El compromiso ideológico y político en la crítica cinematográfica de Silvia Mistral

En este artículo se aborda la dedicación de Silvia Mistral a la crítica cinematográfica, ámbito en el que destacó dentro del ejercicio de su labor periodística, en revistas como Popular Film, Films Selectos, Proyector o Nuevo Cinema —de la que fue también secretaria—, donde fue responsable de numerosas crónicas cinematográficas y reportajes sobre el mundo del celuloide y sus protagonistas. La figura de esta escritora ha sido merecedora de la atención de los críticos, que se han centrado fundamentalmente en las obras que publicó en el exilio, en México, pero falta todavía destacar su papel como pionera de la crítica de cine. Este trabajo pone una primera piedra en este sentido y contribuye a dar valor a un autora polifacética y comprometida política y socialmente.

Post-Horror

Horror’s longstanding reputation as a popular but culturally denigrated genre has been challenged by a new wave of films mixing arthouse minimalism with established genre conventions. Variously dubbed “elevated horror” and “post-horror” in popular film criticism, texts such as The Babadook, It Follows, The Witch, It Comes at Night, Get Out, The Invitation, Hereditary, Midsommar, A Ghost Story, and mother! represent an emerging nexus of taste, politics, and style that has often earned outsized acclaim from high-minded critics and populist rejection by wider audiences. Post-Horror is the first full-length study of one of the most important and divisive movements in twenty-first-century horror cinema. It argues that the affect produced by these films’ minimalist aesthetic has fueled taste-based disagreements between professional film critics, genre fans, and more casual viewers about whether the horror genre can or should be upheld as more than a populist entertainment form, especially as the genre turned away from the post-9/11 debates about graphic violence that consumed the first decade of the twenty-first century. The book thus explores the aesthetic qualities, historical precursors, affective resonances, and thematic concerns of this emerging cycle by situating these texts within revived debates between over the genre’s larger artistic, cultural, and entertainment value. Chapters include thematic analyses of trauma, gaslighting, landscape, existential dread, and political identity across a range of films straddling the line between art-horror and multiplex fare since approximately 2013.

“Chitthi aayi hai”: Diasporic Sensibilities, Memory and Nostalgia

Nostalgia has been a popular concept deployed to examine diasporic narratives. This paper is an examination of the song “Chitthi aayi hai” (“the letter has come from the homeland”) from the popular film Naam (1986) looking at how nostalgia is constructed and recreated. The song is about ‘a letter from the homeland’ gesturing at pain, memory, what has been lost and what is being achieved in the hostland. Through scholarly references to nostalgia, Bollywood music and diasporic theory, this study focuses on the role and function of nostalgia in Indian diasporic narrative practices.

Race, Celebrity and Fashion: Anna May Wong in Spanish Magazines of the 1930s

Anna May Wong was the most widely known Asian American film actress of her generation, achieving unprecedented success in the Hollywood and European industry. When she traveled to Spain in 1935 to perform at the Teatro Casablanca in Madrid, she was already an international star and her visit garnered extensive coverage from the Spanish press, particularly film magazines of the period. These magazines provided their largely female readership with access to Hollywood stars such as Wong, whose celebrity was the site of complex negotiations of race, ethnicity and citizenship in the United States and Europe during the 1930s. Publications such as Cinegramas and Popular Film represented Wong for Spanish readers who, although removed from the particularities of race politics in the United States, were nevertheless intrigued by her ‘exotic allure’, positioned as she was at the intersection of racial otherness and Hollywood glamour. By reading Wong in Spanish magazines from the 1930s, this article considers how Spanish readers might have used these representations as a tool for negotiating their own identities as cosmopolitan at a moment when Spain was often perceived as existing on the cultural margins of Western Europe.