Guest Presentation
“Give the People What They Want!”: Immediacy, Meaning, and Cinematic Form in Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman Heading link
Eugenio Di Stefano
Associate Professor of Spanish
University of Nebraska at Omaha
Friday, March 3, 2023
Mexican neoliberalism in the 1980s not only restructured how films were financed. It has also pushed a number of filmmakers to consider how films could still be art within an industry almost exclusively oriented toward meeting consumer demands. This paper argues that a concern with the viewer’s relationship to film has become central to understanding the most compelling Mexican films today. I examine Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman (2014) to trace an antitheatrical notion of the viewer and the political implications that this notion entail in contemporary Mexico and beyond.
Eugenio Di Stefano is an associate professor of Latin American Literature and Culture in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature and a member of OLLAS (Office of Latino/Latin American Studies) at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He has published articles on the politics of aesthetics in contemporary Latin American cultural production in MLN, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and nonsite. He is the author of the book, The Vanishing Frame: Latin American Culture and Theory in the Postdictatorial Era (University of Texas Press). He is currently working on a book manuscript titled Dead Time: Capturing the Forms of the Latin American Present. He is also a founding editor of Forma, an online journal dedicated to rethinking contemporary Latin American culture and theory.
This will be a hybrid event.
- To attend the event in person in 1501 University Hall,
- Remote participation will be via Zoom at https://go.uic.edu/InBetween2023_DayTwo.