Early Cinema and Modernity

Cinema Journal, 2000

IdeAs, 2016

Norsk medietidsskrift

HoMER, 2021

Paper presented at the HoMER online conference, may 2021.The presentation was later revised, translated to Spanish and published as FREIRE, Rafael de Luna, "Colegas norteamericanos y europeos: ¿qué no hay de nuevo en la New Cinema History desde un punto de vista que no es el de ustedes? In: Clara Kriger e Nicolás Poppe (orgs.). Salas, negocios y públicos de cine en Latinoamérica, 1896- 1960. Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2023.

1996

2018

The Cultura de la Pantalla network consists of an international group of film, media and communication researchers in (Latin) America (Mexico, Colombia, US) and Europe (Belgium, Spain) collaborating in a series of multi-method longitudinal studies on urban cinema cultures in the Spanish language world. The network is writing ‘new cinema histories’ with a focus on exhibition, programming and audience experiences. First we briefly look back at the development of the network and its roots in The Enlightened City project. Then the conceptual framework that inspires it, new cinema history, is defined and the basic three part model is explained, with its central research questions and methods. In a last part, preliminary results from one of the case studies are complemented with reflections on the overall goal of the network, i.e. to present local, national, regional and cross-continental comparative studies on historical cinema cultures.

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 2018

In recent years, the death of cinema has become an anxious critical and popular commonplace. This article examines this problem through a series of contem­porary South American film s and film projects by critically-acclaimed directors Esteban Sapir and Federico León (Argentina), Federico Veiroj (Uruguay), and Eduardo Coutinho (Brazil), all o f which contend with cinema' s status as a late or eclipsed medium. While aesthetically divergent, their film s share a desire to stage cinema' s lateness through two key tropes: architecture and modes o f transport. Through mise-en-scene, framing, and montage, as well as through attentive­ ness to cinema' s shifting processes o f circulation and reception, they construct a hauntology o f the medium' s promises, in particular the mid-century modernist utopia o fa democratic cinephilia as a privileged mode o f spatial-temporal travel. Ultimately, I suggest the ways in which contemporary South American film of­fers us a unique position from which to explore the global debates on cinema' s ostensible demise as both medium and institution.