Filmmakers often mine novels and plays for stories and characters, but what happens when poetry appears on screen? In this edited volume, contributors explore the rich corpus of Latin American films that operate where poetry and cinema meet. Examples include the adaptation of poems to film; the characterisation of poets on screen; the role of poets as filmmakers; the concept of the 'poetic film'; approaches to the 'cinema of poetry' (drawing on writings by Pasolini, in particular); poetic documentaries; and the use of poetry in avant-garde film. Contributions range from silent cinema to contemporary works, and from Mexico through Brazil to the Southern Cone, including studies of films by María Luisa Bemberg, Pablo Larraín, Guillermo del Toro, as well as independent video and media artists. Ben Bollig is Professor of Spanish-American Literature at the University of Oxford. David M.J. Wood is a Researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM, Mexico City.

This study considers the ways Spanish American and Brazilian poets differ from their European counterparts by considering 'Latin American' as more than a perfunctory epithet. It sets the orthodox Latin tradition of the subcontinent against others that have survived or grown up after the conquest then pays attention to those poets who, from Independence, have striven to express a specifically American moral and geographical identity. Dr Brotherson focuses on Modernismo, or the 'coming of age' of poetry in Spanish America and Brazil, and the importance of the movements associated with it. He considers César Vallejo and Pablo Neruda, probably the greatest of the selection, Octavio Paz, and modern poets who have reacted differently to the idea that Latin America might now be thought to have not just a geographical but a nascent political identity of its own. Poems are liberally quoted, and treated as entities in their own right.

This volume examines the unprecedented growth of several cities in Latin America from 1830 to 1930, observing how sociopolitical changes and upheavals created the conditions for the birth of the metropolis. In the century between 1830 and 1930, following independence from Spain and Portugal, major cities in Latin America experienced large-scale growth, with the development of a new urban bourgeois elite interested in projects of modernization and rapid industrialization. At the same time, the lower classes were eradicated from old city districts and deported to the outskirts. The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930 surveys this expansion, focusing on six capital cities—Havana, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, and Lima—as it examines sociopolitical histories, town planning, art and architecture, photography, and film in relation to the metropolis. Drawing from the Getty Research Institute’s vast collection of books, prints, and photographs from this period, largely unpublished until now, this volume reveals the cities’ changes through urban panoramas, plans depicting new neighborhoods, and photographs of novel transportation systems, public amenities, civic spaces, and more. It illustrates the transformation of colonial cities into the monumental modern metropolises that, by the end of the 1920s, provided fertile ground for the emergence of today’s Latin American megalopolis.

From Wild Tales to Zama, Argentine cinema has produced some of the most visually striking and critically lauded films of the 2000s. Argentina also boasts some of the most exciting contemporary poetry in the Spanish language. What happens when its film and poetry meet on screen? Moving Verses studies the relationship between poetry and cinema in Argentina. Although both the poetics of cinema and literary adaptation have become established areas of film scholarship in recent years, the diverse modes of exchange between poetry and cinema have received little critical attention. The book analyses how film and poetry transform each another, and how these two expressive media behave when placed into dialogue. Going beyond theories of adaptation, and engaging critically with concepts around intermediality and interdisciplinarity, Moving Verses offers tools and methods for studying both experimental and mainstream film from Latin America and beyond. The corpus includes some of Argentina's most exciting and radical contemporary directors (Raúl Perrone, Gustavo Fontán) as well as established modern masters (María Luisa Bemberg, Eliseo Subiela), and seldom studied experimental projects (Narcisa Hirsch, Claudio Caldini). The critical approach draws on recent works on intermediality and impure cinema to sketch and assess the many and varied ways in which directors read poetry on screen.

Since the late 1960s, films from Latin America have won widening audiences in North America and Europe. Until now, no single book has offered an introduction to the diverse personalities and practices that make up this important regional film movement. In Cinema and Social Change in Latin America, Julianne Burton presents twenty interviews with key figures of Latin American cinema, covering three decades and ranging from Argentina to Mexico. Interviews with pioneers Fernando Birri, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, and Glauber Rocha, renowned feature filmmakers Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Carlos Diegues, prize-winning documentarists Patricio Guzmán and Helena Solberg-Ladd, among others, endeavor to balance personal achievement against the backdrop of historical, political, social, and economic circumstances that have influenced each director's career. Presented also are conversations that cast light on the related activities of acting, distribution, theory, criticism, and film-based community organizing. More than their counterparts in other regions of the world, Latin American artists and intellectuals acknowledge the degree to which culture is shaped by history and politics. Since the mid-1950s, a period of rising nationalism and regional consciousness, talented young artists and activists have sought to redefine the uses of the film medium in the Latin American context. Questioning the studio and star systems of the Hollywood industrial model, these innovators have developed new forms, content, and processes of production, distribution, and reception. The specific approaches and priorities of the New Latin American Cinema are far from monolithic. They vary from realism to expressionism, from observational documentary to elaborate fictional constructs, from "imperfect cinema" to a cinema that emulates the high production values of the developed sectors, from self-reflexive to "transparent" cinematic styles, from highly industrialized modes of production to purely artisanal ones. What does not vary is the commitment to film as a vehicle for social transformation and the expression of national and regional cultural autonomy. From early alternative cinema efforts in Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba to a contemporary perspective from within the Mexican commercial industry to the emerging cinema and video production from Central America, Cinema and Social Change in Latin America offers the most comprehensive look at Latin American film available today.

V. 1. Theory, practices, and transcontinental articulations -- v. 2. Studies of national cinemas. Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Through a textual analysis of six filmmakers (Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, Fernando Meirelles, Walter Salles and Juan José Campanella), this book brings a new perspective to the films of Latin America's transnational auteurs.