[Commlist] New Cinema 16.2 published

Intellect is pleased to announce that New Cinema 16.2 is now available! 
For more information about the issue, click here >> 
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/nc/2018/00000016/00000002

Special Issue: Latin American Cinema

New Cinemas is a double-blind, peer-reviewed journal aiming to provide a 
platform for the study of new forms of cinematic practice and fresh 
approaches to cinemas hitherto neglected in western scholarship. It 
particularly welcomes scholarship that does not take existing paradigms 
and theoretical conceptualisations as given; rather, it anticipates 
submissions that are refreshing in approach and exhibit a willingness to 
tackle cinematic practices that are still in the process of development 
into something new.

16.2 content

Articles

Global ghosts: Latin American directors’ transnational histories
Authors: Jane Hanley

This article examines nineteenth-century travel routes and transcultural 
encounters as imagined in recent films by Latin American directors 
working abroad and on transnational productions. The examples discussed 
are Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja (Into the Unknown) (2014), Alejandro 
González Iñárritu’s The Revenant (2015), Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson 
Peak (2015), Raúl Ruiz’s Mistérios de Lisboa (Mysteries of Lisbon, 2010) 
and Valeria Sarmiento’s Linhas de Wellington (Lines of Wellington, 
2012). The diverse settings and genres of these films frame stories of 
the cultural, political and economic change wrought by the nineteenth 
century’s networks of human mobility and global power. The films have 
been selected not only because they examine the past through a 
globalized, intercultural lens, but also because they were explicitly 
made for transnational audiences and represent the contemporary 
conditions of transnational production, distribution and consumption. 
From the networked meta-narratives of Mysteries of Lisbon to the 
neo-western colonial frontier of The Revenant, the nineteenth century is 
represented through visual design and in both realist and non-realist 
modes, but consistently evoking transnational interconnectedness and its 
relationship to political and economic change, even where that change is 
not the explicit focus of the story. The invocation of the emergence of 
global modernity, its visual recreation from the present day, suggests a 
kind of spectrality, in which the hauntings of both past and future 
confront and define us now, and inform the ethics and aesthetics of 
contemporary globalized encounters. Our consumption of these imagined 
pasts, with their implicit and their explicit ghosts, has the capacity 
to provoke an ethical reflection on the present. The past is not a space 
of pure fantasy or escape, but irrevocably present in our lives. The 
nineteenth century is no simple exotic object of desire nor canvas for 
fantasy when it is read through the process of imperialism and emergent 
global capitalism.

Bargaining with globalization: The cinema of Juan José Campanella
Authors: Daniel A. Verdú Schumann

Having built his reputation largely on films that seem to embody the 
very quintessence of Argentinianness, it might be surprising at first to 
see the name of Juan José Campanella (Buenos Aires, b. 1959) in a volume 
dedicated to cinema without borders. While other well-known Latin 
American directors such as three amigos Alfonso Cuarón (b. 1961), 
Alejandro González-Iñárritu (b. 1963) and Guillermo del Toro (b. 1964) 
moved to Hollywood after a successful debut in their home countries, 
Campanella took his first professional steps in the United States only 
to later return to Argentina and make his international breakthrough 
there. Yet there is no paradox in his presence here – quite the opposite 
in fact. First, because his work indeed knows no borders: he has also 
filmed in Spain and many of his movies are co-productions. But second, 
and more importantly, because his Argentinian-made films establish a 
complex and fruitful dialogue between the specific history and character 
of his home country and a wide range of foreign inspirations and 
influences, mostly but not only from US cinema, in terms of themes, 
genres, narrative and aesthetics. This article traces that local/global 
dialogue throughout Campanella’s career and complete filmography. From 
this perspective, it is a paradigmatic example of how Latin American 
cinema can nowadays only be understood within the frame of that global 
circulation of works, people and ideas that make borders increasingly 
irrelevant – malgré quelqu’un.

Constellated gatekeepers: Distribution as metaculture and distributors 
as a ‘real’ audience
Authors: Jonathan Risner

While social media potentially changes which films attract public 
attention, film distributors retain a crucial role as gatekeepers in 
shaping prevailing conceptions of cinema from Latin American countries. 
I focus on three distributors outside Latin America to illustrate the 
evolving conditions of film distribution and how distributors serve a 
metacultural function to facilitate the circulation of particular films. 
Distributors act as curators of Latin American cinema and provide a 
means through which Latin American films acquire a generic or other 
categorization to pique the interests of transnational consumers.

The unveiling of Pelo malo: The naked truth of co-producing poverty-porn
Authors: Antonio Isea

Film festivals are important for the survival of world cinema, art 
cinema and independent cinema. One can also add that the awards and 
media exposure that a film receives at a film festival act as 
paratextual layers that condition the reading of the core of that 
particular work of cinematography. Most research on the cultural 
phenomena of film festivals shows that filmmakers/producers internalize 
and integrate an understanding of festival expectations in the very 
inception and development of their projects. Mariana Rondón’s Pelo malo 
(Bad Hair), recipient of the 2013 Golden Shell at the San Sebastián Film 
Festival, is a film that represents art/independent/world cinema and was 
boosted financially by its success at the abovementioned film festival. 
In this article, I explore how the construction of masculinity, race, 
poverty porn and affects in Pelo malo is a byproduct of the cultural 
imperative of a global film festival circuit that sees Venezuela as the 
most potent signifier of misery and violence in today’s Latin America.

Co-production as co-option: Repackaging the national for the global 
market in Rio, I Love You and The 33
Authors: Daniel O’Brien

This article explores two Latin American-US co-productions, Rio, Eu Te 
Amo (Rio, I Love You) (2014) and Los 33 (The 33) (2015). I examine the 
extent to which these films, otherwise disparate in form and content, 
provide a space for addressing issues of national identity and history 
within a context of international filmmaking practices. Simultaneously, 
the films present universalized and homogenized facets that subsume 
rather than promote their cultural specificity in the interests of wider 
accessibility and marketability. This attribute is refracted in, and 
arguably a product of, the multinational financing, casts and crews, and 
local distribution through major US companies. I also look at the films’ 
reception, global and local, with regard to their being perceived as 
distinctly, and distinctively ‘Brazilian’ or ‘Chilean’.

Developing a national cinema through co-productions: The Uruguayan case
Authors: Carolina Rocha

Since its creation in 2008, the Film and Audiovisual Institute of 
Uruguay (ICAU) has developed strategies to support, fund and exhibit 
Uruguayan film productions. These policies have paid particular 
attention to private and public partners and co-production agreements 
with both Latin American and European countries. To a huge extent, the 
contemporary Uruguayan film industry is viable thanks to globalization 
and the larger markets of Argentina and Brazil. Using data from the 
annual reports of the ICAU, interviews and media clippings, in this 
article I trace the development of three co-produced films: Norberto 
apenas tarde (Norberto’s Deadline) (Hendler, 2010), Solo (Rocamora, 
2013) and Mr. Kaplan (Brechner, 2014) to show the process and impact of 
these co-productions and their consumption in Uruguay and the other 
countries that participated in their financing.
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