2-week break!

Queridos LAIFSers,

just sharing some basic information from last Wednesday's meeting:

1- we've decided to take a 2-week break. So please spread the word: there are no movies this week or the next one! :(

2- We'll start a new month (and a new theme Art & Music!!! Eba!) Wednesday 16/09!

3- Needless to say, we haven't decided yet which movies we'll be screening. So please send your suggestions!

4- We also are trying to expand our geo-cinematographic horizons and, for the first time ever, have a non-Brazilian, non-Colombian, non-Argentinian, non-Bolivian, Non-Chilean month! So, if possible, send movies from one of the 16 other Latin American countries. (Aline's research on the AV library could be very useful)

This week (26 August) LAIFS is proud to present:

76-89-03 (2000)Directors: Cristian Bernard & Flavio NardiniArgentina.
The first Argentinian movie without a message...
Dino, Salvador and Paco have been longing to spend a Night with top actress Wanda Manera. The opportunity comes to them when they find a bag full with cocaine during failed Paco's bachelor party. The plan of selling the drug to pay for Wanda will lead them through Buenos Aires' underground and a series of odd characters. 3 friends with very different and stereotyped personalities, a classic Torino car, the underground world, sex. Great movie with lots of funny situations. Totally different from regular "committed" Argentinian movie. Although almost none of the actors are know for general audience, the performances are extraordinary. A good description of the Argentine way (IMDb.com)
Ispace, Wednesday, 26 Aug. 6pm
Level 4, Kate Edger Information Commons, 2 Alfred St.
Sessions strictly limited to UoA staff and students

The Latin Pacific: Latin American Music at the Three Corners of the Polynesian Triangle

New Zealand Centre for Latin American Studies (NZCLAS)
and Latin American and Iberian Film Society (LAIFS)

present

The Latin Pacific: Latin American Music at the Three Corners of the Polynesian Triangle

Thursday August 27, 6-8pm
ARTS 1, Room 616
Followed by discussion, drinks and nibbles

Dr Dan Bendrups
Department of Music
University of Otago

The contemporary Pacific reflects diverse processes of cultural crossover and hybridity. In music, it is often the case that island cultures have developed in conjunction with cultural influences brought by a specific colonial or neo-colonial power, and discourses of music and identity often reflect the enduring relationship between colonist and colonised. While many Latin American nations occupy a place on the Pacific Rim, Latin America played only a small role in the colonisation of the Pacific, represented by the neo-colonial Chilean possession of Easter Island since 1888. Nevertheless, Latin American musical influence can be found throughout the Pacific, making an important if obscure contribution to local music cultures.

This presentation provides an overview of three examples of Latin American musical influence in the Pacific, drawing on case studies from the three points of the Polynesian triangle: Rapanui, Hawai‘i and Aotearoa. As the only Latin American territorial possession in Polynesia, Rapanui presents a unique history of local adaptation of Chilean musical influences, reflected in both traditional and contemporary music repertoires. In contrast, Hawai‘i historically received waves of migration from Mexico and Puerto Rico, and these migrants forged a musical community within the wider scope of Hawaiian performance cultures. Their cultural presence has been reinforced through the arrival of new migrants, and by the integration of Hawai‘i into mainstream America where Latin music and cultural influences are abundant. Like Hawai‘i Aotearoa has a long association with American mass culture, and Latin influences have a long history within jazz and popular music repertoires. However, it is only recently that Aotearoa has begun to receive substantial migration from Latin America – especially Brazil – and these new migrants have made immediate impact in live music, especially through their collaborations with Māori and Pasifika musicians in ‘world music’ contexts. These diverse processes of musical migration and adaptation provide an entry point to understanding the little-researched area of cultural exchange between Latin America and the Pacific, reflecting both historical antecedents and innovations in contemporary performance culture.

Post-Trauma - This Week (19th August)

Previous Films for Post-Trauma Month at LAIFS

Pertinent seminar for Trauma/Post-trauma month

DEPARTMENT OF FILM TELEVISION AND MEDIA STUDIES SEMINAR SERIES SEMESTER TWO 2009

THURSDAY 13th August, 4.15 PMROOM 501, PATRICK HANAN ROOM, LEVEL 5, ARTS 2 BUILDING

Dr. Allan Cameron (Australian Film, Television and Radio School):History in Real Time: National Trauma and Narrative Synchrony in United 93 and Out of the Blue.

This paper explores the use of 'real-time' narrative aesthetics to represent historical events in two recent films: United 93 (Paul Greengrass, US, 2006) and Out of the Blue (Robert Sarkies, New Zealand, 2006). Both of these films recount stories of collective and national trauma (a terrorist attack and a mass murder, respectively) that originally unfolded on live television. Through parallel, multi-stranded storylines, these films attempt not only to recapture television's real-time narrative effect but also to exceed it by striving for a type of narrational and stylistic 'innocence' that marks the events depicted as pre-televisual.

Drawing upon Paul Ricoeur's notion that historical narrative effects a 'fusion of horizons' between past and present, and Mary Ann Doane's linking of contingency, catastrophe and the liveness of television, this paper will argue that these 'real time' narratives of national trauma enact a fraught negotiation between televisual and cinematic modes of narration, exposing the technological underpinnings of narrative. Ultimately, United 93 and Out of the Blue explore the notion that gaps in historical knowledge are also in effect failures of technology. The foreshortened time frames of these films point towards a radically truncated and tenuous fusion of horizons, in which national identity appears on the one hand as absolute but on the other, paradoxically, as contingent upon just-in-time technological interventions.

ALLAN CAMERON is a Researcher and Lecturer at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, and Honorary Fellow in Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is author of Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan 2008)

PLEASE JOIN US FOR A DRINK AFTER THE SEMINAR.