Abstract, Building Memory: Museums, Trauma, and the Aesthetics of Confrontation in Argentina

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Building Memory: Museums, Trauma, and the Aesthetics of Confrontation in Argentina

by Kristi M. Wilson

As Colombia’s asymmetric war has evolved, gravitating toward cities, it has become absorbed by a transitional justice system. In the process, language used to name relevant stakeholders, shape national narratives of collective memory, and activate legal infrastructure is mediated by a symbolic and often duplicitous system of governance. A history of political violence and attempts to impose security focusing on the contemporary population of Comuna 13, the fastest-growing site of urban displacement in the city of Medellín, gives context to stories of violence that are otherwise eclipsed by the process of collective memory making and describes grassroots attempts at retracing a public narrative.

Film Review, Solutions from Below: Pedagogical Documentaries and Praxis by Kristi M. Wilson and Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli

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Solutions from Below: Pedagogical Documentaries and Praxis
by Kristi M. Wilson and Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli

Alejandro Ramírez Anderson, Tierralismo: Stories from a Cooperative Farm, 2013
José Cohen, H2Omx, 2013

Abstract, Building Memory: Museums, Trauma, and the Aesthetics of Confrontation in Argentina

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Building Memory: Museums, Trauma, and the Aesthetics of Confrontation in Argentina

by Kristi M. Wilson

As Colombia’s asymmetric war has evolved, gravitating toward cities, it has become absorbed by a transitional justice system. In the process, language used to name relevant stakeholders, shape national narratives of collective memory, and activate legal infrastructure is mediated by a symbolic and often duplicitous system of governance. A history of political violence and attempts to impose security focusing on the contemporary population of Comuna 13, the fastest-growing site of urban displacement in the city of Medellín, gives context to stories of violence that are otherwise eclipsed by the process of collective memory making and describes grassroots attempts at retracing a public narrative.

Film Review: Latin American Dreaming

Film Review:  Latin American Dreaming, A Neoliberal Vision for Retirement

by Kristi M. Wilson and Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli
Anayansi Prado Paraíso for Sale. (United States/Panama, 2011)

Paraíso for Sale, directed by Anayansi Prado (also the director of Maid in America, 2005, and Children in No Man’s Land, 2008), treats the topic of Canadian and American retirees’ looking to stretch their dollars, buy second homes, and unwind in the sun by relocating (often permanently) to the Caribbean. It presents ample evidence of the looting of prime real estate in the Caribbean, where international corporations disembark with billions of dollars, pressure the locals to sell their land, and entice politicians not to enforce the law or, worse, to break it.

Film Review, Disappearing into the Distance by Kristi M. Wilson

Film Review:  Disappearing into the Distance

Disappearing into the Distance Two Latin American City Symphonies 
by Kristi M. Wilson
Andrea Prates, and Cleisson Vidal Dino Cazzola: A Filmography of Brasília. Brazil, 2012.
Heddy Honigmann Oblivion (El Olvido). The Netherlands, 2008

In Oblivion, the award-winning Dutch-Peruvian filmmaker Heddy Honigmann (Forever, Metal and Melancholy, O Amor Natural) visits her birthplace to record the stories of everyday Peruvians under Alan García’s second presidency (2006–2011). Her camera appears to float or wander at the street level, pausing on occasion to drop in upon the lives of the people it encounters there. Andrea Prates and Cleisson Vidal’s Dino Cazzola is at once a family history, a story of migration, a story of power and national identity, and an homage to filmmaking. Both films recall the Russian director Dziga Vertov’s 1929 classic documentary Man with a Movie Camera in that they are city symphonies, films that produce complex truths about a particular urban space by weaving together images and narrative fragments from the lives of its longtime residents.

Film Review, Latin American Dreaming, A Neoliberal Vision for Retirement by Kristi M. Wilson and Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli

Film Review:  Latin American Dreaming, A Neoliberal Vision for Retirement

by Kristi M. Wilson and Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli
Anayansi Prado Paraíso for Sale. (United States/Panama, 2011)

Paraíso for Sale, directed by Anayansi Prado (also the director of Maid in America, 2005, and Children in No Man’s Land, 2008), treats the topic of Canadian and American retirees’ looking to stretch their dollars, buy second homes, and unwind in the sun by relocating (often permanently) to the Caribbean. It presents ample evidence of the looting of prime real estate in the Caribbean, where international corporations disembark with billions of dollars, pressure the locals to sell their land, and entice politicians not to enforce the law or, worse, to break it.

Film Review, You Never Know What You Are Filming: Art, Mentorship, and States of Siege by Krisiti M. Wilson

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“You Never Know What You Are Filming”
Art, Mentorship, and States of Siege
by Kristi M. Wilson

Miguel Ángel Vidaurre, Marker ’72: Cartography of a Faceless Filmmaker. Chile, 2012

Film Review, Solutions from Below: Pedagogical Documentaries and Praxis by Kristi M. Wilson and Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli

:::::: Film Review ::::::

Solutions from Below: Pedagogical Documentaries and Praxis
by Kristi M. Wilson and Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli

Alejandro Ramírez Anderson, Tierralismo: Stories from a Cooperative Farm, 2013
José Cohen, H2Omx, 2013

Film Review, Force and Meaning Political Hauntings in Two Contemporary Brazilian Films

Film Review: Force and Meaning Political Hauntings in Two Contemporary Brazilian Films

By Kristi M. Wilson

According to Avery Gordon, sociological hauntings can take a range of forms, from lost personal artifacts to decaying archival material to people living in the wake of dispossession and repression.

Film Review, On the Decay of the Art of Going to the Movies By Kristi M. Wilson

Figure 1. Jorge in the Cinemateca lobby (Photo Cinekdoque).

On the Decay of the Art of Going to the Movies 
 By Kristi M. Wilson

Federico Veiroj La Vida Útil, Uruguay/Spain, 2010
In their imaginations they saw the cinema as a total and complete representation of reality; they saw in a trice the reconstruction of a perfect illusion of the outside world in sound, color, and relief.
 —Andre Bazin

It is in the nature of analogical worlds to provoke a yearning for the past. . . . The digital will wants to change the world. 
—D. N. Rodowick

Meet LAP Editor Kristi M. Wilson, Soka University of America

Meet LAP Editor Kristi M. Wilson, Soka University of America

Kristi M. Wilson received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 1999 in Comparative Literature and has since then authored many publications among them Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema (co-edited by Laura E. Ruberto, Wayne State University Press, 2007), an Introduction to The Satyricon of Petronius (Barnes and Nobles, 2006) and several articles and reviews for academic journals such as Screen, the Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, Signs, Literature/Film Quarterly, and others.

Shortly after earning her Ph.D., Wilson was the recipient of a UC Berkeley Summer Research Institute Fellowship and a UC Irvine, Humanities Research Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship. She the went to Stanford as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities in the Humanities Program in 2000 where she taught several interdisciplinary humanities courses. She joined the Stanford Program in Writing and Rhetoric faculty in 2004 where she taught until coming to SUA in 2008.

Her teaching and research interests include classics (Greek tragedy, comedy, oratory, satire, epic poetry), gender studies, philosophy, literature, theater, and film studies. While at SFSU, she wrote and directed a musical adaptation of Euripides' little know tragedy The Phoenician Women called Tanguedia. Lyrics for the songs were set to "golden age" tango classics and the play was set in 1930s Buenos Aires. The musical was performed in two different productions at SF State University and in the Castro district of San Francisco.

At Stanford she founded and directed the Stanford Film Lab (http://filmlab.stanford.edu/), a student-based group that supports the development of links between visual, oral and written rhetoric in the form of documentary film. Wilson was also a founding member of the Bay Area documentary film collective Cine Campesino, which produced two short documentary, films about rural communities in Honduras and created an international Latin American film festival. Some of her film and television work has appeared on the syndicated television show Latin Eyes.

Film Review, Latin American Dreaming. A Neoliberal Vision for Retirement.

Film Review: Latin American Dreaming. A Neoliberal Vision for Retirement
by Kristi M. Wilson and Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli
Anayansi Prado, Paraíso for Sale. United States/Panama, 2011

Paraíso for Sale, directed by Anayansi Prado (also the director of Maid in America, 2005, and Children in No Man’s Land, 2008), treats the topic of Canadian and American retirees’ looking to stretch their dollars, buy second homes, and unwind in the sun by relocating (often permanently) to the Caribbean.

Film Review: 'La vida útil' ('A Useful Life') by Kristi Wilson

On the Decay of the Art of Going to the Movies

by Kristi M. Wilson

1. Federico Veiroj, La Vida Útil, Uruguay/Spain, 2010

In their imaginations they saw the cinema as a total and complete representation of reality; they saw in a trice the reconstruction of a perfect illusion of the outside world in sound, color, and relief.  ~Andre Bazin 

It is in the nature of analogical worlds to provoke a yearning for the past...The digital will wants to change the world. ~D. N. Rodowick

'La vida útil' ('A Useful Life') is simultaneously a cinephile’s dream picture, in its stylized look back at the history of cinema, and a biting satire about the fact that in the digital age of reproduction even the art of filmmaking has lost its aura. Uruguayan film buffs will recognize the film enthusiast and regular film festival patron Jorge Jellinek as the film’s central protagonist, Jorge, and the legendary film critic and real-life Cinemateca director Manuel Martínez Carril as a version of himself. Veiroj’s film captures the dying urban experience of going to the neighborhood movie theater—a collective encounter with celluloid and film history that, all over the world, is slowly but surely being replaced by private, digital, on-demand, and Hollywood multiplex practices of viewing. In this dark comedy about one man’s attempt to save Montevideo’s Cinemateca, an independent theater he has managed for 25 years, we get a glimpse of the many traditions that have helped shape the New Latin American cinema, a distinct film movement of which La vida útil can be considered a recent shining example.

Film Review: Latin American Dreaming

Film Review:  Latin American Dreaming, A Neoliberal Vision for Retirement

by Kristi M. Wilson and Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli
Anayansi Prado Paraíso for Sale. (United States/Panama, 2011)

Paraíso for Sale, directed by Anayansi Prado (also the director of Maid in America, 2005, and Children in No Man’s Land, 2008), treats the topic of Canadian and American retirees’ looking to stretch their dollars, buy second homes, and unwind in the sun by relocating (often permanently) to the Caribbean. It presents ample evidence of the looting of prime real estate in the Caribbean, where international corporations disembark with billions of dollars, pressure the locals to sell their land, and entice politicians not to enforce the law or, worse, to break it.

Film Review: Migration, Regional Traditions

Film Review:  Migration, Regional Traditions, and the Intricacy of Documentary Representation in Cuates de Australia and La chica del sur

172 Film Review:  Migration, Regional Traditions, and the Intricacy of Documentary Representation in Cuates de Australia and La chica del sur
by: Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli, Everardo González, Cuates de Australia (Drought).
Mexico, 2012 José Luis García La chica del sur (The Girl from the South). Argentina, 2012

 Approaches to telling a story are, of course, abundant. Latin American filmmakers borrow from all kinds of artistic traditions—literature, pop music, the plastic arts, home movies, etc. What makes this borrowing both draining and stimulating is that the web offers an excess of examples to draw from. Further, digital production and online distribution are cultivating a new kinship among filmmakers, visual traditions, and viewers across the world. This is a daunting realization that the current crop of young filmmakers is trying to grapple with. Two recent documentary films from Mexico and Argentina bring the topic of social and cultural migration into focus, giving international audiences the opportunity to enter otherwise inaccessible worlds. Cuates de Australia (Drought) from Mexico and La chica del sur (The Girl from the South) from Argentina display contrasting approaches to portraying the hardships of relocation.