Mapping digital practices in Hispanic cinemas. Introduction

Abstract

This dossier interrogates the ways in which cinemas from Latin America and Spain have engaged with digital practices in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The digital medium has thrown into relief the negotiation between local knowledge and the desire for transnational circulation in new global scenarios. This Introduction briefly situates the essays in this dossier in relation to aesthetic and political questions arising from digital cinematic practices; the different contributions explore significant ways in which moving image texts that engage the digital offer new understandings, both of the flow of people, information and capital, and of the processes by which we imagine the spaces and boundaries pertaining to the vexed category ‘Hispanic cinemas’. From a historical perspective the very idea of ‘Hispanic cinemas’ is a fraught one. As Marvin D’Lugo reminds us, the concept of transnational Hispanic cinemas derives from industrial practices that collapsed geocultural differences into a homogenous market model. The category film hispano was originally a mass-media construction that included a Hollywood-produced early sound cinema broadly aimed at Spanish-language audiences, regardless of specificities of location.1 Later frameworks, such as the New Latin American Cinema, crystallized around the political aims of cinemas across a broad regional axis. Yet paradoxically, and despite autochthonous formulations (most famously Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s notion of Third Cinema, from 1969), the regional construction ‘Latin American cinema’ was due to the influence of outside perspectives (both European and North American) on the historiography of the cinemas of South and Central America.2 At the turn of the twenty-first century, with the foundations of historical, auteurist and identity studies firmly in place,3 the field shifted to a new wave of transnational studies, partly prompted by the boom of Latin American cinema after the global success of key millennial films such as Amores perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000) and Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001).4 The field of Hispanic cinemas has been expanded by the incorporation of these and other Latin American filmmakers into the anglophone, if decentred, Hollywood-dominated mainstream.5 Parallel to this, the flux of Latin American ‘festival’ cinema, often sustained (and co-opted) by European funding initiatives,6 and the development of a global cinema in Spanish (of which the most visible model may be Pedro and Agustín Almodóvar’s El Deseo’s transnational co-productions) add further complexity to the mapping of the field.7 The above success stories have emerged as exemplary case studies in an ever-growing body of scholarship; in a contrasting move, this dossier seeks to shift this conversation into less consensual territory. It is our goal to put centre stage the lesser-known moving-image objects of study that actively intervene in broader political discourses and display a self-reflective approach to the question of Hispanic cinemas’ place in the world.