Eva Dale  0:00  
From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work being done by faculty and staff in the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University. From departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials, mathematics and languages, among many others, the college always has something great happening. Join us to find out what's new now.

David Staley  0:32  
I'm happy to be joined today by Laura Podalsky, who's Professor and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at The Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. She specializes in Latin American Film and Cultural Studies, and her research involves the relationship between Latin American culture, politics and socio historical formations. She has developed projects on urban culture, questions of effect, which we're going to learn about, and more recently on youth cultures. Welcome to Voices, Dr. Podalsky.

Laura Podalsky  1:04  
Thank you for having me.

David Staley  1:05  
So, I know you're working on a couple of projects. Right now you're working on a monograph, or finishing a monograph called Consuming Youth Film: Culture Industries and Young Adults in Argentina and Mexico. Tell us about this project.

Laura Podalsky  1:17  
Sure. So it actually began as a comparative project based on some work that I had done on contemporary youth films, because in both of those countries, in Argentina, and Mexico, in starting the 1990s, there was this really big upsurge of films made about and for young people, young adults. And this had really not been the case, you might have had a film about a child, but it was really to talk about society overall. And so, you had this upsurge in what I call youth films for the youth market. And at the same time, you also had a musical phenomena that was somewhat similar. So we will call it Rock and hip annual, so a Spanish language rock and roll, rock and icy rock. And that really emerged in the 1980s, in Spain, in Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, and other countries. And so I was interested, and this was also a time of the emergence of mall culture. And so when I would go to Latin America, you'd see a lot of young people in the malls, looking at kind of different fashion that was also aimed at them. And so, I became really interested in the relationship between all of these, and thinking about how culture industries but industries, consumer industries, overall, we're targeting youth as a market as a group of people that could buy new products, and what that meant for the larger society at a moment in which there were also concerns about the danger of youth, and so youth gangs and things like that. So I began working on that in Mexico, I had gotten a Fulbright to work on that and wrote two articles about them. But after that period, because I was working on another project, what I saw is that a lot of people began writing about these new youth films, right, in the contemporary moment, but I thought we all lacked an historical perspective. So some people were making arguments that this had never happened before. And in fact, it had, right so we had had, and this is what my book is eventually going to be about, um, Youth Films emerging in the kind of late 50s, into the 60s into the 70s in a couple of countries, but particularly in Argentina, and Mexico, somewhat similar to the beach blanket bingo films, right, Frankie in a net? Exactly, exactly. And Elvis, like the Elvis films that took off, which were immensely influential and a lot of these different countries. The project is really to give us a historical perspective on an earlier moment, right? When there's this rise of Youth Films, at a time in Latin America, where a lot of people were talking about how to modernize Latin America, how to kind of bring it up economically through economic transformation to development and developmentalism, to make the economies more robust, and similar to the economies in the US and Latin America, and excuse me, in Europe. And so I'm really interested in how you sort of worked at this particular time as sort of the representation of modernity, a representation of what was new and forward looking and hip, right, that was not to be a term that would be used at that time, but also the way they became identified somewhat mistakenly, as a potential niche market. And so you have at this time, the 50s and 60s, new you what I'm calling Youth Films, you know, films about and directed at youth, but you also have youth programs. So there were dance programs similar to Dick Clark program here in the US, right and Soul Train and, and things like that, where you'd see young people doing the twist, right. So you had TV programs, you had these new youth films, you had another form of rock in Spanish, right? They would call it in Mexico, or the three toss or refried rock. They would make covers basically of songs by Elvis, etc. That in their lyrics and what changed the lyrics to make them more understood. Anabelle unpalatable to a wider public in Mexico. But so again, in this earlier era, you have all these different cultural products coming up, aimed at youth about youth, right? And this hope that youth is somehow going to be a mechanism and a motor of modernization, and it doesn't quite work. So I am kind of interested in what happens in this earlier period. This also at least implicitly compare it with what we see in the contemporary moment, and to see the similarities and differences. s

David Staley  5:27  
Well, perhaps you've already sort of addressed this, but to what degree was both in the 50s, but also in the 90s, this sort of youth movement, this youth culture, how much of this was influenced by American culture? Is this another example of sort of cocacolonization by another name?

Laura Podalsky  5:42  
So, certainly, and in fact, the way that a lot of historians I'm thinking here of Eric Sulabh, who wrote a wonderful book called Rock or the frita, about counterculture, and in Mexico and this particular time, Valeria Manzano, another great historian, social historian from Argentina, who again writes about this period. And they both really talk about the influence of the US, right as being really important, but also kind of talk about what happens within those countries. So it's not simply a derivative, right, a simple imitation, there are all these changes. And it's interesting to see how rock lyrics change if you keep this tune the same, right? And why might that be? What I think has been less studied is other influences. And so I've written an article on youth films that are kind of CO productions between Europe and different parts of Latin America in the 50s, and 60s. And there, what we see is there was a festival called San Remo, or it's similar to the Eurovision festivals that we have now, right. And so those types of festivals were also really influential on Latin America. And particularly in this case, Argentina, there's a lot of Italian influence, and Italian cinema was really seen and use films from Italy, and France, and Germany, and England. All of those were really influential too. So part of my study is exactly to say the US was really influential. But you also had these connections to Europe. And we need to look not only at what was being produced in Latin American countries in terms of film, and TV, and music, but also look at kind of horizons of expectation, where you look at what was circulating, what were the films that people were seeing, to really have a better understanding of the sort of touchpoints right between different countries, and probably much more mutual influences than we're aware of.

David Staley  7:31  
So your focus is on comparative study of Argentina and Mexico: why those two countries?

Laura Podalsky  7:36  
So, those two countries in particular had more robust film industries, in that sense, really, starting in the 30s, through the 50s, both of those countries and also Brazil are considered kind of the three big countries in terms of film industries. And what I mean by that is that they in quantitative terms, they produced more films than perhaps other countries, say Costa Rica, who also produced films, but not as, as robustly. They also had big production companies, right in these three countries that were not present and others that were kind of more artisanal or independent. So they're good countries to study because of this background. In the 50s and 60s, a kind of begin those industry villages begin to enter into crisis, and so this is a particular moment of like, okay, are these youth films a reaction to an attempt to speak to a new market, or what is percieved to be a new market.

David Staley  8:25  
So, you mean like an economic crisis when you say crisis? 

Laura Podalsky  8:27  
Well, a crisis in the film industry, so they weren't really either making the same amount of money that they used to be weren't producing the same amount of films, and there was this kind of sense of, oh, we're losing our grip. So Mexico was a huge film exporter, right, which again, in the US, I don't think we know very much, right. And it was really big Mexican film was big outside of Mexico, including the southern part of the US, right there Spanish language theaters. So in the 50s, and 60s, that kind of, if not dominance, at least spread of films, was not as robust. And so I'm interested in those countries as what I say kind of at the vanguard in some ways in terms of industrial robustness in the film industry, that then comes into crisis. I don't do Brazil, which I would really like to do it, but it's too much. So they're really pragmatic reasons not to do it. But of course, Brazil is another great example. 

David Staley  9:19  
Your previous book 2011 was called "The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema:Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico". So I'm interested in those in the meaning of those two words, right, affect and emotion or at least the meaning in this context. First of all, what do you mean by affect or emotion? What does that mean in this context? 

Laura Podalsky  9:40  
Sure. So for me, I was very interested in getting at broadly speaking, sensorial dynamics, how...

David Staley  9:47  
Sensorial dynamics, okay.

Laura Podalsky  9:49  
So how films not only represent emotional states, so we see a character cry, right, but in some films, when we see a character cry, we laugh. In other films, we see  a character cry and we want to cry too. And so, this sensorial dynamics that I'm interested in is not only what's up on the screen what is represented, but the way in which films evoke and deploy emotion and other means other formal means to encourage us to respond in particular ways, not only on a thinking level, but in an embodied way. So to give you an example, there's a certain theorist called Linda Williams and she tells us that there are certain genres, certain modes of film that always get in our body really quickly. And we can think of this as horror films right? In a horror film, she calls them fear jokers, down in your seat, right and you're pushing back and you're and you're, it's pleasurable, but it's also kind of...

David Staley  9:49  
The audience can't see this, but Dr. Podalsky is doing exactly this. She's scrunching back in her seat. 

Laura Podalsky  10:48  
Exactly, and we also of course, no melodrama is a tear jerker, right, that evokes that emotion of sorrow on the part of the spectator. So after allows me to speak of these sunsoil dynamics that aren't always nameable. So emotion to me, is those types of soil dynamics that we have a name for. It is happy, it made me happy. It made me sad. It made me regretful whereas an effect. Sometimes I think films don't only get us and recognize and reproduce these emotional states. But sometimes they get us to feel in ways that we don't really always know how to name. So I'm interested in both right, the packaging of motions by films, right? How they help us kind of seal aware emotions, genre films quite often do this. At the end, we have kind of a pet response. Okay, that happened. That was sad. But the good guy won in the end. What would I say that this is a surreal movement allows us to feel good about that aspect of a moral ending. So I'm interested in films sometimes that use formal mechanisms, they use camera placement, what's on screen and off screen use of off screen space, or the juxtaposition of sound and visual image that don't quite match up, for example, or they mix up narrative order. So they use these formal means these aesthetic means, and the effect of those sometimes, is to make us feel in a different way. Because I don't see an opposition between feeling and thinking. I think there is good evidence that those modalities work together. And so I'm very interested in the way that these sensorial dynamics, whether an effective dynamics or emotional dynamic can push us to imagine things differently, to understand to have new types of knowledges.

David Staley  12:34  
So, as you're describing sensorial dynamics of a film, let's say, you're talking really about sort of the intentions of the filmmaker. That's all very interesting. How do you bring sort of audience response into this study?

Laura Podalsky  12:48  
That's a great question. So first, just a clarification. I don't really know that I'm talking about what the filmmakers intended. Sometimes I'll go to what they've said in interviews, right. And I think that's really, it informs what I'm doing in my analysis. But I'm really making suggestions about how all of these stylistic dynamics and narrative strategies, right, propose something to the spectator. Now, of course, we don't know...

David Staley  13:14  
Intentionally or unintentionally? 

Laura Podalsky  13:16  
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how people respond. So I'm not making an argument that this is what happens in the theater, nor does my book use the methodologies of perception studies, to in some contexts are very complex. So it's not simply asking people, you know, what did you really feel in this? Right, but they're all these methods that you can use to have a kind of a robust analysis of responses of different groups. And that was something that was kind of outside of the purview of what I was doing in the book. So I do not necessarily claim on any level that all spectators feel this in the film. Rather, I'm kind of looking at the invitations thrown out by films, through their formal methods. But I'm also suggesting that aspect emotion, since rural dynamics are grounded in socio cultural and historical experience. So I also making the strong argument that people don't feel the same thing throughout history. So love may not be the same thing, right, from prehistoric times to the present, even the emotions that we use a similar name to, they have different valances and meanings and understandings and socio abilities from one period to another and from countries to countries. So part of what I'm interested in as well as looking at how these films often draw on and respond to some soil dynamics in those particular countries. So the films are several the films that I deal with are in some ways talking about the legacies of authoritarianism. So the authoritarian governments that were there from the 70s to the 80s, or even 90s in several countries, and the processing of that and the concern on the part of many people, that contemporary film and other forms of cultural production, new mall culture, for example. We're kind of wiping away the memory of the dictatorship. And so I'm looking at these films that talk about the dictatorship and in essence really laden way and saying, Well, yes, sometimes they give us Pat responses and make us feel good, if you will. Right, that things are better now. But sometimes even genre films like thrillers, make us question what we know and how we know it in an embodied way. So it doesn't really package up the past but opens up possibilities, even within a formula film.

David Staley  15:28  
Where did your interest in film come from?

Laura Podalsky  15:33  
I think my interest in film came from my mom. 

David Staley  15:36  
Your mom. Okay. Good place to start.

Laura Podalsky  15:38  
So I, yeah, I remember when I was younger, my mom was a kind of a night owl. And she liked to stay up and at that time, I grew up in Chicago, and at that time, they would have on Saturday, kind of evening, and into that night, double round of films. So they would, you know, start at eight o'clock and have one say John Wayne film a Western, and then at 10 o'clock, you know, have a Fred Astaire musical or something like that. And I just remember the joint, it could have been just the forbidden thing of staying up so late with my mom. But it would do the double feature, right. And these were watching black and white films, you know, there was no remote control, you'd have to you know, there was no pausing. And, you know, it was just that pleasure of being in those films. And so I think that love of film and love lots of different types of film came from that experience that just with your family.

David Staley  16:30  
And I've asked this before others on this program, we study film, can you ever like now watch a film just to watch a film? Or are you always the film scholar? In that sense, are you always working even if you're watching a movie?

Laura Podalsky  16:43  
No, I can certainly just watch a film, quote, unquote, for pleasure. This is actually what my students often asked me after I haven't gotten a longtime introduction to film or for them, it may be their first film course. And they'll come to me and I'm like, Oh, my gosh, everything I'm watching, I'm saying cut. Track. They're walking through their new vocabulary, and they say, Does it ever get any better? You've ruined film pay, but they say kind of laughingly. And what I tell them is, I think there are so many pleasures in watching film, so many things that you can engage with, some of which are, you know, that sort of initial response. But sometimes it's a pleasure of analysis, because I don't think those are opposed, right? Either I have a pleasurable thing, or I analyze I think these can be partners. So I think you can do both. But you know, where I land on the spectrum in any given day is up for grabs.

Janet Box-Steffensmeier  17:37  
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David Staley  18:02  
So, I want to go back to your first book in 2004 was titled "Specular City: Transforming Culture Consumption and Space in Buenos Aires". Why did you use that interesting term specular, what does that mean?

Laura Podalsky  18:15  
So I was studying at that moment, urban phenomena in a particular period, after the fall of the Peronist government, that had been a very powerful, somewhat transformative government that had taken place in Argentina in the 40s. And the 50s, that was interested in looking at or analyzing this sort of huge proliferation of new urban culture. So there were new magazines, so pretty made up Lana emerge at that time, which is basically like a Time Magazine, right, something like that, that covers politics, and economics and culture, you know, in a kind of a new format, right, versus kind of a more serious magazine at a certain niche market. But they're all sorts of new types of films with younger filmmakers filming out in the streets from as the first time and not only to get luscious backgrounds, but to talk about the lives of younger people, you know, and the technologies were incipient in some ways. So they would have kind of scratchy sounds of cars going by when a couple was talking to cafe. But the filmmakers wanted that in the film because they wanted to get you the sense of a lived environment, right, versus a studio production that might talk about the urban environment. I was interested in how these new films there are new skyscrapers being built, new pocket book editions of classical literature was being sought what was being produced and then sold in kiosks. And some older, kind of cultural mavens of Argentine society. Were scandalized by this. Oh my gosh, right. How can you have corppass are very well known author. How could you have that in your pocket book on the metro? That's scandalous. And so it was really interested in the emergence of this new culture and its circulation in new ways, right? Both how it was traveling through the city and being consumed by new population. And, and so I felt like the urban space right when Osiris in particular became this way to kind of speculate on what was happening, and kind of project these larger transformations that were taking place. 

David Staley  20:13  
And so the word specular means, specifically, like speculate? 

Laura Podalsky  20:19  
Yes, and it means like, it's sort of a microcosm of lots of larger things that were happening, right. And so it becomes a field of play for the people at the time, but of course, for me as an analyst as well. So

David Staley  20:31  
I know you're also co editing a volume, which is tentatively titled The essential Anna M Lopez. And this is going to feature both her canonical and lesser known essays. So first of all, tell us who Anna Lopez is,

Laura Podalsky  20:44  
I would love to have a Lopez is a wonderful person, fabulous academic who happened to be and I was lucky enough to have her as my academic mentor, one of my academic mentors while I was at Tulane University. She is a seminal figure in Latin American film studies, in really the 1980s. And there was another woman before her Julianne Burton. But Anna was one of the earliest people to really put Latin American film on the map of us academia, she went to the University of Iowa, to get her PhD in their film studies program. And she began studying an object that none of the professor's knew about, because they didn't really know very much anything about Latin American film. And so she began writing a bunch of different essays at that time about what we're then about films that are about 20 years old. So she began writing about the so called New Latin American cinema, which was an aesthetically avant garde, politically militant cinema in the 1960s, and 70s. That arose in many different countries, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and a lot of filmmakers were doing very experimental things, but in service of societal transformation, radical societal transformation. So she began writing a series of essays about these films, but then, in different periods of her time has also encouraged us to look at different periods in Latin American film production. And so kind of put Latin American film space on the map.

David Staley  22:15  
So you describe some of these essays as canonical, what makes an essay canonical? And I'm interested in that process?

Laura Podalsky  22:22  
That's a great question. So I think it isn't something that one knows when one's writing an economical essay. But I would say for me, canonical essays are field defining, so that they help us frame an issue. They help us frame an object of study, what is important, why do we have to pay attention to these issues? And why do we have to pay attention to these issues in these particular ways? So I think what has been transformative about her work over many years, is she points us in directions through her essay, she says, Well, what about New Latin American film? What about melodrama in the 1940s? And women's pictures in the 1940s? Oh, what about intermediality? So the linkages between different media forms, more recently in her work, so I think she is always in her essays pointing us in different ways to think about things that there may have been some work on before. But she asked like the big concept questions that encouraged us to turn a different way. And I should say always that I should have prefaced it with this. Dr. Lopez is working, always in conversation with the type of wonderful scholarship that is coming out of Latin America. So it's not as if she were working in a vacuum, right? We're always in conversation with our colleagues in Argentina, and Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica, in lots of different countries, because there's a lot of wonderful work of long duration, right, starting going back, oh, gosh, really, to the 30s. But film studies as a discipline had not really consolidated itself in many countries even today, right? It comes out related to another department like history or film, right. But they're wonderful traditions. Another thing that she does is always establishing an interface between that type of work that's happening in Latin America, right? theoretical questions that may be of interest to Anglo American film studies. And so I think that's another way in which her work, pulls together fields in ways it's really productive.

David Staley  24:25  
You'd mentioned course that you teach on film studies, Introduction to film tell us about some of the classes that you teach. The understanding that your chair of a department teaches much now that you have an administrative position but tell us about your classes.

Laura Podalsky  24:38  
Okay, so I teach mostly in my department, Spanish and Portuguese so there I teach English language introductory courses, a course on Introduction to Latin American film, in which I give students a overview of Latin American film from the 1930s to the present, to give them a sense that while they may have heard of a more recent Latin America Under actually films from Latin American, the gobike, way far away. And so it gives them an overview of the development of the Latin American film industry over time, some issues that were present in the 1930s that may reemerge in the present age, and exposure to different genres and different filmmakers. And through that, I also understand that many students come to that course without any background in film. So we begin the course by giving them a little bit of a vocabulary about how to talk about films in more analytical, less descriptive ways. So they can be in use those tools in our course. But then they leave the course. Right, and they have a broader sense of the film world, but also how to analyze film. So I teach that at a GE level, I also teach a course in Spanish in the major Latin American film, and that can vary on topic from a specific national cinema, like Argentine cinema, or a topic, gender and sexuality and Latin American cinema, and then teach grad seminars. And those again, can sort of range on topic from urban cultural studies, right, which I taught maybe two years ago, to a course on theories of visual culture, because my own work is very much centered around film, but I'm always interested in the kind of the larger landscape of what's going on visual landscape of what's going on. And I've also taught not for quite some time, of course on aspect, and Latin American cultural production.

David Staley  26:17  
Laura Podolsky. Thank you.

Laura Podalsky  26:20  
You're welcome. Thanks for having me. 

Eva Dale  26:22  
Voices from the Arts and Sciences is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Technology Services studio. Sound engineering by Paul Kotheimer. Produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Eva Dale.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai