Matt Losada

Education:
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley (2009)

Biography:

I teach and research primarily in the area of Latin American cultural history, though my work ranges from Argentine film history to 19th and 20th-century literary texts from throughout Latin America and to Spanish experimental film. It has been published in Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Modern Language Notes, Hispanic Review, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Film Quarterly, Cineaste and elsewhere. I serve on the Editorial Board of Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana. My Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures is from UC Berkeley (2009).

 

My first book, The Projected Nation: Argentine Cinema and the Social Margins (SUNY Press, 2018), examines the representation of national space in Argentine cinema. It opens with an account of canonical 19th-century literary and visual representations of the nation, which frames the subsequent examination of Argentine film from the silent period until the present. The nation’s culture has long tended to marginalize or deny the existence of certain spaces and peoples, and while cinematic representations have often reiterated these denials, at times they have exposed them as such, altering the possibilities of imagining the nation and, as a result, becoming intensely contested. The book’s selection of both canonical and lesser-known films accounts for the varied representations of the nation’s marginal spaces through time and the specific commercial and political pressures that conditioned these. 

https://www.sunypress.edu/p-6588-the-projected-nation.aspx

 

Many of the films discussed in The Projected Nation can be viewed here, with optional English subtitles:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0e9La2F1jZ8OW2kBC6fXsw

 

Reviewed by Jens Andermann: https://www.academia.edu/42218568/Review_of_The_Projected_Nation_Matt_Lo...

Reviewed by Constanza Burucúa: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/755566

Reviewed by Dolores Tierney: https://www.academia.edu/60049804/Review_of_The_Projected_Nation_Matt_L…

 

 

My second book, Before Bemberg: Women Filmmakers in Argentina (Rutgers University Press, 2020), complicates the historiography on Argentine women filmmakers that has centered on María Luisa Bemberg to the exclusion of her predecessors. Its introductory discussion of the abundant initial participation by women in film production in the 1910s is followed by an account of exclusion from creative roles in the studio cinema, which was only altered by the opportunities presented by a boom in short filmmaking in the 1960s. The book then discusses in depth the six sound features directed by women before 1980, which, despite their trailblazing explorations of the perspectives of female characters, daring denunciations of authoritarianism and censorship, and modernizing formal invention, have been forgotten by film history. The book thus recognizes the works of Vlasta Lah, María Herminia Avellaneda and María Elena Walsh, Eva Landeck and Bemberg.

https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/before-bemberg/9781978814547

 

The films discussed in Before Bemberg can be viewed here, with optional English subtitles:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF_6F4am5024rklIWwExUVA

 

Reviewed by Cynthia Margarita Tompkins: www.asaeca.org/imagofagia/index.php/imagofagia/article/view/2370

Reviewed by Constanza Burucua: https://tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24741604.2022.2046904

 

Research Interests:
Latin American Cultural History
Argentine film
20th and 21st-Century Latin American literature
Spanish experimental film
Women Filmmakers
Brazilian film
Editorial

 

Member of Editorial Board of Chasqui: revista de literatura latinoamericana

 

Selected Publications:

Books

  • Before Bemberg: Argentine Women Filmmakers (Rutgers University Press, 2020)
  • The Projected Nation: Argentine Cinema and the Social Margins (SUNY Press, 2018)

Articles and Book Chapters

  • "Patricio Guzmán." Senses of Cinema 110 (August 2024). Web.
  • “Jeanine Meerapfel, Cosmopolitan Auteur of the Immigrant Condition.” Contemporary Argentine Women Filmmakers. Eds. Vohnsen, Mirna and Daniel Mourenza. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023: 41-60.
  • Gendered Figure Lighting, Artifice, and Realism in Rosaura a las diez." Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 39 (2021): 84-103.
  • "Migration on Film during the Tucuman Crisis." Modern Language Notes 135.2 (March 2020): 459-472.
  • "Muchacho que vas militando: Stardom, Youth Culture and Politics in Palito Ortega Films of 1970-1975." Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 29.1 (2020): 109-131.
  • “Before Bemberg: Eva Landeck, Gente en Buenos Aires and the Gendered Division of Labor in Argentine Cinema.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 50.3 (October 2016): 711-728.
  • "El cine de la Revolución: Dangerous Spectatorship and Instrumentalization of the Filmic Image in Martin Luis Guzman's El aguila y la serpiente." Hispanofila 175 (2016): 263-272.
  • “Argentine Experimental Film of the 1970s: Narcisa Hirsch and Claudio Caldini.” Film Quarterly 67.1 (2014): 73-76.
  •  “Guillermo Martínez.” The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel. Eds. Corral, Birns and de Castro. London: Continuum, 2013: 366-371.
  • “Margarita Nelken, the Madrid Press and the Ballets russes.”Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea 38.3 (2013): 161-185.
  • “La mosca y sus peligros: Science, Affect and the Microscopic Sublime.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 46.3 (2012): 465-480.
  • “Allegories of Authenticity in Argentine Cinema of the 1910s.” Hispanic Review 80.3 (2012): 486-506.
  • “The Chilean Student Movement of 2011: Camila Vallejo and the Media.” Jump Cut 54 (2012). Web.
  • “Pere Portabella’s Umbracle and the Francoist Crusade Narrative.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 13.4 (2012): 339-354.
  • “Argentine Cinema and Rural Space.” Chasqui 40.2 (November 2011): 18-32.
  • “José Val del Omar’s Tríptico Elemental and Other Experiments from Spain.” Cinema Scope 46 (Spring 2011): 47-51.
  •  “Napoleon on the Cauca, or, the Dangers of Reading in Jorge Isaac’s María.” Latin American Literary Review 77 (2011): 64-79.
  • “The Rebranding of Francoism’s Originary Violence in José Antonio Nieves Conde’s Balarrasa.” Romance Notes 51.2 (2011): 257-265.
  • “Jean Rouch.” Senses of Cinema 57 (2011). Web.
  • “Lucrecia Martel’s La mujer sin cabeza: Cinematic Free Indirect Discourse, Noise-scape and the Distraction of the Middle Class.” Romance Notes 50.3 (2010): 307-313.
  • “Iván Zulueta’s Cinephilia of Ecstasy and Experiment.” Senses of Cinema 56 (2010). Web.
  • “San Juan de la Cruz in Tactilvisión: The Technological Mysticism of José Val del Omar’s Tríptico elemental de España.” Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 7.2 (2010): 101-115.
  • “The Secret in Their Eyes: Historical Memory, Production Models, and the Foreign Film Oscar.” Cineaste 36.1 (2010). Web.
  • “Fernando Solanas.” Senses of Cinema 55 (2010). Web.

Translation

  • “Cinema and Guerrilla: An Incomplete Biography of the Film Iracema, Uma Transa Amazônica." By Orlando Senna. Senses of Cinema 108 (Jan. 2024). Web.