Deborah Shaw

Blow: How a Film Created a Hero from a Top-Level Drug Trafficker and Blamed the ‘Colombians’ for his Downfall

Ted Demmes Blow (2001) tells the story of George Jung, the first American to work closely with the Medellin cartel. From the mid 1970s until the mid 1980s he was a key player in the cocaine trade ...

The transnational fantasies of Guillermo del Toro

Following Robin Wood, Tanya Modleski, and other horror theorists, this chapter addresses the political function of horror and horrific tropes (including aspects of horror’s mise-en-scene) in Guillermo del Toros Cronos, El espinazo, and El laberinto del fauno. It takes into consideration the significant transnationality of the horror genre itself both in terms of its classical Hollywood origins that effectively absorbed a range of stylistic, cultural, and industrial practices of nations outside the United States, as well as what critics have argued is its potential as a genre for “travel[ing] . . . across different national cultures and contexts [and] also across media forms and fan culture.” This includes Cronos’s acknowledgment of Mexico’s own horror/fantasy film tradition, which is heavily hybridized, drawing in particular on the style, iconography, and even narratives of the 1930s Universal horror films Frankenstein (James Whale 1931), Dracula (Tod Browning 1931), and Mystery of the Wax Museum (Michael Curtiz 1933). The chapter positions del Toro as a part of this hybridized and transnational film history with institutional roots on both sides of the US/Mexico border. It contends that these films take advantage of a shared Hispanic imaginary and explore cultural, local, and political material specific to Mexico/Latin America and Spain.

Sex, texts and money, funding and Latin American queer cinema: The cases of Martel's La niña santa and Puenzo's XXY

ABSTRACT Through a focus on La niña santa/The Holy Girl by Lucrecia Martel (2004) and XXY by Lucía Puenzo (2007), this article examines the relationship between texts, sex and money. It considers theoretical approaches to European funding programmes and world cinema, and argues that a number of European production companies have created spaces for queer cinema that has proven beneficial to a range of Latin American films and has coincided with a boom in films directed by women. The article focuses on two new powerful protagonists, Amalia, Martels holy girl, and Puenzos Alex, an intersex teenager, who both bring new gazes and new forms of representation to global screens. The study is concerned with the ways in which certain film languages can be used to address an implied international art cinema spectator to make queerness part of our filmic conversation with texts, and the ways in which these languages engage with new modernities emerging through the reconfigurations of new queer families.

Transforming the national body: Salma Hayek and 'Frida'

Frida Kahlo is probably the best-known Latin American artist and a great deal has been written about her cult status, which began to emerge in the United States in the 1980s, and has continued to the present day.2 This essay is not an attempt to feed into that cult, but rather aims to consider how the artist’s story has been told in the film Frida (2000) directed by Julie Taymor and starring Salma Hayek, and to analyze some of the functions that are served by its retelling in a mass cultural form. Through a focus on processes of fictionalization I consider the ways in which Kahlo has been translated from one national context (Mexico) to another (the United States), and look at the ways in which commercial imperatives and generic patterns of mainstream U.S film production have led to the emergence of a new filmic character, that deviates substantially from the historical subject. As Robert Burgoyne has effectively demonstrated in his study of the way Hollywood has represented key historical moments, films play a central role in the on-going construction of nationhood (Burgoyne 1997, 6), and choices made in the portrayal of events can reveal a great deal about contemporary, national social debates. As Burgoyne notes,

Heroes, Villains and Women: Representations of Latin America in The Voyage by Fernando Solanas

This article provides a close study of Solanas’s most ambitious film, The Voyage (El viaje). It examines the director’s attempts to create a model of Latin American cinema in opposition to Hollywood aesthetics. The paper discusses the extent to which Solanas is successful in this project, and examines the ways in which he has been faithful to his political views. In addition, the paper challenges the film’s representations of women, arguing that in this respect The Voyage fails in its attempts at radical filmmaking; the hero’s quest is seen in patriarchal terms and the female characters are marginalized.

The Literary Journalism of Guadalupe Loaeza and Cristina Pacheco

Abstract This article examines the writings of the Mexican literary journalists, Guadalupe Loaeza and Cristina Pacheco. It traces the political agendas of the writers through an analysis of their work in two collected volumes, Las ninas bien (Loaeza) and Sopita de fideo (Pacheco). The paper argues that while each author focuses on opposite ends of the social scale, each piece of writing contains an implicit or explicit attack on the Mexican ruling classes which mismanage the economy, squander its wealth and condemn the majority to economic misery.