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Reviewed by:
  • Cine-Lit VI: Essays on Hispanic Film and Fiction
  • Kathleen M. Vernon
Cine-Lit VI: Essays on Hispanic Film and Fiction. Cine-Lit Publications, 2008. Edited by Guy Wood.

Since its first edition in 1991, the "Cine-Lit" Conference Film Festival (scheduled jointly with the Portland International Film Festival) has provided an essential forum for scholars working in the field of Hispanic cinemas. Indeed I believe it would not be an exaggeration to link the integration of cinema into the Hispanic studies curriculum in US colleges and universities to the establishment of Cine-Lit. While there were a handful of scholars (Marsha Kinder, Katherine Kovacs, Marvin D'Lugo) publishing regularly on Spanish cinema from the early 1980s on, Spanish language cinema was largely overlooked by cinema departments and excluded from the [End Page 283] literature-based curricula of Spanish/Romance/ Modern or Foreign Language departments. Tellingly, when cinema finally began to make its entry, it was often via the alliance or one might say "alibi" of film and literature and/or adaptation studies, a pairing still evident in the title and contents of this sixth Cine-Lit volume. Clearly, film needed literature to give it academic respectability (and funding opportunities?) within Hispanism in 1991. What is the status of that relationship today? Who or what benefits from this conjunction?

I propose to look at Cine-Lit VI with the goal of answering those questions while reflecting briefly the state of Hispanic cinema studies within the US academy. The volume consists of four sections, one each devoted to studies of Latin American and Peninsular cinema topics, a third devoted to literary adaptations and the fourth comprised of interviews with visiting directors. The final article in the volume, included in Part four, offers an autographical account by Cine-Lit "veteran," Nancy Membrez, of her transformation from literature and cinema critic to film director and teacher of filmmaking. Although those groupings might suggest that literary-film relations are restricted to Part three, in fact three of the eight essays in Part one (on Machuca, with a brief thematic comparison to Marco Antonio de la Parra's Carta abierta a Pinochet; Doña Bárbara, novel and film; the films of Lucrecia Martel and Borges) also focus to some extent on what the introduction characterizes more broadly as the "transtextual" Cine-Lit project. In contrast, one article in Part three treating Eva Perón's two film performances prior to taking on the role of first lady, does not deal with issues of film and literary relations. By my count that adds up to nine of the 21 text-focused essays. Is this ratio representative of the field? Yes and no. One of the rewarding aspects of the Cine-Lit conference and the Cine-Lit volumes is the mixture and mixing between experienced scholars and critics and newer members of the field, whether assistant professors or graduate students. To that extent Cine-Lit VI provides a snapshot of a discipline constantly renewing itself, as scholars reenact a kind of apprenticeship in which critics trained in literary (and, increasingly, cultural) analysis apply and adapt the skills developed with respect to one artistic form (usually written, fictional narrative) to another (usually cinematic fiction). In the best cases, these transtextual exercises have several benefits, chief among them: hands on training in analyzing the very different formal languages of literary and film narration; a recognition of the different production and reception contexts for film and literature with a focus on the industrial and commercial pressures specific to film. Five of the essays in the adaptation section (by Klodt, Amell, Thau, López, and Wittern) are exemplary in this regard. Two other essays that also adapt a transtextual methodology, more broadly construed, take a further step. Dan Russek eschews questions of literal adaptation to consider the "family resemblance" between Borges and the films of Lucrecia Martel in regard to both artists' characteristic sexual and psychological reticence, ultimately emphasizing the contrast between Borges's anti-experiential formal coldness and Martel's tactile filmic textures. For her part, Cristina Martínez-Carazo explores the role of painting as a thematic and structuring subtext in Iciar Bollaín's Te...

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