This volume examines the films of Hispanic and Lusophone women filmmakers from the 1930s to the present day. It establishes productive connections between film practices across these geographical areas by identifying common areas of concern on the part of these female filmmakers. Focusing on aesthetic, theoretical and socio-historical analyses, it questions the manifest or latent gender and sexual politics that inform and structure the emerging cinematic productions by women filmmakers in Portugal, Spain, Latin America and the US. With a combination of scholars from the UK, the US, Spain and Latin America, the volume documents and interprets a fascinating corpus of films made by Hispanic and Lusophone women and proposes research strategies and methodologies that can expand our understanding of socio-cultural and psychic constructions of gender and sexual politics. An essential resource to rethink notions of gender identity and subjectivity, it is a unique contribution to Spanish and Latin American Film Studies and Film Studies.

Traditionally women have found recourse in artistic means to interrogate change and upheaval. This volume explores the experiences of women from Spain, Portugal and Latin America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who themselves have crossed cultural boundaries or have described this experience in their literature and film. Areas investigated in this collection of essays include the experience of the exiled or the immigrant and their personal or collective response to displacement and adaptation: the transcultural potential of cyberspace for women, how patterns and styles of the fashion industry have crossed borders, how women have crossed canonical cultural boundaries in search of identity and meaning, how global cultural influences have manifested in Hispanic and Lusophone cultural practices and production by or about women, and the challenging question of whether canine writing can be considered a branch of feminist theory. Common to most of the essays are the central issues of identity, values, conflict and interconnectedness and an analysis of the patterns that result from the transcultural encounter of these aspects.

Latin American women filmmakers have achieved unprecedented international prominence in recent years. Notably political in their approach, figures such as Lucrecia Martel, Claudia Llosa and Bertha Navarro have created innovative and often challenging films, enjoying global acclaim from critics and festival audiences alike. They undeniably mark a 'moment' for Latin American cinema.Bringing together distinguished scholars in the field - and prefaced by B. Ruby Rich - this is a much-needed account and analysis of the rise of female-led film in Latin America. Chapters detail the collaboration that characterises Latin American women's filmmaking - in many ways distinct from the largely 'Third Cinema' auteurism from the region - as well as the transnational production contexts, unique aesthetics and socio-political landscape of the key industry figures. Through close attention to the particular features of national film cultures, from women's documentary filmmaking in Chile to comedic critique in Brazil, and from US Latina screen culture to the burgeoning popularity of Peruvian film, this timely study demonstrates the remarkable possibilities for film in the region. This book will allow scholars and students of Latin American cinema and culture, as well as industry professionals, a deeper understanding of the emergence and impact of the filmmakers and their work, which has particular relevance for contemporary debates on feminism.

In this volume, eighteen experts from a variety of academic backgrounds explore the use of songs in films from the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds. This volume illustrates how – rather than simply helping to tell the story of – songs in Hispanic and Lusophone cinema commonly upset the hierarchy of the visual over the aural, thereby rendering their hearing a complex and rich subject for analysis. Screening songs... constitutes a ground-breaking, interdisciplinary collection. Of particular interest to scholars and academics in the areas of Film Studies, Hispanic Studies, Lusophone Studies and Musicology, this volume opens up the study of Hispanic and Lusophone cinema to vital, new, critical approaches. The soundtracks of films as varied as City of God, All About My Mother, Bad Education and Buena Vista Social Club are analysed alongside those of lesser-known works that range from the melodramas of Mexican cinema’s golden age to Brazilian and Portuguese musical comedies from the 1940s and 1950s. Fiction films are studied alongside documentaries, the work of established directors like Pedro Almodóvar, Carlos Saura and Nelson Pereira dos Santos alongside that of emerging filmmakers, and performances by iconic stars like Caetano Veloso and Chavela Vargas alongside the songs of Spanish Gypsy groups, Mexican folk songs and contemporary Brazilian rap.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Beyond Observation is structured by the argument that the ‘ethnographicness’ of a film should not be determined by the fact that it is about an exotic culture – the popular view – nor because it has apparently not been authored – a long-standing academic view – but rather because it adheres to the norms of ethnographic practice more generally. On these grounds, the book covers a large number of films made in a broad range of styles across a 120-year period, from the Arctic to Africa, from the cities of China to rural Vermont. Paul Henley discusses films made within reportage, exotic melodrama and travelogue genres in the period before the Second World War, as well as more conventionally ethnographic films made for academic or state-funded educational purposes. The book explores the work of film-makers such as John Marshall, Asen Balikci, Ian Dunlop and Timothy Asch in the post-war period, considering ideas about authorship developed by Jean Rouch, Robert Gardner and Colin Young. It also discusses films authored by indigenous subjects themselves using the new video technology of the 1970s and the ethnographic films that flourished on British television until the 1990s. In the final part of the book, Henley examines the recent work of David and Judith MacDougall and the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, before concluding with an assessmentof a range of films authored in a participatory manner as possible future models.

This book studies the intimate tensions between affect and emotions as terrains of sociopolitical significance in the cinema of Lucrecia Martel, Albertina Carri, and Lucía Puenzo. Such tensions, Selimović argues, result in “affective moments” that relate to the films’ core arguments. They also signal these filmmakers’ novel insights on complex manifestations of memory, desire, and violence. The chapters explore how the presence of pronounced—but reticent—affect complicates emotional bonding in the everydayness depicted in these films. By bringing out moments of affect in these filmmakers’ diegetic worlds, this book traces the ways in which subtle foci on gender, class, race, and sexuality correlate in these Argentine women’s films.

A Companion to Latin American Cinema offers a wide-ranging collection of newly commissioned essays and interviews that explore the ways in which Latin American cinema has established itself on the international film scene in the twenty-first century. Features contributions from international critics, historians, and scholars, along with interviews with acclaimed Latin American film directors Includes essays on the Latin American film industry, as well as the interactions between TV and documentary production with feature film culture Covers several up-and-coming regions of film activity such as nations in Central America Offers novel insights into Latin American cinema based on new methodologies, such as the quantitative approach, and essays contributed by practitioners as well as theorists