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The poetry-film nexus: intermediality and indiscipline in Latin American audiovisual cultures

October 29, 2020 by JLACS

This material is also available in: Español Português

January 12th, 2021, 11am (EST) / 4 pm (GMT) / 8 am (PST) (ZOOM – Youtube)

To register for the Q&A session, please click here.

Intermediality and “indisciplined” art have been at the forefront of a number of important recent works of Latin American Cultural Studies, which have raised questions about the viability of generic divisions (e.g. Aguilar; Garramuño; Nagib). In our current edited book project we explore what we call the “poetry-film nexus” in Latin America, considering the diverse modes of intermedial exchange between verse and screen, with contributions ranging from early cinema to present-day audiovisual media. We consider, for instance, the adaptation of poems to film; the role of poets as filmmakers and/or screenwriters and vice versa; the concept of the “poetic film”; approaches to the “cinema of poetry” (drawing on writings by Pier Paolo Pasolini, in particular); poetic documentaries; and the appropriation of poetry in avant-garde film. As part of the Pandemonio 2021 Symposium organised by the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, we propose to outline this work in progress; screen scenes from key works in our corpus; and engage selected contributors to the volume in discussion on related but broader questions. These include the nature of the medium; the politics of generic specificity; the cultural position of forms – such as cinema – that have striven to achieve status in their own right and whose practitioners often keenly defend their artistic and technical specificity; and the possible links between the poetry-film nexus and political agency. Alongside JLACS editors David Wood and Ben Bollig in conversation will be the Brazilian filmmaker Carlos Adriano and independent scholar Jessica Wax-Edwards.

To register for the Q&A session, please click here.

 

Podcast

Here, the editors

 

Participants:

  • Carlos Adriano is a film artist and independent scholar, with a PhD in Film (USP – University of São Paulo; Fapesp’s Fellowship [São Paulo Research Foundation]; 2008) and two Post-Doctorals, in Arts (PUC-SP – Pontifical Catholic University São Paulo; Fapesp’s Fellowship; 2014) and in Film (USP; Capes’s Fellowship [Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel]; 2017). His films have been exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, New York) and in the Tate Modern (London), and shown at festivals in Bilbao, Bologna, Denver, Havana, Locarno, Madrid, Osnabrück, Paris, Philadelphia, Pordenone, Rotterdam, and Toronto.
  • Ben Bollig is Professor of Spanish American Literature at the University of Oxford. His books include Politics and Public Space in Contemporary Argentine Poetry: The Lyric and the State (2016). He is an editor of Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.
  • Jessica Wax-Edwards is an independent researcher who received her PhD in Hispanic Studies from Royal Holloway University of London in 2018. Her research interests include memory, violence and politics in twentieth century and contemporary Mexican visual culture. She has published articles on Latin American fiction and documentary cinema, graphic art and photography and is currently working on her monograph Violence, Victims and the Ethics of Representation: the Visual Legacy of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012).
  • David M.J. Wood is Researcher at the Institute of Aesthetic Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico. He is the author of El espectador pensante: el cine de Jorge Sanjinés y el Grupo Ukamau (UNAM/La Carreta, 2017) and coeditor of Latin American Cultural Studies: A Reader (Routledge, 2017) and Cine mudo latinoamericano: inicios, nación, vanguardias y transición (UNAM, 2015), as well as special journal issues on film and poetry in Latin America and on documentary and institutional cinema in Mexico. He is an editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.

 

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