I have just gotten over my jetlag enough to write about my experience in San Francisco. It was pretty intense on many levels. I went for seven days with 3 days taken up with the conference, one day with travel and the rest wandering around San Francisco. On arrival late at night off the BART…
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Review: Robert Burgoyne (ed) The Epic in World Culture
My review of this book: Robert Burgoyne (ed) The Epic in World Culture New York and London: AFI Film Readers and Routledge, 2011, 391pp, ISBN978-0-415-99018-9 appears in Spanish here, in the online Argentine journal Imagofagia. For an English version see, below. The epic is a genre that is associated with reactionary and outmoded notions of fixed…
The Mexican Revolution and The Wild Bunch
I’m shortly about to publish a chapter on this film and its representation of the Mexican border region. I came across this interesting post today and thought I’d share: An American Take on Mythic Mexico and its Revolution.
Further reflections on Third cinema
To add to my post of the 15th of March, here’s Michael Chanan’s reflection on Third Cinema: http://tinyurl.com/7bvordp
Juárez: A dangerous place to be a woman
Sam Hawken The Dead Women of Juárez London: Serpent’s Tail, 2011. *This contains some spoilers* If you want a review without spoilers see, Mrs Peabody’s excellent blogpost: http://mrspeabodyinvestigates.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/17-sam-hawken-the-dead-women-of-juarez/ According to the attorney general’s office in Mexico the number of femicides in Juarez are the following: 18 in 1993; 19 in 1994; 36 in 1995; 37 in…
Gardens, twungles and e-forests
March 29th, 2010 Margaret Atwood wrote about twitter as populated by helpful fairies on the bottom of her garden eager to scold, encourage and correct her (http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/mar/29/atwood-in-the-twittersphere/), now it has become a twungle/e-forest with rotating skulls pushing her towards political activism: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/mar/12/deeper-twungle-atwood-twitter/. It’s a great trajectory to read. I have quoted Atwood in my forthcoming article on the use…
Latin American “Third” Cinema and its Legacies
A two-day colloquium at the University of Oxford, 9th-10th March 2012, on “third” cinema, was both stimulating and varied. What is “third” cinema? The inverted commas were, no doubt a deliberate acknowledgement of the difficulties involved in using the word “third”, due to its links to third worldism and the first world/third world divide that…
Choices, Choices…
I have to choose from one of the following 6 for the cover of my book:
The discourse of the free
I find open source information and crowd sourcing knowledge compelling ideas. They make knowledge a public good and can have the benefit of being non-hierarchical. The theory is that we all can share, contribute and learn, which is great. The enthusiasm with which the sharing of such knowledge is often discussed can be infectious. I…
Private archives/Public Good: Classic Mexican film online
I love the connectedness of semantic web. I first came across this project to make classic Mexican cinema available online when Ernesto Priego (@ernestopriego) tweeted about it and sent on this link for a free trial which ends today (28th February 2012): http://univstandrewse-resources.blogspot.com/2012/01/trial-e-resource-classic-mexican-cinema.html. I retweeted it to spread the word, then some Facebook friends posted about it. Last week I received notification of…