Utopia and Neoliberalism in Latin American Cinema

Utopia and Neoliberalism in Latin American Cinema

Author: Carla Grosman

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2019-01-15

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1527525864

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The topic of the crisis and recovery of utopia, at both a global and regional level, stands out in these melancholic times in which the capitalist era can no longer legitimize itself as an irreplaceable form of social existence. This book reflects upon the place of utopia, moving from classic Greece to the neoliberal era, specifically as manifested in Latin America. It studies utopia as a political and literary device for paradigmatic changes. As such, it links with the literary mode of the travelogue and its supporting role in the consolidation and perpetuation of the modern/colonial discourse. The book reviews critical approaches to modernity and postmodernity as a philosophical enquiry on the role of symbolic languages, particularly the one played by the image and the theories of representation and performance. With that, and by using decolonialist theory to inform an audio-visual text analysis, it contributes to film philosophy with a model of analysis for Latin American cinema: namely, “the allegory of the motionless traveler”. This model states that Latin America millennial cinema possesses a significant aesthetic-political power achieved by enacting a process of utopic re-narration. This book will appeal to students and academics in the humanities and social sciences and readers interested in film culture, as well as those searching specifically for new perspectives on socio-symbolic decolonialist dynamics operating at the crossroads of cultural politics and political culture in Latin America.


Contemporary Latin American Cinema

Contemporary Latin American Cinema

Author: Claudia Sandberg

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-07-20

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 3319770101

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Contemporary Latin American Cinema investigates the ways in which neoliberal measures of privatization, de-regularization and austerity introduced in Latin America during the 1990s have impacted film production and film narratives. The collection examines the relationship between economic policies and the films that depict recent transformations in many Latin American countries, demonstrating how contemporary Latin American film has not only criticized and resisted, but also benefitted from neoliberal advancements. Based on films produced in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru since 2010, the fourteen case studies illustrate neoliberalism’s effects, from big industries to small national cinemas. It also shows the new types of producers that have emerged, and the novel patterns of distribution, exhibition and consumption that shape and influence the Latin American filmscape. Through industry studies, reception analyses and close readings, this book establishes an informative and accessible text for scholars and students alike.


The Utopian Impulse in Latin America

The Utopian Impulse in Latin America

Author: K. Beauchesne

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-10-24

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0230339611

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An exploration of the concept of utopia in Latin America from the earliest accounts of the New World to current cultural production, the carefully selected essays in this volume represent the latest research on the topic by some of the most important Latin Americanists working in North American academia today.


Globalization and Latin American Cinema

Globalization and Latin American Cinema

Author: Sophia A. McClennen

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-05-25

Total Pages: 555

ISBN-13: 3319570609

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Studying the case of Latin American cinema, this book analyzes one of the most public - and most exportable- forms of postcolonial national culture to argue that millennial era globalization demands entirely new frameworks for thinking about the relationship between politics, culture, and economic policies. Concerns that globalization would bring the downfall of national culture were common in the 1990s as economies across the globe began implementing neoliberal, free market policies and abolishing state protections for culture industries. Simultaneously, new technologies and the increased mobility of people and information caused others to see globalization as an era of heightened connectivity and progressive contact. Twenty-five years later, we are now able to examine the actual impact of globalization on local and regional cultures, especially those of postcolonial societies. Tracing the full life-cycle of films and studying blockbusters like City of God, Motorcycle Diaries, and Children of Men this book argues that neoliberal globalization has created a highly ambivalent space for cultural expression, one willing to market against itself as long as the stories sell. The result is an innovative and ground-breaking text suited to scholars interested in globalization studies, Latin-American studies and film studies.


Ecuadorian Cinema for the 21st Century

Ecuadorian Cinema for the 21st Century

Author: María Fernanda Miño Puga

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-10-13

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 3031409892

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Ecuadorian cinema has been largely overlooked in film scholarship, usually being limited to brief descriptions in Latin American compendiums. Ecuadorian cinema for the 21st century would be the first major publication in English to fill this gap. It provides a thorough account of film activities during the new millennium, while also referring to the country’s previous film history. Specifically, this book discusses the so-called ‘mini-boom” in Ecuadorian cinema, and its relation to industry structures, film policy, and the context of Socialism for the 21st century, hence the chosen terminology of “Ecuadorian cinema for the 21st century”. What makes this project distinctive, aside from the originality of its content, is its transdisciplinary methodology. As a means to frame the textual analysis of selected films, this book discusses theories on national cinemas, memory, political ideology, and production practices, in an interdisciplinary approach that can be emulated in later projects. For this purpose, the book is divided into five chapters, in addition to a brief introduction and conclusion. Each chapter relies on specific case studies to discuss local narratives and documentaries, whether state sponsored or privately funded, centring primarily on films that premiered in commercial theatres between 2006 and 2016.


A Companion to Latin American Cinema

A Companion to Latin American Cinema

Author: Maria M. Delgado

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2017-03-14

Total Pages: 742

ISBN-13: 1118557395

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A Companion to Latin American Cinema offers a wide-ranging collection of newly commissioned essays and interviews that explore the ways in which Latin American cinema has established itself on the international film scene in the twenty-first century. Features contributions from international critics, historians, and scholars, along with interviews with acclaimed Latin American film directors Includes essays on the Latin American film industry, as well as the interactions between TV and documentary production with feature film culture Covers several up-and-coming regions of film activity such as nations in Central America Offers novel insights into Latin American cinema based on new methodologies, such as the quantitative approach, and essays contributed by practitioners as well as theorists


Human Rights, Hegemony, and Utopia in Latin America

Human Rights, Hegemony, and Utopia in Latin America

Author: Camilo Pérez Bustillo

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2016-06-10

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 9004319778

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Human Rights, Hegemony and Utopia in Latin America: Poverty, Forced Migration and Resistance in Mexico and Colombia by Camilo Pérez-Bustillo and Karla Hernández Mares explores the evolving relationship between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic visions of human rights, within the context of cases in contemporary Mexico and Colombia, and their broader implications. The first three chapters provide an introduction to the book ́s overall theoretical framework, which will then be applied to a series of more specific issues (migrant rights and the rights of indigenous peoples) and cases (primarily focused on contexts in Mexico and Colombia,), which are intended to be illustrative of broader trends in Latin America and globally.


Brazilian Cinema and the Aesthetics of Ruins

Brazilian Cinema and the Aesthetics of Ruins

Author: Guilherme Carréra

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-12-16

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 1350203033

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Winner of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) 2023 Award for Best First Monograph. Winner of the Association of Moving Image Researchers (AIM) 2022 Award for Best Monograph. Guilherme Carréra's compelling book examines imagery of ruins in contemporary Brazilian cinema and considers these representations in the context of Brazilian society. Carréra analyses three groups of unconventional documentaries focused on distinct geographies: Brasília - The Age of Stone (2013) and White Out, Black In (2014); Rio de Janeiro - ExPerimetral (2016), The Harbour (2013), Tropical Curse (2016) and HU Enigma (2011); and indigenous territories - Corumbiara: They Shoot Indians, Don't They? (2009), Tava, The House of Stone (2012), Two Villages, One Path (2008) and Guarani Exile (2011). In portraying ruinscapes in different ways, these powerful films articulate critiques of the notions of progress and (under) development in the Brazilian nation. Carréra invites the reader to walk amid the debris and reflect upon the strategies of spatial representation employed by the filmmakers. He addresses this body of films in relation to the legacies of Cinema Novo, Tropicália and Cinema Marginal, asking how these presentday films dialogue with or depart from previous traditions. Through this dialogue, he argues, the selected films challenge not only documentary-making conventions but also the country's official narrative.


Chicanx Utopias

Chicanx Utopias

Author: Luis Alvarez

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2022-02-22

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1477324488

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Amid the rise of neoliberalism, globalization, and movements for civil rights and global justice in the post–World War II era, Chicanxs in film, music, television, and art weaponized culture to combat often oppressive economic and political conditions. They envisioned utopias that, even if never fully realized, reimagined the world and linked seemingly disparate people and places. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Chicanx popular culture forged a politics of the possible and gave rise to utopian dreams that sprang from everyday experiences. In Chicanx Utopias, Luis Alvarez offers a broad study of these utopian visions from the 1950s to the 2000s. Probing the film Salt of the Earth, brown-eyed soul music, sitcoms, poster art, and borderlands reggae music, he examines how Chicanx pop culture, capable of both liberation and exploitation, fostered interracial and transnational identities, engaged social movements, and produced varied utopian visions with divergent possibilities and limits. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Walter Benjamin, Stuart Hall, and the Zapatista movement, this book reveals how Chicanxs articulated pop cultural utopias to make sense of, challenge, and improve the worlds they inhabited.


Crisis TV

Crisis TV

Author: María del Carmen Caña Jiménez

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2024-11-01

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 1438499876

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Crisis TV addresses the motif of crisis that has come to dominate contemporary Hispanic televisual production since 2008 and the onset of the global financial crisis. In almost unprecedented fashion, the global economy came to a standstill, reshaping both geopolitical organizations and, more importantly, the lives of billions across the globe. The Great Recession, sociopolitical instabilities, the rise of extremist political parties and governments, and a worldwide pandemic have resulted in a mode of crisis that pervades contemporary television fiction. 2008 also marks a revolution in television, as local and global streaming services began to gain market share and even overtake traditional over-the-air transmission. The essays in Crisis TV identify and analyze the narrative tropes and aesthetic qualities of Hispanic television post-2008 to understand how different regions and genres have negotiated these intersecting crises and changing dynamics in production, dissemination, and consumption.