Classic Latin American film studies in memory of Mario Benedetti

Sequence from El lado oscuro del corazón (The Dark Side of the Heart, Argentina, 1992, directed by Eliseo Subiela) featuring Mario Benedetti's poem 'No te salves'/'Don't Save Yourself' (recited by Oliverio/Dario Grandinetti to Ana/ Sandra Ballesteros) and starring Benedetti himself as 'El poeta alemán'/'the German Poet' reading his poem 'Corazón coraza'

Film Studies For Free was just going to post today on three classic Latin American film studies texts that are now fabulously available as free e-books from the wonderful people at University of Pittsburgh Press Digital Editions:

• Julianne Burton, The Social documentary in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, c1990)
• Randal Johnson, The film industry in Brazil: culture and the state (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, c1987)
• Eva Paulino Bueno and Terry Caesar, Imagination beyond nation: Latin American popular culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, c1998)
  

But then FSFF's author heard of the sad death at 88 of the great Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti, who devoted his life to demonstrating, so beautifully, that 'the South also exists', in literature, politics, and the cinema.

As the BBC website reports: 'Born to Italian immigrants, Benedetti wrote more than 80 novels, poems, short stories and essays during a career spanning six decades. His 1960 novel [La tregua] The Truce was translated into 19 languages and made into a film', La tregua directed by Sergio Renán based on a script by Benedetti and Aída Bortnik (the film was also remade in 2003) .

While Renán's La tregua was probably the most important film based on Benedetti's writing (at least in terms of its political impact), he was, in FSFF's opinion, the most cinematic of South American poets, with over eighteen screenplays to his name. He had a particular association with the highly lyrical film work of Argentine writer-director Eliseo Subiela (an auteur on whose work FSFF's author has published), especially the films El lado oscuro del corazón (1992, sequence embedded above; also see here) and Despabílate amor (aka Wake Up Love, 1996).

Below, as is FSFF's wont, are links to some online and freely accessible studies of the 'Benedettian' films of Subiela, as well as of Uruguayan and Southern Cone cinema more generally.

Nunca te salvaste, Mario... Gracias.

• Michael Chanan, Cinema in Latin America (1930-1960) and New Cinemas in Latin America (1960-1995) both essays from The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, OUP, 1996
  
• Michael Chanan, 'Latin American Cinema in the 90s. Representational Space in Recent Latin American Cinema', E.I.A.L, Vol. 9, no. 1, Enero-Junio, 1998
• Michael Chanan, The Changing Geography of Third Cinema (Screen Special Latin American Issue, Volume 38, number 4, Winter 1997) The history of the concept of Third Cinema, from the introduction of the term by Solanas and Getino in 1968 to the 1990s.
• Tamara L. Falicov, 'Film Policy under MERCOSUR: The Case of Uruguay', Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 27, No 1 (2002)
• Catherine Grant, 'Giving up Ghosts: Eliseo Subiela's Hombre mirando al sudeste and No te mueras sin decirme a dónde vas', Changing Reels: Latin American Cinema against the Odds, ed. Rob Rix and Roberto Rodríguez-Saona (Leeds: Leeds Iberian Papers - Trinity and All Saints/University of Leeds, 1997), pp. 89-120
• Gustavo Iribarne, 'El último tren: Uruguayan cinema for the new millenium?, El Ojo Que Piensa, 2002
• Geoffrey Kantaris, 'The Last Snapshots of Modernity: Argentine Cinema after the '"Process"' Bulletin of Hispanic Studies [Glasgow] (April 1996)
• Geoffrey Kantaris, "The Repressed Signifier: the Cinema of Alejandro Agresti and Eliseo Subiela". Originally published in Identity and Discursive Practice. Ed. Francisco Domínguez. London: Peter Laing Publishers, 2000
• Geoffrey Kantaris, "Holograms and Simulacra: Bioy Casares, Subiela, Piglia". Web resource based on a seminar paper given at the Science and the Creative Imagination conference, Institute of Latin American Studies, London (22-Mar-2001). Includes video clips
• Jill S. Kuhnheim, Spanish American Poetry at the End of the Twentieth Century (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004, via Google Books preview - on the sequence embedded above)
• David Oubiña, 'Between Breakup and Tradition: Recent Argentinean Cinema', Senses of Cinema, March 2004
  
• Joanna Page, 'Postmodernism, history and social critique in post-dictatorship Argentine cinema: a reading of Eliseo Subiela's El lado oscuro del corazon', The Modern Language Review, 2001; 96 (2)