Proposal-paper

XXXIV Aedean Conference (Almería 2010)

PANEL: FILM STUDIES (Coordinator:María del Mar Azcona Montoliu)

SESSION 1

Adaptation in the Arena: South African Politics at the Movies
Miguel Ángel Martínez-Cabeza Lombardo (University of Granada)

Queer Mechanics: Harry Smith's Heaven and Earth Magic (1957-62)
Juan Antonio Suárez Sánchez (University of Murcia)

SESSION 2

Border Jam Session: The Transnational Subject in The Visitor
María del Pilar Royo Grasa (University of Zaragoza)

Touching the Elephant: Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness as a Multi-protagonist Transnational Film
Julia Echeverría Domingo (University of Zaragoza)

Transnational Power Relations and Border Crossings in Babel
M. Rosaura Urtiaga Echevarría (University of Zaragoza)

SESSION 3 (ROUND TABLE)

Transnacionalismo en el cine contemporáneo: identidad y deseo en Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Gemma López Sánchez (University of Barcelona)
Participants: Gemma López Sánchez, Chair (University of Barcelona), Celestino Deleyto (University of Zaragoza), José Luis Fecé (CESAG/University of Illes Balears), Ana Moya (University of Barcelona)

SESSION 4

A Story of Boy Meets Girl: (Un)Broken Romantic Comedy Conventions in (500) Days of Summer
María del Carmen Rodríguez Ramírez (University of Sevilla)

Representing Irishness in The Crying Game
María Isabel Seguro Gómez (University of Barcelona)

FILM STUDIES
ABSTRACTS

Adaptation in the Arena: South African Politics at the Movies
Miguel Ángel Martínez-Cabeza Lombardo (University of Granada)

Despite their obvious generic differences, District 9 and Invictus have drawn the attention of international audiences towards South African politics. This paper establishes an initial comparison between the shared themes and contrasting styles of these two films that will lead to a scrutiny of the unresolved ambivalence of narratives that combine fact and fiction and the complex relationship between Invictus, marketed as “an inspirational true story”, and its source text, John Carlin’s Playing the Enemy. A final discussion of adaptation as historical rendition will tackle broader issues such as the challenges posed to filmmaking and the modes of engagement between the audience and the story.
Keywords: adaptation, film, South African politics

Queer Mechanics: Harry Smith's Heaven and Earth Magic (1957-62)
Juan Antonio Suárez Sánchez (University of Murcia)

This papers seeks to import into the analysis of queer experimental film one of the central ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: the notion that sexuality does not involve primarily organic, anthropomorphic bodies; it takes place on a non-human plane composed of body-machine conjunctions and object assemblages. Going beyond the human allows us to regard as sexual materials and phenomena that have traditionally been untouched by queer analysis, and, from a historical perspective, it allows us to discover an alternative figurations and embodiments in the queer experimental film tradition. In order explore these ideas, this paper will focus on the analysis of the influential experimental title Heaven and Earth Magic (1957-1962), by (queer) experimental filmmaker Harry Smith (1923-1991), a film that has yet to be considered queer. Heaven and Earth Magic takes to the extreme the confluence, and eventual exchangeability, of the organic and the mechanical and the construction of precarious assemblages of part objects. This paper then is conceived as a double intervention: it wants to look at queer film otherwise, highlighting the importance of non-human sexuality, and, in the process, it seeks to expand the frames of reference used to discuss Smith’s film.
Keywords: Queer theory, American experimental film, gender theory, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Harry Smith

Border Jam Session: The Transnational Subject in The Visitor
María del Pilar Royo Grasa (University of Zaragoza)

In the contemporary global world, borders are gathering strength and attention. Issues concerning the border such as the awakening of new notions of identity are part of the broader field of transnational cinema. This paper seeks to analyse Todd McArthy’s The Visitor (2008) as an example of the transforming power of crossing boundaries and becoming a transnational subject. Using insights from well-known critics such as Jacques Derrida, Edward Said or Stuart Hall, my main aim is to prove the evolution of the film’s main character towards a transnational identity. For this purpose, the paper focuses on a series of stylistic techniques employed by the film in order to illustrate Walter’s overcoming of social, personal and physical borders. Finally, I propose an interpretation of the transnational subject as a mediator, a role that Walter eventually adopts as a consequence of his encounter with the other.
Keywords: identity, transnationalism, border.

Touching the Elephant: Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness as a Multi-protagonist Transnational Film
Julia Echeverría Domingo (University of Zaragoza)

The purpose of this paper is to analyse Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness (2008), filmic adaptation of José Saramago’s novel Ensaio sobre a cegueira (1995), as a representative of a currently emerging genre related to the spread of epidemics. The film articulates discourses about the sicknesses of contemporary societies, such as alienation, miscommunication and excessive individualism, associating them to the breakup of an allegorical epidemic of white blindness. Starting as a multi-protagonist film where each character has a well-defined narrative line, they all come together through a traumatic quarantine confinement. The union fostered by the epidemic is interpreted in this paper as a metaphor of current globalising processes through which culturally varied individuals, and whole nation-states, are forced to dissolve their demarcation lines creating new hybrid multicultural communities.
Keywords: multi-protagonist film, epidemic, globalisation, multiculturalism, identity

Transnational Power Relations and Border Crossings in Babel
M. Rosaura Urtiaga Echevarría (University of Zaragoza)

This paper analyses Alejandro González Iñarritu’s Babel (2006) as an example of transnational cinema. Babel is an international co-production between France, Mexico and the US, featuring seven languages (English, French, Spanish, Berber, Arabic, Japanese and sign language) and four settings (the US, Mexico, Japan and Morocco). The four storylines are linked by a global thread connecting apparently diasporic lives, putting to the test prior assumptions about nation-states as independent containers of ideologies, values or socio-economic processes. The paper explores Babel’s use of narrative structure and stylistic devices in order to bring to the fore transnational issues, focusing on illegal immigration, unfounded fears of terrorism and the failure to communicate in the global space. More specifically, the film denounces unequal power relations while analyzing shared problems of communication worldwide and the desire people have to understand each other. Finally, the paper examines the border as a hybrid concept in Babel. Starting as a dangerous place of exclusion and repression, the border gradually emerges as the place where cultural interaction takes place and where trans-local understandings are possible.
Keywords: transnational, globalization, communication, terrorism, border.

En nuestra mesa redonda, proponemos debatir el tema del transnacionalismo en el cine contemporáneo, tomando como ejemplo la película Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), del director estadounidense Woody Allen. A partir de un debate sobre el concepto de transnacionalidad con referencias a producciones “transnacionales” o “fronterizas” en relación a temas de producción, realización y recepción de las mismas, los participantes pasarán a explorar los conceptos de identidad y deseo en Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Se debatirán estos temas en relación al producto cinematográfico, a los actores principales, al director, y al contexto socio-geográfico que se propone en la película. Nuestro objetivo es promover un debate abierto sobre el tema del transnacionalismo y su plasmación en el cine contemporáneo a través de algunos de los elementos que hacen de Vicky Cristina Barcelona uno de los ejemplos más notorios/populares de cine transnacional que hemos presenciado estos últimos años.
Keywords: transnacionalismo, cine contemporáneo, identidad, deseo, Woody Allen.

A Story of Boy Meets Girl: (Un)Broken Romantic Comedy Conventions in (500) Days of Summer
María del Carmen Rodríguez Ramírez (University of Sevilla)

The basic plot of romantic comedies is that a man and a woman first meet and then separate due to some type of obstacle. Nevertheless, they eventually realise that they belong together and love prevails. (500) Days of Summer (2009) was publicized as an anti-romantic comedy because it tells the story of Tom Hansen´s infatuation with Summer Finn, his subsequent heartbreak, and incapacity to recover the girl of his dreams. Finally, Tom meets someone new and moves on. Despite the fact that the resolution may sound refreshing, this paper intends to prove that this independent production is as dedicated to formula as any other genre film. In fact, the effect of the subversion displayed on the big screen turns out to be superficial only. The only addition is that we must keep the faith and persevere. On the one hand, the deviations seem to make a difference to the target audience of independent cinema. Indeed, the film exposes that we are so pre-conditioned by Hollywood codes that our personal experience turns out to be indirect. On the other hand, it follows the same basic path as any other romantic comedy. After all, at the end of the film there are great expectations once again. There is a girl and there is a boy who meet and after one single conversation are about to have a date. In other words, none of the traditional concepts associated to romantic comedies—such as the meet-cute situation or the grand gesture--is dismantled or even destabilized, only camouflaged.
Keywords: independent cinema, romantic comedies, transgression, gender, genre films, fairy tales, visual culture.

Representing Irishness in The Crying Game
María Isabel Seguro Gómez (University of Barcelona)

Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game received wide critical acclaim and became a box-office success when it premièred in 1992, particularly in the United States where critic Julie Wheelwright considered that the film ‘brilliantly fuses anxieties about sexual identity with questions of nationalism’. This kind of reading seemed appropriate bearing in mind Jordan’s previous filmic oeuvre. In The Company of Wolves (1984), for example, based on one of the short stories from Angela Carter’s collection The Bloody Chamber, Jordan clearly revealed his concern about the transmission and mechanisms of gender roles and stereotypes in the shaping of our psyche, our own images and that of others, together with their workings on the way we behave and are treated. Another relevant production was Angel (1982), specifically dealing with the theme of violence generating more violence, having as its context the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Thus, the themes dealt with in Jordan’s filmography were related to the gendered and violent representations of Irishness. In The Crying Game, then, he seemed to be moving a step forward in his analysis of gendered and racialised representations of nationalism and sexual identity. This paper will argue that, despite Jordan’s efforts to present a critique of stereotypes based on racial/gender/sexual “Otherness”, the film in fact reveals the difficulties of freeing oneself from those images and, to a certain extent, reinforces some of those representations that initially it intended to transgress.
Keywords: Neil Jordan, The Crying Game, Irishness, gender, sexuality.