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.
