International Congress of Hispanism and Cinema

The International Congress of Hispanism and Cinema – VI TECMERIN academic meeting will take place from 2nd to 5th of July at the University Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M). The coordinator of the Audiovisual Studies Research Group, Margarita Ledo Andión, will screen her film Santa Liberdade (2004) on Friday 5th of July in the Doré Cinema, after the round table that closes the evente, ¿Canon o cánones sobre cine español?, which, under the moderation of Juan Carlos Ibáñez (UC3M), is composed by Josetxo Cerdán (Director Filmoteca Española), Marina Díaz (Cervantes Institute) and the GEA member José Luis Castro de Paz (USC).

Cinema and Hispanism, a happy marriage

The interest in cinema of the Hispanic studies flied has increased in the last decades, until the point of claiming that this and other audiovisual media have given a new impulse to Hispanism in the era of economic and cultural globalization. This rise of the union between Hispanic studies and cinema have been parallel to the implantation and consolidation of the cinema as university subject.

Several factors have worked out well for this union. In the first place, the reformulation of the notion of Hispanism itself, that has allowed the reduction of distances among the different cultural and geographical schools. In the second place, cinema has proved to be an useful tool for Spanish teaching. In the third place, epistemological and methodological modifications of comparative literature studies have helped the fluent combination and coexistence of this discipline with the film analysis. In the for fourth place, it is more frequent to find academic professionals in the field of cinema. Generation after generation, these academics have contributed with thesis and investigations linked to cinema since the beginning of their careers, developing a bibliography that is becoming more and more fruitful.

The cinema studies have allowed at the same time to expand the geographical possibilities of Hispanism, that has been interest in the study of the cultural production of the Iberian peninsula (including the minority languages), as well as that of the countries of Latinoamerica, the Hispanic from United States and other diasporas, giving sense to a transatrantic and global Hispanism. Cinema, with is circulation modes, has favoured intercultural communication in a world where the coupling of modernity and globalization has displaced and questioned the traditional modes of representation.

Conferences + Cinema Season

According to these idea, the Research Group TECMERIN. Television-cinema: memory, representation and industry proposes a programme with panels, debate tables and planry conference that is now available int the congress web. The theoretical expositions will be complemented with a cinema season in the Spanish Filmotec, in which Santa Liberdade is included. Goya en Burdeos (Carlos Saura, 1999), Poniente (Chus Gutiérrez, 2002), ¡Vente a Alemania, Pepe! (Pedro Lazaga, 1971) and Jamón, jamón (Bigas Luna, 1992) are the other films to be screened.