May 22: Panel Discussion on Theorizing the Politics of Cinema (2014)

Please join us for the final Chicago Film Seminar of the year at 6:30 pm on Thursday, May 22 to welcome a panel discussion, held in conjunction with the Latin American Studies Association, on "Theorizing the Politics of Cinema (2014)."  Panelists include:  Kathleen Newman (Iowa), Cristina Venegas (UC-Santa Barbara), Marvin D'Lugo (Clark University), Jens Andermann (University of Zurich), Luisela Alvaray (DePaul), and Laura Podalsky (Ohio State).  Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky (UIC) is the organizer/moderator. The CFS will return to our usual location at DePaul's Loop Campus in the Daley Building at 14 E. Jackson Blvd., Room LL 102, using the State St. entrance located at 247 S. State.

Thursday, May 22 at 6:30pm
Kathleen Newman, Iowa
Cristina Venegas, UC-Santa Barbara
Marvin D'Lugo, Clark University
Jens Andermann, University of Zurich
Luisela Alvaray, DePaul
Laura Podalsky,Ohio State 
"Theorizing the Politics of Cinema (2014)"
Moderator: Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, UIC

The panel is described as follows:

In conjunction with the annual conference of the Latin American Studies Association, which returns to Chicago after ten years, this roundtable brings together Latin American film and media scholars from around the world.  Using the "politics of cinema"—a topic with which the sub-field has long been associated—as an entry point, this roundtable will address new trends and debates in Latin American Cinema and Media Studies with an eye toward establishing a dialogue about context, method, and globalization across regional/national specializations.  Historically, politics has been central to scholarship on Latin America cinema.  Moreover, the disciplinarization of the sub-field was integrally linked to the analytic category of the "New Latin American Cinema."  Latin America became one of the privileged sites for thinking about politics in and of cinema more broadly.  The recent revival of Latin American cinema production and the traction of several Latin American films at international film festivals as well as the growth and methodological diversity of current scholarship make this an auspicious time to reflect on the trajectory of the sub-field and its relation to "world cinema."  Scholars—including those participating on this panel—are rethinking sclerotic historical periodizations and theorizing the cosmopolitanism of recent (and past production) in the context of global film culture and transnational (and national) funding schemes. 

Participants:

KATHLEEN NEWMAN (Associate Professor of Cinema & Spanish at the University of Iowa) specializes in Latin American cinema.  Her research focuses on theoretical questions regarding the relation between cinema and globalization.  She co-edited World Cinemas, Transnational Practices (2009) with Natasa Durovicova; this anthology examines the conceptual frameworks that would allow international film history to be understood as a transnational practice.

CRISTINA VENEGAS is Associate Professor and Chair of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her book Digital Dilemmas: The State, the Individual, and Digital Media in Cuba (Rutgers 2010) deals with digital media in Cuba. She has also written about film and political culture, revolutionary imagination in the Americas, telenovelas, contemporary Latin American cinema, co-productions. She has curated numerous film programs on Latin American and Indigenous film in the US and Canada, and is Co-founder and Artistic Director (since 2004) of the Latino CineMedia International Film Festival in Santa Barbara.

MARVIN D’LUGO is Research Professor of Spanish and Screen Studies at Clark University (Worcester Massachusetts). His primary areas of film research include theories of authorship and the aesthetics of transnational cinema. He is author of The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing (Princeton 1991); Guide to the Cinema of Spain (Greenwood 1997); Pedro Almodóvar (Illinois 2006) and co-editor of Companion to Pedro Almodóvar’s Cinema (Wiley-Blackwell 2013). Since 2008 he has been principal editor of Studies in Hispanic Cinema. His current research involves auditory culture in the development of transnational Hispanic films.

JENS ANDERMANN is Professor of Latin American Studies at University of Zurich and adjunct professor at Universidad de Buenos Aires and Universidad de San Andrés (Argentina). Publications include New Argentine Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2011), The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil (Pittsburgh UP, 2007) and Mapas de poder: una arqueología literaria del espacio argentino (Beatriz Viterbo, 2000). As editor, he has published New Argentine and Brazilian Cinema: Reality Effects (Palgrave, 2013), Galerías del progreso: museos, exposiciones y cultura visual en América Latina (Beatriz Viterbo, 2006) and Images of Power: Iconography, Culture and the State (Berghahn, 2005). He is an editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. Current research topics: landscape and modernity in 20th-century Latin America, material and intangible forms of postdictatorial memory, post-mimetic aesthetics of the real in contemporary Brazilian and Argentine cinema.

LUISELA ALVARAY is Assistant Professor in Media and Cinema Studies at DePaul University. She specializes in Latin American cinema, transnational cinemas, media and cultural studies and film historiography. Her articles have appeared in Cinema Journal; Studies in Hispanic Cinemas; Transnational Cinemas; Cultural Dynamics; Communication Teacher and Film & History, among other journals. She is a contributor to the book Latin American Melodrama (ed. Darlene Sadlier, 2009) and has published two books in Spanish – A la luz del proyector: Itinerario de una espectadora (2002) and Las versiones fílmicas: los discursos que se miran (1994).

LAURA PODALSKY teaches Latin American film and cultural studies at The Ohio State University.  She has published essays on a wide variety of topics, including Guillermo del Toro’s English-language films; landscapes of masculinity in contemporary Mexican cinema, telenovelas and globalization, cosmopolitanism in tango films, and pre-revolutionary Cuban cinema.  She is the author of Specular City: Transforming Culture, Consumption, and Space in Buenos Aires, 1955-1973 (2004) on Argentine film and urban culture and The Politics of Affect and Emotion in the Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and Mexico (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Organizer/Moderator:

SALOMÉ AGUILERA SKVIRSKY is Assistant Professor in the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research interests include Latin American cinema, documentary film, film theory, ethnographic film, race and representation, and melodrama. Her work has appeared in Cinema Journal, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and Social Identities. Currently, she is working on a book-length manuscript titled “The Aesthetic of Labor: Work, Toil, and Utopia in Latin American Political Cinema” about the aesthetics and politics of, what might be called, the “process film” genre in Latin American and world film history.