interpret the convergence of older cinematic forms with an emerging digital aesthetics traceable in typical post-media “hosts” of moving images? These are only some of the major questions that the theoretical investigation and in-depth analyses in this volume try to answer in an attempt at exploring not the disappearance of cinema but the blooming post-media life of film.
In and out: the transnational circulation of Spanish cinema in digital times
Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2015
This article is an introduction to a dossier of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies that contains contributions centred on the circulation of contemporary Spanish cinema. The paper reflects on historical and cultural revisionism in the light of the political and social crisis of the 2000s. Such a revisionism, we observe, has taken an aggressive, critical side on the democratic project that started with “la Transición”, and an equally aggressive and tense exploration of what “new models” may be coined to face current challenges. In this context of fluctuation both inside and outside the national borders, ‘the transnational turn’ has been embraced as a much-needed perspective to situate contemporary debates about Spanish cinema. Within this shift, we attend to the impact of digital technology and the importance of film circulation as two areas that have been under-researched in Spanish cinema studies and that are key to understand the complexity of the audiovisual culture that we live in. Taking into account these two lines of inquiry, the introduction describes recent political struggles to use Spanish cinema as a part of “Marca España”, while it also comments on other practices that understand cinema as a part of what Joseph Nye referred to as “soft power”. Finally, the article presents the different contributions to the dossier within the tensions between national identity, global capital, and individual and collective agency. As the four interventions that integrate this dossier, the introduction crosses cultural, political, economic and technological borders and delineates an ample, flexible space of circulation for transnational digital culture, one in which new models of Spanish cinema are in continuous interaction.
Cinema and Television in the Transition
The Politics and Memory of Democratic Transition: The Spanish Model, eds. Diego Muro and Gregorio Alonso (New York: Routledge,), pp. 199-214., 2011
This article offers a survey of cinema and television during the Spanish Transition to democracy. It makes four observations: that industrial factors must be considered with formal or ideological ones; that far from colluding in a 'pact of oblivion' cinema in the period is intimately engaged with history; that cinema is inextricable from television, a medium vital for historical memory but often neglected; and finally that screen narrative must be examined in formal terms, as well for its content. The case studies of the article are Víctor Erice's much praised art movie El espíritu de la colmena and Antonio Mercero's much loved TV series Crónicas de un pueblo, both of which contain key scenes of rural pedagogy in the Francoist period.
2020
In the past decades, the field of cinema has undergone several transformations. The digital turn increasingly called for new forms of production, distribution, and exhibition, which imply different ways of thinking, doing, and experimenting cinema. These new forms also reduced the gap between cinema to other so-called visual arts. If cinema and visual arts were already in the process of merging, the last years forced the naturalization of thinking in similar theoretical grounds. This special issue aims to be a forum for the discussion of new practices of researching cinema, and the changes in cinema's forms of experience and production.
The Cultura de la Pantalla network: writing new cinema histories across Latin America and Europe
2018
The Cultura de la Pantalla network consists of an international group of film, media and communication researchers in (Latin) America (Mexico, Colombia, US) and Europe (Belgium, Spain) collaborating in a series of multi-method longitudinal studies on urban cinema cultures in the Spanish language world. The network is writing ‘new cinema histories’ with a focus on exhibition, programming and audience experiences. First we briefly look back at the development of the network and its roots in The Enlightened City project. Then the conceptual framework that inspires it, new cinema history, is defined and the basic three part model is explained, with its central research questions and methods. In a last part, preliminary results from one of the case studies are complemented with reflections on the overall goal of the network, i.e. to present local, national, regional and cross-continental comparative studies on historical cinema cultures.