Interdisciplinary Approaches to Hispanic Film

Session Coordinator: Benjamin R. Fraser

Dept. of Modern & Classical Languages & Literatures

Christopher Newport University

Newport News, VA 23606

benjamin.fraser@cnu.edu

“Reconciling Cinema and Geography: Bergson and Bioy Casares’s La invención de Morel”

The rising importance of all things spatial in the humanities has placed increased attention on the intersection between cinema and geography. It is in this context that I wish to explore the philosophical basis of our understanding of spatial processes. Adolfo Bioy Casares’s short work La invención de Morel allows such an exploration. In discussing the relation of cinema and geography as presented in the work, I will emphasize the methodology common to both Henri Lefebvre’s classic text the Production of Space and the whole of philosopher Henri Bergson’s undervalued ouvre. Ultimately, the standard dualities of space and time, thought and action, the static and the dynamic give way, revealing the consequences of thinking the world through static categories and implicating thought itself as an active force in constructing a common world.

Benjamin R. Fraser

Christopher Newport University

benjamin.fraser@cnu.edu

“Approaching Cinema: A Phenomenological Perspective on Barroso's Extasis”

The studies of film and literature have integrated diverse perspectives (-e.g. formal ones, those based on discourse, or approaches focused on their essential differences). In spite of the fact that the structure of these cultural expressions is dissimilar, this paper is centered in finding phenomenical connections between them. With this goal in mind, this proposal explores both the reception experience and the narrative dimension of a literary and cinematic artifact. Using literary references, this study specifically explores the phenomenon of interpreting an audiovisual text such as Mariano Barroso's film Extasis. In short, this perspective is centered around the process through which a text acquires a discursive reading to a reader. Hence, the hypothesis is that the act of reading a written or audiovisual narrative, works according to a juxtaposition between a meaning and its referent. Therefore, this effort intends to connect literature and film studies avoiding an analysis based exclusively on content, exploring the possibility of a reader/spectator manipulation throughout the form of a narrative in both kinds of media.

Vania Barraza Toledo

Central Michigan University

Barra1vt@cmich.edu

“Lacan and Suvin at the Theater: The SF (Science Fiction) Gaze and Julio Medem”

The films of Julio Medem appropriate a Science Fiction (SF) aesthetic in order to erase the past national symbolic and as a result he has helped create a new foundational fiction for (post?)national Spain that is created out of male sexual fantasy. His film style primarily depends upon the process of metonymy and metaphor in order to define the relation between male fantasy and visual language; through explicit separation and reintegration of the Lacanian registers (symbolic, imaginary, real) in the mise-en-scene the protagonist’s imaginary gains control over the symbolic through control of the narrative. In order to establish and legitimize this dominance, Medem relies upon the process of cognitive estrangement particular to science fiction; he creates a visual spectacle that, as Darko Suvin has proposed as the "satisfying goal of the SF voyage", is a transforming mirror that changes the way we view our reality ("On the poetics of the SF genre” 59). In this way, the image that Medem has created for Spain is one of empty national signifiers that permit the male imaginary to control the national narrative. In order to prove this I will explore several of Medem’s films, La ardilla roja, Los amantes del círculo polar and Lucía y el sexo, through a primarly Lacanian gaze while also utilizing many of Darko Suvin’s theories on the SF genre.

Susan Divine

University of Arizona

susand@u.arizona.edu