(2012) ‘New Latin American film: Addressing the negative culturescapes and glocalising transnational problem’, Crítica Contemporánea. Revista de Teoría Política, (Montevideo), 2 (November), 119-129. (Invited paper). (original) (raw)
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New Transnationalisms in Contemporary Latin American Cinemas
New Transnationalisms in Contemporary Latin American Cinemas, 2018
In the late 1990s and early 2000s Latin American films Amores perros, Diarios de motocicleta, El hijo de la novia, Y tu mamá también, and Cidade de Deus enjoyed unprecedented critical and commercial success in global markets. Benefiting from external financial and/or creative input, these films were considered examples of transnational cinema. This book examines the six transnational directors (Iñárritu, Cuarón, del Toro, Meirelles, Salles and Campanella), who made these and the subsequent commercially successful and mostly ‘deterritorialized’ films (21 Grams, Babel, Biutiful, El espinazo del Diablo, El laberinto del fauno, Blindness, The Constant Gardener, Children of Men, On the Road, El secreto de sus ojos). Arguing against criticism in which these films’ commercial (Hollywood) and transnational features efface the authorial sensibilities of these directors and make them irrelevant to Latin American trends and politics, this book shows how they engage with national, continental a...
From Postmodernity to Post Identity: Latin American Film after the Great Divide
A Companion to Latin American Cinema, 2017
Uncorrected proof of chapter published in Stephen Hart, María Delgado and Randal Johnson, eds, A Companion to Latin American Cinema (London: Wiley, 2017), 150-166. It discusses the reasons for the belated emergence of a postmodernist aesthetic in Latin American film, and the current transition to a post-identitarian framework. It looks at specific examples from Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Argentina and Brazil.
Pax Lumina, 2023
Much has been said about Roma, Alfonso Cuaron’s movie of 2018. While critics have swung from extreme to extreme, stating that it is either a work of art or that it has been overrated and could be considered the emperor's new clothes, I would like to offer three ideas to free us from this crossroads or at least try to do so. This paper, within the limits of the short format, aims to make the film visible as a useful tool to challenge homogeneous visions of Latin American violence that produce consequently monolithic and identity-based visions of the subjects, anchored in violent narratives that prevent us from seeing the peace in which domestic workers participate and the complexity of the places and times in which their actions unfold, permanently relating to the law.
Studies in 20th & 21st century literature, 2019
This article examines cinematic perspective in six Spanish im/migration films to show that by resituating the identification from an alignment with that of a hegemonic character (who accepts the systematic bias that confers impunity to perpetrators) to identification with a criminalized migrant subject, these films 1) denounce systemic intersectionality that confers impunity to perpetrators and criminalizes the racialized and/or feminized other and 2) aim at fostering empathy in the hegemonically identified viewer. Parameters for the selection of the six films are: immigration to Spain, African (whether geographic or ethnic) origins, eroticization of the migrant, objectification/(ab)use/commodification/victimization of the Other, criminalization of the Other while conferring impunity to a malfeasant representative of the hegemony and, ultimately, an identification (be it fleeting) between a character of the Spanish in-group and the migrant subject. The cinematic narratives include three canonical films from the 1990s Cartas de
Out of the Shadows: ‘New’ Peruvian Cinema, National Identity and Political Violence
Modern Languages Online, Liverpool University Press, 2014
This article focuses on two debut works of cinema that were released within a few months of each other shortly after the turn of the century and which offer quite different modes of representation of the 'dirty war' that devastated Peru for two decades before that: Paloma de Papel (Fabrizio Aguilar 2003) and Días de Santiago (Josué Méndez 2004). It sets out a critical analysis of the cinematic treatment of the violence of terror as imagined via their film-makers and reflects upon their critical and commercial reception in Peru and beyond. It seeks to refute the accusations of neglect on the part of film-makers from some journalists and politicians by highlighting the ongoing importance of the period, its events and consequences for cinema in and of Peru. Moreover it explores the extent to which individual films, and cinema as a collective practice, play a key role in harnessing the potential for testimony and triggering debate about cultural and historical heterogeneity. In the final analysis, I argue that fiction cinema continues to play an influential and controversial role in shaping a sense of collective identity in nations such as Peru that are in the process of 'crystallization' and that have suffered recent trauma. I contend that so-called 'national' films (those supported to a certain degree by the State) remain vital in their provision of diverse representations of landmark events of national concern that draw attention to the fractured and fragmented nature of such experiences, emphasising the persistence of division at every level.
NO FUTURE: The Colonial Gaze, Tales of Return in Recent Latin American Film
Humanities , 2022
The past is certain, the future an illusion. Contemporary films such as Ivy Maraey: land without evil (Juan Carlos Valdivia 2013), Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra 2015), The Fever (Maya Da Rin 2020), and Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles 2020) are border films, from the genre of contact films. They announce how coloniality maintains a grip on frontier territories in the Americas. These films also present particular indigenous visions that challenge western epistemes and confront audiences with particular ways of being in the world, where the modern subject finds its limit. The article introduces a critical perspective on cinema as a colonial tool, producing forms of capture that are part of the modern archive and the notion of linear time. These films also build on cinematic traditions such as tercer cine and afro-futurism, and are strong on concepts such as cosmopolitanism, resistance, and subalternity. They present forms of adaptation, reaction, return, and redemption while maintaining the status of cinema as a capturing device, entertainment, and capital investment (the triad of destruction in modernity/coloniality).