Description
Book SynopsisFrederick Aldama’s The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez (2014) was the first full-scale study of one of the most prolific and significant Latino directors making films today. In this companion volume, Aldama enlists a corps of experts to analyze a majority of Rodriguez’s feature films, from his first break-out success El Mariachi in 1992 to Machete in 2010. The essays explore the formal and thematic features present in his films from the perspectives of industry (context, convention, and distribution), the film blueprint (auditory and visual ingredients), and consumption (ideal and real audiences). The authors illuminate the manifold ways in which Rodriguez’s films operate internally (plot, character, and event) and externally (audience perception, thought, and feeling).
The volume is divided into three parts: “Matters of Mind and Media” includes essays that use psychoanalytic and cognitive psychology to shed light on how Rodriguez&
Table of Contents
Rodriguez's Cinema of Possibilities: An Introduction (Frederick Luis Aldama)
Matters of Mind and Media
One. From El Mariachi till Spy Kids? A Cognitive Approach (Sue J. Kim)
Two. You've Come a Long Way, Booger Breath: Juni Cortez Grows Up in the Spy Kids Films (Phillip Serrato)
Narrative Theory, Cognitive Science, and Sin City: A Case Study
Three. Painterly Cinema: Three Minutes of Sin City (Patrick Colm Hogan)
Four. Sin City, Style, and the Status of Noir (Emily R. Anderson)
Five. Sin City, Hybrid Media, and a Cognitive Narratology of Multimodality (Erin E. Eighan)
Aesthetic and Ontological Border Crossings and Borderlands
Six. Intertextploitation and Post-Post-Latinidad in Planet Terror (Christopher González)
Seven. Planet Terror Redux: Miscegenation and Family Apocalypse (Enrique García)
Eight. The Border Crossed Us: Machete and the Latino Threat Narrative (Zachary Ingle)
Nine. The Development of Social Minds in the "Mexico Trilogy" (James J. Donahue)
It's a Wrap
Ten. Tarantino & Rodriguez: A Paradigm (Ilan Stavans)
Eleven. Five Amigos Crisscross Borders on a Road Trip with Rodriguez (Frederick Luis Aldama, Samuel Saldívar, Christopher González, Sue J. Kim, and Camilla Fojas)
Afterword. Postproduction in Robert Rodriguez's "Post-Post-Latinidad" (Alvaro Rodriguez)
Works Cited
Notes on Contributors
Index
