Rehabilitating Neoliberalism: Disability Representation in the Films of Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga

2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (5) ◽  
pp. 970-989 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie A. Minich

When screenwriter, novelist, and director Guillermo Arriaga was 10 years old, he practiced giving acceptance speeches with a Coke bottle. The reason, he explained to his parents, was because he was convinced he would win an Oscar, a Nobel Prize, or an award at the Cannes Film Festival. He’s already achieved one of those goals—he was honored at Cannes with Best Screenplay for The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), which also won Best Actor for director Tommy Lee Jones—and he’s been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Babel (2006). Born in Mexico City, Arriaga is at the forefront of Mexican artists who have brought his country’s cinema to the attention of worldwide audiences in the 21st century. With director Alejandro González Iñárritu, he wrote the screenplays for Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), and Babel, films that were praised for their unflinching view of humanity’s darkness while at the same time offering hope in the form of community and individual compassion. Arriaga directed his first feature in 2008: The Burning Plain—which starred Charlize Theron, Kim Basinger, and Jennifer Lawrence— and continued his passion for nonlinear stories and complicated, compelling characters. Throughout his work, Arriaga has explored how different languages, cultures, and borders can divide people—but as well how those divisions can be broken down in unexpectedly moving or terrifying ways. A celebrated short-story writer and sports enthusiast, he is also the author of the novels The Night Buffalo and A Sweet Scent of Death.

2013 ◽  
pp. 25-27

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Shaw

Director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter and novelist Guillermo Arriaga worked together on three, highly successful films – Amores perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006). Yet, theirs was a troubled partnership and ended in a public feud. Arriaga stressed his creative primacy in the projects they worked on and downplayed the input of the director, while Iñárritu underplayed Arriaga’s contribution after Amores perros. Finally, during the making of Babel, these tensions came to a head and their collaboration came to an acrimonious end over irreconcilably different notions of what we might term ‘creative credit’. This well-known collaboration, feud and separation tell a story of creative partnerships, film industry working practices, power plays and media manipulations. This article examines the public statements of the two men and explores their story. It also asks a series of questions that relate to their specific relationship, but also to broader power dynamics between directors and the screenwriters with whom they work when both have auteurist ambitions: what does the Iñárritu/Arriaga dispute reveal about discourses of auteurism and its construction? What is the role of the screenwriter and his/her access to an auteurist status in the film industry?


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Julian Smith

This article is presented in two halves. The first analyses little known interviews with Iñárritu before he made his career in feature films that document his practice in radio, advertising and television drama. These interviews focus on his early conception of the relation between art and commerce and his views on the Mexican media scene in the 1990s. The second half of the article analyses the rare primary materials themselves: radio commercials, television idents and, at much greater length, his first feature-length fiction film, an experimental drama made for Televisa in 1995 called Detrás del dinero/Behind the Money. The conclusion argues that even as Iñárritu has more recently distanced himself from broadcasting, his later career as an artistic and commercially successful feature film director embodies a precarious balance between artistic innovation and mass culture and a focus on the audience which he first learned in his early work in advertising, radio and television.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
Dolores Tierney

This introduction to a Special Issue of Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinema charts the shift in Alejandro González Iñárritu's directorial persona from transnational auteur to mainstream figure over the course of his six feature films and virtual reality installation: Amores perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), Babel (2006), Biutiful (2010), Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014), The Revenant (2015) and the installation Carne y arena (Virtually Present, Physically invisible) (2017). It argues that this shift into a (predominantly Anglo) mainstream is reflected in the different ways in which his last names (apellidos) are used, abbreviated or even excised altogether, and in the differing approaches to him as auteur employed by the authors of the different articles, but that Iñárritu’s persona and creative collaborators continue to be primarily determined by his Mexican and Latin American identity.


Ñawi ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Andrés Luna Pérez
Keyword(s):  

Con este texto no se ha pretendido menospreciar o minusvalorar la magni cencia de Akira Kurosawa, que es indiscutiblemente uno de los grandes de la historia del cine. Sin embargo, es preciso establecer los antecedentes y correlaciones que existen en una poética determinada, para evitar confundir vanguardia con cosmovisión, y de este modo cambiar el paradigma; comprender que las cosmovisiones e idiosincrasias pueden generar poéticas esporádicas e independientes, sin ninguna clase de correlación directa con la historia contada desde Occidente o desde los premios y los festivales.


2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-191
Author(s):  
Eneida Maria de Souza

Resumo: A partir do filme Babel, de Alejandro González Iñarritu, o estudo trata dos descompassos da modernização conservadora e desenfreada, que tem como preço a perda dos valores humanitários, em nações que se desintegram e se fragmentam na luta pelo domínio.Palavras-chave: Babel; multiculturalismo; modernidade.Abstract: Using Alejandro González Iñarritu’s movie Babel as a starting point, this paper examines the discordances of conservative and unbridled modernization that causes the loss of humanitarian values in nations that disintegrate and collapse in the fight for dominion.Keywords: Babel; multiculturalismo; modernity.


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