Expresiones audiovisuales

Film production in Latin America is as old as cinema itself, but local film industries have always been in a triangulated relationship with Hollywood and European cinema. This book situates Latin American film industries within the global circulation of film production, exhibition and distribution, charting the changes that the industries have undergone from the sound era to the present day.

Focusing in particular on Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, Tamara Falicov examines commonalities among Latin American film industries, such as the challenges of procuring funding, competition from Hollywood, state funding battles, and the fickle nature of audiences, as well as censorship issues, competition from television, and the transnational nature of Latin American film. She addresses production, exhibition, and distribution contexts and financing and co-production with Europe and the United States, as well as the role of film festivals in funding and circulating films both within and outside of Latin America. Newer trends such as the revival of protectionist measures like the screen quota are framed in contrast to the U.S.'s push for trade policy liberalization and issues of universal concern such as film piracy, and new technologies and the role of television in helping and hindering Latin American cinema.

Indian cinema is the only body of world cinema that depicts courtesans as important characters. In early films courtesan characters transmitted Indian classical dance, music and aesthetics to large audiences. They represent the nation's past, tracing their heritage to the fourth-century Kamasutra and to nineteenth-century courtly cultures, but they are also the first group of modern women in Hindi films. They are working professionals living on their own or in matrilineal families. Like male protagonists, they travel widely and develop networks of friends and chosen kin. They have relations with men outside marriage and become single mothers. Courtesan films are heroine-oriented and almost every major female actor has played this role. Challenging received wisdom, Vanita demonstrates that a larger number of courtesans in Bombay cinema are Hindu and indeterminate than are Muslim, and that films depict their culture as hybrid Hindu-Muslim, not Islamicate. Courtesans speak in the ambiguous voice of the modern nation, inviting spectators to seize pleasure here and now but also to search for the meaning of life. Vanita's groundbreaking study of courtesans and courtesan imagery in 235 films brings fresh evidence to show that the courtesan figure shapes the modern Indian erotic, political and religious imagination.

Críticos culturales de plumas avinagradas han sentenciado durante décadas que el cine de Hollywood oculta un maligno instrumento de adoctrinamiento colectivo. Una perversión subliminal que aliena a las masas y les inocula la ideología dominante. Semejante visión del cine comercial supone que la gente es imbécil. Que se la traga siempre. Entre cuencos de palomitas. Y encima, riéndose.

Pedro Vallín ha escrito un ensayo herético que defiende que no, que ni los superhéroes yanquis defienden la propiedad privada ni el cine de autor europeo transmite valores progresistas. Y que puestos a generalizar ocurre lo contrario: que el cine made in Hollywood es emancipador y que las producciones europeas acusan un sesgo burgués, ensimismado y autoindulgente.

¡Me cago en Godard! es un libro irreverente y con clara vocación de incordio. Su autor no se caga solo en Jean-Luc, sino que también lo hace en la elitismo condescendiente del establishment cinematográfico europeo, en los dogmas que identifican las películas estadounidenses con la derecha y en el mal llamado «placer culpable». Porque es absurdo sentirse un aliado del imperialismo por disfrutar de una película palomitera (o sentirse mejor persona por dormirse frente a una mala película indie).

En definitiva, Pedro Vallín ha querido firmar una defensa del goce en el cine, del humor y del pensamiento autónomo, es decir, su sentencia de muerte como crítico cultural de prestigio. Y los de Arpa encantados de ayudarle. RIP Vallín.

A provocative analysis of net neutrality and a call to democratize online communication

This short book is both a primer that explains the history and politics of net neutrality and an argument for a more equitable framework for regulating access to the internet. Pickard and Berman argue that we should not see internet service as a commodity but as a public good necessary for sustaining democratic society in the twenty-first century. They aim to reframe the threat to net neutrality as more than a conflict between digital leviathans like Google and internet service providers like Comcast but as part of a much wider project to commercialize the public sphere and undermine the free speech essential for democracy. Readers will come away with a better understanding of the key concepts underpinning the net neutrality battle and rallying points for future action to democratize online communication.

To See and Be Seen considers some of the ideological, aesthetic, pragmatic, institutional, cultural, commercial, environmental, and psychological forces that consciously or otherwise shape the production of news images and subsequently influence their reception. T. J. Thomson examines the expectations, experiences, and reactions of those depicted by visual journalists and considers other relevant factors: how do everyday people perceive cameras and those who operate them? How are identities visually represented and presented to different audiences? And how does the physical and the socially constructed environment shape those depictions?

The results of Thomson’s research provide one of the first empirical and real-time glimpses into the experience of being in front of a journalist’s lens. To See and Be Seen enables us to understand the stories behind images by considering the environment in which such images are made, the exchange (if one occurred) between the camera-wielding observer and the observed, the identities of both parties, and how they react to the representations that are created.

A member of the French New Wave group of filmmakers who first came to prominence at the end of the 1950s, Claude Chabrol has received the least amount of critical and scholarly attention, although he was the more prolific and commercially successful of them all. Jacob Leigh fills this lacuna by focusing on the last nine feature films of Chabrol's career, exploring his imagery, camerawork, use of sound and music, and performances, revealing the stylistic characteristics of his films while identifying the fundamental thematic issues that lie at the heart of his career-length exploration of the relationship between individuals and societies.

Key areas of focus includes Chabrol's careful depiction of upper-class settings in films such as La Cérémonie (1995), Merci pour le chocolat (2000) and La Fille coupée en deux (2007) and on what Robin Wood and Michael Walker call 'the beast in man' (1970), the quasi-sympathetic 'id-figures' of which Le Boucher's Popaul is the most celebrated. Chabrol's 'id-figures' inherit the traits of Shadow of a Doubt's Uncle Charlie, Rope's Brandon and Strangers on a Train's Bruno, all three of whom have characteristics of the Nietzsche-quoting psychopath familiar in crime fiction. Additionally, The Late Films of Claude Chabrol considers the influence on Chabrol of a range of significant writers, including Patrick Hamilton, Patricia Highsmith, Charlotte Armstrong and Ruth Rendell.

Using critical race theory and film studies to explore the interconnectedness between cinema and society, Zélie Asava traces the history of mixed-race representations in American and French filmmaking from early and silent cinema to the present day. Mixed Race Cinemas covers over a hundred years of filmmaking to chart the development of (black/white) mixed representations onscreen. With the 21st century being labelled the Mulatto Millennium, mixed bodies are more prevalent than ever in the public sphere, yet all too often they continue to be positioned as exotic, strange and otherworldly, according to 'tragic mulatto' tropes. This book evaluates the potential for moving beyond fixed racial binaries both onscreen and off by exploring actors and characters who embody the in-between. Through analyses of over 40 movies, and case studies of key films from the 1910s on, Mixed Race Cinemas illuminates landmark shifts in local and global cinema, exploring discourses of subjectivity, race, gender, sexuality and class. In doing so, it reveals the similarities and contrasts between American and French cinema in relation to recognising, visualising and constructing mixedness. Mixed Race Cinemas contextualizes and critiques raced and 'post-race' visual culture, using cinematic representations to illustrate changing definitions of mixed identity across different historical and geographical contexts.

¿Cuánto hace que no juegas? ¿Te has olvidado de jugar? El cine nunca se ha olvidado, y el cine ludens nos recuerda la importancia de lo lúdico en la gran pantalla, la cultura y la sociedad. Con un carácter divulgativo y filosófico, este libro analiza cómo el cine ha dialogado con juegos de mesa, juguetes, videojuegos, laberintos, puzles, culturas lúdicas, juego forzado, parques de atracciones e incluso juegos creativos y formales como el cadáver exquisito o el mindgame film. Porque hay muchas formas de jugar y de hacer cine, esta filmografía esencial invita a disfrutar de lo lúdico en toda su libertad y complejidad.

Tomando como referencia Apocalypse Now, obra de culto ganadora de la Palma de Oro en Cannes en 1979, Adolfo Monje ha realizado un exhaustivo análisis textual del filme con la intención de rastrear todas aquellas influencias mitológicas y literarias que Francis Ford Coppola tomó como referencias para crear esta auténtica joya cinematográfica, que constituye su obra más personal y ambiciosa. En ella no solo se vislumbran influencias literarias clásicas como la Odisea, Divina Comedia, Fausto o El corazón de las tinieblas, novela de Joseph Conrad en la que se inspira, sino que el director norteamericano utiliza para su creación referencias antropológicas y mitocríticas claves para aportar a la película una estructura narrativa y un conglomerado temático muy complejo.

Para el autor, Apocalypse Now se enmarcaría dentro de lo que denomina en el libro como «poética del mito», un modo de creación artística similar a la que utilizaron en literatura grandes autores como James Joyce o T. S. Eliot. El estudio se completa con el análisis de otras películas de referencia del realizador como son la trilogía de El Padrino, La ley de la calle, Drácula de Bram Stoker, o películas de su última etapa creativa como El hombre sin edad o Tetro. A través de este completo estudio de la filmografía de uno de los grandes directores de la historia, el autor demuestra cómo en la actualidad los medios audiovisuales, y en especial el cine, son el mecanismo contemporáneo para revitalizar cuestiones y preocupaciones presentes en el ser humano desde tiempos ancestrales. El libro supone un viaje iniciático para comprender la peculiar concepción que tiene Francis Ford Coppola del cine, un tipo de arte que siempre ha querido asimilar a la literatura y que ha terminado convirtiendo en mito.

Listening is critical in today’s organizations. As recent examples in the #MeToo era and numerous organizational failures and scandals illustrate, the consequences of poor listening in organizations can be significant, and in some cases, catastrophic. Listening is commonly described in terms of ethics, overlooking its strategic value.

The book guides leaders and decision-makers to question the listening habits, practices, and infrastructure within their organizations. The author lays out an argument for the benefits and challenges of strategic listening. She also develops a method for internal analysis of listening capabilities and practices, and provides a framework for building and maintaining a more robust listening culture, infrastructure, and set of practices. In order to improve organizational listening, the author argues that we need to do more than improve personal listening skills, we need to design organizations to listen.