deborah shaw
Professor Deborah Shaw is Professor in Screen Studies at the University of Portsmouth. Her research interests include transnational film theory, Latin American cinema, and film and migration, and she has published widely in these areas. She is the founding co-editor of the Routledge journal Transnational Cinemas. Deborah has written articles that have been published in The Conversation The Independent, The New Zealand Herald, Newsweek, SBS, Pink News, Tranzgendr, and The Huffington Post.Deborah has spoken at many international conferences, and delivered keynote lectures in the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Germany and Colombia. She has been an invited speaker at Universities in the UK, Spain, Brazil and the United States.
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Papers by deborah shaw
The book will allow scholars and students of Latin American cinema and culture, as well as industry professionals, a deeper understanding of the emergence and impact of the filmmakers and their work, which has particular relevance for contemporary debates on feminism and postfeminism.
(pun from title stolen from Aníbal Santiago article in Chilango) –
The famous collaboration, feud and ultimate split between Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga, the screenwriter with whom he worked for his first 3 films, tells a story of creative partnerships, competing egos, working practices in the film industry, power plays and media manipulations. This paper explores these dynamics through an exploration of public statements made by both men and use them and the evolution of the relationship to ask: What we can draw from this beyond gossipy titillation? What can it tell us about public discourses of auteurism and its construction? What is the role of the screenwriter and his/her chances of achieving an auteurist status?
Deborah Shaw
Forthcoming 2019 Latin American Cinema: Film Funding, Film Festivals, Debates and Aesthetics (in Spanish ) Estudios hispánicos en el contexto global“ Peter Lang, Matthias Hausmann and Jörg Türschmann (Eds.)
English language version
Abstract
This chapter will consider the new funding landscapes for Latin American filmmakers with a focus on European funding bodies and will ask whether these have created new forms of dependence or new partnerships. European social funding bodies aligned with film festivals, have been instrumental through their support in developing the careers of some of the most high profile auteurist contemporary Latin American filmmakers. Latin American directors have been favoured by the Dutch Hubert Bals Fund, the German World Cinema Fund, and Cinéfondation a programme linked to the Cannes film festival.
This chapter will outline key debates relating to the political and social implications of this new funding landscape. It will examine the arguments of those who are critical and those who are supportive of these developments and drawing on examples of films from the above-mentioned directors will ask whether relationships between funding bodies and filmmakers create new forms of dependence or new partnerships. In addition, the chapter identifies categories of films that are funded (slow or poetic cinema, popular art cinema and social realist/ cinema), and examines the cinematic languages of these categories.
Deborah Shaw
Forthcoming 2019 Latin American Cinema: Film Funding, Film Festivals, Debates and Aesthetics (in Spanish ) , Peter Lang, Matthias Hausmann and Jörg Türschmann (Eds.)
English language version
Abstract
This chapter will consider the new funding landscapes for Latin American filmmakers with a focus on European funding bodies and will ask whether these have created new forms of dependence or new partnerships. European social funding bodies aligned with film festivals, have been instrumental through their support in developing the careers of some of the most high profile auteurist contemporary Latin American filmmakers. Latin American directors have been favoured by the Dutch Hubert Bals Fund, the German World Cinema Fund, and Cinéfondation a programme linked to the Cannes film festival.
This short article analyses the role of animation in narrating the experience of refugees and asylum seekers from the POV of an integrated Afghan-Danish gay man. It also considers the soft power of film and highlights how the Danish government in 2022 has an anti-asylum policy in contrast to its approach in the 1990s.
In a recent class, when I asked my film studies students who had watched the set film for the week only a few hands went up – and my heart sank. Searching for an explanation, I asked who had watched the latest episode of the popular Netflix show Stranger Things. Nearly every hand went up.
Can cinema survive in a golden age of serial tv?
Deborah Shaw article in The Conversation
https://theconversation.com/can-cinema-survive-in-a-golden-age-of-serial-tv-122234
What does this anecdote reveal about changing viewing habits? Does the fact that even film students prefer the latest streaming series to the classic films set as coursework serve to illustrate the point that cinema is dying?
There is no doubt of the enormous appeal of the many long-form series .....
https://theconversation.com/hundreds-of-mexican-politicians-have-died-in-the-run-up-to-the-election-but-cultural-leaders-are-fighting-back-98739
The article will ask why the show mattered then and why it matters now. I will consider the cultural and social impact of the series, and the ways in which it presented a series of firsts that other television series have built on. It was the first mainstream series to feature lesbians, and attractive lesbians with aspirational lifestyles; it was the first to feature a biracial lesbian couple who conceive a child through insemination; it was the first to attempt a sympathetic portrayal of transgender experience in a sustained way. I will consider the way that positive and negative responses to the series reboot speaks to the ways that cultural artefacts impact on our lives and help shape our identities.
Anti-migrant rhetoric is not new in the United States; it has long been a staple of the Republican right and more recently the alt-right. It was a controversial focal point in the Donald Trump campaign of 2016, with Trump calling Mexicans drug dealers, criminals and rapists, and encouraging supporters to cheer his promise to build a wall – something that he has now signed an executive order on.
This migrant-baiting is increasing despite the fact that there has been a decline in migration from Mexico due to improvements in the Mexican economy, family reunifications, and the dangers of the migration journey.
What anti-migrant rhetoric also ignores is the fact that many who are still making the perilous journey from Central America and Mexico to the United States are driven by desperation at extremely high levels of violence and poverty, and have been categorised as refugees by organisations such as Amnesty International and the United Nations’ refugee agency (UNHCR).
Filmmakers from the region and those sympathetic to the plight of Mexican and Central American migrants are using their films to counter the misinformation, scapegoating and xenophobia that migrants have been subject to. The surge in anti-migrant rhetoric in recent years has been accompanied by a surge in films on the subject, to the extent that we can talk of a new sub-genre of migration films from the region.
These films can serve a useful role in countering negative representations of migrant-refugees. Film has a particular ability to assign worth. This is an even more urgent endeavour when we consider that the experiences of actual migrant-refugees are so often absent in political and media discourses.
Season 2 of Sense8 was released on Netflix in May 2017. It has a massive global fan base, and responds to a deep need to find transnational connection and community in times of national isolationism, sexual conservatism, rising homophobia and transphobia. Fans become like the Sense8 characters and connect across space through streaming and social media platforms, forging a virtual community that stands against narrow populist nationalism and for a new globalism built on solidarity. All of this progressive social content is contained within a genre-filled thriller full of action packed narratives and sexually explicit scenes designed to appeal to a mass audience.
Now in its fifth series, OiTNB, as it is often referred to, offers a very different vision of US society to what has previously appeared on our screens. The cast features Latina, Asian, and black women, as well as white supremacists, and liberal white women, all of whom have fallen on hard times. The show demonstrates that a focus on marginalised communities can have broad appeal, and offers a vision of US society at odds with Hollywood whitewashing.
Since it first appeared in 2013, OiTNB has highlighted key social issues, including transgender rights, inter-ethnic conflicts, queer identities, mental illness and drug addiction. Each has been treated in such a way that the episodes are never didactic or dull. The show is compelling and tragicomic, exploring extraordinary depths of character, transcending the ethnic, sexual and class divides that separate incarcerated women from audiences on the outside.
'For this roundtable we approached a number of leading scholars who have published on the topic and invited them to answer five questions that speak to the current discourses on cinematic transnationalism. We hope that this intervention might help us move beyond the theoretical impasse that Hjort identified above, and, ultimately, help produce more rigorous and nuanced scholarship on transnational cinemas, as well as generating a valuable resource for teaching in the field'.
a blog on the film Embrace of the Serpent/El abrazo de la serpiente for the media and film studies blog site Mediático, for Latin American, Latino/a and Iberian media cultures