The Film Archipelago: Islands in Latin American Cinema

Description

How do the islands and archipelagos of the New World figure in Latin American cinema? Comprising 15 essays and a critical introduction, The Film Archipelago: Islands in Latin American Cinema addresses this question by examining a series of intersections between insular spaces and filmmaking in Latin America. The volume brings together international scholars and filmmakers to consider a diverse corpus of films about islands, films that take place on islands, films produced in islands, and films that problematise islands. The book explores a diverse range of films that extend from the Chilean documentaries of Patricio Guzmán to work on the Malvinas/Falkland Islands, and films by Argentine directors Gustavo Fontán and Lucrecia Martel. Chapters focus on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), the Mexican Islas Marías, and the Panamanian Caribbean; on ecocritical, environmental and film historical aspects of Brazilian and Argentine river islands; and on Cuban, Guadeloupean, Haitian, and Puerto Rican contexts. The Film Archipelago argues that the islands and archipelagos of Latin American cinema constitute a critically interesting, analytically complex, and historically suggestive angle to explore issues of marginality and peripherality, remoteness and isolation, and fragility and dependency. As a whole, the collection demonstrates to what extent the combined insular and archipelagic lens can re-frame and re-figure both longstanding and recent discussions on the spaces of Latin American cinema. Cover Contents List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Islands in Latin American cinema: Film(ing) archipelagos Antonio Gómez and Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián  Part 1 Islands at the end of the world 1 Deserted islands for the nation: Empty land- and seascapes in three Argentine films of the Malvinas/Falkland Islands Jason A. Bartles 2 Marooned testimony: Chilean islandscape and the politics of memory in Sebastián Silva’s Magic Magic (2013) William R. Benner 3 Memory islands: Repeating traumas in Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz (2010) and El botón de nácar (2015) Amanda Holmes 4 Insular spaces: A documentary and an affective ethno-mapping of the Rapa Nui culture Irene Depetris Chauvin Part 2 Liminal islands 5 Social reformation and the edges of sovereignty: Fernando Soler’s La hija del penal (1949) and Emilio Fernández’s Islas Marías (1951) Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado 6 Exposed insularities: Islands, capitalism and waste in Jorge Furtado’s Ilha das Flores (1989) Axel Pérez Trujillo 7 Islands in Lucrecia Martel’s Nueva Argirópolis (2010): Eroding and fracturing the national map Natalia D’Alessandro 8 Gustavo Fontán’s films: On faces, spectres, fragments of matter  Laura M. Martins Part 3 Antillean relations on screen 9 The duplicitous empire: Ambiguous representations of Puerto Ricans and Japanese-Americans in Herbert I. Leeds’s Mr. Moto in Danger Island (1939) Naida García-Crespo 10 An archipelago of crossed gazes: Intersections of documentary media practices in Cuba and Puerto Rico Juan Carlos Rodríguez 11 ‘Irreducible memories’ of Caribbeanness: Mariette Monpierre’s Le Bonheur d’Elza (2011) Sheila Petty 12 Documenting lifestyle migration: Anayansi Prado’s Paraíso for Sale (2011)  Carolyn Fornoff 13 Raoul Peck’s archipelagic cinema: Island contestations of the international order in Assistance mortelle (2013) Jana Evans Braziel Part 4 Reimagining islandscapes 14 Notes on an island film: A journey to Martín García Edgardo Dieleke 15 Letters from the islands: A visual essay Antonio Traverso Index