Project Details
Projekt
Glocalising Modes of Modernity: Transnational and Cross-Media Interconnections in Latin American Film Musicals
Applicant
Professor Dr. Peter W. Schulze
Subject Area
Theatre and Media Studies
Term
from 2015 to 2019
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 279045576
This research project will provide the first comparative analysis of film musicals from Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, in the 1930s–1950s, through their transnational, intercultural and cross-media interconnections, thus unveiling an important sector of media history and popular culture in the Americas. As one of the first in-depth studies of early cinematic “glocalisation” in Latin America, the proposed project promises to give new insights into complex transnational exchange processes, both symbolic and in terms of media capital, including their role for shaping imaginaries of modernity in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. A network of “crisscrossing histories” will be mapped on the basis of a body of around 500 film musicals, focusing on paradigmatic films featuring the most popular singer-actor star figures who have played a central role in the transnational cultural economy of Cine Tanguero, Chanchada and Comedia Ranchera genre productions.Combining semiotically-grounded genre and star studies with postcolonial, gender and globalisation theories, the project proposes the following objectives: (1) to analyse the cultural economy of musical film productions in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico and their multi-directional media flows as glocalising modes of modernity in Latin America; (2) to frame film genre productions in the Americas as a site of converging, but also conflicting identities and discourses and to investigate the local appropriations of Hollywood film genre structures; (3) to establish the interdependence between film and music industries in the period in focus and the kind of transnational and cross-media relations they elicited across the cultural practices of tango, samba and ranchera; (4) to analyse the role played by singer-actor stars and film crews in the interbreeding of different film musical subgenres; and (5) to establish and analyse the results of political interventions into the film industry by governments, corporations and lobbies in Argentinean, Brazilian and Mexican cinemas. The research results will be disseminated on an international plane by publishing them in form of a single-authored monograph in English, to be submitted to I.B. Tauris World Cinema Series, directed by Lúcia Nagib.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
International Connection
United Kingdom, USA
