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Speakers): Luis Martín-Cabrera

Talk in Spanish.

In preparation for this lecture, we will be screening  on April 29, 2013 at 4:15PM and  on April 30, 2013 at 4:15PM.

In the 1960’s Octavio Getino and Pino Solanas distinguished between three types of films: the first cinema or industrial cinema from the first world (i.e. Hollywood), the second cinema or auteur cinema from the national bourgeoisies, and finally the third cinema or film liberation in search of an esthetic of decolonization. This old typology returns forcefully in the making of two recent film productions: También la lluvia (2010) by Icíar Bollaín and Para recibir el canto de los pájaros (1995) by Jorge Sanjinés. Both films narrate the story of a film crew that goes to Bolivia in order to make a movie about the Spanish conquest; both films also connect the colonial past to its reproduction in the present. 

These films, however, are clearly different both from a political and an esthetical vantage point of view. While Bollaín’s film is a transnational production that counts with the financing of Spanish and European media conglomerates, Sanjinés’ feature is a national production that circulated only within national and regional circuits. Furthermore, the background of También la lluvia is the water wars in Cochabamba, Bolivia, whereas Sanjiné’s production takes place in the Bolivian altiplano and focuses on the perpetuation of racist behavior on the part of the Bolivian criollo population.

Departing from the tensions and differences between the two films, the presentation will attempt to elucidate the economic, political, and esthetical consequences implied in the production of the cultural imaginaries of globalization, decolonization and neocolonialism.

Luis Martín-Cabrera is an Associate Professor of Peninsular and Latin American Literature and Culture at the University of California, San Diego. He is interested in Marxism and Psychoanalysis as a theoretical matrix to address a series of problems such as the politics of memory in Spain and Latin America, neocolonialism, and migration. He has published many articles, interviews, and film reviews. His last book, Radical Justice: Spain and the Southern Cone beyond Market and State (2011), is an analysis of dictatorial regimes on both sides of the Atlantic that interrogates the relationship between memory and justice in these regions. He is also the director of The Spanish Civil War Memory Project, a UCSD initiative to collect testimonies of survivors from the Spanish Civil War.