Latin American Cinema Research Articles

Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s (review)

Reviewed by: Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s Michael DeAngelis (bio) Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s, by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. Continuum 2007. $95.00 hardcover; $24.95 paper. 229 pages “I have tried on the whole to position myself inside of this cinema rather than outside or above it,” explains Geoffrey Nowell-Smith at the start of Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s, “and to recreate the world of the new cinemas as it appeared to participants in that world rather than view it with conscious or critical distance.”1 Although this position is difficult to sustain at times, the focus on analysis from a contemporary perspective serves the author well in his attempt to foreground both commonalities and distinctions in a set of cinemas that is primarily European, but that also encompasses movements in Latin American cinema. The structure of the book is elegant and the work itself engaging, tracing a path that begins with more general pronouncements and broadscale observations on cinema’s interactions with the politics and culture of the decade, and that concludes with a critically sharp set of analyses of major movements and filmmakers that includes Antonioni, Pasolini, and Godard. In the book’s introductory chapter, Nowell-Smith argues that the primary common element across the cinemas in question is rebellion—a dissatisfaction with and turning away from both the formulas and strategies of the classical Hollywood Cinema and from national cinematic traditions that had become stale or outworn. Tied to this notion of rebellion is the author’s assertion that a “narrative of liberation” was developing on several fronts, from increasingly permissive cultural [End Page 167] attitudes about sex and sexuality, to political and politicized representations of human experience, to the rejection of capitalistic excess, to the largely failed attempt by Eastern European countries to free themselves from the constraints of Soviet communism. Nowell-Smith provides a workable context for his discussion through a brief historical overview of cultural and institutional perspectives in cinema during the 1950s, focusing first upon the inception of a new audience and target market for international cinema, and then upon the Cahiers du cinéma critics’ development of a “realist matrix” context for the 1960s.2 The core middle chapters of the book then correlate political, social, and cultural developments of the decade with changes in formal, stylistic, and institutional practices of cinema. Especially enlightening among these are the author’s discussion of how Western imperialist expansion and Soviet communist oppression led to resistance movements that can ultimately be correlated with radical practices in both narrative and documentary film. Nowell-Smith also includes a remarkable chapter on the development of portable, versatile, and more affordable camera and sound recording technologies, explaining how such advancements supported the political and stylistic practices of the cinema verité movement, Direct Cinema, and the French New Wave, permitting new filmmakers to work outside of the expenses and politically unwelcoming confines of studio production. The author also effectively illustrates how narrative filmmakers of the decade adopted documentary stylistics to question the subject’s access to such absolutes as truth and the real. Nowell-Smith situates these developments alongside a discussion of the aesthetic and political implications of such technological innovations as color film production, wide-screen image formats, and the zoom lens. A shared concern of these cinematic movements, Nowell-Smith argues, “is that they set out to rectify something false or misleading in the way life in their country was portrayed and in so doing came up with an alternative image which they hoped was more accurate or relevant to modern life as they understood it.”3 And in “Movements,” the third section of the book, he focuses upon the intricacies of cinema’s role in both the formation and transformation of national identity. Aside from his praise for the work of Joseph Losey, in his discussion of the “Kitchen Sink and Swinging London” movements, Nowell-Smith is highly critical of British cinema’s general failure to engage with contemporary political and cultural problems. He finds the prospect of a more politically confrontational cinema in the French New Wave, discussing this cinema in light of a new generation’s reaction...

Social Violence, Political Conflict, and Latin American Film

This article examines the political role of documentary film in Chile between 1970 and 1973. Based on a careful study of two influential films, Pedro Chaskel and Hector Ríos's Venceremos and Patricio Guzman's The Battle of Chile, the author argues that documentary filmmakers engaged, analyzed, and sought to inform the political trajectory of Allende's peaceful road to socialism, highlighting the revolutionary potential of film while experimenting with aesthetic and formal languages appropriate to the political context of the time. Turning their attention to the ways in which everyday experience was politicized, and paying special attention to the political struggle played out in city streets, these filmmakers were able to explore the relationship between political change, social inequality, and everyday and state violence. These films are, in short, important documents for the writing of a cultural history of political change in the late twentieth century.

Confronting the 'Dirty War' in Argentine Cinema, 1983-1993: Memory and Gender in Historical Representations

Over the last three decades the political cinema of Latin America has been extensively documented in English-language criticism, raising the question of why we need to return to this theme in a text on Argentina's ‘Dirty War’ cinema. We might also question the return to a particularly national context when transnationalism and border-crossing have become the more popular trends in recent scholarship. What is immediately apparent is that this book-length study on just one decade in Argentina's cinematic history allows for an attention to detail that is often overlooked in other approaches to Latin American cinema. At times this means that new snippets of information emerge, such as the revelation that famed political filmmaker Fernando Solanas began his career composing jingles and directing commercials (p. 46) or that the Argentine press followed La historia official (Luis Puenzo, 1985) from its preproduction stages through to its exhibition (p. 123). The scope of the text also makes it possible for the introduction to offer an in-depth account of the specific Argentine sociohistorical–political processes that defined both the Dirty War and the move to democracy. Highlighting these factors is a useful move considering that the numerous military crises, and their effect on the cinema of twentieth-century Latin America, are often easily conflated.

Side dishes: Latina American women, sex, and cultural production

Moving beyond the 'main dishes' of traditional literary works, Side Dishes offers a provocative and delicious new understanding of Latin American women's authorship and activism. The book illuminates a wealth of creative and intellectual work by Latin American women - editors, directors, cartoonists, academics, performance artists, and comedians - and explores them in light of their treatment of women's sexuality. Side Dishes considers feminist pornography and literary representations of masturbation, bisexuality, lesbianism, and sexual fantasies; the treatment of lust in stand-up comedy and science fiction; critical issues in leading feminist journals; and portrayals of sexuality in four contemporary Latin American films. Melissa A. Fitch concludes with a look at the rise of women's and gender studies programs in Latin America.

The Paradoxical Effect of the Documentary in Walter Salles’s Central do Brasil

This article explores the fusion between the conventions of the documentary and fiction films in Walter Salles’s Central do Brasil (1998), tracing this synergy back to the impact of the documentary and Neorealism on the New Latin American Cinema and Cinema Novo, its Brazilian counterpart. After acknowledging Alberto Cavalcanti’s role in the development of British documentary and cinema in Brazil, this text examines Salles’s film in terms of Juliane Burton’s typology of the observational mode. Particular attention is given to Bill Nichols’s work on the textual conventions shared by the observational documentary and fiction films. The affective impact, which Nichols foregrounds, is reinforced by applying Gilles Deleuze’s views on the close-up. This article concludes by noting the intertextual reverberations between Central do Brasil and Cinema Novo, a phenomenon typical of the mid-1990’s revival of Brazilian cinema, which would come to be defined as Cinema da Retomada.

Beyond Slavery: The Multilayered Legacy of Africans in Latin America and the Caribbean

Students of “black history” in the United States have accomplished a great deal over the past several decades, but they have been surprisingly slow to acknowledge in practice that the stage on which the African diaspora has unfolded over five centuries is an extraordinarily broad one. Most African Americans have always lived outside the United States; most aspects of black experience here have parallels elsewhere; and the study of African American experience anywhere ought therefore to be informed, wherever possible, by comparative perspectives. Similar blinders have handicapped a good many specialists in Caribbean and Latin American black history, causing them to miss the opportunities for useful comparison with North America and Brazil.Though this tantalizing smorgasbord of a book, designed as a reader for undergraduate courses, is miscellaneous in coverage and only sporadically concerned with exercises in comparison, it can nevertheless contribute quite a lot to the development of comparative approaches. Those who seek new understandings of familiar subjects in a close examination of comparable experiences elsewhere will find plenty of sustenance in these pages. The contributors, mostly seasoned historians of Latin America, include David Geggus, Camilla Townsend, Ricardo Salvatore, Dario Euraque, Eduardo Silva, Aline Helg, Darién J. Davis, Judith Michelle Williams, Aviva Chomsky, Sujatha Fernandes, Jason Stanyek, Bobby Vaughn, and Ben Vinson III. The individual contributions are on the whole well written and convincingly documented. Notes are ample and conveniently situated at the ends of chapters.In the skillful hands of these authors we are introduced to the resounding impact that the Haitian Revolution and independence in 1804 had upon slave consciousness and political economy everywhere in the slave-holding Americas. Enterprising slaves in early nineteenth-century Guayaquil are seen organizing an effort to achieve their own freedom by collective self-purchase. In Buenos Aires, free blacks live large under the rule of their patron, caudillo and president Juan Manuel de Rosas, down to 1852; but they are soon pushed back into the shadows by the Liberal national elite that overthrows him. In Honduras, the descendents of eighteenth-century pardos and mulattos, now elevated to a provincial elite, play a key role in the submission and assimilation to the Liberal civil order of Indian communities, once populous and culturally independent. A few decades later, black abolitionists employ as their symbol of freedom the camellias cultivated by an escaped slave community near Rio de Janeiro, while struggling belatedly to eliminate the last remnants of the “peculiar institution” from the Empire of Brazil. Early in the twentieth century, the organized black citizenry of newly independent Cuba confronts head-on the barriers imposed by a deeply entrenched official racism. In the 1930s and 1940s, black pride movements sweep the Caribbean and Brazil with wide-ranging effects upon political, cultural, and intellectual life. In all of these instances, African American agency is evident, while the long-term constraints upon it are fully acknowledged.The resilience of Afro-Latin Americans and the startling precariousness and complexity of their life today are made unforgettable by three essays on current affairs. Millions of black Colombians from the maritime lowlands are displaced, despite the vigorous organizing of resistance at the grass roots, as the result of a half-century of U.S.-sponsored civil war and neoliberal land-grabbing. Hip-hop culture, both imported and homegrown, plays a many-faceted, deeply political role among black youth in Cuba, Venezuela, and Brazil. The migration of many thousands of black Mexicans from the Costa Chica of Guerrero to the Winston-Salem area of North Carolina reveals surprising things about race and social norms in both countries. Finally, a useful contribution by the editor himself reviews the evolving treatment of peoples of African descent in Latin American cinema, both feature films and documentaries.The introduction sketches broad outlines for nineteenth- and twentieth-century black history in the Caribbean and Latin America, and provides some conceptual framing for the stories to come. There is an index, a glossary, and a time line of recent Afro-Latin American history, a respectable list of suggestions for further reading, and even a list of NGOs and resources concerned with contemporary Afro-Latin American life. All in all, in addition to being usable as an undergraduate reader, Beyond Slavery has a reasonable claim to a place on the shelves of serious students anywhere of African diasporic experience in the New World.

'New' Latin American Cinema and Authorship: Old Wine in New Bottles?

By analysing the recent work of three of the mainstays of the New Latin American Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s — the Argentine Fernando Solanas, the Cuban Julio García Espinosa, and the Bolivian Jorge Sanjinés —, this article focuses on the notion of film authorship to question these filmmakers' uses of it as a means of lending historical depth and narrative continuity to their careers, which are indissolubly linked to their respective political and ideological agendas. In parallel, and given the persistence of a socially committed Latin American cinema that is manifest not just in the films of such 'classic' directors but also in those of a new generation of Latin American filmmakers, this paper ponders the possibilities and the reach of reading such a cinema from an auteur-oriented critical perspective. Furthermore, given the prominence and importance of film authorship throughout the history of Latin American cinema, the article asks to what extent these directors' recent productions — and indeed the whole 'New Latin American Cinema' project itself — really do constitute a clean break with their previous work, or whether they are simply recycling tried-and-tested strategies.

National, Regional, and Global: New Waves of Latin American Cinema

Since the 1990s, the phenomenon of media globalization has contributed to transforming the status of local and regional cinemas. This article offers a documented economic perspective and a critical approach to reassess the current situation of the major Latin American film industries.

Fear of the Trannies: On Filmic Phobia of Transvestism in the New Latin American Cinema

The transvestite, as a fi gure that contests both heteronormativity and machismo, has remained in the cinema of Latin America, unlike its literature, a rather unexplored theme. Although some fi lms have attempted to deal with such a fi gure, they have devoted very little diegetic time either to the process of physi- cal and psychological transformation from man to woman or to showing trans- vestism as the externalization of the character's self-perceived gender identity. This article aims to show that the lack of on-screen transvestism in Arturo Rip- stein's El lugar sin limites (1978), Miguel Barreda's Simon, el gran varon (2002), and Karim Ainouz's Madame Sata (2002) is caused by a kind of het- eronormative fi lmic fear to depict the fl uidity of sexuality beyond the biologi- cally oriented binary man-woman. I suggest that Latin American audiences do not respond positively to transvestitic images (i.e., the cinematic acknowledg- ment of transvestism) because they transgress the fi xity of gender roles within heteronormativity. In Latin American popular culture (especially its literature), the trans- vestite has become a fi gure that functions to destabilize the heteropatri- archal system. He crosses the boundaries that divide the hegemonic con- structs of femininity and masculinity; yet for him the act of crossdressing not only permits the transgression of heterosexual normativity but also allows for the intersection of other social and cultural discourses such as those of race, class, and politics. As Ben Sifuentes-Jauregui (2002, 10) rightly points out in his analysis of transvestism in Latin American lit- erature, the fi guration of the Latin American national subject involves the selection of desirable fragments to compose 'identity.' Likewise, transvestism might involve picking and choosing desirable objects to create a gender effect. He observes that for the Latin American male subject, to make sense of his own persona, he must choose those aspects of the given culture that best fi t his idea of the self in much the same way that transvestites articulate their own feminine persona through a collection of feminine elements that will re-create a sense of wom- anliness. The articulation of the transvestite character's feminine per- sona allows for questioning of the fi xity of the sexual parameters with

Hybridizing Puerto Ricanness

Frances Negron-Muntaner's Brincando el charco is a film that brings up suggestive questions about the n truction and reconfiguration of the cinematic modalities of fiction and non-fiction.1 The fact that the film blurs the lines between documentary and (melo) dramatic narrative aligns this text with the political projects of cinematic practices and academic frameworks such as the New Latin American Cinema (particularly through the concept of Imperfect Cinema), the New Queer Cinema, Teshome Gabriel's specific iteration of Third Cinema, and Hamid Naficy's Accented Cinema.2 However, the task at hand is to review Brincando el charco and propose how it dialogues with the Caribbean. Elsewhere, I have argued that Caribbean film and video need to be understood as part of larger creolization processes that involve the configuration and constant reinvention?that is, in the imaging and imagining?of transnational cultural communities emerging from or historically connected to the geopolitical area known as the Caribbean (Blasini 2008). These cinematic creolization processes become apparent in the characterization of historical revisions, narrative constructions and cinematic representations that engage the social, political and cultural processes of Caribbean syncretism. In this sense, the formation and constant transformation?in other words, the hybridity?of Caribbean cultures could be traced through different narrative and representational tactics, particularly those connected to rescuing and giving voice to the stories and cultural manifestations that have been suppressed, erased or forgotten by Eurocentric and normative versions of the region's history. In the case of Brincando el charco, Negron-Muntaner opens up cultural spaces for the expression of distinct versions of Puerto Ricanness?par ticularly in terms of race, ethnicity and queerness?that have emerged as a result of migrations to the U.S., especially those that have been taking place since the 1980s. In addition, she suggests the possibility of creating alliances with other groups (e.g. certain sectors of the African American community) who share cultural affinities stemming from larger collective historical experiences common to the Caribbean region.

Latin American Silent Cinema: Triangulation and the Politics of Criollo Aesthetics

Despite its important role in the construction of imagined communi- ties throughout the region, the study of silent cinema in Latin America has barely gone beyond an initial stage of unearthing national and regional cinemas to a more comparative and critical study of trends and ideologies from a transnational per- spective. This essay outlines such a comparative history by using the spatiotempo- ral metaphor of triangulation as a framework for theorizing the politics of criollo aesthetics, and by combining a diachronic examination of major trends with syn- chronic close readings of paradigmatic fi lms. The periodization and selection of fi lms respond, in turn, to a broader consideration of how ideology, aesthetics, and eco- nomics intersect in the evolution of fi lmic practices in Latin America during the silent era. Finally, in the conclusion, I argue that the most important legacy of this period of Latin American cinema on subsequent fi lmmaking in the region is not so much the elaboration of a criollo aesthetics, which would not survive beyond the silent period, but rather the development of the strategy of triangulation, whereby Latin American fi lmmakers navigated a global cinematic landscape from a position of marginality.

Contemporary Latin American cinema: breaking into the global market

Introduction: Latin Amercan Cinema Today: A Qualified Success Story Chapter 1: Los diarios de motocicleta as Pan-American Travelogue Chapter 2: So What's Mexico Really Like?: Framing the Local, Negotiating the Global in Alfonso Cuaron's Y tu mama tambien Chapter 3: Cidade de Deus: Challenges to Hollywood, Steps to The Constant Gardener Chapter 4: Playing Hollywood at Its Own Game? Bielinski's Nueve reinas Chapter 5: Afro-Brazilian Identity, Malandragem and Homosexuality in Madame Sata Chapter 6: Family Romance and Pathetic Rhetoric in Marcelo Pineyro's Kamchatka Chapter 7: Soapsuds and Histrionics: Media, History, and Nation in Bolivar soy yo Chapter 8: Killing Time in Cuba: Juan Carlos Tabio's Lista de espera Chapter 9: The Power of Looking: Politics and the Gaze in Salvador Carrasco's La Otra Conquista Chapter 10: Peruvian Cinema and the Struggle for International Recognition: Case Study on El Destino no tiene favoritos

Youth culture in global cinema

* Preface * Acknowledgments * Introduction: Culture Shock (Timothy Shary) * Part I. Rebellion and Resistance * Chapter 1. American Juvenile Delinquency Movies and the European Censors: The Cross-Cultural Reception and Censorship of The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle, and Rebel Without a Cause (Daniel Biltereyst) * Chapter 2. The Imported Rebellion: Criminal Guys and Consumerist Girls in Postwar Germany and Austria (Alexandra Seibel) * Chapter 3. Rebels with a Cause: Children versus the Military Industrial Complex (Mick Broderick) * Part II. Politics and Style * Chapter 4. Chinese Youth Problem Films in the 1980s: The Apolitics of Rebellion (Xuelin Zhou) * Chapter 5. The Age of Transition: Angels and Blockers in Recent Eastern and Central European Films (Aniko Imre) * Chapter 6. The Sound of the South Bronx: Culture, Genre, and Performance in Charlie Ahearn's Wild Style (Kimberley Bercov Monteyne) * Part III. and Inner-National Conflict * Chapter 7. Out of Depth: The Politics of Disaffected and Contemporary Latin American Cinema (Laura Podalsky) * Chapter 8. Birds That Cannot Fly: Childhood and in City of God (Sonia Cristina Lino) * Chapter 9. Portraying Muslim in Egypt and India: Worship None but Allah and Be Dutiful and Good to Parents (Claudia Preckel) * Chapter 10. Projecting a Bridge for Youth: Islamic Enlightenment versus Westernization in Turkish Cinema (Savas Arslan) * Part IV. Narrating Gender and Difference * Chapter 11. Narrating the Feminine Nation: The Coming-of-Age Girl in Contemporary New Zealand Cinema (Mary M. Wiles) * Chapter 12. Gender, Race, Feminism, and the International Girl Hero: The Unremarkable U.S. Popular Press Reception of Bend It Like Beckham and Whale Rider (Sarah Projansky) * Chapter 13. Pachyderm's Progress (Murray Pomerance) * Chapter 14. Boys Will Be Men: Teen Masculinities in Recent Spanish Cinema (Santiago Fouz-Hernandez) * Part V. Coming-of-Age Queer * Chapter 15. Girls Looking at Girls Looking for Girls: The Visual Pleasures and Social Empowerment of Queer Teen Romance Flicks (Susan Driver) * Chapter 16. Youth, Sexuality, and the Nation: Beautiful Thing and Show Me Love (Scott Henderson) * Chapter 17. Different from the Other(s): German and the Threat of Homosexual Seduction (Stephen Tropiano) * Appendix A: Filmography of Global Films by Nation * Appendix B: Filmography of Global Films by Theme * Bibliography * Contributors * Index

The State of Things: New Directions in Latin American Film History

Twenty-five years ago, English-language scholarship on Latin American film was almost entirely identified with the New Latin American Cinema movement. The emerging “new” cinemas of Brazil, Cuba and Argentina, linked to evolving social movements and to the renewal of the pan-Latin American dreams of Martí and Bolivar (Nuestra América, “Our America”), had captured the imagination of U.S.-based and other scholars. As I argued in a 1991 review essay, unlike other national cinemas which were introduced into English-language scholarship via translations of “master histories” written by nationals (for example, the German cinema, which was studied through the histories of Sigfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner), the various Latin American cinemas were first introduced in English-language scholarship in the 1970s ahistorically, through contemporary films and events reported in non-analytical articles that provided above all, political readings and assessments. Overall, this first stage of Latin American film scholarship was plagued by problems that continued to haunt researchers through the 1980s: difficult access to films, scarce historical data, and unverifiable secondary sources. Above all, this work displayed a blissful disregard of the critical and historical work written in Spanish and Portuguese and published in Latin America.

The State of Things: New Directions in Latin American Film History

Twenty-five years ago, English-language scholarship on Latin American film was almost entirely identified with the New Latin American Cinema movement. The emerging “new” cinemas of Brazil, Cuba and Argentina, linked to evolving social movements and to the renewal of the pan-Latin American dreams of Martí and Bolivar (Nuestra América, “Our America”), had captured the imagination of U.S.-based and other scholars. As I argued in a 1991 review essay, unlike other national cinemas which were introduced into English-language scholarship via translations of “master histories” written by nationals (for example, the German cinema, which was studied through the histories of Sigfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner), the various Latin American cinemas were first introduced in English-language scholarship in the 1970s ahistorically, through contemporary films and events reported in non-analytical articles that provided above all, political readings and assessments. Overall, this first stage of Latin American film scholarship was plagued by problems that continued to haunt researchers through the 1980s: difficult access to films, scarce historical data, and unverifiable secondary sources. Above all, this work displayed a blissful disregard of the critical and historical work written in Spanish and Portuguese and published in Latin America.

A Companion to Latin American Film

A Companion to Latin American Film

The Cambridge Companion to Modern Latin American Culture

The Cambridge Companion to Modern Latin American Culture

An Appraisal of Latin American Cinema

An Appraisal of Latin American Latin American Cinema: Essays on Modernity, Gender and National identity, eds. Stephanie Dennison and Lisa Shaw. New York: McFarland & Co., 2005. This selection of texts on Latin American cinema is uneven but valuable. It is so primarily because the book contains much anticipated historical essays on cinemas that are often internationally invisible, like the Peruvian and Uruguayan ones. But it also presents up-to-date analytical accounts of more high-profile national cinemas, such as Brazilian, Cuban, and Mexican. The editors seem to draw correctly from the consideration put forth by John King in his seminal History of in Latin America: that it is impossible to assess Latin American (or Asian or European) culture while disregarding the specificity of localized experiences. Most essentially, the ensemble of these essays offers a non-reductive panorama of the region's motion picture endeavors. The threefold subtitle is useful as it reveals at once the editors' embrace of a cultural studies perspective (especially in cherishing gender as an approach). Not so beneficially, the three topics cited in the tide also define a somewhat arbitrary chapter division, which ends up disclosing even more important problems in the volume's organization. First, modernity is too general a rubric for a chapter. If we have in mind that a certain level of modernization is implied by the very existence of an industrial medium such as cinema, this heading could classify the majority of texts in the book. National identity, in the same manner, is implied by the book's own framing of different regions and the filmmakers' efforts to keep national cinemas alive-so it would not serve too well as a way of differentiating the essays. Furthermore, the similarity of approach in the texts classified under varied headings is manifest in some of the most insightful articles of the volume, such as Randal Johnson's TV Globo, MPA and the Contemporary Brazilian Cinema, Sarah Barrow's of Peru, and Keith Richard's Cinema and Social Imaginary in 21st-Century Uruguay. All of them analyze national film productions within the context of recent tension between increasingly necessary international co-productions and potentially conflicting (inter)national representations. The only understandable section heading turns out to be the one on gender and sexuality. The topic allows a fruitful emphasis on many key points: the sociopolitical strength of patriarchal forces within Latin American institutions (not only filmic); the overspread interplay of sex as a moral subject and marketplace attraction; and the complex remix of highbrow and lowbrow in Latin America's overtly mestizo culture. Unfortunately, the benefit from such an emphasis is not fully realized. Apart from acknowledging the basic insight that genders are social constructs reified and revisited by performance, the essays that constitute this chapter explore the topic's potential only very slightly. Claire Taylor's piece Performativity and Citation in Camila and Yo la peor de todas for instance, holds a loose argument on cinematic intertextuality. Furthermore, Ismail Xavier's Mirror Images and Social Drama, followed by Stephanie Dennison's Two adaptations of O Beijo no Asfalto both focus quite redundantly on the obvious moral judgments implied by the assessed films' plots. Only Alison Fraunhar's Mulata Cubana goes beyond the traditional assessment of gender as a privileged field of oppression toward a comprehensive understanding of its discursive tensions and rhetorical uses. However, symptomatic of the incoherence in the book's classification, her essay is placed under the chapter on national identity. Ironically, some essays even go the other way around their chapter organization. Robert J. Miles' Crossing the Line in Mexico? forgets the topic of national identity, and instead claims that many European critics dismiss the better part of Bunuel's production in the region. …

Der digitale Grimm: Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm. Elektronische Ausgabe der Erstbearbeitung by Hans-Werner Bartz, Thomas Burch, Ruth Christmann, Kurt Gärtner, Vera Hildebrandt, Thomas Schares, Klaudia Wegge

MLR, I01.4, 2006 II57 original analysis. Hart's comments are intelligent and perceptive, and he provides solid information on each film. As awhole, the volume essentially constitutes the base for an excellent year-long introductory course on Latin American film. The only negative note Iwould strike is the inclusion of Marcel Camus's I959 Orfeu negro. Camus was a French director who made this (admittedly) lovely film in Rio. However, I know of no study or reference book on Brazilian film that recog nizes Orfeu negro as a Brazilian work, and many commentators have lamented the 'poeticization of misery for export' on which it is grounded (see, therefore, Carlos Diegues's I999 remake as, significantly, just Orfeu, dropping the adjective negro). What ismost important, however, is that by including Camus's film Hart has forgone the opportunity to include any film from Brazil's internationally acclaimed Cinema Novo of the same period. Otherwise, this is amasterful contribution to the growing bibliography of mono graphs and reference works on Latin American film. ARIZONASTATEUNIVERSITY DAVIDWILLIAM FOSTER Der digitale Grimm: Deutsches Wdrterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm. Elektronische Ausgabe der Erstbearbeitung. Ed. by HANS-WERNER BARTZ,THOMAS BURCH,RUTH CHRISTMANN,KURT GARTNER,VERAHILDEBRANDT,THOMAS SCHA RES, and KLAUDIAWEGGE. Frankfurt a.M.: Zweitausendeins. 2004. Cassette comprising 2 CD-ROMs; Begleitbuch (132 pp.); Benutzerhandbuch (44 pp.). ?49.90. ISBN 3-86I50-628-9. Itwould be difficult to find superlatives which could possibly do justice to this pro duct. Through it, the whole of the Deutsches Worterbuch is available for a tenth of the price of the paperback edition, and a hundredth of the price of the hardback, and it takes up no more bookshelf space than an average paperback. It is a truism that the dictionary has many weaknesses besides its strengths, but until the new edition is complete itwill remain the most comprehensive collection of information on the history of German vocabulary, and the electronic format offers much more than any print version can tomake this treasure trove easily accessible for all kinds of scholarly and casual investigation. The team from the University of Trier involved in its pro duction have taken pains to equip this version with a range of search facilities which are sophisticated but wholly user-friendly. A short review can mention only a few of the possibilities, and point out some of themost striking features. It isworth noting, first, that individual word-forms can be searched for not only in thewhole text, but also in the italicized or non-italicized por tions, or simply in verse quotations. Quotations from individual sources or authors can be retrieved, and abrief search revealed that there were 3 I65 citations from Platen in the work, io8 from Sudermann, but only one from Lilienkron. However, when the search was modified to capture possible alternative spellings of the name (Lilienkron or Liliencron) I3 II citations were recovered; this modification is very simple to ex ecute in a single operation, as one simply puts alternatives in square brackets, i.e. Lilien[ck]ron. This is an example of the careful thought which has gone into the preparation of this work. Given the length of time which the Deutsches Wdrterbuch was in the making, there are immense inconsistencies inmany aspects, not least in the orthography, but these have all been taken into account here in developing eco nomical and effective search tools. An immense further advantage is that the citations under individual lemmata can be related directly to the register of sources, so that the historical development of a particular word or itsmeaning can be seen quickly. One of the real disadvantages of the Deutsches Wdrterbuch compared, say, to the OED I158 Reviews was always that the citations were not dated, and not every user had Jacob Grimm's encyclopaedic knowledge. But the problem is now overcome in this version. The program is installed from the CD-ROMs onto the computer hard disc and is launched from a desktop icon, with no need to put the CD into the drive each time the program is to be used. The instruction manual (Benutzerhandbuch) is very clear and has full details of all the tools and features. The...

A Companion to Latin American Film by Stephen M. Hart

A Companion to Latin American Film by Stephen M. Hart