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

 The aim of this article is to make Carmen Prada known. A film journalist who wrote in the Madrid press bet­ween 1918 and 1921 under the alias of ‘Duchess Borelli’, Prada will be later the manager of two important ci­nema theatres in the capital. In this text I will focus on her journalistic work. In order to cover all her writings, I have carried out a first reading of her articles and selected the most relevant to make known her insightful and complex knowledge of the cinema of her time. Insightful, because Carmen Prada made use of any press format to promote cinema, from the omnipresent newsletter of those times to the interview or the opinion article, where she demonstrated an extensive knowledge of film. Complex, because in all her writings she co­vers all types of film-related topics: not only the relatively brief film review, or the usual star propaganda, but she also reflects on interesting aspects from the study of film reception, film aesthetics, the work of directors and writers, the behaviour of audiences in the cinema theatre, or the work of film critics. The latter turns Carmen Prada one of the main references of film criticism in Madrid and a fundamental agent to understand that complex segment of film historiography which is the study of film reception.

Hong Kong’s martial arts cinema has developed historically along two subgenres: wuxia and kung fu films. Though similar subgenres with coincidental origins and dialectical evolutions, both show specific semantic and syntactic elements. In this sense, the present work suggests their characteriza­tion, revealing their tangible differences as well as their internal coherence. In order to do so, the text examines the etymology of the words usually identified with these subgenres. The aim is clarifying some terminological misunderstandings and exposing the singularities that these expressions allude to. Then, I refer to the cultural traditions to which each genre is linked, demonstrating that the dif­ferences between the two reproduce superior geohistorical divisions fundamental to Chinese culture. Finally, I compare some of the thematic, narrative and aesthetic features of each textual category considering their internal coherence as well as their particular link to the cultural traditions above discusse.

This article studies how Greta Garbo’s star image was built in the specific context of Spain in the twenties and thirties, a period in which film journals enjoyed a boost in this country thanks to the arrival of magazines such as Popular Film or La pantalla. Garbo’s reception is connected with the debates on national cinema, characterized by the rejection of the «españolada» and Hollywood female stereotypes such as vamps that brought the spectre of Carmen back, stereotypes Garbo had tried to overcome through her rejection of playing such roles. In the late twenties, her image was positively regarded and some intellectuals described her as a «star-author». Then I analyse the changes occurred in the thirties, when the proclamation of the Second Republic meant an improvement of women’s status that triggered a crisis of masculinity. Such crisis can be traced in cinematographic culture as some journalists claimed the director’s «superiority», now presented as the authentic custodian of creative genius to the detriment of stars, which were henceforth attacked and denigrated with the aim of reasserting the status of the artistic creation as a male prerogative. Finally, this paper focuses on the influence of Greta Garbo on Spanish female spectatorship, which helps to better understand what has been previously described.

The Italian film director Ermanno Olmi began his cinematic career in the 1950s making promotional films for the hydroelectric company Edison Volta, where he was employed. Following the theoretical lines proposed by scholars such as Vizenz Hediger, Patrick Vonderau, Thomas Elsaesser, Paola Bonifazio or Elena Mosconi on industrial cinema and Olmi’s first cinematic works, this paper aims to refute some of the theoretical frameworks from which the film production of Edison Volta has been approached. At the same time, this article proposes other tools to investigate the vast but disregarded corpus of industrial cinema.

In this article, we study, through some of Propp, Kayser, Genette and Aumont’s proposals, the animated short film La casa triste (Sofia Carrillo, 2013), which presents a specific modality of the metadiegetic narrative and the fantasy tale.We agree with José Burguera when he points out that the proliferation of this type of films allows us to explore concerns that do not find expression in the rationalization of current though. Thus, our study allows us to identify a structural variation of the framed story according to which the historical events that appear in the film – and that portray the dominant ideologies of the time – are mythologically interpreted.

Jean Cocteau offers in The Blood of a Poet an interesting reflection on the nature of literary writing, shaping a personal cinematographic poetics based on universal symbols. The result describes the process of depersonalization to which the poet is forced when he finds himself compromised by a language which he does not recognize as his own. This implies the acceptance of his indeterminate condition, marked by an androgynous nature doomed to death.

Between the fifties and seventies, the end of the period of industrial expansion of Mexican cinematography and of its leadership in regional markets brought new challenges to producers, who had to fight against the new industrial structures and the competition resulting from the emerging television. The social and cultural changes that were manifested during those years in art and society played also an important role. Accordingly, new topics of great interest for the public appeared, such as films focussing on youth’s customs, on the emergence of new musical rhythms connected to rock n’roll, and on portraying a more explicit eroticism. In this article, we will study a strategy that was also used in pursuit of these purposes: the production of films that mixed popular shows like wrestling with mythical and ancestral traditions, both national (the myth of «La llorona» or «The aztec mummy») and universal (referring to the legends of Dracula, Frankenstein and the werewolf, among others). We will focus on films produced by the company Cinematográfica Calderón that were starred by Santo, known as el enmascarado de plata [the silver masked man], placing them in the context of regional fantasy and horror cinema, and considering their construction of the wrestler’s figure as representative of justice and as an active participant of ancestral myths in national and universal folklore.

The artistic boom and industrial consolidation that took place in Italian cinema after the Second World War had a wide reception in Argentina. Although Neorealism’s influence has been noticed in Latin American cinemas’ renovation, I consider that the presence of commedia all'italiana (produced over the fifties and sixties) in Buenos Aires’ cinemas has also had a strong effect on spectators ?some of whom would become filmmakers, and who later on took aspects of that model for their own films. Audience’s preference for these movies undoubtedly operated as an important reference for local producers during the following years. In this article, I examine comedies’ reception at a quantitative (observing the screening programmes) and qualitative (analyzing different kinds of reviews) levels. This process has also been part of a broader transnational development of peninsular cinema in Argentina, taking into account the centrality of Italian’s culture in the South American country.