SPAN 313 Latin American Film and Culture

This course offers students the opportunity to analyze films that have emerged in Latin America (e.g. Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru) as well as in the United States in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Many of the visual works studied treat significant contemporary issues in Latin America, such as the representation of history, questions of identity and alterity, questions of race and ethnicity, globalization, authority, the construction of class and gender in society. Emphasis will be placed on studying films within the social historical and cultural contexts of the material they treat and current critical theories. Specifically, this course is a critical survey of the representation of Latin America with representative examples from different historical periods (beginning with the pre-Columbian and Colonial periods followed by the 19th and 20th Centuries). The goals of the course are to understand how film as a medium has functioned historically and aesthetically in its representations of different sectors of society.