Catherine L. BenamouAssociate Professor, Film & Media Studies Affiliated Faculty, Chicano/Latino Studies Director, Film and Video Center |
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Research Interests |
Latin American and Latina/o Cinema and Media, Neocolonialism, Film Preservation and Reconstruction, Media Ethnography as Community Practice, Orson Welles and Off-Hollywood Production, Realist Aesthetics, Transnational Flows and Diasporic Viewers | |
| URL | IT'S ALL TRUE: Orson Welles's Pan-American Odyssey | |
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Academic Distinctions |
Honorable Mention, Dissertation Award, Society for Cinema Studies (1998) Smithsonian Institution Award in Recognition of Special Achievement Reflecting a High Standard of Accomplishment (1996) |
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Research Abstract |
My research is mostly hemispheric in scope, and it is generally concerned with the politics and aesthetics of inter-American representation, as well as the formation of migrant subjectivity and spaces for marginal expression within national and globalizing media texts and practices. My published work to date has focused on transformations in the representation of gender, class, and national identity in Brazilian, Cuban, and Mexican cinema at pivotal moments in the history of inter-American and interethnic relations: the Good Neighbor cinema and its aftermath, the seventies and eighties, and the post-NAFTA era. I am currently at work on a multi-site, multi-method exploration of the transnational flow of Spanish-language television and its significance for Latina/o diasporic communities in the United States and Spain. Another project, also book length, examines the mid-career cinema of Orson Welles in relation to exile, ethnic and gender relations, and postwar modernity. A third line of investigation involves the ethical and political stakes attached to the representation of cultural difference and violence in hemispheric and cross-border media texts. | |
| Publications | IT'S ALL TRUE: ORSON WELLES'S PAN-AMERICAN ODYSSEY (University of California Press, 2007) | |
| Televisual Melodrama in an Era of Transnational Migration: Exporting the Folkloric Nation, Harvesting the Melancholic-Sublime, in LATIN AMERICAN MELODRAMA: PASSION, PATHOS, AND ENTERTAINMENT, ed. Darlene J. Sadlier, 139-171 (University of Illinois Press, 2009) | ||
| "Con amor, tequila, y gasolina: Lola the Truckdriver and Screen Resistance in Border Cinema (Cine Fronterizo)." In LATSPLOITATION: LATIN AMERICAN EXPLOITATION CINEMAS, eds. Victoria Ruetalo and Dolores Tierney (Routledge, 2009) | ||
| "'Everybody's Orson Welles:' Treasures from the Special Collections Library at the University of Michigan," in MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW 48/2 (Spring 2009): 186-242. | ||
| "Realism as Artifice and the Lure of the Real in Orson Welles's F FOR FAKE (1973) and Other T(r)eas(u)ers," in F IS FOR PHONY: FAKE DOCUMENTARIES AND TRUTH'S UNDOING, ed. Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) | ||
| with Lucia Saks, "Circumatlantic Media Migrations," in MOVIE MUTATIONS: THE CHANGING FACE OF WORLD CINEPHILIA, ed.Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin (BFI, 2003) | ||
| "Cuban Cinema: On the Threshold of Gender," in REDIRECTING THE GAZE: THIRD WORLD WOMEN FILMMAKERS, ed. Diana Robin and Ira Jaffe (SUNY Press, 1999) | ||
| "'Those Earrings, That Accent, That Hair': A Dialogue with Maria Hinojosa on Latino/as and the Media," in TALKING VISIONS: MULTICULTURAL FEMINISM IN A TRANSNATIONAL AGE, ed. Ella Shohat (New Museum of Contemporary Art; MIT Press, 1998) | ||
| Grants | Sister's Grant, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan, 2007-2008 | |
| Cultural Diversity Studies Grant, Academic Senate Council on Research, Computing and Libraries (CORCL) 2009-2010 | ||
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Professional Societies |
Society for Cinema and Media Studies Latin American Studies Association SOCINE (Brazil) AMERICAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION National Association of Latino Producers |
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| Other Experience |
Guest Curator Everybody's Orson Welles, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor 2004—pres |
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Lead Consultant, Preservation of Orson Welles's IT'S ALL TRUE UCLA Film and Television Archive 2000—pres |
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Associate Producer & Senior Research Executive IT'S ALL TRUE, BASED ON AN UNFINISHED FILM BY ORSON WELLES 1992—1993 |
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| Graduate Programs |
Visual Studies Culture and Theory |
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| Link to this profile | http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=5510 | |
| Last updated | 10/25/2009 | |