Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

In the following work, various ways of approaching the documentary film The City of Photographers by Chilean director Sebastián Moreno, released in 2006, are proposed. Among them are the analysis of the mechanisms used by the memory to store, fix and recreate the traumatic past experienced by Chileans during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), as well as the textual and narrative analysis of the photographic images that make up the film. To do this, the different types of relationships our memory establishes with space, the archive or art are analyzed based on emotion, the recording of memories and imagination. The work aims to be a contribution to the rescue of Chilean social memory, through the analysis of an autobiographical narrative that starts from the individual to become a multimodal and antithetical collective story, contrary to the official narratives of Pinochetism.  

This paper is a subjective exploration of the place of film analysis in the contemporary Spanish academic world, taking as a starting point the book Conexiones, un diálogo con Santos Zunzunegui (Asier Aranzubia, 2022). For this purpose, an impressionistic essayistic style is used to deploy a series of theoretical suggestions on the evolution of film writing in the last four decades and on its corresponding transfer processes in the Spanish university. Special emphasis is placed on the difficulties that the current system of publish or perish exerts on new researchers and on the difficulties of access to accreditations. On the positive aspects, the figure of the teacher and the exercise of analysis as a method of knowledge transmission and reflection in the classroom for a correct reflection on the processes of meaning of the film are vindicated. Our text intends to explore the many successes of Aranzubia's book and to vindicate the legacy of Santos Zunzunegui in the contemporary panorama of film analysts in the Hispanic field.

Abstract: On the basis of the japanese animation model, with its consequent features and symbolisms and its cultural idiosyncrasies, a research will be carried out on the power that the city imposes on the animated film narrative. It will be approached from the perspective of a mainly qualitative analysis based on a method of studying the content of two concepts: post-apocalyptic and cybersociety in Rintaro's film Metropolis.  The city, as the main character of the story, will allow us to examine the visual, aesthetic and thematic concepts that define and constitute the film. The case study of the influence of the futuristic metropolis and the technologised city in japanese animated film subjects brings the selected feature film to a procedure of narrative and visual references that, two decades after its release, has positioned Metropolis as one of the main anime products of cinematic exploration indispensable in the advancement of popular film culture.  

The article focuses on the urban representation in the horror films of the second Franco regime as a scenario of fear in the face of the profound transformations of the period. The city in Spanish horror was constructed as a degenerate space and container of vices that facilitated the rupture with traditional roles. Through four films (Ella y el miedo, El espectro del terror, Una libélula para cada muerto and El sádico de Notre Dame), the urban serial killer embodies a monstrosity born of two fundamental discourses. First, the anxieties about the dangers of modernity associated with dehumanization and fear of strangers that had constructed the serial killer in other cinematographies. On the other hand, the strong conservative component of the Spanish version created an antagonist derived from the deformation of national Catholic and patriarchal values. Thus, the urban monster also symbolized youth insecurity in the face of the persistence of a repression that hardened its measures during the last years of the dictatorship.

Czech filmmaker Ivan Zachariáš offers a complex spy plot in The Sleepers in the previous weeks to the Velvet Revolution, which ended four decades of communism in Czechoslovakia. The film locations of this TV serie depersonalize the monumental Gothic and Baroque Prague of another audiovisual productions to collect an interesting catalog of rationalist architecture, as the building Dům Radost (Karel Honzík y Josef Havlíček) -clearly influenced by Le Corbusier-, the headquarters of the sport organization Sokol (František Marek, Václav Vejrych y Jaroslav Kabeš) or the Strašnice Crematorium (Alois Mezera). These scenarios, which make possible to recreate from diplomatic spaces to the offices of the Czechoslovak political police (ŠtB), also visit historicist Prague of Václav Roštlapil or the socialist architecture of František Jeřábek, architect for the International Hotel. A new cinematographic view, definitely, to one of the most architecturally diverse cities in Europe.

The city is the object of study of different disciplines, one of those is the cinematographic narrative. Through cinema we can visit cities and discover their identities due to the social representations that the cinematographic narrative disseminates. In addition, the cinema is an eminently spatial art that lends itself to the narrative analysis of the elements that compose it. In this way, with the aim of making known how cities are narrated by the cinematographic discourse, a methodology of filmic analysis in triad has been designed to study the film from three perspectives: iconic, oral and actantial. This methodology has been applied to the film Blue Jasmine (2013), directed by Woody Allen, because represents two cities: New York and San Francisco. The results of the analysis shows the urban tale of each one and the narrative strategies used by the director to film cities.  

Dialogue with the famous film editor Pedro del Rey del Val about his extensive and prolific career in the film industry. Since his beginnings in the industry as an assistant editor in the late 1940s, Pedro del Rey has been responsible for the editing of some of the most iconic and successful titles in Spanish cinema during the second half of the 20th century. In his more than two hundred films he has worked under the orders of such famous directors as Luis Buñuel, Carlos Saura, Vicente Escrivá, Francisco Regueiro, Jaime Chávarri, Julio Diamante or Basilio Martín Patino, among many others. In addition, from 1995 and for twelve years he has been a second and third year Film Editor teacher at the School of Cinematography and Audiovisual of the Community of Madrid (ECAM). An exceptional first-hand journey through the history of our cinema and through one of its most important and, at the same time, unknown to the general public, the cinematographic montage, through the point of view and the experiences lived by one of its main protagonists.

The cultural context of the Movida has changed to put aside the common spaces built by the community to lead to an individualistic and adolescent landscape that disdains adult responsibilities. The Nueva Movida has developed a youthful and intimate photography in which the subject has also become the creator of his own gender and sexuality. However, both generations occur in the urban context of Madrid; an urban landscape that has changed its way of looking and being looked by itself, to develop a place that works, no longer for the community of the eighties, but for the unique and individualized being of the new century. The present study tries to focus on the treatment of Madrid in the photography practiced by a generation that has been named as the natural heir of the streets of the city.

This text reviews the films Historias que contamos (2012, Stories we tell, Sarah Polley), Hija (2012, María Paz González) Amazona (2017, Clare Weistkopf) and Portrait of my mother (2016, Look at us now, mother! Gayle Kirschenbaum) from the resources and methodologies proper to the autobiographical documentary, its entity as research within the subtype documemoir, from the narratives of the types of attachment of social psychology and from its contribution to deactivate the idealization of motherhood as a patriarchal myth in conflict with the heterogeneous real motherhood. These examples make use of the interview, the real or recreated home movies, the road-movie, the filmed travel diary demonstrating their belonging to the participatory and reflexive subtypes. They share the subjectivity, personal temporality and performativity of memory films. The comprehensiveness of their collaborative proximal autobiography allows them to address the bond with their reference attachment figure, their mother, explaining the secure and insecure preoccupied attachment styles they have developed in dealing with them. The documemoir subtype thus proves to be a suitable container for addressing motherhood and freeing it from the narrow patriarchal narratives of its idealization inherited from the 1990s towards narratives of real motherhood.

Given the fact that cinematography captured the first images in movement of the modern city, it would be poetically appropriate if it managed to arrive in time so as to capture the last images of its final stillness, right before its disappearance. In few filmographies like Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s can we perceive the continuity between modern city and imagery and contemporary city and imagery. Following the narrative of the last things, this article will focus on three of his movies; moreover, it will also focus on the progressive decay of the Tokyo that it is portrayed, until it reaches its ghostly disappearance. These movies are Cure (1997), Retribution (2006), and Pulse (2001). In these, Kurosawa enacts how our present would be when our modern cities -and the concept of modernity that he so well knows- are on the verge of their end. It will be, at this moment, when the viral infection of its ghostly façade becomes the biggest indication of its decadence.