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In the 1990s, three Mexican-born filmmakers, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, and Alejandro G. Iñárritu, began careers that would see them directing films in Mexico, the US, and Europe. The three filmmakers are known for incorporating a broad spectrum of genres and aesthetic traditions from world cinema into their own films. Despite their internationalism, scholars and critics have tended to emphasize their national identity, viewing their films as either intrinsically Mexican or not Mexican enough. I argue that their films reflect multiple national identities and address what it means to live in a global community constituted by a plurality of cultural perspectives. This dissertation reads these auteurs as constructing their films as sites of dialogue between different identities, enabling their work to appeal to global audiences. I also understand these filmmakers as being in conversation with each other through shared themes that articulate specific social scenarios while remaining broad enough to resonate with audiences around the world. Chapter 1 examines Cuarón’s Sólo con tu pareja (1991), del Toro’s Cronos (1993), and Iñárritu’s Amores perros (2000). I read the directors’ thematization of precarity, alienation, and abjection as resonating with audiences in Mexico and the US who experienced the jarring effects of neoliberalism. Chapter 2 discusses Cuarón’s A Little Princess (1995) and del Toro’s Mimic (1997), which I read as sharing a theme of dislocation that spoke to American, Indian, and Latin American societies that were being transformed at the end of the Cold War. Chapter 3 explores how del Toro, Cuarón, and Iñárritu responded to the post-9/11 political environment in Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Children of Men (2006), and Babel (2006). Through their thematic concern with chaos and order, these films spoke to viewers overwhelmed by war, the torture and detainment of terrorist suspects, mass surveillance, harsh immigration policies, and the looming threat of terrorism itself. / 2024-11-14T00:00:00Z

Through a group of films from the late 60s and 70s which have been totally obliterated in the canonical studies about Spanish film due to their low technical quality and apparent triviality, this study focuses on their cultural impact, overwhelming production and extending consume. This group of films, belonging to a genre called “sexy-celtiberic” comedies, suggests and presents a series of social, psychological and sexual behaviors very important in the dynamics of the configuration of a national ideology. The evolution of the treatment of the female body and her sexuality in this filmic genre provides a very challenging field of study within a social, economic, political and cultural context. The use of the female body in this cultural media serves to shape, in a controlled way, the national identity of a society under a dictatorial regime based on a traditionalist moral ideology that is being undermined by a cultural “other.” The sexual and national economy can not work in a simple opposition to the new and foreign, but, as we can see in these comedies, a play of acceptance and repulse comes into action. The female body is one of the pillars on which this national transformation into democracy is supported and where the text of this new national configuration is inscribed. The national discourse is inscribed in the female body, a foreign one in the comedies of the late 60s and a national one in the 70s, to pertain a heterosexual economy whose aims are matrimony and reproduction. However, the Spanish female body needs to contain certain sexual actions, very far away from the moral duty imposed on her, to save the national welfare (that is to say, the male Spaniard) from the foreign influences. Women become a non-historic and pure signifier that can be moved along a chain of signifying and can be furnished with different meanings within a national discourse. Her use and role are going to be present in the long and difficult road to Spanish democracy.

Own to a long tradition in Spanish America, the Venezuelan feminine chronicle production takes a greater consideration and interest in the last decades. In this sense we present Elisa Lerner who constitutes an indispensable presence when we need to talk about Venezuelan chronicle. This research is directed to the chronicle corpus of that writer in order to establish a tentative pattern, necessary for its study an analysis. That pattern is conformed by five groups, literary chronicle, mass media chronicle, sexual gender chronicle, cinema chronicle, and autobiographies chronicle. Each one of them can be analysed independently and represent a particular study object. However, we have verified that lernereanas chronicles have an axis which unified them such as the concern for women in the modernization process, which has Hollywood cinema influence. In particular we take cinema chronicles, because in them we have observed that the life in the United States, as it is presented on the screen, is a systematic reference for Lerner when she speaks about women, modernity, and their compulsive conflicts. The cinema then is a metaphor in order to do cultural critic when we refer to more problematical aspects of Venezuelan culture and society. At the same time, she comments, socially and ironically, about the North American society and the strategies related to feminine aspects in that area. We analysed some of this chronicles in a cinema temporal curve in Hollywood from 1920's to 1960's. When Lerner filters her critic through Hollywood, she readapted herself inside the masculine hegemonic speech without using the political speech of their like kind. This cinema mediation allows offering her point of view in the face of modernity, the feminine liberation, the Venezuelan society, and the international politics without being put apart from the circle she belonged at that time. While many of the intellectual people enjoyed a privileged situation own to their hegemonic situation, Lerner's writing continued constantly and secretly emergent in the Venezuelan society.

The purpose of this thesis is to take a more profound and nuanced look into the effects of diversity in transmedia storytelling (also known as transmedia narrative or multiplatform storytelling) on society, more specifically, how the representation in these stories affect the minority groups that interact with transmedia. This thesis investigates the depiction of minority groups in transmedia storytelling and the influence of identifiable characters and plotlines. The research and following interviews I have engaged in will encapsulate into a screenplay set in a fictional court that offers the discourse of "forced diversity" within the transmedia narrative: whether or not this exists and is necessary for the success of telling a story across multiple platforms. By exploring the human condition in both the documentary and the screenplay, I conclude in a critical reflection accompanying the creative works that the inclusion of minorities in transmedia is vital to its success. When creators include minorities in transmedia, audiences can draw connections that are more personal to them; they can participate in the symbolic "hero's journey" with the character in the story. By further diversifying transmedia works, intellectual properties' appeal is widened to a broader audience, allowing for potential success, both economically and socially, that transcends both domestic and international borders. I further conclude that failures with diversification efforts have detrimental socioeconomic consequences that could impact both transmedia and its audiences.

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No description available.