SPAN 210: Spanish and Spanish American Film Studies (HC)

During the past twenty years, Latin American cinema has experienced an enormous upsurge, prompting film critics and scholars to hail the onset of a new era. What this signals, more than thriving financial or production infrastructures, is a renovated cinematic vision connected more closely to everyday experience and social and cultural concerns. The films analyzed in this new collection reflect and examine contemporary lives in their diversity and singularity, through their focus on identity politics, sexuality, the body, the family, and/or community. Drawing especially on Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of 'inoperative community' and Enrique Dussel's critique of 'modernity,' the essays here weave together a progression that stresses the breakdown of the nation-state in Latin America and the search for new communal settings. The nation-state's breakdown is linked to modernity's homogenizing project and its concomitant hierarchies that, in seeking to impose order and progress, have alienated those who do not conform to conventional norms. In response, Nancy offers the concept of "inoperative community," which questions current forms of "operative" communities that do not allow for individuation and implies instead the recognition of plurality and singularity and replacement of hierarchies by horizontal and transversal connections.Essays in the first part of the volume, "Crisis of the Nation-State and Desire for Community," question the nation-state and its related institutions from different perspectives and theories, while the second part, "Sexuality, Rape and Representation," focuses on configurations of plurality and singularity in terms of sexuality and gender. The third part of the book, "Visions of the Transnational," moves toward the recognition of a global sense of interconnectedness that transcends local and national borders. Featuring more diversified methodological perspectives and covering a wider scope of cinematic traditions than most recent anthologies on Latin American cinema, these eleven essays represent a rich new contribution to film studies as well as cultural and gender studies.With Contributions By:Isabel ArredondoNayibe Bermudez BarriosGerard DapenaLuna de AvellanedaDavid W. FosterElizabeth Montes GarcesCharlotte H. GleghornMyriam OsorioElissa J. RashkinKeith John RichardsPaola Arboleda RiosJuana Suarez

This engaging book explores some of the most significant films to emerge from Latin America since 2000, an extraordinary period of international recognition for the region's cinema. Each chapter assesses an individual film, with some contributors considering the reasons for the unprecedented commercial and critical successes of movies such as City of God, The Motorcycle Diaries, Y tu mama tambien, and Nine Queens, while others examine why equally important films failed to break out on the international circuit.

This collection of eleven essays seeks to interpret and analyze the extent to which violence communicates structural inequalities or lines of fissure in contemporary Argentina resulting from the transformations that the state, the economy, and society in general have experienced during the past two decades.

This book explores the role of emotion and affect in recent Latin American cinema (1990s-2000s) in the context of larger public debates about past traumas and current anxieties. To address this topic, it examines some of the most significant trends in contemporary Latin American filmmaking.

Still the most comprehensive analysis of the subject to have appeared in English, Magical Reels charts the development of Latin American film industries in a world increasingly dominated by the advanced technology and massive distribution budgets of the North American mainstream.

This book focuses on the cross-currents and points of contact in film production among so-called Hispanic countries (Spain, Portugal and Latin America), and in particular the impact that co-production and supranational funding initiatives are having on both the film industries and the films of Latin America in the twenty-first century. Together with chapters that discuss and further develop transnational approaches to reading films in the Hispanic and Latin American context, the volume includes chapters that focus on funding initiatives, such as IBERMEDIA, that are aimed at Spain, Portugal and Latin America.