When Mexican director Guillermo del Toro won the Academy Award for best picture, director and animated feature for Pinocchio (2023), it came as no surprise given the explosive trajectory and growing visibility of contemporary Latin American filmmakers. This exciting course explores some of the most significant films to emerge from Latin America and Spain since 2,000. In fact, the cinema of Latin America and Spain has become increasingly globalized, and all of the films we study have achieved important commercial and critical success internationally; this begs the question, why have these films become so popular? We will study the emergence of this new Latin American international cinema by investigating how it fulfills or disrupts desires for a borderless world, how it represents local and global conflict, whether it successfully “translates” the cultural specificity of its countries of origin (which are often more than one), or whether it erases difference and regional particularities in order to “sell” itself to a global audience. The course will also provide a basic introduction to understanding film form and we will study how conventions of classical cinematic language (continuity editing, linear narrative, shot-reverse-shot) that have become globalized are upheld or disrupted in Latin America, and to what end. We will examine how these films respond to geopolitical conditions in Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Spain, and the United States, and explore such topics as globalization, gender roles, immigration and exile, narco-traffic and political violence, considering the historical, cultural and political trends that gave rise to these thrilling films. .

SPAN 326 B – CULTURAL STUDIES IN THE AMERICAS II.

FICTION CINEMA IN LATIN AMERICA: Getting Reel: An Introduction to 21st Century Latin American Cinema
FALL 2023 – SECT B - CRN: 53123 TIME: 11:00AM - 12:20PM TR

Taught in Spanish