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

How long lasted May 68? A whole month or just a week? Historians do not quite agree on the duration of French May, but neither on its effects, nor even on the real reach of the protest movements and revolutionaries that shook Europe and the US. in the late 60's and early 70's. Franco-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard, like many of his contemporaries could not, nor wanted, to remain outside the process and together with the group Dziga Vertov would be launched to the realization of a series of unorthodox documentary films that suppose an extraordinary counter-narration of the events that occurred in those important months of the late 60's. The director and his collaborators shied away from a direct and explanatory documentary image, and with prophetic lucidity, preferred to investigate the absent image, always elusive, hidden, through explorations that would have as spearhead complex technical explorations of sound and image montage. The 68 leaves a trail in the documentaries of Godard but also in several of his later productions. It seems that the Franco-Swiss director could no longer escape the image of the revolution, or its ontological and communicative value

This article examines the feminist pornographic films made by the Swedish director Erika Lust. A pioneering cinema that emerges as a rejection of the heteronormativity present in traditional pornographic cinema, accused of reflecting only exclusive male fantasies. This new feminist cinema is characterized by constructing narratives that go beyond mere sexual act, showing different types of sexualities, and giving prominence to the woman as an active subject. A cinema that is also characterized by a constant aesthetic search through various cinematographic resources in order to create a beautiful work. From the study of the stylistic features of Lust's series of short films X-Confessions, the content of this type of films is questioned, because despite being well made in cinematographic terms, are far from achieving its objective of offering a natural portrait of sex. Ending up in implementing a new fantasy as a result of the constant search for beauty. All of this in opposition to the phenomenon of the amateur or gonzo cinema, true documentary of the sexual act that does not require of any fiction, although it may contain it, to elaborate its discourse of naturalness and to show its pornographic object.

In this work we intend to develop such thorny concepts as the representation of reality through fiction and the discursive mechanisms that make it possible. We have tried to clarify the notion of point of view by an extreme example capable of calling into question the principles managed by previous theoretical reflection when applied to a very singular text: the film by László Nemes Saul’s Son (Saul fia, 2015). Our objective is to apply a series of narratological notions that allow us to reflect the complexity of visual and sound perception from the limitations of the narrator implicit in the subjectivity of the protagonist of Saúl's son.

In The Great Dictator (1940) and Su Excelencia (1966), Charles Chaplin and Mario Moreno, Cantinflas, respectively, satirize the desire of power of leaders of great Nations. The first denounces the Europe of fascisms, especially the nazi Germany; and the second, the world of the Cold War, fundamentally the two superpowers of the time: the US and the USSR. Despite its comic nature, the two films end with two quite serious speeches in which their protagonists make a similar appeal in favor of freedom, peace and the brotherhood of all men. This article delves into the similarities of the two allegations, which are based on the same situation: a common citizen temporarily become a great political leader –by confusion or some bizarre circumstances–, who will have to make a serious decision of which depend on the fate of humanity.

Michael Christopher Brown is a US photographer who went to Lybia in 2011 in order to meet and document the Lybian Revolution. He published his images in a 2016 book, Lybian Sugar. In it, he tried to overcome the limitations of the traditional photo documentary —practiced in Western countries since the Spanish Civil War— by using an amateur camera —the iPhone— and an autobiographical narrative form of his experience there. I argue that the ethical position that emerges from the work remains deeply ambiguous despite the qualities of the book and the photographer’s skill. More broadly, I argue that the book is representative of a trend in contemporary Western photography which finds it difficult to go beyond a post-colonial auctorial stance, despite sincere efforts to the contrary.

Eisenstein, who was born hundred years ago, is considered one of the greatest filmmakers in History. Committed to Bolshevik ideas and as supporter of the October Revolution, he wanted to use film as another vehicle in the awareness of the masses. Although he faced the most orthodox sectors of Stalinism, Eisenstein knew at all times to put into practice a series of theoretical ideas related to sound and color. The implementation of these, not only served for ideological purposes, but also converted their films into authentic works of art. For this,  he not only researched in arts and color theory, but also chose to introduce in his work references to other cultures (such as the Kabuki), avant-garde artists (Kandinsky) and musicians such as Prokofiev. The present essay analyzes the connections between Eisenstein and all of them, and specially how he performed these revolutionary ideas.

In this article, the practice of photomontage is presented as a revolutionary agent capable of reconfiguring real events and creating new narratives based on political interests. To this end, two different approaches to the role of photomontage are presented, both carried out in a context where the political scenario was undergoing deep restructuring.In the first case, described through an analysis of a set of works by John Heartfield, the photomontage is characterised by a discourse of opposition to a rising fascist political regime in Germany, revealing this practice as a potential medium to propose a rereading of real events and to appeal to the critical sense of the public. In this context we can say that photomontage acts as an (anti)political weapon.In the second case, described through the analysis of a set of works by authors such as Klutsis or El Lissitzky, photomontage is characterised by a discourse in accordance with a new political era taking place in the Soviet Union in the sequence of the October Revolution.

Reseña del libro GARCÍA ROIG, Manuel (2017). Leni Riefenstahl. Cátedra: Madrid, 306 pp. Reseña de Nicolás Ried

This article aims to contribute to studies on contemporary photography. We focus our attention on fragmentation methods and it is used for shaping images: systematization, accumulation and process. We focus our studio on the work of three Andalusian artists: Clara González Ortega, who deals the concepts of space and time through a systematic repetition of photographic shots; Gabriel Campuzano that works with the archive idea for reordering the accumulation of photographic images and generating a new discourse; and Juan Carlos Bracho that works with the process as the conjunction of the systematic method and accumulation. We make use of an analytical-comparative methodology, our main conclusion emphasizes that the fragmentation through the different processes allows us to approach new strategies of representation.

In this paper we present an analysis of the ways of narrating and presenting the outbreak and the struggle of the Zapatista Arma of Liberation National (EZLN) in México country, in the documentary films. We recovered three films made between the nineties of the twentieth century and the first decade of the 21st century: Chiapas: paisaje después de la batalla (Irma Ávila, 1994); 2) Autonomía zapatista. Otro mundo es posible (Cristina Hijar y Colectivo AMV, 2008); y Los hombres sin rostro (Elena Korykhalova y Oleg Myasoedov, 2016), to analyse what they said about the EZLN, how it is presented and who do it. We support the proposals of film analysis and visual studies, wich allow us to understand the relationships that are established between the revolutionary event and its film objectification, its intervention and persistence in the present.