Conversations about Contemporary Media
October 16, 2–4 pm, over Zoom
“Voice, Accent and Identity in Spanish Cinema and Television,” by Kathleen Vernon (SUNY Stony Brook)
The compulsion to control and classify voices according to narrowly defined standards and conventional assumptions about gender, nationality and other markers of identity has taken particularly visible and audible form over the history of the Spanish film and television industries. This paper brings together two strands of ongoing research that focus on the struggles over access and authority, identity and belonging, and cultural and commercial dominance in the realm of Spanish language media.
Kathleen Vernon teaches in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. She has published widely on Spanish-language cinema from the 1930s to the present and is the editor of books on the Spanish civil war and the visual arts and the films of Pedro Almodóvar. She is currently completing a cultural history of film sound, music and voices in Spain, titled Listening to Spanish Cinema, to be published by Liverpool University Press.Her work in progress includes the multi-authored book, Cinema and Everyday Life in 1940s and 1950s Spain: An Oral History.
“Netflix’s Spanish Series: Production, Reception, Text,” by Paul Julian Smith (CUNY)
This paper examines three female-led series distributed by Netflix and produced in Spain, the streamer’s European hub. It pays particular attention to reception in the USA and formal changes within the TV text that were made to adapt that text from a national free to air television system to a global streaming platform.
Paul Julian Smith, a Fellow of the British Academy, has for ten years been Distinguished Professor in the Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures Program at the Graduate Center in City University of New York. His most recent books are Spanish Lessons: Cinema and Television in Contemporary Spain (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2017), Queer Mexico: Cinema and Television since 2000 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017), Spanish and Latin American Television Drama: Genre and Format Translation (London: School of Advanced Study University of London/Institute of Modern Languages Research, 2018), and Multiplatform Media in Mexico: Growth and Change Since 2010 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Follow him on twitter: @pauljuliansmith
“National Games: Spanish Games of the 1980s,” by Clara Fernández-Vara (NYU)
This paper introduces the Spanish home computing landscape in the 1980s, and examines how the games produced at that time expressed different aspects of Spanish culture within the technical limitations of the platform. The paper borrows the concept of national cinema as a way to understand how Spanish games tackled themes, images and incorporated design approaches that were distinct from the production in other countries.
Clara Fernández-Vara is an Associate Arts Professor at the NYU Game Center. She is a game scholar, designer and writer, and her main research interest is the study and creation of narrative games, and how they create worlds where the player can perform. She also studies the history of early digital games in Europe. Her work is grounded in the humanities, informed by her background in literature, film and theatre. Her first book, Introduction to Game Analysis, has been published by Routledge and is now in its second edition.