Niamh Thornton

YouTube: transnational fandom and Mexican divas

ABSTRACT YouTube is a rich source of fan material representing transnational film stars. The videos created by fans have multiple functions, including a celebration of their idols, an engagement with a transnational audience, and a space in which they can create and project a packaged self. The results are the development of a form that draws on the techniques and images of classical film, mixed with the duration and aesthetics of the modern music video. Using interviews with YouTubers, this article analyses the YouTube videos of María Félix and Dolores del Río as transnational star texts.

Paraíso ¿Cuánto pesa el amor?: Challenging the Neoliberal in Mexican Cinema

Thornton argues that neoliberalism can determine both the reading of a film and the roles key workers play in the production and the consumption of film. She examines the careers and contributions of the director, principle actor, source text author and the music supervisor to the making of the Mexican film, Paraiso ?Cuanto pesa el amor? (Mariana Chenillo, 2013). The fat body of the protagonist and her attempts to control and, eventually, accept it is a central motivating force in the narrative. Therefore, Thornton considers the ways the film critiques how women’s bodies are subjected to scrutiny and regulation under neoliberalism. The film provides both a fascinating case study at textual level because of its narrative concerns and at a contextual level as an opportunity to explore women’s creative contributions. Consequently, Thornton analyzes how neoliberalism is an inescapable determinant in understanding Paraiso ?Cuanto pesa el amor? as a nodal point for the intersection of multiple interests.

Where Cabaret Meets Revolution: The Prostitute at War in Mexican Film

Star and Fashion Studies inform this analysis of the Mexican film star Maria Felix. This chapter considers how movement, performance and wardrobe complicate the traditional role of women in war, with a particular focus on two Revolutionary Melodramas, La mujer de todos (Julio Bracho 1946) and La Bandida (Roberto Rodriguez 1963), films set in 1912 during a brief truce in the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920). Where the prostitute is normally punished for what is presented as immoral behaviour in Mexican cinema, Felix brings a star quality with the aid of key wardrobe choices that upend this archetypal trajectory. Wardrobe becomes a signifier of her power as a star and character that provide the character with considerable agency.

Pacific Rim: Reception, Readings, and Authority

Genre and auteurship are frequently seen to be incompatible. Where genre has its own “supervisory” function necessitating some adherence to convention through the repetition of significant elements, auteurship is understood to be about originality, the director marking out unique characteristics identifiable as patterns from one film to the next (Cook and Bermink, 1999, 137–38). When auteurs take on genre films, they are expected to reinvent and repackage them so that they conform to certain art-house conventions.1 When auteurs do reinvent and repackage, the use of genre becomes part of a coherent career path. Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013) destabilizes this approach because it is a genre film that does not seemingly reinvent genre, and, as a result, a close reading demands a reconsideration of the relationship between genre and auteurism. This chapter examines Pacific Rim as a challenge to dominant theoretical approaches to both genre studies and auteurism and proposes that del Toro should be read as a “geek auteur.”