A panoramic, chronological account of the cultural history of the Cuban Revolution from 1959 to 2022, this book examines Cuban revolutionary culture and its control by the state.The book is conceived as a cultural history guidebook about one of the most significant and controversial historical events in Latin America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, using the most relevant and up-to-date sources possible.Examining emblematic cultural events from different period...

Contemporary Cuba is opening up to the rest of the world. Its colonial past and the Communist revolution have left a lasting imprint on society, yet there is a tangible sense of rapid change which is reflected in the island's national cinema. New screen technologies and digital distribution media have supported the efficacy and global reach of Cuban filmmakers whose work, somewhat in lieu of adequate distribution and traditional screening facilities in Cuba itself, is often disseminated vi...

The 1970s have largely been overlooked in scholarly studies of the Cuban Revolution, or, at the very least, dismissed simply as a period of “Sovietization” characterized by widespread bureaucratization, institutionalization, and adherence to Soviet orthodoxy. Consequently, scant research exists that examines the major changes that took place across the decade and their role in determining the course of the Revolution. This book provides, for the first time, a comprehensive assessment of th...

There has been a significant surge in recent Argentine cinema, with an explosion in the number of films made in the country since the mid-1990s. Many of these productions have been highly acclaimed by critics in Argentina and elsewhere. What makes this boom all the more extraordinary is its coinciding with a period of severe economic crisis and civil unrest in the nation. Offering the first in-depth English-language study of Argentine fiction films of the late twentieth century and early t...

In Mexican Melodrama, Elena Lahr-Vivaz explores the compelling ways that new-wave Mexican directors use the tropes and themes of Golden Age films to denounce the excesses of a nation characterized as a fragmented and fictitious construct. Analyzing big hits and quiet successes of both Golden Age and new-wave cinema, the author offers in each chapter a comparative reading of films from the two eras, considering, for instance, Amores perros (Love’s a Bitch, Alejand...

Though loved by moviegoers worldwide, Spanish cinema has thus far suffered from a relative lack of critical attention. Focusing on the vast corpus of films that have left their marks on generations of spectators, Directory of World Cinema: Spain returns the national cinema of Spain rightfully to the forefront with numerous full-colour stills and essays establishing the key players and genres in their sociopolitical context, including civil war films, romances, comedies and the cin...

This study examines the discourses of nationalism as they intersected or clashed with Spanish film production from its inception to the present. While the book addresses the discourses around filmmakers such as Almodóvar and Medem, whose work has achieved international recognition, Spanish National Cinema is particularly novel in its treatment of a whole range of popular cinema rarely touched on in studies of Spanish cinema. Using accounts of films, popular film magazines and documents not...

La crisis, a period of political and economic turmoil in Mexico that began in the late 1960s, spawned a new era in Mexican cinema. Known as el Nuevo Cine (the New Cinema), these films presented alienated characters caught in a painful transition period in which old family, gender, and social roles have ceased to function without being replaced by viable new ones. These are the films explored by Charles Ramírez Berg in Cinema of Solitude, the first book-length cri...

The Cinema of Latin America is the first volume in the new 24 Frames series of studies of national and regional cinema. In taking an explicitly text-centered approach, the books in this series offer a unique way of considering the particular concerns, styles and modes of representation of numerous national cinemas around the world. This volume focuses on the vibrant practices that make up Latin American cinema, a historically important regional cinema and one that is incr...

This engaging book explores some of the most significant films to emerge from Latin America since 2000, an extraordinary period of international recognition for the region's cinema. Each chapter assesses an individual film, with some contributors considering the reasons for the unprecedented commercial and critical successes of movies such as City of God, The Motorcycle Diaries, Y tu mamá también, and Nine Queens, while others examine why equally important films failed to break out on the ...

A Companion to Spanish Cinema is a bold collection of newly commissioned essays written by top international scholars that thoroughly interrogates Spanish cinema from a variety of thematic, theoretical and historic perspectives.Presents an insightful and provocative collection of newly commissioned essays and original research by top international scholars from a variety of theoretical, disciplinary and geographical perspectivesOffers a systematic historica...

Trumpets in the Mountains is a compelling ethnography about Cuban culture, artistic performance, and the shift in national identity after 1990, when the loss of Soviet subsidies plunged Cuba into a severe economic crisis. The state's response involved opening the economy to foreign capital and tourism, and promoting previously deprecated cultural practices as quintessentially Cuban. Such contradictions of Cuba's revolutionary ideals elicited an official preoccupation with how twen...