I am just refining a chapter on Paraíso ¿Cuánto pesa el amor? (Mariana Chenillo, 2013). It’s currently available in the UK and Ireland on Netflix as Paraíso [Paradise]. Dark humour characterises Chenillo’s approach. The women in her films have non-standard and disruptive bodies that present challenges to the social constructions of wellness and women’s agency. Paraíso ¿Cuánto pesa el…
Category: Mexican film
1976: Haunted by 1968
I have spent much of the last few weeks drafting and re-drafting a chapter for a forthcoming edited collection on Memory and Trauma in Mexican Visual Culture, a project I am co-editing with Miriam Haddu. My chapter considers three films released in 1976 that I contend are all haunted in different ways by the ghosts…
Alejandro G. Iñárritu Day at Sussex
I was invited to participate in a one day symposium on the Mexican filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu (as he has now taken to naming himself). Alongside Paul Julian Smith, Geoffrey Kantaris, Deborah Shaw and Dolores Tierney who gave fascinating papers bringing new approaches to this well-studied director, I gave a talk on melodramatic masculinity in…
María Félix – on happenstance and segueways in online research
I am writing a chapter on women in world cinema taking Mexico as a case study. No doubt, I will write more on this anon. Here, I want to post a short reflection on a brief segueway in my research. In the chapter I am planning on including an analysis of the actor Diana Bracho…
Re-Framing Mexican Women’s Filmmaking: the case of Marcela Fernández Violante
I have recently completed editing on a chapter entitled, “Re-Framing Mexican Women’s Filmmaking: the case of Marcela Fernández Violante” that will come out in 2016 in Debbie Martin and Deborah Shaw edited collection of essays, Latin American Filmmakers: Production, Politics, Poetics (I.B. Tauris). Whilst researching for a monograph (2013) on political violence in Mexican cinema I encountered…
Cine de la Revolución en Linea / Films of the Revolution Online: Reading and Viewing
If you want to carry out online research on films of the Mexican Revolution there are a small number of resources to guide you. I thought I’d curate a sample that includes a range from the introductory to the applied. All of these are in Spanish. Very short reads (and some viewing) Coinciding with the…
YouTube as Archive: Fans, Gender and Mexican Film Stars Online
I am completing the final edits of a chapter, “YouTube as Archive: Fans, Gender and Mexican Film Stars Online” for a book entitled Revising Star Studies edited by Guy Austin and Sabrina Yu. In the chapter I’m exploring what it means to access YouTube in order to carry out star fan studies and to gain…
Museo de la Revolución
Whilst in Mexico City I was invited to give a talk by the UNAM and the Museo Nacional de la Revolución. I also launched my book, Revolution and Rebellion in Mexican Cinema. Here’s the poster of the event.
“De gran importancia” – Mexican film scholarship
Lauro Zavala, UAM Xochimilco, Mexico and Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Washington University, St Louis discuss the need for a Film Research Institute in Mexico in the Mexican national newspaper, El Universal. It is a good survey of the current state of film scholarship. Also, I am honoured to be highlighted as one of the leading film scholars in the UK in Mexican…
Los de abajo Commemoration in Los Angeles
On the 15th and 16th of May I’ll be a featured speaker in a second conference commemorating the 100 year anniversary of the publication of Mariano Azuela’s novela de la Revolución, Los de abajo. Click herefor more information. My paper,”A Question of Taste: the Cinematic Adaptations of Los de Abajo“, considers the two films adaptations, the first in…