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

In 1923, after producing the adaptation of his brother Josué’s best-selling novel La vendedora de Harrods (1919), Alfredo Quesada made his directorial debut with the film Martín Fierro. It was based on the poem by José Hernández (1872 and 1879), which had been canonized shortly before. Although the film is now lost, this essay aims to examine its reception through different publications of the time and to place it within the framework of a film field that in the beginning of the 1920’s was already autonomously constituted. In particular, this work focuses on the interdependence of two fundamental demands of the field: the requests for movement and projection, defined according to Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Michel Frodon, respectively. Considering this link, the goal is to understand the reasons why Quesada’s movie was considered a failure and to infer the conditions that could determine the fate of Argentine films both locally and in the global market of culture.

This article analyzes the mechanisms of political resistance deployed by cinematographic resources in two Argentine films: Invasión (1969), directed by Hugo Santiago, with screenplay by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Moebius (1996) directed by Gustavo Mosquera. Focusing the analysis further on Moebius, but making a foothold in Invasión, I argue that both films work with "fantastic situations" that seek to stage the universality of the notion of "resistance." This vocation of universality makes Santiago’s fictitious Aquileia to anticipate the Buenos Aires of the last civic-military dictatorship in Argentina, and the more retro-futuristic Buenos Aires of Mosquera speaks to us of those same dictatorial years, as well as of the deep crisis of disinterest for the other of the neoliberal nineties. Both Invasión and Moebius propose that resistance has no end, and they assume the task of constantly "resisting" the artificial balance of the contemporary, approaching in a disturbing way past, present and future.

The text raises a critical interpretation about the representation of the body in the documentary Noticias (2009) of the Chilean directors Bettina Perut and Ivan Ossnovikof. To this end, it is emphasize on the capacity of the concept of a body without organs to destroy the intellectual reflection that has been universally hegemonic when it comes to appreciating a work of art. In this way, it is argued that the body in the analyzed film, aims to the de-hierarchization of the gaze in the intellectual act of appreciating cinematographic work. The body understood,then, as a sensitive organicity that inverts the reflection of body/intellect, shows the capacity of making a critique of the classic cinematic representation  and a questioning to the ideological and social configuration in which, historically, the cinema has developed its  discourse.

 During most of the 19th century, an important body of literary works appeared outside of Cuba criticizing the institution of slavery on the island, the system’s inherent violence, its sexual practices, and its repercussions on the white population. Among the most famous works published at the time were Sab (1841), by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, and Cecilia Valdés ([1839] 1882), by Cirilo Villaverde. In this essay, I would like to explore a lesser known novel that was published by a Cuban writer of the following generation—El negro Francisco (1875), by Antonio Zambrana y Vazquez—in order to understand the principal role of the legal and anthropological archives in the novel, as well as the author’s use of newspaper reports and advertisements. How are these texts and styles intertwined in the novel to criticize institutional slavery on the Island? How does the authorial voice appear in the novel when we consider a tradition present since the beginning of the Spanish Conquest of the Americas—which reached the 20th century with novels such as Los pasos perdidos (1958) by Alejo Carpentier? I would base my arguments on Roberto González Echevarría’s interpretation of Latin American novel in Mito y Archivo, una teoría de la narrativa latinoamericana, in which he employs basic concepts of US critical anthropology in order to re-interpret various aspects of 19th century Latin American history.

The purpose of this article is to analyze how a selection of texts by Venezuelan authors Celeste Olalquiaga, Yolanda Pantin and Arturo Uslar Pietri, each produced in different historical stages of Venezuela, represent space as a textual-image. This representation of space as a textual-image portrays both its contemporaneity and a series of effects that stem from memory and the historical configuration of the city, to the suggestion of new ways of seeing and feeling at a given space. To answer this hypothesis, the corpus will be analyzed by articulating theoretical aspects of the visible and the enunciable (Jacques Rancière), and the idea of the generation of images based on the text’s textuality (Luz Horne). Taking these theoretical approaches as a starting point, it will be argued that by remediating Realism the study corpus conveys space as an image that both portrays its contemporaneity, and seeks to condense the affects induced by a determinate space such as the city of Caracas.

This article analyzes Mi tío el empleado (1887) by Ramón Meza, a Cuban novel that presents a grey Cuba in which the administration is absurdly corrupt, handled by greedy and uneducated people. It shows an upper class worried only aout its own benefit, and a country ruled by the interests of people who did not know anything about Cuba or had even been. With these and other tools, Meza offers an image of Spanish identity that is defined by corruption and greed, with the ultimate message that Cuba needed to break the colonial yoke in order to develop its own national potential. Through the sudy of this novel, along with contemporary texts as well as postcolonial theory, the reader can see the grotesque portrait that Meza drew of the Cuban colonial government to emphasize his own conception of an independent Cuba that could move forward as a sovereign nation.

The documentary Tierra en movimiento (2014) is an audiovisual essay realized in collaboration with the Chilean poet German Carrasco. In it the counterpoint of sounds, texts and a narrative voice-over (in other words, its intermedial condition), allows to establish a poetic reflection on the material and concrete experience of living in a territory devastated by an earthquake. The remnants of what survived is collected to talk about memory and the present, opposing at the same time to the monumentality of memory and to neoliberal rationality.

Reseña

This paper focuses on the study of some of the forms of representing Mexico City that are reflected in 21th Century Mexican Poetry. Taking as the starting point the heterogeneous and hybrid nature attributed to this City, and limiting the study to four of its characteristic features —namely extension, overcrowding, difficulties in movements and transportation, and the mixed feelings of its population—, it explores some of this urban space’s metaphorical figurations that can be found in texts. In line with the above mentioned hybridism, the City appears in many of them as an animate being with diverse characteristics —woman-animal-insect-machine-effigy— that symbolizes the City's monstrosity and explains the senses of threat and danger at the possibility (equally feared and desired) of its annihilation and destruction.

In Learning Management Systems (LMS), the learning resources that students value most highly are selfassessment questionnaires (quizzes) that include automatic feedback to their responses in real-time. These systems can facilitate the development of conceptual and procedural competences. Our study therefore sets out to establish whether this tool and the frequency with which it is used will increase student learning outcomes and student satisfaction with the teaching process. A longitudinal study is conducted with a sample of 179 Health Science students on the Moodle Platform v.3.1. Both quantitative and qualitative techniques are applied to the analysis of the data. The results indicated that when the self-assessment questions were incorporated in instructional videos, the learners not only obtained better results but also increased their level of satisfaction with the degree course. In addition, students in both (the experimental and the control) groups considered that the use of videos incorporated in the LMS facilitated their conceptual understanding and respected their pace of learning. In summary, students valued the inclusion of automatic feedback (both within videos and self-assessment questionnaires) in real time as a good technique for the personalization of learning.