Showing posts with label Latin American film studies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Latin American film studies. Show all posts

Tuesday, 3 August 2010

"Roots of Third Cinema" and other Michael Chanan films and videos online

Roots of Third Cinema from Michael Chanan on Vimeo 
(made available for teaching and private viewing only)

As regular readers of this blog will know, Film Studies For Free is a fervent admirer of the work of filmmaker and academic writer Michael Chanan, Professor of Film at Roehampton University. Chanan has been making his work accessible online for a long time now. And now his professional website and his great blog Putney Debater have been joined by a Vimeo account where he is gradually archiving some marvellous audiovisual work from an impressive back catalogue.

FSFF has embedded one of its favourite items above, Roots of Third Cinema which has been extracted and re-edited from Chanan's enormously important and influential documentary New Cinema of Latin America (Channel Four, 1983). This is an incredibly rich and useful scholarly resource, FSFF is sure you will agree.

Written, produced, and directed by Chanan with photography by Peter Chappell, part I of New Cinema of Latin America traced the origins and development of the new cinema movement in the countries of Latin America from the early 1950s to the present and examines its political and social themes. In part II the political and cultural dimensions of the new cinema since the 1960s were explored in greater detail. The film examined the new cinema's political concerns, its desire to give expression to the traditional cultures, national identities, and everyday experiences of Latin Americans, and the growing prominence of feminist cinema. Both parts included commentary by directors and others active in the new cinema movement and excerpts from numerous films.

[FSFF has devoted a number of previous entries to online and openly accessible resources on Third Cinema in the past. See especially this bumper post.]

Tuesday, 4 May 2010

Film-Historia: Index to English language articles


Over the years, Film Studies For Free has noticed that there were some excellent English-language articles on lots of different aspects of film history to be found at the (very difficult to navigate) website of the excellent Universitat de Barcelona-based film journal Film-Historia

Until today, however, there was no easy way to access all of these articles, but ...  (drum roll) ... ta-da! Cast your eyes at the awesome list of direct links below, and, if you feel so inclined, thank your lucky stars that FSFF's author needed some distraction from her country's general election shenanigans this morning.

Thursday, 1 April 2010

"Making films anyhow": On Glauber Rocha's DIY cinema


Terra em Transe/Entranced Earth (Glauber Rocha, 1967)
Glauber said more: "We are going to make our films anyhow: with handheld cameras, in 16mm if there is no 35mm, improvising in the street to get people's true gestures"; "..a cinema on the basis of whatever means are possible, at low cost and in a short time"; "..a political cinema that intends to inform not by logic, but by poetics."
Making films anyhow. Not making films anyhow. In fact, filming with a hand-held camera revealing its nervous presence in the scene more than the scene itself properly speaking, was not a way of simplifying and impoverishing cinematographic writing, but a creative intervention to make it more complex and rich. Glauber's Earth Entranced (Terra em Transe, 1967) is a good example, the scene improvised, not because it had not been thought through properly beforehand in the screenplay, but because it continued being thought through there in the shooting; the image tremulous; not because of any failure or lack of skill on the part of the photographer, but because at that time reality was being discussed like that in speech, nervous and tremulous.
In fact, this cinema, with an idea in its head and a camera in its hand, enriched the speech of itself. It helped people think of screenplays as a challenge to shooting, of shooting as a response to the challenge of the screenplay, of the camera as a challenge to the eye. It helped people think of cinema as an expression finished, on the screen and, at the same time, unfinished, just in the imagination, part of a process that does not end with the film on the screen; it helped people think of film as a work print, a not yet finished print for the spectator to clean up and bring order to; cinema as an inventor and stimulator of images.
José Carlos Avellar, 'Writing the Speech', FIPRESCI, 2006
The links list offered up today is Film Studies For Free's customary tribute to Glauber Rocha, a political and aesthetic leader of the Cinema Novo movement which emerged in Brazil in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Known above all for the trio of films Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (Black God, White Devil, 1964), Terra em transe (Earth Entranced/Land in Anguish, 1967), and O dragão da maldade contra o santo guerreiro (Antonio das Mortes, 1969), the latter about a legendary gunman hired to kill a group of rebelling peasants, Glauber Rocha's work -- made according to his DIY dictum 'An idea in your head and a camera in hand...' -- has been an inspiration for much cinema in Brazil and elsewhere.

This post is also intended to support and publicise a (for charity) screening of Glauber Rocha's Terra em Transe in London by Latin America House/CasaLatina.org on April 8. Do please go along if you can, and find out more about about this important filmmaker's work and about Brazilian cinema, politics and culture more generally.

    Thursday, 29 October 2009

    Peruvian Cinema (in the age of transnational film finance)


    Image of Fausta/Magaly Solier, in La teta asustada/The Milk of Sorrow (Claudia Llosa, Spain/Peru, 2009) - see a review of this film here


    Film Studies For Free's author attended a very stimulating seminar yesterday given by Sarah Barrow of Anglia Ruskin University, entitled 'Transnational Film Financing in the Hispanic World: A Peruvian Case Study'.

    Barrow presented a fascinating overview of Peruvian cinema in the last five years, and, in particular, of the efforts made by an emerging set of filmmakers to take advantage of new international funding and support opportunities. These include the regional Ibermedia programme, Rotterdam Film Festival’s Hubert Bals project, the Berlin World Cinema Fund (WCF), and the Cannes screenwriting residency awards for developing writer-director talent from developing economies. Barrow focused on the career trajectories of two Peruvian writer-directors: Josué Méndez (Días de Santiago [2004]; Dioses [2008]) and Claudia Llosa (Madeinusa [2006]; La teta asustada/The Milk of Sorrow [2009], Winner of the Golden Bear Award at the Berlinale 2009 and 2009 Foreign-Language Oscar Nominee).

    FSFF wanted to follow up on Barrow's valuable seminar with some online resources for researchers working on Peruvian cinema as well as on transnational film finance. Below, then, are some links to high-quality, openly-accessible, scholarly work on these topics, most of them in English. See also FSFF's earlier post on Studies of 'Third Cinema' and anti-Eurocentric film culture


    Monday, 10 August 2009

    Studies of 'Third Cinema' and anti-Eurocentric film culture


    Subtitled introduction to the first part of Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's 1968 Third Cinema classic La hora de los hornos/The Hour of the Furnaces (made by the Grupo Cine Liberación collecive), 1968 on YouTube. Also see the first part ('Neocolonialismo y violencia'/'Neocolonialism and Violence') in its entirety, without subtitles, HERE.

    Two events in particular provoked Film Studies For Free's posting, today, of a webliography of openly accessible, online material about Third Cinema and anti-Eurocentric film culture: the revamping of the website of Michael Chanan, one of the most important anglophone writers on Third Cinema (note the updated page for his online essays and papers and his new blog address); and the publication of a new issue of online film journal Offscreen (volume 13, issue 6), with an article on Third Cinema by Nicola Marzano.

    The film-studies links are below, but first, here are links to three essential 'Third Cinema' Manifestos: Julio García Espinosa, 'For an Imperfect Cinema' ; Glauber Rocha, 'Aesthetic of Hunger'; and Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, 'Towards a Third Cinema' (Published online courtesy of Revolutionen aus dem Off: EINE RETROSPEKTIVE DES DRITTEN KINOS IM AUFBRUCH, ZEUGHAUSKINO BERLIN, April 18-May 27, 2009)

    Tuesday, 19 May 2009

    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:

    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.