Latin American Cinema Research Articles

Galdós, 100 años después, y en el presente: Ensayos actualizadores by Víctor Fuentes

Reviewed by: Galdós, 100 años después, y en el presente: Ensayos actualizadores by Víctor Fuentes Joan Hoffman Fuentes, Víctor. Galdós, 100 años después, y en el presente: Ensayos actualizadores. Visor Libros, 2019. Pp. 246. ISBN 978-8-49895-530-9. Víctor Fuentes, professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is a giant in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hispanic literary criticism, having prepared respected critical editions of Misericordia and La Regenta and published on such wide-ranging topics as Benito Pérez Galdós, César Vallejo, Benjamín Jarnés, Luis Buñuel, Max Aub, Isabel Allende, Pedro Almodóvar, Juan Rulfo, Antonio Machado, Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, Carlos Fuentes, Latin American film, César Chávez and the Chicano labor movement, and the literature of exile, among others; this is not a man to rest on his very substantial laurels in retirement. It should come as no surprise, then, that he has published Galdós, 100 años después, y en el presente: Ensayos actualizadores in celebration of the centenary of Pérez Galdós’s death in 2020. This is a collection of twelve articles about the life, times, and works of Galdós, some previously published, some revised, some as yet unpublished, all assembled with “el propósito de contribuir a actualizar la vigencia, riqueza y complejidad cultural y humana que su novelística sigue manteniendo en este conflictivo siglo XXI que vivimos,” as Fuentes points out in his preface (11); he understands Galdós as a figure still to be reckoned with “desde la perspectiva del presente español y mundial” (12). Fuentes’s investigations run the gamut from a tour of Galdós’s Madrid to discussions of his Novelas contemporáneas; his so-called novelas de tesis; his Episodios nacionales; his theatre; his journalism; his republicanism; women, religion, and anticlericalism in his works; Galdós as seen through the lens of the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent exile; Galdós in relation to both Juan Rulfo and Luis Buñuel. Indeed, these articles were written by a man who seemingly has read and re-read every word written by Benito Pérez Galdós as well as the plethora of criticism about those words, a man who is interested in everything. Fuentes here is constantly dialoguing with other critics and making unexpected and surprising associations. For example, he unites Cervantes, Galdós, and Machado in his discussion of El caballero encantado (167–91), and he reminds us that Galdós’s life overlapped with Federico García Lorca’s (193). By creating a continuum from the Spanish Golden Age through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and beyond, Fuentes succeeds in reviving Galdós in these pages, reminding us of his importance to the past but also of his relevance in modern times. Thus, not only is this nineteenth-century author alive in Lorca’s memories, and connected to Machado’s poetry, he is also linked to a twentieth-century Mexican author in Rulfo and an avant-garde filmmaker in Buñuel; further, through Misericordia, Fuentes connects Galdós to Mother Teresa (128) and to Pope Frances through Antonio Machado (135); he reads Gloria in light of “el fanatismo y los odios religiosos y étnicos, tan presentes y devastadores, mundialmente, en nuestros días” (151); and he links “el ideal de una España republicana, democrática, y popular, por la cual el Benito Pérez Galdós republicano militó entre 1907 y 1913” with the work of the great hispanists Ángel del Río and Joaquín Casalduero as they wrote and taught in exile after the civil war (29). It is of no coincidence, then, that Víctor Fuentes dedicates Galdós, 100 años después, y en el presente: Ensayos actualizadores to Ángel del Río and Joaquín Casalduero; they were, after all, his professors in this sustained continuum of writing, reading, and teaching. I, a professor of Spanish literature, and as such a point on that continuum as well, find myself pondering how many students were influenced by Del Río and...

Antes e além das telas

A feitura de um filme envolve aspectos que ultrapassam a obra em si. Por isso, é pertinente esmiuçar as questões que fazem parte da sua elaboração antes e além do produto acabado. As relações econômicas e o funcionamento do mercado audiovisual são algumas dessas particularidades que interferem diretamente na forma como as obras cinematográficas vão circular e ter alcance de público dentro e fora do seu país de origem. Os filmes, além de produtos artísticos e culturais, são também produtos industriais inseridos em uma lógica de mercado com regras, limitações e interesses econômicos. Os desafios desse processo e a disputa desigual travada ente o cinema da América Latina e a indústria de Hollywood estão entre os temas pontuados neste artigo.

“giro historiográfico” en los estudios sobre el cine

En este estado de la cuestión se hace una comparación entre el desarrollo de la historiografía del cine anglonórdica versus la historiografía del cine en Latinoamérica. En la primera parte del trabajo se abordan los debates que cuestionan las metodologías, los enfoques y los resultados de la historiografía del cine anglosajona y que culminan con la publicación de The Routledge companion to new cinema history (Biltereyst, Maltby, y Meers 2019). La segunda parte está dedicada a revisar el desarrollo de la historiografía del cine en Latinoamérica hasta la aparición del texto Tradición y modernidad en el cine de América Latina (Paranaguá 2003) y su influencia en los estudios e investigaciones de la región. Seguidamente se presentan algunos trabajos que dan una idea de los diversos caminos y líneas de investigación en boga dentro de la más reciente historiografía del cine en Latinoamérica.

Cineando: The Master's House: Latin American Cinema's New Class-Warfare Genre

While Bong Joon-ho's Parasite is the most well-known recent example of the home-invasion thriller, Latin American cinema has produced a number of other films—many made before Bong's Oscar-winning film premiered at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival—using similar settings to create urgent stories about economic inequality. Emerging during a period of political and economic instability, these films present the luxury home as a stand in for an antiseptic capitalist order and a dulled bourgeois complacency, providing its occupants with a sense of safety and comfort that is as arbitrary as it is illusory. These films may focus on the rift between economic classes, but they are equally driven by a desire to unravel and dismantle the systems that put the working class at the mercy of moneyed homeowners. FQ columnist Manuel Betancourt examines these trends in relation to two recent films: Mexico's Mano de obra (Workforce, 2019, dir. David Zonana) and Argentina's Marea alta (High Tide, 2020, dir. Verónica Chen).

Book Review: Latin American Film Industries, by Tamara L. Falicov

Book Review: <i>Latin American Film Industries</i>, by Tamara L. Falicov

Spanish-American Studies: Latin American Cinema

Spanish-American Studies: Latin American Cinema

Caribe: Audio-visual representation of the Latin American cinema

This research article analyzes the cinematographic production from the semioticand structural perspective of a Costa Rican audiovisual product. The studyanalyzes the narrative structure, character building, stage setup, and visualcomposition. The study also adopts a qualitative methodology with an analyticalscope. Results locate the Caribe film as a national product, produced by anorganized production and good study of the Latin American cinema.

Bars, banality, mierda and love: The struggle for (comm)unity in the Costa Rican film El regreso/The Return (2011)

This article explores how Costa Rican Hernán Jiménez’s El regreso/The Return (Jiménez, 2011) expresses a vision of community predicated on belonging, home, love and forgiveness reminiscent of the idea of a collective, revolutionary love in twentieth-century Central America. I argue, however, that the film’s idealistic vision contradicts itself by defining community through persistent images of bars and shit compounded by a pronounced sociopolitical disengagement. In turn, a fractured (comm)unity results, where social violence and inequality are perpetuated. This article places El regreso into dialogue with Laura Podalsky’s ideas on affect in Latin American cinema, Michael Billig’s banal nationalism and Julia Kristeva’s abject in order to explore how the film’s proposal might be reframed on more sustainable terms. The film’s world-view and affective appeal, I argue, also tangibly manifest via the Kickstarter campaign that funded the project.

The way of the dog: Truman through the cosmopolitan lens

This article examines Truman (Gay, 2015) as an example of a transnational co-production between Argentina and Spain within the wider context of contemporary co-productions in Latin American cinema. The article uses cultural-industrial analysis and cosmopolitan theory – in particular, the notion of cosmopolitan performance and cosmopolitan spaces – as a framework for the exploration of the symbolic-ideological space that the film creates out of the real places in which the action is set and out of the various journeys inscribed in the cinematic identities of its main authorial voices. The Madrid neighbourhood in which most of the narrative develops, Las Salesas, is transformed in the movie through the presence in its midst of transnational star Ricardo Darín and the urban sensibility contributed by Barcelona-based director Cesc Gay. As a consequence, Truman’s construction of space becomes part of a Hispanic American imaginary which, originating in industrial practices, financial motivations and a vaguely defined common cultural space, attempts to supersede colonial history within the logics of globalization, transnationalism and cosmopolitan sensibilities.

El cortometraje latinoamericano moderno. Registro, dispositivo, documento y memoria

El cortometraje, de acuerdo a sus potencialidades económicas y estructurales, tuvo un rol destacado en la transformación del campo cinematográfico latinoamericano durante las décadas del cincuenta y sesenta, tanto en la renovación estética como en el compromiso social. El objetivo de este trabajo consiste en analizar un corpus de cortos documentales argentinos, brasileños y mexicanos junto a sus condiciones de producción con el interés de efectuar una doble reflexión en torno a la dimensión política y patrimonial de este cine. En primer lugar, se focalizará en el perfil observacional de la cámara, el montaje, el testimonio y las voces como elementos expresivos tendientes a registrar una problemática social en el presente de gestación del film e intervenir en dicha realidad. En segundo lugar, y de forma complementaria, se colocará la atención en el carácter mnemónico del corpus y la construcción de un documento cultural para la posteridad, teniendo en cuenta no sólo la propia textualidad de los films sino también la conciencia patrimonial de las entidades de producción y difusión en cada país.

Latin American Film Industries by Tamara L. Falicov

Reviewed by: Latin American Film Industries by Tamara L. Falicov Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez (bio) Latin American Film Industries by Tamara L. Falicov British Film Institute. 2019. 208 pages. $94.00 hardcover; $31.95 paper; also available in e-book. In terms of sheer output, Latin American cinema in the twenty-first century has surpassed the previous record set in the 1940s and 1950s, during the so-called Golden Age of cinema in Mexico and Argentina. In terms of reception, contemporary Latin American cinema is at least on par with the kind of critical acclaim enjoyed by the New Latin American Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. How has this unprecedented convergence of sustained high output and critical acclaim been possible? In this long-awaited volume, Tamara L. Falicov argues that a key factor has been the emergence and growth of various public-private partnerships with enough flexibility to adjust rapidly to ever-changing conditions. The book's central thesis is that in the twenty-first century, state and private initiatives are so intertwined that to separate the two would be a "false dichotomy, as it is often state legislation that promotes and incentivizes the private sector into participating in film production."1 This has been studied before at the national level, and to a lesser extent at the transnational level, but Falicov's book is the first to provide ample and detailed evidence that state and private partnerships play a major role in not just film production but also exhibition and distribution. Latin American Film Industries is the first book of its kind to be published since 1984, when Jorge Schnitman published Film Industries in Latin America: Dependency and Development.2 Just as Shnitman's book summarized much of what we knew about Latin American film industries during the so-called Golden Age of the 1940s and 1950s, as well as during the New Latin American Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, [End Page 179] Falicov's book summarizes much of what we know about Latin American film industries in the twenty-first century. Yet unlike Schnitman, who clearly privileges strong state intervention as the best way to break with what he saw as Latin American cinema's dependency on capitalist models of production and representation, Falicov avoids privileging any one mode of production, distribution, exhibition, or legislation over others. Instead, she describes a wide range of real-world interactions between private and public sectors in a number of national industries over the past two decades, leaving it up to the readers to make their own judgments based on the vast amount of information provided in five areas: state funding; private funding; distribution networks; the role of exhibitors; and the impact of legislation, screen quotas, and piracy on all of the above. She dedicates one chapter to each of these areas, framing them with an introduction plus a first chapter on the history of film studios on one end and with a conclusion that summarizes the book's main arguments on the other. In chapter 2, "State Film Funding," Falicov notes that "in the case of most Latin American film industries (with the exception of Mexico), the state remains the main purveyor of essential funding and support for filmmakers in their respective countries to produce cinema and circulate it nationally and globally"3 Much of the chapter is devoted to what she calls "film institutes," state agencies whose role varies widely by country but nevertheless share an overarching goal to develop, protect, and promote national cinema at home and abroad; one example is through the highly successful Program Ibermedia.4 In the case of Brazil, Falicov traces the country's long experience with said institutes, including the National Institute for Educational Cinema (INCE), the National Film Institute (INC), the Brazilian Film Enterprise (EMRAFILME), and the National Film Agency (ANCINE). In the case of Mexico, she briefly discusses the Department of Radio, Television and Cinema (RTC) and the Mexican Film Institute (IMCINE) as well as a number of tax incentives. Finally, for Argentina, Falicov discusses the National Film Institute (INC, later the National Institute for Cinema and Audiovisual Arts, or INCAA) and the city-supported Buenos Aires International Independent...

Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts by Juan G. Ramos

Reviewed by: Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts by Juan G. Ramos Katie Anania Ramos, Juan G. Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts. U of Florida P, 2018. Pp. 266. ISBN 978-1-68340-024-0. Poetry, film, and music all summon revolutionary energy in particular historical moments in distinct ways. In his book Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin America, Juan G. Ramos preserves the heterogeneity of these arts while simultaneously undermining the disciplinary boundaries that separate them. In this ambitious and stimulating volume, Ramos puts forward Jacques Rancière’s theory of aisthesis, or the idea that all sensory perception should be trusted as knowledge, as a way of re-centering the arts within the cultural production of leftism. Ramos’s main argument is that we cannot grasp the networked, interdisciplinary political artworks of the 1960s using traditional epistemes handed down from colonially-driven academic disciplines. Instead, he uses the sensescape as a framework—something that, according to the Argentine semiotician Walter Mignolo and the aforementioned French political theorist Rancière, bypasses the rigid structures of knowledge that are the West’s colonial legacy. Such structures, including Kantian aesthetics, exclude (and discount) the movement-galvanizing, world-changing power of popular entertainment forms like antipoetry, nueva canción, and the New Latin American Cinema. Ramos shows how these art forms created new sensory environments for thinking about what futures were possible. In four sections, Ramos reveals the poetic, filmic, and musical techniques across Latin America that appealed to the senses in order to locate “a certain indigenous spirit” in Latin America that was “the key to a future poetics of liberation” (65). The most commendable aspect of the book is its willingness to combine seeing, hearing, and spoken dialogue into the central axis of a decolonial aesthetic program. Ramos reminds us, rightly, that the sounds, sights, smells, tastes and touches of decolonial movements across Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s were drawn from “other” places and times, such as vernacular cultural forms from these countries’ distant pasts. By focusing on how they were heard and received in the long 1960s, Ramos fashions a method for considering these entertainment forms—many of them meant for popular audiences—without “fall[ing] prey to nostalgia,” as many analyses of the global 1960s tend to do (19). In this sense, several groups stand to benefit [End Page 288] from this book. Advanced undergraduates and graduate students might mine it for methods and bibliography for their own material on postcolonial cultural production, in an effort to expand the canon of Latin American literary and cultural history. Scholars of comparative literature, philosophy, art history, or film studies will find a methodologically adventurous account of popular arts production across Latin America. Broadly, the book also appeals to anyone interested in the history of leftism within Latin American lived experience in the long 1960s. The text is not without problems. The first and most pressing is that, despite the book’s title, Ramos’s prose style frequently neglects the senses. Descriptions of how these poems, songs, or films might have unfolded in the moment are frequently sidelined in favor of quotations of other scholars’ work. While Ramos has done rigorous research to craft an energizing constellation of discourses—a challenge for a text with this kind of interdisciplinary scope—the book often tells rather than shows. Illustrations could also have done significant work in Chapter 3 to demonstrate how nueva canción performances might have been “sensed otherwise” (21), or in Chapter 4, to show how each of his chosen New Latin American films “engage . . . [the] other modes of sensing” that constitute a decolonial aesthetic experience (147). Additionally, Ramos introduces gender alongside other identities and positionalities that were historically de-emphasized and subjugated under colonialism but does not directly set it aside as a framework for many of his analyses. This is surprising given that this book charts important new terrain in analyzing mixed-gender artistic networks of poets, performers, and filmmakers. An example is his discussion of both the musician and artist Violeta Parra and poet Nicanor Parra, who are brother and sister. Violeta Parra’s work in both music and the visual arts...

Politics of Architecture in Contemporary Argentine Cinema by Amanda Holmes

Reviewed by: Politics of Architecture in Contemporary Argentine Cinema by Amanda Holmes Paul Merchant Holmes, Amanda. Politics of Architecture in Contemporary Argentine Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 162 pp. ISBN: 978-3-319-55191-3. In this study of the political role played by architecture in six Argentine fiction films, Amanda Holmes contends that “[i]n Argentine cinema since the mid-1990s, architecture has become a political signifier of contemporary socioeconomic conditions” (2). After this point in Argentine history, Holmes argues, architecture on film largely abandons representational or symbolic functions, but rather evokes political and nostalgic memories, marks economic marginalization, and explores the possibility of community in an increasingly fragmented urban context. The book makes a persuasive case for its focus on politics and architecture as a means of elucidating the social significance of the works studied. It is surprising, therefore, that there is no fuller consideration of the changing relations between Argentine cinema, society and the state in the period covered, or of the circulation of the films themselves. There are hints of this in the discussion of media landscapes in Chapter 6, but it could have been productively extended into other areas of the analysis. The films selected cover a range of genres and geographical locations, from Buenos Aires to Salta and Patagonia: Pizza, birra, faso (Caetano and Stagnaro 1997), Mundo grúa (Trapero 1999), Nueve reinas (Bielinsky 2000), La niña santa (Martel 2004), La antena (Sapir 2007), and El hombre de al lado (Cohn and Duprat 2009). This selection allows the author to address topics including the intersection of architecture and the media, class divisions, and globalization. There is, however, relatively little consideration of relations between these films, either in the introduction or in the main chapters: it is strange, for example, that the shared interested in hotel spaces in Nueve reinas and La niña santa is not addressed more fully. A reader might also wonder, given the book’s stated aim of addressing “contemporary” Argentine cinema, why the corpus reaches only 2009, and consists in large part of films that have already garnered significant critical attention. Briefer reference is made to other works, including Buenos Aires vice versa (Agresti 1996) and Medianeras (Taretto 2011), but one is nonetheless left with the impression that a different selection of material might have strengthened the book’s principal arguments. It is surprising, given the importance of gated communities in the framing of the arguments in the introduction and conclusion, that cinematic representations of these are not dealt with more fully. The analysis makes good use of historical detail (for instance in its evocation of the past of the Hotel Termas in Salta in Chapter 5, and the discussion of the Obelisco in Chapter 2). This information grounds the close readings of the films, which [End Page 176] are attentive to formal detail and make original observations. The book draws on a range of critical writing concerning the relationship between film and architecture, with the evocation of Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin in the discussion of Nueve reinas (Chapter 4) being particularly effective. The author’s relationship to existing critical writing on Argentine cinema of this period is somewhat less productive: the analysis draws quite heavily on existing readings, especially those of Joanna Page (Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema, 2009), and does not always make clear how these are being built upon or contested. The clarity of the author’s argument is, at times, hampered by awkward expression: take, for example, the statement that films such as Los rubios (Carri 2003) and Bar El Chino (Burak 2003) are “characterized” by “distinctions between documentary and fiction” (5), when it is rather a blurring of the boundary between these categories that emerges most strongly in the films cited. There is, nonetheless, considerable value in the book’s conclusion that architecture in films from this period points towards new forms of community, family, and social interaction, which resonates with James Scorer’s discussion of inclusive urban futures in Argentine culture (City in Common, 2016). Holmes’s book will be of use to students of Argentine culture and Latin American cinema, especially for its integration of historical architectural detail. Its conclusions...

"My Camera Is Not a Weapon": Indigenous Erasure in Lucía Puenzo's Wakolda

This article analyzes director Lucía Puenzo's film Wakolda (2013) in juxtaposition to the eponymous 2011 novella upon which the film was based. By examining Wakolda through the lens of Argentine cinematic history, this study highlights the ways in which transnational co-production trends and Puenzo's screen adaptions of nuanced literary texts impact the representation of Indigenous subjects in twenty-first-century Latin American film and further contribute to the erasure of historically marginalized groups that has occurred in national discourse throughout Argentine history.

Из года в год: ибероамериканское кино на Московском международном кинофестивале

Retrospectives of feature films and documentaries, presented at the Moscow International Film Festival, are regularly reviewed in the journal “Latin America” and reflect the main tendencies and the contemporary state of filmmaking in the region. The article offers an analysis of Iberoamerican cinema as it appeared at the 41st MIFF and gives an overview of the festival successes of Latin American movies during several decades. Given the obvious shift at the MIFF towards the Asian region, the spectrum of out-of-competition Iberoamerican works was fairly diverse. The film “Asfixia” by the Mexican director Kenya Marquez is characterized by a feminist approach; it raises the problem of social and domestic violence against women in contemporary Mexican society. “Nadie nos mira” by Julia Solomonoff displays a mixture of drama and comedy typical for mainstream Argentinean cinema and narrates the story of an unemployed actor, touching upon relevant questions of LGBT. “Todos somos marineros” co-produced by Peru and the Dominican Republic deals with various aspects of emigration and nostalgia with the help of Russian actors playing the leading characters. Particular attention is given to the analysis of two Latin American films “Pájaros de verano” by Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego (Columbia) and “Rojo” by Benjamin Naishtat (Argentina). “Pájaros de verano” is an epic saga of the family of Wayuu Indians, whose life and demise are inseparably connected to Columbian drug trafficking. The film “Rojo”, which combines the genres of drama, detective story and thriller, uses various images and symbols to evoke the atmosphere of the mid-70s on the eve of the military coup in Argentina.

Gothic Imagination in Latin American Fiction and Film by Carmen A. Serrano

Gothic Imagination in Latin American Fiction and Film by Carmen A. Serrano

Clara Roquet's "El adiós": Visualizing Women in Film and Filmmaking in the Contemporary Catalan Curtmetratge

Clara Roquet's "El adiós":Visualizing Women in Film and Filmmaking in the Contemporary Catalan Curtmetratge Kate Good A 2015 video published by CIMA, the Asociación de Mujeres Cineastas y de Medios Audiovisuales, titled "Las mujeres invisibles del cine", highlights the roles of women in the Spanish film industry. The opening shots feature make-up artists at work, cinematic lighting conspicuously placed in the mise-en-scène, and a hand manipulating a clapperboard. These images call to mind the work of people in cinema including make-up artists and lighting designers that spectators do not consciously see in a completed film. Aside from promoting recognition of those working behind-the-scenes, the video also underscores the minority presence of women screenwriters, directors, and producers in Iberian cinema through statistics and personal stories. It cites, for instance, that women directed only 7% of films in Spain in 2015 and that, on average, the budget of films directed by women is half of that of films directed by men ("Las mujeres"). In the same year that "Las mujeres invisibles del cine" begins to circulate, the short film El adiós is released. Written and directed by the Catalan filmmaker Clara Roquet, El adiós tells the story of Rosana, a Latin American immigrant caregiver to an elderly Catalan woman, who has recently died. The opening shots show the work of Rosana as she completes an array of domestic labors in preparation for her mistress's funeral. Akin to the work of the women in the film industry illustrated in the CIMA clip, Rosana's labors also remain hidden from view. They make possible another type of final product—in this case, the mistress's funeral—yet garner comparably little recognition or reward. This essay analyzes El adiós in order to draw a connection between the invisibility— or at least under-visibility—of women in the Spanish film industry and the invisibility of Latin American migrant women working in domestic service in Spain. It argues that the film functions to represent the work of women both on screen and off. In its telling of Rosana's story, the film draws attention to the invisibility of her labor and the challenges that immigrant domestic workers face in Catalan and, more broadly, Spanish contexts. Through an insistent focus on her actions, the camera takes a position of solidarity with Rosana and recognizes her humanity and the value of her work. Outside of its narrative world, the film—as a cultural product written, directed, produced, and acted [End Page 105] by women—counterbalances the predominance of men in the Iberian film industry and serves to highlight the capable contributions of women in Spanish and Catalan cinema. Recognizing, as Brad Epps does, the limitations of concepts of gender and national origin, this article uses these categories to address the material, lived realities of those who self-identify as women in an industry that has unevenly recognized and privileged work on the basis of gender and origin (18). Domestic Labor in Hispanic Film With the striking success of Alfonso Cuarón's feature film Roma (2018), the filmic representation of the critical-yet-precarious role of Latin American women engaged in domestic service work has garnered a renewed global spotlight. Nonetheless, thematic interest in this figure has considerable precedent in the case of Latin American cinema. Film scholar Deborah Shaw distinguishes "Latin American films featuring maids" as its own genre, in which recent critically-acclaimed films such as Sebastián Silva's La nana (2009) and Anna Mulayert's Que horas ela volta? (2015) can be included (124). Shaw adds Lucrecia Martel's La mujer sin cabeza and Lucía Puenzo's El niño pez as representative examples (124). Shaw asserts that Latin American women filmmakers in particular have been at the forefront of featuring "the poor women who sustain [liberal bourgeois feminists'] work," which forms part of a larger project to correct, or perhaps atone for, prior generations' inattention to these women (128). Shaw correlates the filmmakers' cinematic interest with Latin America's extraordinary rates of employment of domestic servants—the highest in the world—in order to suggest that the inevitability...

New Beginnings

New Beginnings Bill Johnson González This issue of Diálogo marks an important moment of transition for our journal. Since 2010, when she accepted the position as Director of the Center for Latino Research at DePaul University, Dr. Elizabeth Martínez has directed Diálogo as Editor in Chief, a role that finally came to an end with the publication of our previous issue in Fall 2019. Elizabeth shepherded the journal through its first major growth spurt: from a non-peer-reviewed, annual, magazine-style journal, to a biannual, fully refereed, academic journal, publishing work by scholars from around the world. Under Elizabeth's guidance, the journal was awarded the Council of Editors of Learned Journals' Phoenix Award in 2015 for most transformed and revitalized journal. In addition, thanks to Elizabeth's hard work and leadership, our journal is now published by the University of Texas Press, is fully indexed in the MLA International Bibliography, and is accessible online through Project Muse. As she moves on to new projects and new horizons, I wanted to express our thanks to Elizabeth for these significant editorial achievements, and for opening Diálogo up to a wider readership and greater recognition. My editorship of Diálogo officially begins with this issue, whose special theme is the Indigenous presence in contemporary Latin American cinema. This theme, which brings together scholars from across the hemisphere as well as from around the world, exemplifies our commitment to publishing outstanding scholarship that grapples with the complex cultural production and history of the Americas. In the future, we look forward to continuing to publish specially themed issues, and we encourage you to look at the guidelines for submitting new proposals included in the back of this issue. In addition to special themes, however, we are also opening up Diálogo to general submissions from scholars who are working in US Latinx and Latin American Studies. Please feel free to send us queries about whether a particular article would be a good fit for our journal by emailing dialogo@depaul.edu. We are particularly interested in proposals that explore migration, gender and sexuality, and new cultural forms, and projects that take a transnational approach. Upcoming themes already in production include an issue on violence in contemporary Argentine and Peruvian literatures, another on "Latinx Noir" (Latinx detective fiction), and finally, one that explores the histories of Latino Studies programs and departments established throughout the Midwest. We have other innovations in store as we move forward into a new era. Soon, we will be introducing a recurring section for research on Latinx communities in the Midwest. We are also expanding our book and media review section, and we welcome suggestions for book reviews from multiple disciplines. I'm excited to see where our Diálogo will take us! [End Page 1] Bill Johnson González DePaul University Copyright © 2020 University of Texas Press

Screening the Indigenous Experience in Contemporary Latin American Cinema

Screening the Indigenous Experience in Contemporary Latin American Cinema

Las «conocidas» de siempre. Recepción de la commedia all’italiana en Buenos Aires

The artistic boom and industrial consolidation that took place in Italian cinema after the Second World War had a wide reception in Argentina. Although Neorealism’s influence has been noticed in Latin American cinemas’ renovation, I consider that the presence of commedia all'italiana (produced over the fifties and sixties) in Buenos Aires’ cinemas has also had a strong effect on spectators ?some of whom would become filmmakers, and who later on took aspects of that model for their own films. Audience’s preference for these movies undoubtedly operated as an important reference for local producers during the following years. In this article, I examine comedies’ reception at a quantitative (observing the screening programmes) and qualitative (analyzing different kinds of reviews) levels. This process has also been part of a broader transnational development of peninsular cinema in Argentina, taking into account the centrality of Italian’s culture in the South American country.