SLAC 18.1: Iñárritu: Interpreting the Auteur

Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas issue 18.1 is a Special Issue devoted to Alejandro González Iñárritu edited by Dolores Tierney (University of Sussex).

As Dolores Tierney explain in her introduction, this Special Issue “charts the shift in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s directorial persona from transnational auteur to mainstream figure over the course of his six feature films and virtual reality installation: Amores perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), Babel (2006), Biutiful (2010), Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014), The Revenant (2015) and the installation Carne y arena (Virtually Present, Physically invisible) (2017). It argues that this shift into a (predominantly Anglo) mainstream is reflected in the different ways in which his last names (apellidos) are used, abbreviated or even excised altogether, and in the differing approaches to him as auteur employed by the authors of the different articles, but that Iñárritu’s persona and creative collaborators continue to be primarily determined by his Mexican and Latin American identity.”

Inspired by a Symposium held at Sussex in 2016, the Special Issue includes the work of many of those who originally presented at the Symposium plus the work of other scholars.  Click on the links below for additional materials.

Poster for the Contemporary Director’s Symposium on Alejandro González Iñárritu in 2018 at the University of Sussex.

CONTENTS:

Editorial
Shifting conceptions of Alejandro González Iñárritu: Interpreting the auteur
DOLORES TIERNEY

Articles

Behind the money: Iñárritu as career director

PAUL JULIAN SMITH

Whose film is it anyway? The battle over auteur status between Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga
DEBORAH SHAW

Visceral reality in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena/Virtually Present, Physically Invisible (Iñárritu 2017)
CATHERINE LEEN

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s melodramatic masculinities
NIAMH THORNTON

The texture of the age: Digital construction of unbounded Space in Birdman (Iñárritu 2014)
MARÍA DEL MAR AZCONAAND CELESTINO DELEYTO

Interrogating (neo)colonialism in the contemporary western: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant (2015)
DOLORES TIERNEY