Reflexiones sobre la escritura cinematográfica en México: Apuntes para una historia (1965-2013)

The reflections on screenwriting in Mexico constitute a tradition that has not been critically reviewed. This article recovers fundamental texts of Mexican writers and teachers in order to analyze their attempts to articulate this practice. The texts oscillate between the poetics, the essay and the didactic manual. A stimulating dialogue arises from interweaving their ideas about the nature of the screenplay, its narrative and dramatic dimensions, the specificity of this type of writing and the creative process. The review begins with El conocimiento cinematográfico y sus problemas (1965), written by José Revueltas and ends with the unpublished book by Beatriz Novaro, El roce de los lenguajes (2013).

De Holocausto (1978) a Chernobyl (2019): ¿Qué puede hacer el audiovisual ante un pasado traumático y un futuro amenazado?

Retracing the cultural history of the reception of the TV series Holocaust (1978) as it redefined the politics of the State and put the testimony for the first time at the centre of the cultural field, undermining how the Jewish genocide was perceived until then, the article aims at discuss —by the contributions of Annette Wieviorka and Georges Didi-Huberman, among others— through a comparison with the hbo series Chernobyl (2019) and other cinematographic productions, what audio-visual is capable of in front of different forms of State violence, of a traumatic past and of a threatened future.

La paz del vacío y la bola de la Revolución: aproximaciones a El samurái de la Graflex

This paper deals with El samurái de la Graflex, by Daniel Salinas Basave. The analysis focuses on the representation of a historical character of Japanese origin: Kingo Nonaka, whose figure represents the irruption of a culture that contrasts with the attitudes and ideosyncrasy of revolutionary Mexico. Nonaka concentrates elements that form the image of a Japan in transition towards modernity. Between meditation as a method for diving and fluency with a camera, Salinas Basave follows Nonaka in his wanderings and allows the reader to appreciate details of the history of the first half of the twentieth century from a perspective “alien” to the Mexican one, while building a space for reflection on writing and memory.

Cuerpos abiertos, cuerpos insaciables. Modelos narratológicos y una vieja maldición en El Sinaloa, de Guillermo Rubio y de Vizcarrondo

Luis Manuel Salcido Arispuro, whose alias gives its name to the novel El Sinaloa, is a policeman with a dual personality: an agent in the service of the Mexican State, which in turn serves the interests of the Sinaloa drug cartel mafia of the late 1990s. Hand in hand with Guillermo Rubio’s narrative, the reader will be introduced to the world of the mafia, with its impunity and self-confidence, where amid parties, excesses and violence, we will discover a charismatic character, with an insatiable hunger and of an exacerbated voracity. Given this, it is valid to ask ourselves if it is a normal condition of a character of its type, or if it is a curse of unsuspected, as well as ancestral dyes.

Del lado encantado de la modernidad: mesianismo y ocultismo en las novelas expresionistas de Gustav Meyrink

This article analyses the work of the Austrian novelist Gustav Meyrink (1868-1932), who, between the years 1913 and 1927, published five fantastic novels in which several elements of late Twentieth Century Occultism prevail, in contrast to the historical context in which they were written, compelled by positivist scientism. From these esoteric and expressionist texts, we can build insight into a reading of modernity influenced by theosophy and eastern religions, as well as other spiritual currents, which show the multiple complexities of modernity.

Emulación pictórica y experiencia ilusoria: pictorialismo en El biombo y los frutos de Jesús Gardea

Belonging to the last stage of Jesús Gardea, El biombo y los frutos is one of his most enigmatic and perplexing novels. This article examines the relationship with painting in this work under the notion of pictorialism as a textual phenomenon that creates pictorial effects in the narrative. In particular, the dialogue between painting and gaze is analyzed, where the narration plays with both the vivid and illusory experience of representation in the story. With this, it sets out to elucidate one of the most suggestive elements of Gardea’s writing, especially manifested in this novel, not without seeking to contribute to a greater understanding of the author’s latest creative stage and aesthetic proposal.

Vivir endeudado. Las narcolepsias de Wasabi de Alan Pauls

The aim of this paper is to explore and to analyze the set of formal elements that makes up the time of Wasabi by Alan Pauls. The topic of debt is here understood as our starting point. There are three debts: one extratextual and two purely economic (contracted within fiction). Our hypothesis is that the three debts, linked together, are not only paid fictionally with the child born at the end of the text (analogy between art and life); nor only with the monstrosity of the cyst (link between body and writing), but with time. Narcolepsies, those chronic sleep disorders are, well looked at, temporary coins through which fiction collects the debt that the writer contracts with it.

Aura de amor sobrenatural (de Apolonio de Tiana a Carlos Fuentes)

In this essay the comparative follow-up of the motive of the dis / encounter of lovers belonging to different ontological fields (life / death, wakefulness / sleep), expressed in fantastic figures such as empusas, ghosts and vampires is carried out. The starting point is a story of Apollonius of Tiana according to the text of Philostratus, which was recovered by Goethe in The Bride of Corinth, taken up by 19th century authors such as Théophile Gautier and Amado Nervo, and reworked by Carlos Fuentes in the 20th century, in his novel Aura, with the addition of an 18th century Japanese author, Ueda Akinari, who wrote stories along these lines.