Paul Julian Smith

Y Tu Mamá También (2001), an intelligent and sensual road movie directed by Alfonso Cuarón and co-written by him and his brother Carlos, is both an acclaimed feature by a director who would go on to win Oscars and a box office success abroad and in its native Mexico, where it was the biggest grossing local film of all time. Its teenage protagonists Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna went on to be major stars of global cinema.

Yet on its release the film was vilified by established Mexican critics as a coarse comedy and 'Penthouse fantasy' of youthful lust for an older woman. Paul Julian Smith's lucid study of the film argues that Y Tu Mamá También not only addresses with playful seriousness such major issues as gender, race, class, and space, which are yet more urgent now than they were on its release; but that the film's apparently casual aesthetic masks a sophisticated audiovisual style, one which brings together popular genre film and auteurist experiment.

Smith suggests Y Tu Mamá También remains an example for world cinema of how a very local film can connect with a global audience that is ignorant of such niceties. Combining production and distribution history, based on unexplored material held in Mexico City archives, with close textual analysis, Smith makes an argument for Cuarón's film as an enduring masterpiece that hides in plain sight as an ephemeral teen movie.

This book offers a new perspective via visual culture of the reimagining of history for contemporary Spanish media audiences. It gives close readings of major recent texts in a number of media (theater, cinema, television, and streaming) which have yet to receive scholarly attention and are closely connected to each other. And it stresses the intermediality of the visual by calling attention to connections between those media and others such as painting. From Picasso to the Javis and from the classic serial to Netflix, this book shows how Spanish history is radically reimagined through recent visual culture.

This book focusses on gender and the audio-visual landscape of Mexico since 2010, examining popular culture as expressed in the still distinct but rapidly converging media forms of cinema, television, and streaming platforms. It tracks how changes in producers and genres coincide with changes in gender representations and engages with depictions of feminism, women's sexuality, masculinity, and teen homosexuality. It aims to move beyond the art, auteur or specialist film that is vaunted by film festivals but little seen by Mexicans at home, focussing instead on a wider world of media content and practices available in Mexico itself. Close attention is also paid to the social media footprint of the productions studied and the way it is used for promotion and engagement with the target audience. The book proposes a new approach to audio-visual studies, combining textual analysis with field surveys and the useof industrial sources perhaps unfamiliar to scholars in Anglo-American Hispanism and Latin American media studies in the UK and USA

Multiplatform Media in Mexico is the first book to treat the exciting, interconnected fields of cinema, television, and internet in Mexico over the last decade, fields that combine to be called multiplatform media. Combining industrial analysis of a major audiovisual field at a time of growth and change with close readings of significant texts on all screens, acclaimed author Paul Julian Smith deftly details these new audiovisual trends.

The book includes perspectives on local reporting on the ground, as covered in the chapter documenting media response to the 2017 earthquake. And, for the first time in this field, the book draws throughout on star studies, tracing the distinct profiles of actors who migrate from one medium to another. As a whole, Smith’s analyses illustrate the key movements in screen media in one of the world’s largest media and cultural producing nations. These perspectives connect to and enrich scholarship across Latin American, North American, and global cases.

Television Drama in Spain and Latin America addresses two major topics within current cultural, media, and television studies: the question of fictional genres and that of transnational circulation. While much research has been carried out on both TV formats and remakes in the English-speaking world, almost nothing has been published on the huge and dynamic Spanish-speaking sector. This book discusses and analyses series since 2000 from Spain (in both Spanish and Catalan), Mexico, Venezuela, and (to a lesser extent) the US, employing both empirical research on production and distribution and textual analysis of content. The three genres examined are horror, biographical series, and sports-themed dramas; the three examples of format remakes are of a period mystery (Spain, Mexico), a romantic comedy (Venezuela, US), and a historical epic (Catalonia, Spain).

Queer Mexico: Cinema and Television since 2000 provides critical analysis of both mainstream and independent audiovisual works, many of them little known, produced in Mexico since the turn of the twenty-first century. In the book, author Paul Julian Smith aims to tease out the symbiotic relationship between culture and queerness in Mexico. Smith begins with the year 2000 because of the political shift that happened within the government—the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was voted out of national office after over seventy years in power. Judicial and social changes for LGBT Mexicans came in the wake of what was known at the time as simply "the change" ("el cambio") at the start of the millennium, bringing about an increased visibility and acknowledgment of the LGBT community.

Divided into five chapters, Queer Mexico demonstrates the diversity of both representation and production processes in the Mexican film and television industry. It attempts also to reconstruct a queer cultural field for Mexico that incorporates multiple genres and techniques. The first chapter looks at LGBT festivals, porn production, and a web-distributed youth drama, claimed by its makers to be the first wholly gay series made in Mexico. The second chapter examines selected features and shorts by Mexico’s sole internationally distributed art house director, Julián Hernández. The third chapter explores the rising genre of documentary on transgender themes. The fourth chapter charts the growing trend of a gay, lesbian, or trans-focused mainstream cinema. The final chapter addresses the rich and diverse history of queer representation in Mexico’s dominant television genre and, arguably, national narrative: the telenovela. The book also includes an extensive interview with gay auteur Julián Hernández.

The first book to come out of the Queer Screens series, Queer Mexico is a groundbreaking monograph for anyone interested in media or LGBT studies, especially as it relates to the culture of Latin America.

Though unjustly neglected by English-language audiences, Spanish film and television not only represent a remarkably influential and vibrant cultural industry; they are also a fertile site of innovation in the production of “transmedia” works that bridge narrative forms. In Spanish Lessons, Paul Julian Smith provides an engaging exploration of visual culture in an era of collapsing genre boundaries, accelerating technological change, and political-economic tumult. Whether generating new insights into the work of key figures like Pedro Almodóvar, comparing media depictions of Spain’s economic woes, or giving long-overdue critical attention to quality television series, Smith’s book is a consistently lively and accessible cultural investigation.

Over the last decade Spain and Mexico have both produced an extraordinary wealth of television drama. Drawing on both national practices of production and reception and international theories of textual analysis this book offers the first study of contemporary quality TV drama in two countries where television has displaced cinema as the creative medium that shapes the national narrative. As dramatized societies, Spain and Mexico are thus at once reflected and refracted by the new series on the small screen.

Este libro es fruto del 'Cuarto Coloquio Internacional de Cine Iberoamericano: géneros cinematográficos (2): la comedia y el melodrama' celebrado en el Graduate Center de la City University of New York, los días 12 y 13 de junio de 2013 y los contribuyentes son de España, Francia, México, y EEUU. Las ponencias leídas en ese evento han sido rigurosamente reelaboradas para resultar en los artículos científicos que se reúnen aquí. La diversidad es la palabra clave del volumen, diversidad en los campos geográfico, histórico, teórico, mediático, y (huelga decirlo) genérico. Los contribuyentes abarcan Madrid, México y Ecuador, y los años veinte, setenta, ochenta y dos mil. Adoptan enfoques tanto historicistas como filosóficos para abordar textos de cine, televisión e Internet. Es más, esos textos audiovisuales, objetos de estudio de nuestro equipo de investigadores, al margen de tener ciertas semejanzas (por ejemplo, la presencia de los temas del turismo y de la juventud en más de un artículo), demuestran una variedad deslumbrante: desde la farsa, al parecer frívola e intranscendente, hasta el drama más intenso y sangriento. El título del volumen hace referencia al "audiovisual" y no al "cine", dado que varios artículos suponen un contexto multimediático de producción, distribución o recepción para los textos que tratan. El libro atestigua entonces la creciente convergencia entre cine, televisión e Internet. Y aunque los trabajos tienden a ser transmediáticos, son también transnacionales. Algunos autores tratan explícitamente las relaciones entre textos de procedencia multinacional; todos dan por sentado que la concepción de un cine exclusivamente nacional ya no sirve al examinar el audiovisual hispanoamericano.

In the last decade, Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar has grown from critical darling of the film circuit scene to mainstream success. Frequently comic, often deadly serious, always visually glorious, his recent films range from the Academy Award–winning drama Talk to Her to the 2011 horror film The Skin I Live In. Though they are ambitious and varied in style, each is a distinctive innovation on the themes that have defined his work.

Desire Unlimited is the classic film-by-film assessment of Almodóvar's oeuvre, now updated to include his most recent work. Still the only study of its kind in English, it vigorously confirms its original argument that beneath Almodóvar's genius for comedy and visual pleasure lies a filmmaker whose work deserves to be taken with the utmost seriousness.

Mexican cinema is booming today, a decade after the international successes of Amores perros and Y tu mamá también. Mexican films now display a wider range than any comparable country, from art films to popular genre movies, and boasting internationally renowned directors like Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Guillermo del Toro. At the same time, television has broadened its output, moving beyond telenovelas to produce higher-value series and mini-series. Mexican TV now stakes a claim to being the most dynamic and pervasive national narrative.

This new book by Paul Julian Smith is the first to examine the flourishing of audiovisual fiction in Mexico since 2000, considering cinema and TV together. It covers much material previously unexplored and engages with emerging themes, including violence, youth culture, and film festivals. The book includes reviews of ten films released between 2001 and 2012 by directors who are both established (Maryse Sistach, Carlos Reygadas) and new (Jorge Michel Grau, Michael Rowe, Paula Markovitch). There is also an appendix that includes interviews carried out by the author in 2012 with five audiovisual professionals: a feature director, a festival director, an exhibitor, a producer, and a TV screenwriter.

Mexican Screen Fiction will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars and essential reading for anyone interested in one of the most vibrant audiovisual industries in the world today.

This book is the first to explore the interaction of three media in contemporary Spain. Focusing on some of the best known and most important books, feature films, and television series in the country (including novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina, director Pedro Almodóvar, and the Spanish version of telenovela Ugly Betty), it addresses three pairs of linked issues central to Hispanic studies and beyond: history and memory, authority and society, and genre and transitivity. Much of the material is very recent and thus as yet unstudied. The book also focuses on the representation of gender, sexuality, and transnationalism in these texts. Drawing on approaches from both the humanities and social sciences it combines close readings of key texts with the analysis of production processes, media institutions, audiences, and reception.

This book argues that cinema and television in Spain only make sense when considered together as twin vehicles for screen fiction. The Spanish audiovisual sector is now one of the most successful in the world, with feature films achieving wider distribution in foreign markets than nations with better-known cinematic traditions and newly innovative TV formats, already dominant at home, now widely exported. Beyond the industrial context, which has seen close convergence of the two media, this book also examines the textual evidence for crossover between cinema and television at the level of narrative and form. It gives readings of some well-known texts and discovers new or forgotten ones. For example, the book compares Almodóvar's classic feature ‘Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios’ (‘Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’) with his production company El Deseo's first venture into TV production, the 2006 series also known as ‘Mujeres’ (‘Women’). It also reclaims the lost history of female flat share comedy on Spanish TV from the 1960s to the present day. The book examines a wide range of prize-winning workplace drama on TV, from police shows, to hospital and legal series. Amenábar's ‘Mar adentro’ (‘The Sea Inside’) an Oscar-winning film on the theme of euthanasia, is contrasted with its antecedent, an episode of national network Tele 5's top-rated drama Periodistas. The book also traces the attempt to establish a Latin American genre, the telenovela, in the very different context of Spanish scheduling.

This book is the first to explore three visual media in contemporary Spain: cinema, television and the internet. It also examines cultural products in each of these media in terms of three vital themes: emotion, location and nostalgia.

The first two chapters focus on emotion. They analyze the 'emotional imperative' in a recent Almodóvar feature film and in Spanish television's top-rated period drama, and investigate the politics of affect in TV drama in the last decade. The next pair of chapters deal with location. They use cultural geography to re-read contradictory accounts of the movida (the post-Franco cultural boom) and examine an attempt to anchor a US-derived genre (the youth movie) in the urban landscape of Madrid. The fifth and sixth chapters introduce the theme of location into nostalgia. They treat the unique cases of a successful Spanish heritage movie and a contemporary Spanish thriller remade in Hollywood. The peunultimate chapter investigates electronic artists and the virtual universe, and the book ends with a look at the implications of Hispano-Mexican co-productions and the interconnectedness of economic and aesthetic cultural forms.

Any follower of Spanish cinema who turns to television finds that the locally produced programs most appreciated by both audiences and critics are as creative and original as any feature film.
This book, the first of its kind, gives close readings of TV programmes broadcast from the 1970s to the present day. They embrace drama, comedy, and talk/reality shows and are currently available on DVD. It also treats the obsessive theme of television in Almodóvar, Spain's most celebrated film director, arguing for a re-reading of his work in the light of TV studies. In addition to analysing particular programmes, this book examines TV channels, production companies, governments, and the role of the press, academy, and audience.

This accessible introduction to the exciting field of contemporary Spanish visual culture is the first of its kind. It combines cultural context with close readings of particular works.

Going beyond the field of cinema, in which Spain is an acknowledged leader, Smith examines new developments in television, where original and innovative series drama has recently blossomed. He also explores Spanish fashion, where 'classic' design is married to high tech production and distribution.

Two aspects of Spanish visual art are considered: the career of Miquel Barceló, global artist and pure painter, and Basque conceptual art which, through photography and installation, puts a new spin on international questions of gender and sexuality.

Finally, Contemporary Spanish Culture examines Catalan independent cinema and the most recent work of Spain's best known director, Pedro Almodóvar, who has resurrected a genre long considered dead: the art movie.

This innovative new book provides an ideal introduction for undergraduates and will be essential reading for those working in Hispanic studies, cultural studies, and film.

Amores Perros (2000), directed by first-time filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárittu, with its intersecting storylines and treatment of urban violence and decay, kickstarted a renaissance for Mexico's film industry. It was the first Mexican film for generations to achieve major international success, winning many awards, including the Critics' Prize at Cannes.

An edgy, complex and sometimes shocking view of life, love and death in the most populous metropolis on the planet, Amores Perros achieves the rare feat of speaking to an international audience while never oversimplifying its indigenous culture.

In the first book-length study of this remarkable film, Paul Julian Smith opens up that culture, revealing the film's relationship to television soap operas, pop music and contemporary debates about what it means to be Mexican. Having researched into the production records and interviewed key personnel, he also shows how the film came to be such a success before going on to analyse how its outstanding acting, music and cinematography combine to create 'a uniquely powerful work in world cinema'.

This book offers a radically new account of the rich and varied culture of contemporary Spain. It focuses on three intellectuals who chronicle contemporary life (including journalist Francisco Umbral); three filmmakers who engage with the many nationalisms of the Spanish state (Victor Erice, Bigas Luna, and Julio Medem); and three crucial topics that are expressed in many media (the replaying of history, the rise and fall of the city, and the practice of everyday life). Ranging from ethnographic photography to high tech architecture, from hyperrealist painting to neo-flamenco dance, this book is also the first to draw on theorists of the intellectual field, the production of space, and the arts of bricolage (Pierre Bourdieu, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel de Certeau). Refuting the charge that contemporary Spanish culture is trivial or superficial, this book argues that it is fully engaged in the aesthetic and historical project of modernity.

The Theatre of García Lorca offers radical new readings of his major plays, drawing on cultural studies, women's and gay studies, psychoanalysis, and previously unexamined archival material. It also juxtaposes Lorca with major figures such as Gregorio Marañón, Langston Hughes, André Gide, and Lluis Pasqual, enabling us to see his theater in a new light. In addition, the book presents a new psychoanalytic reading of the plays, which returns to Freud's early clinical texts.

Quevedo, who for much of his life was a nobleman politically active at court, is now remembered as one of the great writers of the Baroque era. His love poems are among the best regarded from his substantial poetic oeuvre, but he ranges also over metaphysics, mythology and satire, and there are frequent references or allusions to his deep reading from numerous languages.

Over the last decade, visibility and sexuality have become a major theme in Spanish and Cuban cinema, literature and art. Vision Machines explores this development in the light of contemporary history and recent theoretical accounts of sight by writers including Paul Virilio, Gianni Vattimo and Teresa de Lauretis.

The very visible women of Almodóvar’s cinema are Paul Julian Smith’s first subject. He shows how, in his early Dark Habits, lesbianizes the look, putting women’s pleasure at the centre of the frame, and then examines Almodóvar’s recent film, Kika, where the conflict between cinema and video is played out in the bodies of women: good, bad and ugly. Moving the focus to Cuba, Smith discussed the reception in Europe and North America of Nestor Almendro’s remarkable documentary on gays in Cuba, Improper Conduct, and traces the trial of visibility to which effeminate men were exposed. He compares Amendor’s work with the autobiography of exile novelist Reinaldo Arenas, which revels in graphic sex, and also looks at the first Cuban film with a gay theme, Gutierrez Alea’s Strawberry and Chocolate.

Smith returns to Spain to consider the response of artists and intellectuals to the public invisibility of AIDS in a country with one of the highest rates of HIV transmission in the Eurpean Union. Drawing on Anglo-American debates on the representation of AIDS, he concentrates on the one major intervention by Spanish scholars and artists, Love and Rage, and on the only figure in any medium to address AIDS in his aesthetic practice, the conceptual artist and video-maker Pepe Espaliu. He concludes with a fascinating account of Julio Medem’s pathbreaking film from 1993, The Red Squirrel, which has opened up a new approach to two formerly taboo subjects: Basque nationalism and female sexuality.

Paul Julian Smith and Emilie Bergmann

"¿Entiendes?" is literally translated as "Do you understand? Do you get it?" But those who do "get it" will also hear within this question a subtler meaning: "Are you queer? Are you one of us?" The issues of gay and lesbian identity represented by this question are explored for the first time in the context of Spanish and Hispanic literature in this groundbreaking anthology.
Combining intimate knowledge of Spanish-speaking cultures with contemporary queer theory, these essays address texts that share both a common language and a concern with lesbian, gay, and bisexual identities. Using a variety of approaches, the contributors tease the homoerotic messages out of a wide range of works, from chronicles of colonization in the Caribbean to recent Puerto Rican writing, from the work of Cervantes to that of the most outrageous contemporary Latina performance artists. This volume offers a methodology for examining work by authors and artists whose sexuality is not so much open as "an open secret," respecting, for example, the biographical privacy of writers like Gabriela Mistral while responding to the voices that speak in their writing. Contributing to an archeology of queer discourses, ¿Entiendes? also includes important studies of terminology and encoded homosexuality in Argentine literature and Caribbean journalism of the late nineteenth century.
Whether considering homosexual panic in the stories of Borges, performances by Latino AIDS activists in Los Angeles, queer lives in turn-of-the-century Havana and Buenos Aires, or the mapping of homosexual geographies of 1930s New York in Lorca’s "Ode to Walt Whitman," ¿Entiendes? is certain to stir interest at the crossroads of sexual and national identities while proving to be an invaluable resource.

This is the first book to analyze Spanish and Spanish-American literature in light of several theories of sexuality advanced since Freud. Bringing into discussion such writers as Fuentes, Neruda, Garcia Lorca, Galdos, and St. Teresa of Avila, Smith draws on critical approaches derived from Marx, Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, and French theoretical feminism (Kristeva and Irigaray). He argues that in spite of the variety of texts and theories treated, there are three broad areas of coherence or coincidence: the status of women in a male culture; the possibility of resistance to authority; and the role of the body as protagonist in that resistance.

This study, the first to apply a poststructuralist viewpoint to literature of the Spanish Golden Age, offers new insights into major texts. Beginning with a comparison of Renaissance and modern theories of discourse, the book examines lyric poetry, picaresque narrative, and drama by Góngora, Quevedo, Lope de Vega, Calderón, and Cervantes.