Back from Mexico
Normally I don’t do selfies, but this is special. Back from
at the Filmoteca In Mexico City
Cuba in Nottingham
A short note on the Cuba Research Forum conference which has just taken place at Nottingham, which suggests that international research on Cuba is in good health. Under the as-ever cheerful helm of Tony Kapcia, we heard from speakers of various nationalities, either based in the UK or abroad, and several Cubans, ditto, including, from Havana, the redoubtable Fernando Martínez Heredia, who spoke about the diverse origins of Cuban socialism. We also enjoyed a special lecture delivered with great verve by the distinguished Cuban-American historian, Louis Pérez, outlining his current work on the nineteenth century Cuban middle class and the figure of the coquette, a suggestive rethinking of cultural history. As always the forum was multidisciplinary and covered an impressively wide range of topics: Read more
Chile: Divided Generations
This is drawn from from a longer project, ‘Interrupted Memory’, an inquiry into the character of political memory filmed in Chile and Argentina in 2013.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/102417704[/vimeo]
Spirit of Coutinho
This video presents an overview of the work of the Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho (1933-2014), one of the most original documentarists of recent decades, whose films remain shamefully little known in the English-speaking world.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/99022268#[/vimeo]
Read an accompanying discussion of the themes and preoccupations of his work here.
Eduardo Coutinho
Here’s my obituary for Eduardo Coutinho,
(from the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies)
Latin America in Tübingen
In the world of film studies, Germany is a country not much associated with the investigation of Latin American cinema, but here we were, gathering in the small university town of Tübingen for a Spanish-speaking symposium on ‘Encuadrando La Dictadura en el Cine Latinoamericano’—’Framing Dictatorship in Latin American Cinema’. It’s an odd sensation, going some place where you don’t speak the native language for a gathering that’s conducted in another language altogether. You end up addressing the waitress in the restaurant in Spanish—who then replies in Spanish, and you’re no longer quite sure where you are!
Convened by Sebastian Thies and intended as the founding event of a new (and peripatetic) Forum for Iberamerican Audiovisual Studies, the range of papers was impressive, with sessions on feminine militancy, testimonial, discourses of exile, violence on the screen, propaganda and power, memory and the archive, and the commodification of memory. Read more
Eduardo Coutinho In Memoriam
Poetic injustice. The terrible irony of it. On the same day, the news that the US actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has died from a heroine overdose, and the veteran Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho, has been stabbed to death by his son, who is reported to suffer from schizophrenia. (According to a BBC report, the police told a press conference that the son ‘knocked on a neighbour’s door after the attack saying he had “liberated his father”.’) I learn about the first from the mass media, the second from Facebook, in posts from Latin American friends and colleagues, who over the next few hours register a huge outpouring of shock and grief, for Coutinho was well known and much loved. In Latin America, that is, because Coutinho was a documentarist. Still active at the age of 80, his work was little known elsewhere. The more’s the pity, because he was one of the most original of contemporary filmmakers in any field. Read more
New? Latin American? Cinema?
The proper title of Havana’s annual film festival, founded in 1979, is the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema – Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano. The words mark the Festival’s identification with a movement that was born in the 1960s, in the diverse endeavours of a new generation of filmmakers across the continent. The Festival remains a model of its kind after thirty-five years, the programme not only full of films in cinemas across town but also workshops and masterclasses of all sorts. This year’s centre-piece seminar (in which I was privileged to be one of the panelists) boldly addressed the Festival’s very raison d’être, under the title ¿Nuevo? ¿Cine? ¿Latinoamericano? – ‘New? Latin American? Cinema?’ It went along with perhaps the strangest festival promo you’ve ever seen, beautifully made by Pavel Giroud, in which an old projectionist switches off his projector, takes the reel off and goes and buries it.
[youtube aJNg73RM-U4]
Interrupted Memory
News of upcoming screenings and other information can be found here.
View it online here:
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/76406932#[/vimeo]
Havana 35
The Cuban dissenting blogger Yoani Sanchez has written a somewhat cynical blog about Havana’s Film Festival, or to give its full title, the International Festival of the New Latin American Cinema, whose 35th edition closed on Sunday, in which she comments that
“The Festival” (period… as we call it), had a clear ideological focus from the beginning to promote creations filled with social criticism, a reflection of regional problems or the historic memory of the dictatorships that plagued Latin America.
I laughed when I read this because the last of those — well, that’s me, folks, in the shape of my new documentary, Interrupted Memory, which premiered at the Festival. OK, it wasn’t the only film on the subject. All I can say is that I’m very happy to have been screened in such company, even if Yoani didn’t bother to come to the screening. Read more