Composed of three sections, Historical Recuperation, Sexual Reinscription, and Marketing Transfiguration: Money/Politics/Regionalism, Refiguring Spain: Cinema/Media/Representation is a collection of essays that examine the ways in which Spanish cinema has both defined and constructed a national identity in the latter half of the twentieth century under a transformative climate of repression, democratization, social liberation, and globalism. […]
One of the most striking aspects of José Luis Guerín’s preceding film, En Construcción is the recurring image of cast shadows in motion as a metaphor for the “ghost residents” of El Chino – the migrant laborers, evicted tenants, and even unearthed ancient corpses whose traces of existence and personal histories are gradually being displaced […]
Something of a cross between the organic essentiality of Johan van der Keuken’s ethnographic documentaries (most notably, in I Love Dollar) and the disenfranchised cinema of Pedro Costa, José Luis Guerín’s En Construcción anticipates Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life in its understated, yet bracing portrait of economically imposed dislocation, class stratification, and cultural erasure. Ostensibly a […]
Ostensibly framed as a restoration of a degraded found film recovered some 70 years after the sudden and unexplained death of its creator, a Parisian attorney and amateur filmmaker named Gérard Fleury at a lake in the village of Le Thuit in Normandy, Tren de sombras (Train of Shadows) is a dense, sensual, and richly […]
As in Tren de sombras, José Luis Guerín ambiguously prefaces Innisfree as a series of images and observations recorded from the site of a historical event, in this case, the filming of John Ford’s The Quiet Man around Cong village in the Irish countryside. And like the film, Guerín alternates between modes of non-fiction – […]