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Abstract
This essay focuses on the interface between praxis and theory in Hispanism in the twenty-first century. The author describes the ways in which his experience making documentary films at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión in San Antonio de los Baños in Cuba led him to re-evaluate the way in which he taught theoretical and historical film courses at University College London. This led him, for example, to introduce a filmmaking exercise based on the Kuleshov Effect which provides the students with a better understanding of the mechanics of editing, or montage, within a given film. The essay turns to a discussion of difference between analogue and digital film and concludes with a comparison between Carl Dreyer's Ordet (1955) Carlos Reygadas' Stellet licht (2007).
Notes
1 ‘Jorge Sanjinés’, in Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Culture: Hispanic Culture of Spanish America, ed. Peter Standish (New York: Gale Research, 1995), 246–47 (p. 246). Sanjinés was in fact born in 1936.
2 Brazilian Cinema, ed. Randal Johnson & Robert Stam (Rutherford/London: Fairleigh Dickinson U. P./ Associated University Presses, 1982); The New Latin American Cinema: An Annotated Bibliography of Sources in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, 1960–1980, compiled by Julianne Burton (New York: Smyrna Press, 1983); Michael Chanan, The Cuban Image: Cinema and Cultural Politics in Cuba (London: British Film Institute, 1985); Julianne Burton, Cinema and Social Change in Latin America: Conversations with Filmmakers (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1986); Randal Johnson, The Film Industry in Brazil: Culture and the State (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1987); Luis Trelles Plazola, South American Cinema: A Dictionary of Film Makers (Río Piedras: Univ. de Puerto Rico, 1989); John King, Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America (London: Verso, 1990).
3 I remember a conversation in the autumn of 2002 with Paul Julian Smith, then Head of Spanish at the University of Cambridge, when he told me about his surprise when he first saw Amores perros; it had a quality which Latin-American films had not demonstrated up until that point.
4 For further discussion of this point, see Deborah Shaw, ‘Latin American Cinema Today: A Qualified Success Story’, in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Breaking into the Global Market, ed. Deborah Shaw (Lanham: Rowman, 2007), 1–10.
5 Anon., ‘Mexican Wave Rides High in the Film World’, BBC News, 22 February 2007; see <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6382161.stm> (consulted 17 October 2014).
6 ‘ “Slick Grit”: Auteurship Versus Mimicry in Three Films by Francisco Lombardi’, New Cinemas, 3:3 (2005), 159–67.
7 Quoted in Frank Tomasulo, ‘Theory to Practice: Integrating Cinema Theory and Film Production', Cinema Journal, 36:3 (1997), 113–17 (p. 113).
8 Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folk Tale (Austin/London: Univ. of Texas Press, 1968).
9 For discussion of the Babel imagery, for example, see my book, Latin American Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), 157.
10 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2011), 252.
11 Deleuze, Cinema 2, trans. Tomlinson & Galeta, 254.
12 The Danish film Idioterne (The Idiots) (1998), directed by Dogme 95 film director Lars von Trier, is normally seen as the first film to be filmed entirely on a digital camera (it was a Sony DCR-VX1000), that is, thirteen years after Deleuze's book came out.
13 Sigmund Freud, ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology I’ (1895), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, and assisted by Alix Strachey & Alan Tyson, 24 vols (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966–74), I [1886–1899], 353–54 (p. 356).
14 William Brown, Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age: Supercinema (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 1.
15 Brown, Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age, 2.
16 Brown, Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age, 3.
17 Brown, Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age, 2.
18 The difference—or lack of substantive difference—between digital and analogue is a contested field, in moving image as much as photography; for a brief introduction to some of the main issues at play here, see Adam Lerner, ‘Film Photography vs. Digital Photography—A Shoot-Out of Sorts’, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AL3L0Lexr4c> (consulted 2 October 2014).
19 Brown, Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age, 9–10.
20 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, trans. Tomlinson & Galeta, 4.
21 Patricia Pisters, The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2012), 10.
22 Pisters, The Neuro-Image, 10.
23 J. Hoberman refers to La batalla en el cielo as ‘a new sort of ceremonial cinema at once dauntingly local and boldly universal’ (Film after Film, Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema? [London: Verso, 2012], 229).
24 Andrew Pulver, ‘Carlos Reygadas: In Defense of Post Tenebras Lux’, The Guardian, 14 March 2013, <http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/mar/14/carlos-reygadas-post-tenebras-lux> (consulted 5 September 2014).