Saturday December 6, 2025 | 9:00AM – 10:45AM

LBC 210 McKeever

Presenters

• Jonathan Risner (Indiana University Bloomington), “Argentine Horror Film Documentaries and the Organic Documentarian”

Recent documentary series on Shudder’s streaming platform about horror cinema calls attention to documentary cinema’s varied relationship to horror. (Footnote: These series include The 101 Scariest Horror Movies of All Time; Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror; Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror.)

If Argentine horror cinema has squarely entered a commercial phase with films such as Cuando acecha la maldad, Los que vuelven and Lucerferina, there is no shortage of documentaries about Argentine horror cinema that have been made on different budgets and scales. The making of documentaries about Argentine horror cinema broaches a number of issues, such as documentary styles; the making and circulation of films; and the relationship between documentary and a larger film culture, which, here, is an Argentine horror film culture.

In this presentation, I will provide an overview of documentaries and documentary styles about Argentine horror cinema, which include films about particular actors and production entities; a mockumentary; a film festival; and historical overviews of the genre in Argentina. In doing so, I will examine the idea that in the Argentine context documentary cinema can serve as a barometer for a genre’s development, while also accounting for the limitation of such an idea.

Finally, I will elaborate on is a term that I call organic documentarian. Borrowing from Antonio Gramsci’s term organic intellectual, the organic documentarian is not a filmmaker who happens upon a foreign topic and thus necessitating a kind of ethnographic process of being accepted by a community. Instead, the organic documentarian is already integrated into a culture (here, Argentine horror film culture). Moreover, they are participants in that culture and whose documentary film constitutes that participation and perpetuates that film culture.

• Emmanuel Ramos-Barajas (Northwestern University), “Past Perfect? Canon Formation and the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema”

In 1994, the magazine SOMOS published a ranking of the “100 best films in Mexican cinema,” eventually the de facto canon. In 2020, Sector Cine revised the list to reflect changing cultural politics. While the “Golden Age” no longer dominates the catalogue, its enduring appeal across both lists raises some important questions about the past, present, and futures of Mexican cinema.

This presentation treats the “Golden Age” not as a fixed corpus but as a discursive formation that evinces Mexican film history’s evolving engagement with differing affective modes, stylistic preferences, and political stances. Film scholars have shown how this taxonomy downplays transnational influences while enabling the state and corporations to recycle its imagery as a nostalgia that naturalize existing power structures. Building on this scholarship, I argue for a critical rethinking of how classical Mexican cinema has been defined and chronologized.

My approach is intermedial: I link classical Mexican cinema to nineteenth-century visual culture (academic painting, lithographs, cartes de visite) to show how Mexico’s incipient dreams of modernity were first staged in this earlier pictorial regime. This method effectively expands existing chronologies of Mexican film studies—revealing a long oscillation between cosmopolitan desires and regionalist sentiment that policed class boundaries through mutable notions of buen and mal gusto.

As today’s transnational conglomerates monetize images of Mexico in an era marked by war, genocide, climate crisis, mass migration, and wealth inequality, excavating the histories of canon formation, taste politics, and affective stylization exposes the ideological work performed by seemingly placid screens.

• José Miguel Palacios (California State University Long Beach, chair and moderator), “Raúl Ruíz at the House of Culture in Le Havre: Archives of Labor and Modes of Production”

This presentation is part of a book project devoted to the archives of exile filmmaker Raúl Ruiz, who made over one hundred films in Chile, France, Portugal, Germany, and the United States, among other places. Ruiz’s status as a key figure of world cinema has kept on growing after his death in 2011, with an endless proliferation of “rediscovered” films, writings, and media installations—a direct result of an archival constellation conditioned by exile. The book examines the nature of archival collections shaped by exile as well as on the possibilities of a film historiography that foregrounds scatteredness as its fundamental precondition.
In this talk I focus on Ruiz’s tenure as co-director of la Maison de la Culture du Havre (MCH) between 1985 and 1989. To tell this story I rely on MCH catalogues and on a series of archival documents that detail the fraught process of Ruiz’s election as artistic director in partnership with executive director Jean-Luc Larguier, together with their plan for the institution and its execution over four years.
My main purpose here is to dissect the mode of production of MCH as a studio lab that mixed film, video, dance, and theater, and as a meeting hub for likeminded artists like filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira and choreographer Jean-Claude Galotta. In doing so, I expand on questions of labor and collaboration scattered across Ruiz’s archival documents, centering on Ruiz’s role as a “cultural worker” favoring a unique understanding of the creative industries based on marginality and experimentation.

• Analays Álvarez Hernández (University of Montreal) “Latinx- Artists and Curators in Montréal, Paris, and Madrid: Challenging the Logic of Reinforced Subalternity”

This paper is part of a broader research project examining the local and international insertion of diasporic artists and curators from Latin America or those identifying as “Latinx-.” The term “Latinx-,” intentionally used with a hyphen, underscores the diasporic condition of individuals from Latin American backgrounds living globally, beyond solely the United States––when combined with the country of residence, it generates categories such as Latinx Canadian or Latinx French. Specifically, the paper analyzes institutional efforts in Montréal, Paris, and Madrid, aimed at supporting and promoting diasporic Latin American artists and curators. These efforts arise from established cultural institutions as well as grassroots organizations and initiatives led by members of the Latin American diaspora. Despite each city’s unique contexts, I argue that the logic of coloniality operates transnationally. Within this globalized “coloniality of power,” diasporic Latin American artists and curators experience what I term “reinforced subalternity,” leaving their visibility and legitimacy within art systems precarious, something these organizations actively counter. In Paris, Latinx French artists and curators remain significantly underrepresented in major cultural institutions and the broader international scene. Recent diaspora-led initiatives, including the curatorial project Persona Curada and the Mira Latin Art Fair (2024), are beginning to shift this landscape. Montréal’s Fondation LatinArte has consistently supported new media and visual diasporic Latin American artists since 2009, while SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art has embraced a notable Latin American “turn” since 2020. Similarly, Madrid has seen nonprofit organizations like La Parcería, Espacio CóMPLICES, and Espacio Afro emerge as vital platforms.