Courses > 2011 Spring

Electives

CINE 396 - Representing Marginalities in Latin American Cinema

LALS 397 | SPAN 396
404 | MWF 11am-12pm | WILL 319

From its early origins, Latin American cinema has been particularly committed to giving visibility to marginality and representing both continental and national sociopolitical problems. Some of the most important cinematic movements of Latin America, such as tercer cine and other manifestations ofnuevo cine latinoamericano, or cinema novo, have even found in the social margins a means of representing Latin American identity. A big portion of the more recent Latin American film production is still within that sociopolitical tradition, but the earlier genuine commitment to the political seems to be more blurred and questionable today due to the very nature of globalization and the current global cinematographical markets. In this course we will study a history of Latin American sociopolitical cinema, and through it we will discuss this cinema’s evolutions and involutions, its intricacies regarding social agency, and the different ways in which Latin American cinema represents Otherness as the historical, national, sociopolitical and cinematographical contexts change. We will study the works of film directors such as Luis Buñuel, Fernando Birri, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Joshua Marston, among others. At the beginning of the semester, students will learn the basic vocabulary and analytical tools necessary to adequately discuss cinema. The course will be conducted in Spanish, but we will watch some Brazilian movies with English subtitles.