SUNY series in Latin American Cinema

Explores experimental cinema and alternative film formats from across the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic, from the 1960s to the present.

This is the first book on experimental cinemas of Latin American and Spain to offer a comprehensive look at old and new technologies, including Super 8, VHS, cell phones, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and more. From the militant films of the 1960s to today's expanded reality experiences, filmmakers in Argentina, Spain, Cuba, Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico have continually used alternative formats both to dialogue with international movements and to counter commercial cinematic trends. To make this argument and cover this vast geographic and historical terrain, Eduardo Ledesma adopts a transnational and intermedial approach, examining exchanges and associations between cineastes to better understand how their films were created and circulated. Ledesma works to untangle both the relations between media and the associations of experimental cinema to cultural phenomena such as diaspora, exile, displacement, and immigration. Throughout the book, connections are further made to other global avant-garde and alternative cinemas and formats, including in the United States.

Explores how watery spaces provoke radical modes of screening queer corporeality in a diverse range of contemporary Latin American films.

Rivers, swimming pools, lakes, and oceans: these watery spaces recur with remarkable frequency in recent queer Latin American cinema, urging us to question the intimacies between queerness and the aquatic. Unpredictable and uncontrollable, water reflects a natural fluidity in our sexual desires and orientations; it is both a space and a substance, one in which bodies surrender themselves to the natural forces of currents and flows. As the first book to investigate water's queer cinematic potential, Bodies of Water proposes that we think not only about water but also through it, illuminating new directions for the study of queer world cinema and its evolving aesthetic strategies. Bodies of Water engages critically with theories of cinematic embodiment and recent work in queer theory and the environmental humanities, foregrounding a region of the world historically overlooked in global discussions of queerness. By examining the radical queer epistemologies that emerge at the convergence of body, camera, and water, Bodies of Water ultimately poses a question of both critical and sociopolitical concern: what's so queer about cinematic waters?

Illuminates the complex factors that have helped or hindered creative work by and about women in the twenty-first-century Brazilian film industry.

Woman-Centered Brazilian Cinema highlights the bold, inspiring, and diverse work of female filmmakers-including directors, screenwriters, and producers-and female protagonists in the twenty-first-century Brazilian film industry. This volume examines the diverse production and distribution spaces these filmmakers are working in, including documentary, experimental, and short filmmaking, as well as commercial feature films. An intersectional approach runs throughout the chapters with complex considerations around gender, race, sexuality, and class. The book features a mix of research methods and genres, with macro-level political, economic, and industry-wide views of gender disparities appearing alongside in-depth conversations with contemporary filmmakers Maria Augusta Ramos, Petra Costa, Mari Corrêa, and Paula Sacchetta, focused on micro-level personal experiences. In bringing together original essays and interviews, the volume provides valuable information for students of Brazil in general and of Brazilian film in particular.

Examines representations of religion in Mexican film from the Golden Age to the early twenty-first century.

Rebecca Janzen brings a unique applied understanding of religion to bear on analysis of Mexican cinema from the Golden Age of the 1930s onward. Unholy Trinity first examines canonical films like Emilio Fernández's María Candelaria and Río Escondido that mythologize Mexico's past, suggesting that religious imagery and symbols are used to negotiate the place of religion in a modernizing society. It next studies films of the 1970s, which use motifs of corruption and illicit sexuality to critique both church and state. Finally, an examination of films from the 1990s and 2000s, including Guita Schyfter's Novia que te vea, a film that portrays Mexico City's Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish communities in the twentieth century, and Carlos Carrera's controversial 2002 film El crimen del padre Amaro, argues that religious imagery-related to the Catholic Church, people's interpretations of Catholicism, and representations of Jewish communities in Mexico-allows the films to critically engage with Mexican politics, identity, and social issues.

Sheds light on emergent Latin America cinema that addresses the politics of environmental destruction, the unevenness of climate change consequences, and new ways of visualizing the world beyond the human.

Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema brings together fourteen scholars to analyze Latin American cinema in dialogue with recent theories of posthumanism and ecocriticism. Together they grapple with how Latin American filmmakers have attempted to "push past the human," and destabilize the myth of anthropocentric exceptionalism that has historically been privileged by cinema and has led to the current climate crisis. While some chapters question the very nature of this enterprise-whether cinema should or even could actualize such a maneuver beyond the human-others signal the ways in which the category of the "human" itself is interrogated by Latin American cinema, revealed to be a fiction that excludes more than it unifies. This volume explores how the moving image reinforces or contests the division between human and nonhuman, and troubles the settler epistemic partition of culture and nature that is at the core of the climate crisis. As the first volume to specifically address how such questions are staged by Latin American cinema, this book brings together analysis of films that respond to environmental degradation, as well as those that articulate a posthumanist ethos that blurs the line between species.

Explores the wide-ranging impact of the Mexican Revolution on global cinema and Western intellectual thought.

The first major social revolution of the twentieth century, the Mexican Revolution was visually documented in technologically novel ways and to an unprecedented degree during its initial armed phase (1910–21) and the subsequent years of reconstruction (1921–40). Offering a sweeping and compelling new account of this iconic revolution, The Mexican Revolution on the World Stage reveals its profound impact on both global cinema and intellectual thought in and beyond Mexico. Focusing on the period from 1940 to 1970, Adela Pineda Franco examines a group of North American, European, and Latin American filmmakers and intellectuals who mined this extensive visual archive to produce politically engaged cinematic works that also reflect and respond to their own sociohistorical contexts. The author weaves together multilayered analysis of individual films, the history of their production and reception, and broader intellectual developments to illuminate the complex relationship between culture and revolution at the onset of World War II, during the Cold War, and amid the anti-systemic movements agitating Latin America in the 1960s. Ambitious in scope, this book charts an innovative transnational history of not only the visual representation but also the very idea of revolution.