Notice Board

The Department of History Colloquium Series presents:

Zombies in Latin American Contemporary Cinema
Guest Speaker:  Dr. Omar Rodriguez (Department of Modern Languages)
Day/Date:  Thursday, October 1, 2015
Time:  3:00 p.m.
Location:  C-610 (University Hall)

The zombie is a creation of the Caribbean, specifically Haiti. Made popular outside the island by a sensationalist book in the late 1920’s, the ethnological origin of the “monster” was soon lost in popular culture. The zombies most film audiences are  familiar with are the result of George A Romero imagination in films like The Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978). This talk examines the reappropriation of the zombie in its George A Romero form by contemporary Latin America film as an alternative to represent identity within a  political discourse.  Two movies will be discussed in detail, the Cuban film Juan de los Muertos [John of the Dead] (2010) and the Chilean Solos [The Descendents] (2008). In both films the zombie is used as a strategy to deploy a  political representation based on the notion of identity while ignoring, even rejecting, the classic political discourse based on class struggle.

Dr. Omar Rodríguez teaches Spanish film, Spanish literature and the Spanish language in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Lethbridge. His research focusses on the aesthetic, narrative and ideological elements present in marginal popular films. His most recent publication Re-casting la revolución: El héroe popular en “Juan de los muertos” [Recasting the Revolution: The Popular Hero in “John of the Dead”] explores the redefinition of the popular hero in contemporary Cuban film. He is currently involved in a multidisciplinary project that will allow low income children to create, through a series of video workshops, a corpus of direct  video films in suburban areas of Caracas, Venezuela.