Look at this person’s bibliography: race and the state, and hybridity, and now Herzog.
Admiration and envy are my feelings on this — I wanted to be in a position to spend time on these things myself. Perhaps I can now.
Axé.
Category Archives: Cinearte
Film on the Spanish Civil War
What would you teach for this? (Side note: McClennen’s Globalization and Latin American Cinema costs hundreds of dollars; if not, I might use it as a textbook for a different film course.)
La lengua de las mariposas – Raza – Dragón rapide/Encontrarás dragones – Cría cuervos – ¡Ay Carmela! – Land and freedom – El laberinto del fauno – El espinazo del diablo – Soldados de Salamina – That film about Puig Antich
These and then there are historic ones here, some very important. There are a lot of other lists, and this has some good, old ones (as in, anarchist films from during the war)
- Balada de la triste trompeta
- Las bicicletas son para verano (Chávarri)
- El bosc (Aibar)
- El mar (Villaronga 2000)
- Gernika
- Los girasoles ciegos (Cuerda 2008)
- Incierta gloria (Villaronga)
- Libertarias (Aranda 1996)
- Mientras dure la guerra (KEY)
- La trinchera infinita (KEY)
- La vaquilla (García Berlanga)
- Pa negre (Villaronga 2010)
- Pájaros de papel (Aragón)
- La sierra de Teruel (Malraux 1938)
- Vida en sombras (Llobet-Gràcia 1949
Axé.
The edge of democracy
It is a film by Petra Costa about Bolsonaro and it is opening in San Francisco January 5, although it is almost a year old and is apparently available on Netflix already. Apparently it is very important and we should show it in class if there is any way to justify doing something in Portuguese.
Axé.
Vijay Seshadri, Werner Herzog
I was taken with this poem and discovered its author is well known. And it seems Herzog is still working, I do not necessarily approve of him or like all of his work but effectively he seems to be my favorite filmmaker, so what can one do. Life, pleasure, art.
Axé.
Filed under Bibliography, Cinearte, Poetry
Meleko Mokgosi
I was quite taken with this artist, some of whose work we saw last summer in Baltimore.
Axé.
Filed under Cinearte
Another world
I got up in Dupont Circle and walked past the row houses to a café, had coffee and came back and packed. I walked to the metro and rode to the airport, changing trains once. At the airport I read old notes on Vallejo and transcribed them, including the outline of an old conference paper, and it was very interesting.
On the plane I finished rereading Bodas de sangre, which I am teaching, and it was interesting as well. When I arrived to New Orleans I picked up the car and drove three hours to western Maringouin, where I haggled with a telephone repair shop, and then came home.
At home in the country I was so shocked to have been in the city and now here, I went into a depression. I decided to hide from the world by reading a biography of Leopoldo Panero, which was fascinating. I have never seen the film El desencanto for some reason, and I must.
I was in another world and I immersed myself in reading about further ones. I felt terrible that I was not engaged in grading or local service, although I was traveling on national service and suffering with it. But reading is also part of my job.
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The meeting I went to was sad, contentious and worrisome, but I was four nights in a cosmopolitan, urban area, and I am suddenly in the country. It is so different, it does not seem real. As usual I am terrified to go in to work, but I will do it.
Notice, though, how in a day of travel I read and thought quite a lot about these three authors, and how it is not that aspect of work that scares me — it is not the material, or the research, or the preparation of college-level classes.
It is that I must repress so much self here, perhaps, and that self arises so easily when I leave, and is so hard to shed. My graduate student feels this too, so I am not alone.
Axé.
Another film course
Jerónimo Arellano has an article in RHM (2016) called “The screenplay in the archive: screenwriting, new cinemas, and the Latin American boom.” The boom novelists also wrote screenplays, not all of which were published. This raises a number of interesting questions I am interested in the article primarily for purposes of course creation. Could one not read boom novels and screenplays together, and watch boom films?
It seems that the Cineteca Nacional and Escuela de Cine Universidad Mayor in Chile have published a series of ten key Chilean screenplays. One could get these, and any films that have been made with them, and there would be a course. Similar projects have been undertaken by the Asociación de Guionistas Colombianos and the Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía, in collaboration with the Editorial El Milagro.
(Note how this post would be a perfect item for a file for me in Evernote, about courses, and it would be connected to the stable URL of the article, and everything.)
The corpus in question includes screenplays, teleplays, and film treatments written by García Márquez, Vargs Llosa, Cortázar, Donoso and Cabrera Infante during the 1960s and 70s. There is some work on the connection between the Boom and a/v, and between literature and cinema (see the article, p. 116), and Fuentes’ adaptation of “¿No oyes ladrar a los perros?” and Antonioni’s of “Las babas del diablo” are well known. Vargas Llosa wrote one in 1972 for Os sertões. García M.’s Tiempo de morir (1965) is an allegorical Western. Indeed, the Boom writers appear to form a screenwriting collective of sorts (see further examples, p. 117 and beyond; Rimbaud and Juan Goytisolo are involved, as well as connections Idelber and Brett have made between all of this and “Latin Americanism”).
A keyword here would be transmedia studies, transmedia poetics. Consider the concept “nuevo guión hispanoamericano” (p. 119). Fuentes had 32 film projects that were not made into films, but whose existence makes a difference to the understanding of what the boom was. (And note: there is my languishing article on nueva canción; this is all of a piece somehow.) The screenplay of the boom is “born literary,” says Arellano. NOTE: this means that the Boom writers did not always insist on the primacy of the author (pace Beverley)?
Axé.
Películas
An unscientific survey of students revealed these as their favorite films in Spanish. I haven’t seen them all, and some of those I have, I have not seen in a long time. But it is a rather good list.
21 gramos
Azul y no tan rosa
Babel
Biútiful
Hable con ella
María llena de gracia
Nueve reinas
Relatos salvajes
Vivir es fácil con los ojos cerrados
Y tu mamá también
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World on a Wire
I don’t know whether to submit these poems to The Nation or to Two Lines. I am thinking Two Lines is a good place to send this author, although they want a longer set than what I was about to send off.
There are other journals: Latin American Literature Today, Modern Poetry in Translation, and more, but the first two are the ones I am drawn to now.
Axé.
Alain Resnais
From Austerlitz, I learned about this Resnais short obliquely based on Borges, Toute la mémore du monde. This article, about architecture in the Bibliothèque Nationale of France, complements the film and the novel very well. And here is a set of 13 films of works by Borges and Bioy Casares.
How do you see film “à la Alain Resnais”? There is a moment in Hiroshima mon amour where Emmanuelle Riva says “Bien regarder, je crois que ça s’apprend.” The entire film is about vision, and it is about war, so it is related to Austerlitz.
Related to both Borges and Resnais: Mon amour, reading films; another list of films on Bioy, in a book; another discussion of Bioy, Resnais, and film.
Axé.
Filed under Arts, Bibliography, Cinearte, Primary texts, Teaching
