Race & Gender in Latin American Cinema

Lecture 1 – 20 January

Introduction: Spaces of race and gender

in Latin American cinema

Dr Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián

MLAC Hispanic Studies – Durham University
Epiphany Term 2014
This term

• We will watch eight films from the second half of

the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st
(1950-2009), thus covering six decades of Latin
American film history

• Our approach will be simultaneously film-

historical, geohistorical, geopolitical and cultural

• These films were made in Mexico, Cuba, Spain

and Colombia by directors from Spain, Cuba,
Ecuador, Mexico and Colombia
Spaces of race and gender

• We are adding the concept of space to our two

other running concepts of race and gender

• Space is a broad, capacious category that

encompasses places and relations among places
– space is about perspective and location

• More specifically, space, in the following lectures,

refers to how films rely on specific locations and
environments for their results
Reading for Week 1

• Hamid Naficy, ‘Phobic Spaces and Liminal Panics:

Independent Transnational Film Genre’

• You may also find this link useful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnational_cinema
‘To examine the dynamics of the closed and open
spaces, I must take a moment to bring in the allied
concepts of agoraphobia and claustrophobia—only
in so far as they have a bearing on the configuration
of space in this genre [transnational films]. My
intention here is not to establish a pathology of
transnational cinema or of its spaces but to use the
medical language and paradigms suggestively and
heuristically to discover the specificities of the
experiential and allegorical uses of space in this
genre.’ Naficy, p 212
Notice the varieties of: (a) spaces and places; and (b)
composition strategies at work in the following series
of stills from the films that we will be studying this
term

• Ranging from Los olvidados to El vuelco del cangrejo

(see our module syllabus/outline), these stills
illustrate how relations between cinematic subjects,
spaces, and subjective points of view can construct
the culturally embedded traces of ‘race’ and ‘gender’
• How would you identify, contextualize, and analyze
race, space, and gender elements in the following
visual compositions?
‘A sense of claustrophobia pervades the worldview,
mise-en-scène, shot composition, and plot
development of many transnational films. These are
films of liminal panic, of retrenchment in the face of
what is perceived to be a foreign, often hostile, host
culture and media representation. This perceived
(and at times very real) threat is dealt with by
invoking confining but comforting claustrophobic
spaces. … 
… A variety of strategies are used to create such
spaces, including the following: closed-shot
compositions, tight physical spaces within the
diegesis, barriers within the mise-en-scène and the
shot that impede vision and access, and a lighting
scheme that creates a mood of constriction and
blocked vision. Often many of these strategies are
condensed in the site in which the film unfolds. Such
locations are self-referential, but since at the same
time they refer to other places, they are also
symbolic.’ Naficy, p 213
‘Like all genres, of course, the independent transnational
genre also attempts to reduce and channel the free play
of meanings in certain predetermined manners. But, in
this task, the genre is driven by its sensitivity to the
production and consumption of films in conditions of
transnationality, liminality, multiculturality, multifocality,
and syncretism. This new generic designation [the
transnational film genre] will allow us to classify certain
hitherto unclassifiable films. It will also allow us not only
to classify new transnational films but also to reclassify
and thereby to reread certain existing films by loosening
them from their traditional generic moorings.’ Naficy, p
204
Spaces of Latin American cinema
• The spaces of Latin American cinema are of at least
five different types:
– National and communal spaces or ethnoscapes
– Urban spaces or cityscapes
– Rural spaces or landscapes
– Natural spaces or ‘pure landscapes’
– Mythical and symbolic spaces, such interior,
insular, and coastal or littoral locations:
islandscapes and seascapes
ethnoscapes (from the Greek ethnos = people, cultural group
or community; race)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470670590.wbeog181/abstract
Consider the use of sophisticated sound editing
techniques in this 2010 short by Lucrecia Martel to
achieve a unique soundscape effect that integrates aural,
visual and of course spatial elements into a complex
sensorial experience (a kind of aquatic dreamscape)

Lucrecia Martel, Pescados / Fish (Argentina, 2010)

http://vimeo.com/11718306

• soundscape 
• aural and visual environment
• dreamscape 