1-decyne Research Articles

Representation of Andean Communities: Indigenous Cultures and Languages in Peruvian Cinema

ABSTRACT Peru is a country that has a world-renowned cultural heritage. However, there is a set of historical discrimination in different instances of society against the indigenous population, their cultural identity, social recognition, and even legal protection. Due to this situation, there have been recent manifestations in the cinema, television and education products with the purpose of recognizing, integrating and valuing all people and their cultures. This differs significantly from almost all of republican history, characterized by the unilateral representation of the privileged classes of the Peruvian cities. For that reason, this article analyzes three independent films dedicated to representation of Andean characters: Wiñaypacha (‘Eternity’) (2017), Retablo (‘Altarpiece’) (2017), and Willaq Pirqa, el cine de mi pueblo (‘Speaking Wall, the cinema of my town’) (2022), which have achieved a high degree of acceptance by the public and specialized critics. The proposal analyzes the recognition and revaluation of the Andean characters in these films, based on the linguistic, cultural and social dimensions, and the ideas of nationhood that are developed discursively and symbolically.

Helena Lumbreras’s foundational filmmaking experience in Italy during the 1960s: An artistic biography

Helena Lumbreras (1935–95), founder of the Colectivo de Cine de Clase in Francoist Spain, started her film career at Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. The politically charged atmosphere of 1960s Italy marked a turning point for the young filmmaker professionally and ideologically. Her Italian sojourn proved remarkably influential, since it allowed her to delve into cultural materials that were censored in Spain and drew her into left-wing intellectual circles. During these years (1962–70), she encountered film directors and theorists like Pier Paolo Pasolini and Cesare Zavattini, who deepened her interest in collective film movements. She took her first step towards politically engaged cinema with her graduation film, España (1964). In the following years, her deepening involvement with the anti-Francoist movement coincided with her prioritization of documentary over fiction. This veered her career away from representational political cinema towards militant political cinema, which she would eventually put into practice in her homeland.

The international vocation of the Centro Sperimentale: Oral history, personal memories and an interview with Roberto Perpignani

This article seeks to provide an overview of the rich history of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (CSC) in Rome, as well as show the importance of preserving its institutional legacy. First, this article details the school’s connection to the Italian State, with particular attention to its fluctuating political affiliations over the years. Next, this article considers the international vocation of the CSC and offers reflections on the school’s pertinent influence on film abroad, with a specific focus on the CSC’s connection to the Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV (EICTV) in Cuba and its lasting mark on its alumni from across the globe. All of this will be followed by an interview with Roberto Perpignani, a prestigious Italian film editor and editing instructor at the CSC.

Film-Induced Tourism, Destination Branding and Game of Thrones: A Review of the Peñíscola de Cine Project

This paper addresses an alternative perspective on tourism success, emphasising sustainability over traditional quantitative metrics such as arrival numbers. It explores the impact of fiction films and TV series on individuals’ mental representations of destinations featured on screen, as well as the capacity of film discourse to construct a brand aligned with local stakeholders’ interests. Qualitative methods have been employed, conducting a literature review on sustainable film tourism and destination branding. Local news and an interview with the head of the Peñíscola Film Office complemented academic insights. The primary goal is to examine the “Peñíscola de Cine” project as a paradigm of success, initiated by the city council of Peñíscola, Spain. This project positions the municipality as a natural film set through productions like Game of Thrones (2011–2019), illustrating how film can contribute to destination branding and community engagement. The study highlights the positive contribution of film tourism to sustainability by diversifying and de-seasonalising a territory’s offerings. It also attracts a more educated and environmentally conscious audience. However, it cautiously discusses the potential risks, as evidenced by misapplications in Goathland, England, and Skellig Michael, Ireland, following their appearances in Heartbeat (1992–2010) and Star Wars (1977–2019), respectively. The paper concludes by suggesting film-friendly measures for destination management organizations (DMOs), emphasising the pivotal role of film commissions and film offices in crafting effective marketing strategies and capturing the interest of audiovisual production companies.

Pasolini in/and Catalonia: Translation, Minority Languages, and Internationalism

Abstract This article posits that Pier Paolo Pasolini’s long engagement with Catalonia offers important insights into his practice as a poet, filmmaker, and thinker about language, as well as explaining the nature of his influence on other European cinemas. The first part of the article focusses on the special issue “Fiore di poeti catalani” of Quaderno romanzo alongside Pasolini’s poetry in and advocacy for the Friulan language. The second part of the article focusses on Joaquín (Joaquim) Jordà’s translation of Pasolini, published as Cine de poesía contra cine de prosa, alongside the emergence of the Barcelona school of filmmakers, of which Jordà was a part. Overall, the article argues that although there was clearly an Italian influence on Catalan cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, throughout the long course of his career there was a distinctly Catalan quality to Pasolini’s thought.

From the Apennines to the Andes: ‘Global neorealism’ in the intercontinental dialogue between Zavattini and García Márquez

This article investigates the fruitful cultural and artistic partnership between Cesare Zavattini and Gabriel García Márquez, starting from the course in directing taught in the 1950s at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Experimental School of Cinema) in Rome by the Italian master and attended by the Colombian writer. In this article, I analyse García Márquez’s literary-cinematographic works that best testify to the Zavattinian influence: from the ‘Márquezian’ masterpiece Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) () to the screenplay of Milagro en Roma (Miracle in Rome) (), both indebted to Zavattini’s neorealism of the screenplay of Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan) (), and to the short story ‘La santa’ (‘The saint’) (), in which one of the characters is Zavattini himself. This article also includes the analysis of unpublished materials, such as private letters between the two authors, which reconstruct Zavattini’s crucial role in promoting Italian neorealism in Latin America, as well as the Zavattinian authorship in the birth and development of magic realism. The result of Zavattini’s and García Márquez’s effort and collaboration is represented by the founding of the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión in in Cuba, an institution that best represents ‘global neorealism’.

Mexico Silent Film Festival's Journey of Cultural Resistance: Tracing a Path of Community Survival

Mexico Silent Film Festival's Journey of Cultural Resistance:Tracing a Path of Community Survival Alejandra Calleja Toxqui (bio), Roxana Hernández Martínez (bio), Ana Gabriela Hernández Rodríguez (bio), Rosa María Licea Garibay (bio), Enrique Moreno Ceballos (bio), Julio Cesar Quiterio Morales (bio), Ana Belén Recoder López (bio), Cecilia Ramírez Morales (bio), Lluvia Soto Rodríguez (bio), and Laetitia Vigneron (bio) Festival Internacional de Cine Silente México/FIC Silente or Mexico Silent Film Festival was born out of a collective necessity to celebrate, study, and promote silent cinema within the city of Puebla and beyond. At the time of our creation, in 2016, a great number of heritage film festivals were already in the picture, from the legendaries such as Bologna's Cinema Ritrovato and Pordenone Silent Film Festival/Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, to the closer (but equally legendary) San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Though we share the same raison d'être with these other festivals, there remain significant differences between us: their priorities have focused on North American and European film archives and materials, and our programming emphasizes Latin American filmmaking and exhibition contexts. Located in Puebla, one of the largest cities in Mexico, we strive for a balance in our programming that both speaks to local audiences and exposes them to silent cinema, since an initiative like ours was entirely new in the region. That was our starting point as a team, which mostly includes women and workers in [End Page 263] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. FIC Silente México opens the gates of time and invites audiences to appreciate the complexities and richness of silent films in their own cultural right. Courtesy of Festival Internacional de Cine Silente México. the cultural sector. Our labor is volunteer-driven, independently financed, and requires us to work other jobs to sustain our livelihood. Pueblan Film Culture and the Emergence of FIC Silente At the time of our first edition, Puebla was already a city of thriving film festivals, cinema schools, and cine-clubs. Yet local familiarity with silent cinema was limited to a canonical, patriarchal, and western universe of "great male masters." That is why we insisted on going back to the earliest years: to topple the canon by rediscovering its wild and unruly formations. We all encountered early cinema together as an overflowing river. That abundance further provoked us to confront the absence of cross-cultural dialogue about silent cinema that substantively includes Latin America. Doing so became an impetus for creation and emancipation in the face of established formulas, rigid conventions, and hegemonic screen markets. Simultaneously, and with this nonlinear notion of time and space in mind, we played with the idea of opening the festival to contemporary silent cinema as another aspect of our programming. We decided to expand the corpus of silent films to the twenty-first century, highlighting new works that are marked by the past but made for the present. We curated them through various genre and geographical categories, ranging from French [End Page 264] feminist farce to Bolivian docu-drama. But any technology or aesthetic strategy is fair game, as long as there is no audio dialogue. These films vary quite a bit in terms of budget, production values, and access to resources. To help level the playing field, we do not demand a registration fee from the creators, especially since we receive their materials through open-access digital platforms such as FilmFreeway and Festhome. This is how we programmed our Contemporary Official Selections and also how they became interspersed with the aesthetic practices of films from the early twentieth century. Our aim is to surprise and attract audiences of all ages, persuading and revealing to them that silent cinema is more alive than ever; it is a current multicultural social practice rather than a passing trend or obscure fetish. Along with these screenings and live cinema concerts, we established an educational program that includes courses and workshops, even for children, all designed to encourage people to question their concept of cinema, which has been predominantly shaped by the capitalist culture industry and by Hollywood-sanctioned film canons...

Una historia comparada del cine latinoamericano by Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez

Reviewed by: Una historia comparada del cine latinoamericano by Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez Dennis West Schroeder Rodríguez, Paul A. Una historia comparada del cine latinoamericano. Traducción de Juana Suárez. Iberoamericano-Vervuert, 2020, pp. 481. ISBN 978-8-49192-093-9. Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez’s Una historia comparada del cine latinoamericano is a translation of his Latin American Cinema: A Comparative History published in 2016 by the University of California Press. This latter work was the first comparative history of Latin American cinemas to be published in any language. Its competent translation to Spanish, by Juana Suárez, represents a laudable effort to make this author’s in-depth, wide-ranging, and up-to-date research known to Spanish-speaking scholars who do not read English. Schroeder Rodríguez’s methodological framework is a manifestation of the recent comparative tendency in the field of Latin American film studies. As he acknowledges, this trend has been prominently exemplified by film historian Paulo Antonio Paranaguá in his influential collection of essays entitled Tradición y modernidad en el cine de América Latina (2003). Una historia comparada constitutes an ambitious and unusual work of synthesis since this researcher writes as a film historian, as a theoretician of comparative modernity studies, and as a film critic. Most histories of individual Latin American national cinemas have focused on fiction features; and Schroeder Rodríguez the film historian follows this precedent as he unfurls a chronological and comparative narrative account of the medium’s socioeconomic, technological, and esthetic evolution from its beginnings to the present. The writer concentrates on the production of the three major movie-producing countries of the region: Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. All the major historical periods are examined according to the following periodization: the silent era, studio cinema, neorealism and art cinema, New Latin American Cinema, and contemporary cinema. The author’s comparative perspective situates the region’s national cinemas within the context of the century-old “triangular flow” of moving images amongst Latin America, Europe, and “Hollywood.” Prospective readers should be advised that Schroeder Rodríguez does not propose to sketch a more-or-less comprehensive historical survey in the manner of the standard texts Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America (1990) and Historia del cine latinoamericano (1987) by John King and Peter B. Schumann respectively. Rather, Schroeder Rodríguez tends to concentrate on selected cineastes who have succeeded in creating unique cinematic worlds, such as the contemporary Argentine director Lucrecia Martel, or the Brazilian auteur Glauber Rocha. This approach tends to downplay certain important historical movements, such as Brazilian Udigrudi, and certain popular culture genres, such as the Mexican wrestling movies exemplified by the popular El Santo franchise. Cult figures, such as Alejandro Jodorowsky and José Mojica Marins (Zé do Caixão), also receive short shrift. Documentary production is not examined apart from a few notable exceptions, such as Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s celebrated La hora de los hornos. Schroeder Rodríguez excels as a theoretician of the interdisciplinary field of comparative modernity studies. The scholarly question of Latin America’s modernity remains an unsettled issue; and here he parts ways with Paranaguá in that the latter conceives of a single Latin American modernity while the former postulates multiple forms or discourses of modernity for the region, to wit: liberalism, socialism, corporatism, and the baroque/neobaroque. As Schroeder Rodríguez clarifies, the baroque/neobaroque version of Latin American modernity is the most problematic as its theorization continues to be on-going in the work of scholars such as the late Aníbal Quijano. These discourses of modernity are carefully elucidated by Schroeder Rodríguez; and they have been deeply researched—in the case of corporatism, for instance, from Saint Paul’s description of the body politic (I Corinthians 12:12–28) to Thomism, the dominant ideology in colonial Latin America. The author’s evident abilities as a film critic are on display in the volume’s approximately fifty close textual analyses of paradigmatic films. In the tradition of Marxist-influenced thinkers such as Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson, Schroeder Rodríguez considers films as cultural texts [End Page 514...

“CINE DE QUINTA”: CINEMA PARA ALÉM DO ENTRETENIMENTO

Resumo: O “Cine de Quinta” foi desenvolvido na UFV, campus de Rio Paranaíba-MG com o objetivo principal de construir conhecimento junto a estudantes e moradoras/es de Rio Paranaíba por meio de ciclos fílmicos escolhidos semestralmente. O projeto teve início em 2017 e desde então tem colocado em pauta diversos assuntos inerentes à sociedade contemporânea, porém, muitas vezes negligenciados. Dessa forma, o “Cine de Quinta” usa o cinema como ferramenta principal na formação sociocultural das/os participantes, promovendo debates e instigando o público a desenvolver seu senso crítico através da “sétima arte”.Palavras-chave: Cinema, Entretenimento, Conhecimento.Área temática: Cultura e Educação

Guido Models (Julieta Sans, 2015)

Reviewed by: Guido Models by Julieta Sans Alan Smyth (bio) Guido Models. Julieta Sans, 2015. Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales (INCAA) and Stigliani Mouriño. 68 mins. Since Argentina's informal sett lements known as villas miseria first appeared on cinema screens in the 1930s, filmmakers have primarily defined them by their relationship to violence, drugs, and criminal gangs. Guido Models, the award-winning debut film by Julieta Sans, sets about reimagining narratives of villas and broadening understandings of these complex spaces. The documentary follows Guido Fuentes, a Bolivian immigrant living in Villa 31, Argentina's largest unofficial neighborhood. A passionate and self-taught designer, Guido trains economically marginalized teens as catwalk models. The fashion shows he organizes despite a lack of state support celebrate and make visible in the most explicit of manners those who are otherwise shunned by mainstream society. Whereas contemporary documentaries generally portray fashion as a divisive force by critiquing the labor exploitation and dangerous beauty ideals driven by transnational clothing companies and Western consumerism, Sans explores its potential to build bridges between disparate socioeconomic, regional, and ethnic communities. The director ventures into the road-movie genre as she follows the titular mentor and his two most promising students, Delia Cáceres and Sonia León, across international borders to the city of Cochabamba, where they host a public show celebrating the work of Latin American immigrants. This positively unsensational portrayal of Guido and the young women he manages challenges stereotypes about the villa dweller. They are resourceful, resilient, and unrelenting in their quest to succeed against the odds. They are not helpless victims, nor are they used to serve the interests of any political movement, as has historically been the case when screening villas. Shots of elegant models posing in front of dilapidated shacks and recurring close-ups of their stilett o heels gracefully negotiating the muddy terrain of the villa convey dignity in the face of destitution. Such moments mark the emergence of Sans as a compelling voice in Argentine film, which is renowned for its strong social conscience. Sans observes, rather than speaks for, Delia and Sonia as they pursue social mobility amid a culture of machismo. Her fitt ing employment of music, [End Page 195] demonstrated by Alicia Villareal's rousing live performance of "Te quedó grande la yegua" [The mare was too big for you], touches on prevalent local and global debates about gender rights and violence toward women. References to the Bolivian and Paraguayan origins of villa residents reinforce major themes of international solidarity and social inclusion. Guido's creations, which include a beautiful gown based on the Bolivian flag, speak to the significant contribution of Latin American immigrants in a deeply fragmented Argentine society and reflect the protagonist's mantra "todo por la integración, 'no' a la discriminación, 'sí' a la inclusión" [all for integration, "no" to discrimination, "yes" to inclusion]. The Plaza de las Banderas, where the flags of the Americas are permanently at mast, becomes a symbolic setting for a final show that reinforces a sense of Latin American kinship and rejects the postcolonial hierarchies that villas have come to represent in Argentina, a country that has seen its Indigenous influence whitewashed by its European image. Despite Guido's positive message, however, the documentary's downbeat pace and somber tone circumvent the naïve implication that art is a sure-fire antidote to privation and social invisibility. Sans's use of direct cinema allows the disheartening realities of poverty to reveal themselves organically. Images of hardship never feel imposed, yet the overwhelming enormity of the concrete labyrinth often seems unsurmountable. A poignant final sequence filmed from the window of a train carriage underscores the uncertainty faced by villa communities, as a pensive-looking Guido gazes silently toward the sprawling shantytown to which he returns after his cross-border trip. Thereafter, Sans counterbalances this disillusionment with hopeful glimpses of the dressmaker in his home studio, an intimate world of colorful materials and sparkling sequins where an unwavering work ethic inevitably resurfaces despite the lack of opportunity he endures. Guido Models is a welcome and original film that diverges from standard discourses surrounding both...

Rompiendo el sistema de autoría. Prácticas cinematográficas colaborativas y narrativas transmediales en la era digital

El presente artículo analiza diferentes propuestas de creación cinematográfica colaborativa que rechazan la autoría única. En primer lugar, se muestra el alcance y la significación de dos agrupaciones de cineastas en ámbito español, el Colectivo Cine de Clase y el Colectivo Cine Sin Autor. Perteneciendo a distintas épocas, ambos colectivos encuentran un vínculo en su creación colaborativa, que además implica una ruptura en relación a la mitologización de la autoría única. El artículo aborda esta eliminación común de una narrativa individual en los equipos de creación audiovisual, para después centrarse tanto en su fundamentación social como en su intento de establecer nuevos modos de representación. Posteriormente, se examinan otras tipologías de audiovisual participativo, características de la era digital, que también asumen una autoría colectiva. Incorporan con frecuencia formatos, procesos y enfoques recientes de creación, entre los que destacamos las narrativas transmediales, que en ocasiones originan nuevas perspectivas sobre la autoría. Tras ofrecer una discusión sobre las aportaciones y las limitaciones que encuentra el modelo de creación colaborativa al que pertenecen los casos seleccionados, indicamos algunas contribuciones que estos enfoques de creación, especialmente las narrativas transmediales, pueden ofrecer al audiovisual colaborativo contemporáneo y a la autoría colectiva.

Representing Realities: The Role of Documentary in It all Started at the End (2015) by Luis Ospina

Representing Realities: The Role of Documentary in It all Started at the End (2015) by Luis Ospina Cindy Bonilla Documentaries, then, do not differ from fictions in their constructedness as texts, but in the representations they make. At the heart of documentary is less a story and its imaginary world than an argument about the historical world. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (1991) It all started in 1971, according to Luis Ospina and his entourage—a film renaissance that flowed through Cali changing the very essence of the city, its people and the way that cinema was produced in Colombia. It is from this period that the main characters from It All Started at the End (2015) emerged: Andrés Caicedo, Carlos Mayolo, and of course, Luis Ospina, the director. These three visionaries were the protagonists of an entire generation obsessed by cinema in the city of Cali, Colombia. This group of self-identified cinephiles are responsible for the creation and production of a collection of cinematographic works which have come to be considered a fundamental component of Colombia’s film catalogue. Victims of the so-called mal de cinesífilis, they managed to build a network that fashioned the foundation for cinema in Colombia. Between 1971 and 1991, a number of young people from Cali joined the three originators to grow a strong audiovisual tradition in an unfocused country—a country that at the time was being torn apart by violence, death, and drugs. This documentary film is a collaborative effort (much like many of the films that were produced by the Grupo de Cali coalition) to tell the story of the Grupo de Cali from those who remain. At first glance, this feature appears to be a memoir of the work and life of Ospina, who at the time of the production of this film was struggling with a serious form of cancer. However, this documentary goes far beyond this initial evaluation to uncover the story of the origins of the cinema movement that transformed Cali. Despite the war, violence, and drugs that were prevalent during this time period, Cali grew into a film Mecca, and the Group of Cali came to be known as Caliwood. This documentary is also a narrative [End Page 132] that pays homage to the living and fallen members of Caliwood. The film successfully transports its audience through time and space to deliver an insider view of what inspired this film in particular, and also the events that transpired throughout the 20-year period that this film seeks to represent. This brief analysis will attempt to explore the documentary techniques used within the film, through the perspective of critics like that of Bill Nichols in Representing Reality (1991). Additionally, due to the structure of the film, this analysis will seek to identify the use and significance of cinematographic devices like intermediality, transmediality, reflexivity, and intertextuality, beginning with “To Make You See: Photography as Intermedial Resource in Theatre and Film Adaptation” by Carmen Pérez Riu. These approaches will aid in the identification of the narrative aspect of the film, as well as the semiotic symbols transmitted through photographs and other transmedial and intermedial visual elements that complement the diegesis of the documentary. It is also pertinent to this study to highlight the significant role that Luis Ospina has played in the development of Colombian cinema, which is supported by his nomination to the Toda una vida de cine award. Presented by Macondo Awards1 in 2010, the award honored his lifetime of contributions to the development and the creation of meaningful works that represent Colombia’s reality through his own lens. Colombian documentary cinema, like any national cinema, is a historical process with an industrial and artistic dimension. The expression “Cinema of Colombia” or “Colombian Cinema” refers, in a broad sense, to the cinematographic productions made in Colombia or considered Colombian for other reasons. The history of cinema in Colombia began in 1897 when the arrival of the cinema to the country was first recorded. Only two years before, the Lumière Brothers’ apparatus2 had made its legendary public appearance in Paris, and the invention caused euphoria around the world. As a result...

Entrevista con Daniela Michel

Abstract Director of Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia (FICM) Daniela Michel looks back over the festival’s history, commenting on its origins as a biannual showcase for Mexican short films. Begun in 1994, the Jornadas de Cortometraje Mexicano (Sessions of Mexican Short Films) that Michel coorganized at Mexico City’s Cineteca Nacional, provided important exposure to aspiring Mexican filmmakers at the beginning of their careers. Michel discusses the festival’s underlying philosophy as it contributes to the enrichment and expansion of Mexican cinema for national and international audiences.

Imágenes de sobrevivencia: del realismo urbano del Grupo Chaski al Perú contemporáneo de Claudia Llosa

El artículo analiza los trabajos iniciales del Grupo Chaski y de Claudia Llosa, dos puntos de referencia en el cine peruano contemporáneo. A través de la crítica al argumento y las características de las películas de estos cineastas, se construye una imagen del Perú, un país que volvió a la democracia en 1980 y, desde entonces, ha sido gobernado por presidentes posteriormente acusados de corrupción y abuso de poder como Alan García, Alberto Fujimori, Alejandro Toledo y Ollanta Humala. Las películas de Chaski inciden en la pobreza y vulnerabilidad de niños enfrentados a la gran ciudad, Lima, y se anticipan a ese cine de la marginalidad que en los años 90 produjo cintas tan logradas como Pizza, birra, faso, La vendedora de rosas, Ciudad de Dios o Ratas, ratones, rateros. La obra de Claudia Llosa, por su parte, llamó la atención internacional por el triunfo de su segunda película, La teta asustada, en el Festival de Berlín. Esta película, que marca una continuidad respecto de la primera, Madeinusa, es un retrato de los años posteriores a la guerra interna, los de la barbarie de Sendero Luminoso y la respuesta de las Fuerzas Armadas. El artículo aspira a ofrecer una mirada global de la sociedad peruana de los últimos treinta años, marcados por la pobreza estructural, el terrorismo, la aplicación de reformas neoliberales y la corrupción a todo nivel del estado.

México de mis inventos: Salon Music, Lyric Theater, and Nostalgia in Cine de añoranza porfiriana

Produced almost exclusively at the beginning of the 1940s, cine de añoranza porfiriana (films of Porfirian longing) is a romantic comedy genre that focuses on the pairing of two members of the upper class in Mexico at the end of the nineteenth century. The genre—set during Mexico’s thirty-five-year dictatorship known as the Porfiriato (1876–1911)—focuses on the social-climbing aristocracy and their musical practices, featuring excerpts from zarzuelas, música de salón, and teatro de revistas. Juan Bustillo Oro’s En tiempos de don Porfirio (1939) and México de mis recuerdos (1944) are two noteworthy films that intertwine musical performances in the narratives and expose the social contradictions of Porfirian culture, particularly concerning women’s roles. This article examines the intricate reimagining of Porfirian musical culture and society in Mexico’s cine de añoranza porfiriana, which functioned as a nostalgic escape for the 1940s postrevolutionary cultural elite.

Sonia M. Tascón, Human Rights Film Festivals: Activism in Context.

Human rights film festivals have grown significantly in number in recent years, and alongside this trend the definition of human rights is continually negotiated and adapted to current situations. As a practitioner in both human rights and film festivals, the academic Sonia Tascón has made an insightful and provocative contribution to the debates and scholarship concerning their practices and discourses. In this monograph, human rights film festivals take centre stage as Tascón conceptualizes a framework that links films, film festivals and human rights. Integrating analysis of the discourse around these disciplines presents the challenge of navigating an underresearched area in film festival scholarship. Developments in this field have generated a growing body of work that acknowledges the evolving role of festivals as exhibitors, distributors and producers of cinema globally, and one that is increasingly focused on its transnational and industry-level functions.1 At the same time, specialized festivals continue to proliferate and to demand more academic enquiry. While Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin’s book Film Festivals and Activism2 addresses a range of film festivals, from the human rights-oriented to the indigenous or queer, Tascón’s monograph is the first published volume with a specific focus on the human rights film festival and its political and cultural implications. Her work is enriched by a very detailed study of two festivals: Festival Internacional de Cine de Derechos Humanos in Buenos Aires and Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York.

Matías Piñeiro’s Viola and the Resonant Drift of Love

Matías Piñeiro’s Viola and the Resonant Drift of Love Constanza Ceresa1 If music be the food of love, play on. Give me excess of it that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again, it had a dying fall. Oh, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound, that breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odor. Enough, no more. ‘Tis not so sweet now as it was before. O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou, That, notwithstanding thy capacity Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there, Of what validity and pitch soe’er, But falls into abatement and low price Even in a minute. So full of shapes is fancy That it alone is high fantastical. —William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 1 With this brief monologue, Orsino, the Duke of Iliria, opens Twelfth Night, the Shakespearean comedy that is being rehearsed by a group of female performers in Matías Piñeiro’s film Viola (2012). Although the fragment quoted above does not appear in the film, it aptly expresses how the discordant “spirit of love” resists categorization into a single meaning. The spirit of love emerges as a synesthetic “sweet sound” that “breathes upon a bank of violets,” later turning into an intolerable noise that falls “into abatement and low price.” Viola articulates the precarious shapes of “fancy” through the entanglement of different discourses, genres, and subjects, allowing theatre, [End Page 87] literature, music, design, maps, text messages, emails, and pirated films to intersect in a vibrant dialogue. It is now firmly accepted that one of the characteristics of contemporary aesthetic production pertains to the loss of boundaries between disciplines and artistic genres. As Florencia Garramuño states: “Contemporary aesthetics’ transformations propitiate modes of organization of the sensible that put into crisis ideas of belongingness, specificity and autonomy” (245). Such porosity of language not only questions automatized categorization of genres (how a form responds to an identity), but also strengthens new forms of interaction between fiction and reality, art and spectator. By means of technical and narrative operations, Viola positions itself in that interstice in order to create an indiscernible zone where gender identities and meanings are dissolved. In this article, I will first examine how the tension between cinema and theatre that lies at the heart of the film breaks boundaries between different forms of perception. Second, I will explore in what way the baroque imaginary unleashed by the Shakespearean play contributes to blurring the limits between reality and artifice. Finally, I will explore how the performative2 repetition of texts and gestures creates an unstable affective network in which bodies, sounds, and gazes contaminate characters’ everyday lives. I will conclude that Viola shows that the resonance of love, as a social and affective force, circulates beyond what is visible. Cinema and Theatre in Tension Matías Piñeiro (1982, Buenos Aires) is a graduate of the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires, currently living in New York. He has made five films to date: El hombre robado (2007), Todos mienten (2009), Rosalinda (2011), Viola (2012), and La princesa de Francia (2014), the last of which was released at the Lorcano Film Festival. The first two films engage with the work of 19th-century Argentine writer and statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento,3 while Rosalinda, Viola, and La princesa de Francia4 are part of a series of films that explore the feminine world in William Shakespeare’s comedies. Viola was released in September 2012 at the Toronto International Film Festival and shown at the Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente (BAFICI) in 2013, where María Villar, Agustina Muñoz, Elisa Carricajo, and Romina Paula shared the award for best female performer. As in other Piñeiro films, a literary text (in this case the rehearsal of a scene from a Shakespeare comedy) becomes the catalyst for a series of unexpected connections. The film’s plot is apparently simple. The title character delivers [End Page 88] pirated DVDs throughout the Buenos Aires as part of her boyfriend’s video business. Along the way she joins up with a group...

Preface: The Spaces Between

Preface: The Spaces Between María Delgado It is impossible to consider Argentine theatre without folding in some discussion of film. Any discussion of 21st century Argentine cinema similarly touches theatrical motifs and prisms. It’s not simply about actors—like María Villar, Pilar Gamboa, Esteban Lamothe, Julian Tello, and Esteban Bigliardi, among many others—whose performative ethos has been shaped by both. Dramatists like Walter Jakob and Santiago Loza also work in film, as an actor and director, respectively. These kinds of crossovers are just the tip of the fertile exchange that characterises Buenos Aires’ creative arts culture. The essays featured in this collection point to wider currents and exchanges. Romina Paula and Lola Arias work as performers, writers, and directors across both stage and screen cultures. Alejo Moguillansky works as a writer, director, and editor in cinema, but theatre spills into his films through plotting, performance, and intertextuality, disrupting their surface realism in playful, impish ways. The boundaries between these art forms, as the spatial configurations of Buenos Aires indicate, are hugely porous. Part of this has to do with the city’s lithe and improvisational theatre culture. Productions shift from venue to venue. A production may “take a break” when actors are filming, or play one or two days a week or play late in the evening—it’s not unusual to be heading to a performance at 11:30 p.m. Buenos Aires lives and breathes theatre—from the proscenium arch venues of central Corrientes to the Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires’ (CTBA) cluster of theaters to the plethora of fringe theatres that can be found in the Abasto. For a decade the Abasto was home both to Buenos Aires’ independent film festival, the Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine (BAFICI), and the city’s alternative theaters, and BAFICI’s origins can be linked to Buenos Aires’s biennial international theatre festival, the Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires (FIBA). [End Page 3] Both alternative theatre and the New Argentine cinema are built on a culture of thrift, of making do and improvising with the means you have at your disposal. All the works discussed in this volume are lean and focused—nothing superfluous, nothing wasted—and they are often marked by an approach to artistic creation that may be branded around the writer/director but is effectively realised in the rehearsal room or on location through group creation. Minefield (2016) and El loro y el cisne (2013) both show this process at work. This strategy also spills over into the multifarious roles that the artists featured in this collection occupy: directors work as producers or editors on the films of their contemporaries; actors direct and directors act; and groups of actors—ensembles of sorts—feature across the works of Romina Paula and Matías Piñeiro. The essays in this collection handle a range of productions (across both film and theatre) that articulate the intersections between history, memory, and fiction that have been so prevalent in Argentina’s creative arts over the past decade. The stages are varied. In La forma exacta de las islas (2012), the Falkland Islands/Malvinas are the theater for a quest narrative where the road movie and travelogue meld together. Lola Arias’s Minefield also returns to the Falklands/Malvinas, only the islands are here a space of memory and recollection, a place that is conjured through props and photographs, newspaper cuttings and pop songs. Communities are created through performance—whether it’s the Argentine and British veterans in Minefield or the family forged through film in Moguillansky’s El loro y el cisne. Community—what it means, how to forge, and sustain it—is key to the works covered in the volume. Community, of course, was central to the oldest documented theatrical cultures of Western Europe. Theatre’s origins lie at the interface of democracy and performance. A way for a community to debate the key issues of the time—issues of governance, ethics, and responsibility, of history, memory, and representation. As with the ancient Greek theatre of Dionysus, the stages discussed in this issue offer the space to debate the foundations on which post-dictatorship Argentina has been...

Las rupturas del 68 en el cine de América Latina, edited by Mariano Mestman

Las rupturas del 68 en el cine de América Latina, organizado por Mariano Mestman, analisa as rupturas ocorridas em distintas cinematografias da América Latina – Argentina, Bolívia, Brasil, Chile, Colômbia, Cuba, México e Uruguai – em torno a 1968. O ano é pensado como símbolo de uma “época”, palco de contestações políticas e proposições vanguardistas em diferentes partes do mundo. Mestman pretende entender como essas rupturas incidiram em cada caso nacional, convidando autores de distintas nacionalidades para analisarem as transformações cinematográficas em seus respectivos países. O livro traz ainda, em sua segunda parte, artigos que pensam essas rupturas em uma perspectiva transnacional.

Uma análise do pensamento “industrialista” no Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano nas revistas de cinema latino-americanas (1969-1980)

Este artigo visa estudar as ideias do pensamento “industrialista” do Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano (NCL), a partir da analise de textos e entrevistas publicadas em revistas especializadas cinematograficas latino-americanas de 1969 a 1980. No seio do NCL, a virada das decadas 1960/70 e marcada pela querela entre o “cinema industrial” e o “cinema clandestino”. Podemos resumir essa querela como posicoes divergentes acerca da questao da industria cinematografica nacional. Afirmamos que a vertente do “cinema clandestino” e fortemente ressaltada na historiografia sobre o NCL, reproduzindo a recepcao na epoca. Por isso, postulamos a necessidade de mais estudos e analises da vertente “industrialista” no interior do NCL. Os periodicos utilizados na pesquisa sao Cine Cubano (Cuba), Hablemos de cine (Peru) e Cine al dia (Venezuela).Palavras-chave: cinema industrial, Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano (NCL), revistas de cinema.