Touching on Touch of Evil: Projecting Latin America at the Movies

Film Studies For Free (returning after a short unplanned break filled with unfortunate technical hitches of the sick computer kind) is happy to bring its loyal readers news of a wonderful weblog devoted to studying

the ways in which Latin America has figured in Hollywood and European cinema. Rather than lamenting the distance between stereotype and reality, it is interested in the functions served by the innumerable projections of fantasized Latin Americas onto the silver screen.

This website - Projections - was founded in 2005 by the renowned Latin-Americanist scholar Jon Beasley-Murray, currently Assistant Professor in the Department of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. As his university website testifies, Beasley-Murray is a longstanding practitioner and exponent of Open Access scholarship with numerous of his excellent publications archived online. He is also author of the important weblog Posthegemony.

Projections' project is to write about Hollywood and European movies 'in which Latin America plays a part, however small'. Beasley-Murray asks: 'Is there some shared element beyond the contingent commonality of location or theme? My wager is that there is, and that it's something worth writing about. Indeed, my suspicion is that when Hollywood goes Latin, it reveals something essential about cinema tout court.' The index by title of the many films so far examined can be found by clicking HERE.

For Spring 2009, this project has been aided by a UBC grant to hire three undergraduate student researchers to expand this online database of Latin America on screen. As Beasley-Murray notes in a blurb on the UBC website of his encouragement of students to write blogs

The idea is in large part to get beyond the ghetto of closed, proprietary educational software (WebCT and the like), to give students a sense that they are producing research on a public stage, and to integrate their learning with their own real world experience of the internet.

Important work, indeed. To conclude its celebration of the achievement of Projections, Film Studies For Free decided to drill down and produce an extensive series of high-quality, online-resource links pertaining to one of the films studied on that blog (and a great favourite of this blogger, too): Orson Welles's 1958 Touch of Evil. The list is headed by Projections's great entry on this film.
Online analyses of and information about Touch of Evil:

• Touch of Evil (at Projections) by Jon Beasley-Murray
• Touch of Evil: Orson Welles, Director (via Google Books) by Terry Comito
• Touch of Evil: A Cognitivist Approach (Offscreen, Volume 11, Issue 12 ) by Benjamin Paquette
• Great Beginnings and Endings. Made by Orson Welles (P.O.V. , 2, Nov. 1996) by Edvin Kau
• Touch of Evil: Crossing the Line (at Parallax View) by Robert C. Cumbow
• Touch of Evil review (at the Chicago Reader) by Fred Camper
• The Master Touch (at Moving Image Source) by Tom Charity
• This Way, Myth (at Moving Image Source) by Jonathan Rosenbaum
• John W. Hall on Psycho and Touch of Evil (Bright Lights Film Journal)
• Touch of Evil (1958) weblog post (at f i l m j o u r n e y . o r g) by Doug Cummings
• Unnerving Cinema: Touch of Evil (1958) (at The Art and Culture Of Movies) by Matt Barry
• Touch of Evil page at FilmReference.com
• Touch of Evil page at Wikipedia
• Touch of Evil pages at the Internet Movie Database

Online discussions of and information about the making, remaking, and DVD production of Touch of Evil:

• Orson Welles's memo to Edward Muhl (at Wellesnet)
• Orson Welles on the use of Wide Screen processes (at Wellesnet)
• Cahiers du Cinéma Interview with Orson Welles by André Bazin and Charles Bitsch (at Senses of Cinema) translated and annotated by Sally Shafto
• The Making, Unmaking and Reclamation of “Touch of Evil” (at Parallax View) by Sean Axmaker
• “Actors loved him” - Charlton Heston on Orson Welles and Touch of Evil (at Parallax View) by Sean Axmaker
• “A rough, jagged, jarring, shaking-you-up kind of movie” - Janet Leigh on Touch of Evil (at Parallax View) by Sean Axmaker
• “A tremendous piece of filmmaking” - Walter Murch on Touch of Evil (at Parallax View) by Sean Axmaker
• “Let’s give them something to really work with” - Rick Schmidlin on revising Touch of Evil (at Parallax View) by Sean Axmaker
• Why Murch’s Touch of Evil Doesn’t Make the Cut! (at Bright Lights After Dark) by C. Jerry Kutner (also see comments)
• Potential Perils of the Director’s Cut by Jonathan Rosenbaum
• Touch of Evil (at Cinemasparagus) by Craig Keller
• Whose fingerprints are on 'Touch of Evil'? (at Scanners) by Jim Emerson
• “Mirrors are the doorways through which death enters the world” (at Shadowplay) by David Cairns

On Orson Welles, with significant discussion of Touch of Evil:

• Orson Welles: Ten Years After His Death, A Reflection on His Work (Kinema, Fall 1995)by Kevin Tierney
• Orson Welles overview (at Senses of Cinema) by Jaime N. Christley
• Orson Welles links and discussion at mardecortesbaja.com by Lloyd Fonvielle

Also see the wonderful Wellesnet, the Orson Welles Web Resource, together with its sister project The Museum of Orson Welles which continues to 'compile and present the available radio and recorded works of Orson Welles'.