In this chapter I examine how post-coup Chilean cinema depicts the coming of age of boys who are entering manhood, a process executed within a single hegemonic socio-political structure in which issues of gender, sexual dynamics and class function both organically and indivisibly. The analysis will focus on a 1976 fictionalisation of the coming of…[Read more]

En 1950 Luis Buñuel produce Los olvidados, y sesenta años después Alejandro González Iñárritu le devuelve la mirada al filmar su cuarta película en los barrios marginales de Barcelona. Más allá de la denuncia socio-política de su argumento, Biutiful hace visible un centro cada vez más desplazado hacia los bordes al enfocarse en metrópolis…[Read more]

Central to the analysis of a corpus of films dealing with current psychosocial conditions in Chile and the challenges of communal reconciliation, are the concepts of collective memory and social trauma. Chilean cinema of the postdictatorship reflects a society whose channels of communication have been broken, in which the past continues to be a…[Read more]

Distinct modes of social and psychological angst are noted in a significant number of films from Chile and New Zealand, becoming most evident in the way family relations are portrayed, and in various modes through which the protagonists relate to their natural and social environment. This article focuses on the films In My Father’s Den (Brad M…[Read more]

This essay demonstrates how Lynch Law suspended normative criminal law and undermined constitutional amendments made after the US Civil War. Focusing on the period between Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, the essay argues that “outlawry” provides the necessary juridical concept for understanding how a tradition of popular sovereignty wor…[Read more]

Syllabus for ENGL 758D, The Speculative Situation, graduate seminar in the University of Maryland English department, Fall 2017.

Disciplina de graduação oferecida na Faculdade de Comunicação da Universidade Federal da Bahia no segundo semestre de 2017. Mais informações em: https://www.incinerrante.com/textos/cinema-internacional-cinemas-africanos-2017-2

Configurações político-ideológicas, estéticas e geográficas dos cinemas africanos, em perspectiva histórica e…[Read more]

Proponho a análise do filme O mundo (2004), de Jia Zhangke, como alegoria aberta da globalização. A noção de alegoria aberta, ou abertura alegórica, possibilita abordar a globalização como condição de possibilidade do filme (que decorre, em parte, da participação da China nos circuitos globais de capital e de comércio) e como horizonte de…[Read more]

Com base na hipótese de que a emergência histórica dos cinemas africanos e sua contemporaneidade são indissociáveis de uma reivindicação do direito de olhar, de narrar e de imaginar o mundo, este artigo busca estabelecer um quadro conceitual para uma história das formas de imaginação do comum nos cinemas africanos. Nessa história ainda a escrever…[Read more]

Discussion about the relation of Juan Muñoz works, Volker Schlöndorff film “The Drummer boy” and Günter Grass novel “Die Blechtrommel”.

The central topic of João Botelho’s “Um adeus português” (1986), is memory in 1980s Portuguese society. The film alternates scenes from 1973, during the colonial war in Africa, with scenes set in 1985, in rural and urban areas of Portugal. In the present essay, I argue that the film enacts the need for a conversation among the Portuguese by opti…[Read more]

Entry for “The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism” on Senagelese filmmaker and writer Ousmane Sembène.

Review of American Road Narratives: Reimagining Mobility in Literature and Film by Ann Brigham (University of Virginia Press, 2015)

Digital technology is enabling a reconceptualization of film and cinema. The pliability of digital media opens up, particularly, the theory and practice of montage to revision. This pliability allows for cheap and easy copying and combining of images, and, relatedly, the transition from film frame to digital screen provides a less precious and…[Read more]

The article examines how the depiction of American suburbia in motion pictures illustrates the physical, cultural, and demographic changes in modern suburban society. Particular attention is paid to the portrayal of the suburban landscape in the 1999 film “Office Space,” written and directed by Mike Judge. The “polymorphous” landscape of “Office…[Read more]

The article traces two phases of SF about human species change, the first in the 1940s and early 1950s, the so called “golden age” of SF. In this first phase the advent of the posthuman is brought on by eugenics or sudden mutations caused by fallout from nuclear war. It consists of well-known books by most of the leading authors of the period: C…[Read more]

A review of Robert Leucht’s “Dynamiken politischer Imagination. Die deutschsprachige Utopie von Stifter bis Döblin in ihren internationalen Kontexten, 1848–1930” (2016) and Ulrich Bach’s “Tropics of Vienna: Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire” (2016)

Because nineteenth-century paper was made from rags, the materiality of paper money became a likely ground from which to debate the nature of value in modern capitalism. On one hand, if paper money was backed by nothing but itself, then it was worth little more than itself: a gathering of lowly rags. On the other hand, the process of turning…[Read more]