Bridget Franco, Spanish

Introducción

     Increasingly popular college film courses straddle the "inside/outside" classroom divide in a very specific way. On the most basic level, students must engage with the primary material outside of regularly scheduled course time, and then bring their observations, criticisms, and questions back to the class for discussion. Additionally, the viewer physically occupies the position of outsider as she sits and watches the movie, although her gaze draws her into the visual film experience. Finally, in the case of foreign language film, students are offered a glimpse into cultures, politics, languages and aesthetic expressions that are usually beyond or outside their own personal experience. The following movie reviews were submitted as part of a course focused on the development of cinema in Latin America, particularly in relation to the military dictatorships of the 1970s and '80s and the subsequent transition period to democracy of the early 1990s in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. We examined how these films highlight important social and political issues, as well as how cinematography, as an artistic medium, grapples with questions of representation, censorship, testimony, memory, and popular culture. Students were required to write one review in English for a U.S. audience that was not familiar with the historical and political context of the film. A second review was submitted in Spanish and designed for publication in a local newspaper in the country of origin. The following reviews are representative of the work of the course.