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ABOUT

PERSONAL DETAILS
Los Angeles, CA
grromaguera@gmail.com
Hello. I am a Researcher Teacher Filmmaker
I am passionate about film and filmmaking
Welcome to my Personal and Academic profile I am assistant professor

BIO

ABOUT ME

Guillermo R. Rodríguez Romaguera is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Television Arts at California State University, Northridge. He is a narrative filmmaker and film scholar from San Juan, Puerto Rico. He first cultivated his writing talents at Princeton University while workshopping a novel under the mentorship of Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison. But his passion for cinema, specifically exploring the horror genre and representing marginalized voices, compelled him to become a filmmaker. He went on to pursue an M.F.A, and later a Ph.D., at the University of Southern California.

His directorial debut The Shadows premiered at Los Angeles’s Outfest LGBTQ Film Festival in their Dramatic Competition and is currently available on Amazon Prime. He is also the producer of the indie coming of age feature Sweet Thing, which debuted at the Seattle International Film Festival, and the horror short Totem Goat, which premiered at the Cannes Short Film Festival. In addition to writing, directing, and producing, Guillermo has edited four feature films, a documentary series for The History Channel and promos for CBS, NBC and DirecTV.

Prior to arriving at CSUN, Guillermo was Assistant Professor of Narrative Filmmaking at Santa Clara University where he created a course on Film Adaptation in collaboration with Emmy-winning actor/writer/director/producer Mark Duplass, and Teaching Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he developed courses that use video games as a pedagogical tool as well as integrate film theory into the filmmaking process through a Latinx lens. He is also the author of the book Spanish Meta-Art and Contemporary Cinema: Mirrors to the Unconscious (Bloomsbury, 2023), and his academic work has been published in Studies in European Cinema, Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America and the Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies. He is currently in pre-production for the queer horror film Mala Coda while working on his second book-length academic project, tentatively titled The Fluid Gaze: Transgender Visual Pleasure in Spnaish Horror Film.

RESEARCH

INTERESTS

Narrative film and television production, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality in narrative cinema, the horror genre

Film studies, critical and literary theory, continental philosophy, Gothic literature, and surrealism

Spanish, Latin American and Latinx cinema, American cinema and television, Eastern European cinema

Video games, neuroscience and film, multimedia composition and digital rhetoric

FACTS

NUMBERS ABOUT ME

10,920
CUPS OF COFFEE
3
PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES PUBLISHED
10
CONFERENCE PAPERS
7
INVITED TALKS AND/OR GUEST LECTURES
32
COURSES TAUGHT AND/OR DESIGNED
989
SATISFIED STUDENTS

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RESEARCH

CURRENT PROJECTS

SPANISH META-ART AND CONTEMPORARY CINEMA: MIRRORS TO THE UNCONSCIOUS (Bloomsbury, 2023)

FIRST BOOK

Can cinema reveal its audience's most subversive thinking? Do films have the potential to project their viewers' innermost thoughts making them apparent on the screen? This book argues that cinema has precisely this power, to unveil to the spectator their own hidden thoughts. It examines case studies from various cultures in conversation with Spain, a country whose enduring masterpieces in self-reflexive or meta-art provide insight into the special dynamic between viewer and screen.

Framed around critical readings of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, Diego Velázquez' Las meninas and Luis Buñuel's Un chien andalou, this book examines contemporary films by Víctor Erice, Carlos Saura, Bigas Luna, Alejandro Amenábar, Lucrecia Martel, Krzysztof Kieslowski, David Lynch, Pedro Almodóvar, Spike Jonze, Andrzej Zulawski, Fernando Pérez, Alfred Hitchcock, Wes Craven and David Cronenberg to illustrate how self-reflexivity in film unbridles the mental repression of film spectators. It proposes cinema as an uncanny duplication of the workings of the brain – a doppelgänger to human thought.

THE FLUID GAZE: TRANSGENDER VISUAL PLEASURE IN SPANISH HORROR FILM

SECOND BOOK

My second book-length research project The Fluid Gaze: Transgender Visual Pleasure in Spanish Horror Cinema repurposes traditional gender studies to reflect gender fluidity in cinematic identification as a disruption of the power dynamics of cisnormativity in addition to patriarchal structures. Specifically, it examines Spanish horror films before, during and after “la Transición española” through an intersection of queer and trans theory to re-think the horror genre as the site of a complex intermingling of gender and sexual identities for its Spanish audience. It applies critical queer and trans theory to classic Spanish horror films such as La residencia (1969) and La novia ensangrentada (1972) as well as the genre work of Ivan Zulueta (Arrebato), Agustí Villaronga (Tras el cristal), Eloy de la Iglesia (La semana del asesino, Nadie oyó gritar), Alejandro Amenábar (Tesis, Abre los ojos, Los otros) and Pedro Almodóvar (La piel que habito). Why does a typically misogynistic genre accused of demonizing trans and queer subjects continues to be embraced by LGBTQ+ audiences in Spain and around the world? My research will not only examine representations of queer otherness in Spanish horror cinema by bringing together the fields of Spanish cultural studies, queer theory, and film studies, but will ultimately seek to transform the genre’s gender and sexuality stereotypes into narratives that advocate for the underrepresented, the oppressed and the marginalized. My approach to Spanish film studies in this book seeks to go beyond a cultural studies approach to Spanish national cinema by building upon the critical and literary theoretical framework developed in my first book to formulate a spectatorship of exclusion for LGBTQ horror audiences not only in Spain but also in Latin America and the Spanish-speaking populations of the United States.

DISSERTATION COMMITTEE AND REFERENCES

JULIAN GUTIERREZ-ALBILLA

PROFESSOR

Professor

of Spanish and Portuguese and Gender Studies and Comparative Literature

Dept of Latin American and Iberian Cultures

University of Southern California

Los Angeles, CA 90089-0358

E-mail: juliangu@usc.edu

Phone: (213) 740-1258

Office: THH 156

AKIRA MIZUTA LIPPIT

PROFESSOR

Professor of Cinematic Arts,

Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Cultures

Critical Studies Division, School of Cinematic Arts

University of Southern California

Los Angeles, CA 90089-2211

E-mail: lippit@usc.edu

Phone: (213) 740-8508

Office: THH 376

SHERRY VELASCO

PROFESSOR

Professor

of Spanish and Portuguese and Gender Studies

Dept of Latin American and Iberian Cultures

University of Southern California

Los Angeles, CA 90089-0358

E-mail: svelasco@usc.edu

Phone: (213) 740-7659

Office: THH 156

ANNA KRAKUS

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

Assistant Professor of Polish Studies

Dept of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies

University of Copenhagen

DK-2300 Copenhagen S

E-mail: Anna.Krakus@hum.ku.dk

Phone: +45 35 33 22 58

ERIN GRAFF ZIVIN

PROFESSOR

Professor

of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature

Dept of Latin American and Iberian Cultures

University of Southern California

Los Angeles, CA 90089-0358

E-mail: egz@dornsife.usc.edu

Phone: 213-740-7659

Office: THH 156

ROBERTO DÍAZ

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

Associate Professor

of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature

Dept of Latin American and Iberian Cultures

University of Southern California

Los Angeles, CA 90089-0358

E-mail: rdiaz@usc.edu

Phone: 213-740-1271

Office: THH 374

PEGGY KAMUF

PROFESSOR

Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Professor of French and Italian and Comparative Literature

Dept of Comparative Literature

University of Southern California

Los Angeles, CA 90089-0359

E-mail: kamuf@usc.edu

Phone: (213) 740-0101

Office: THH 278

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PUBLICATIONS

LIST OF ARTICLES, CONFERENCE PAPERS AND LECTURES
ALL
SORTING BY DATE
14 MAR 2024

The Fluid Gaze: Transgender Visual Pleasure in Horror and Spanish Cinema

MONTREAL - CANADA

To be presented in the seminar "Thinking the 'Unthinkable World': Theories of Horror, Horrors of Theory" at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association
Conferences Selected Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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The Fluid Gaze: Transgender Visual Pleasure in Horror and Spanish Cinema

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Conferences Selected

This paper re-thinks the horror genre as the site of a complex intermingling of gender and sexual subjectivities for its Spanish audience. By applying critical queer and trans theory to the classic Spanish horror films such as La residencia (1969) and Pedro Almodóvar's La piel que habito (2011), this paper proposes a theory of how gender fluidity in Spanish cinematic identification disrupts not just patriarchal structures and heteronormative sexualities but the power dynamics of cisnormative oppression.

19 MAR 2023

Seeing Through Darkness: Visualizing Soundscapes in the Hispanic Thriller

CHICAGO - USA

Paper presented in the seminar "Hearing Images, Reading Sounds in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures, Film, and Other Visual Arts" at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association
Conferences Selected Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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Seeing Through Darkness: Visualizing Soundscapes in the Hispanic Thriller

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Conferences Selected

We tend to think of film as a strictly visual medium, reliant on shot composition, color palette, the face of the actors and the movement of the camera to tell its story. However, as George Lucas once reminded us, “sound is half the picture,” because a film’s sound design provides half of the information needed to “fill in” that which lies outside the frame of a cinematographic image. Still, the role of sound in film spectatorship is often overlooked because it operates on such an unconscious level. This paper will trace the role of sound in cinematic storytelling as it conjures images outside the frame for its spectators. It will focus on the writing, producing and sound editing process of making a contemporary Hispanic thriller through the lens of French critic and sound theorist Michel Chion’s book Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen as well as some of his most recent work. Specifically, it will explore how sound effects and music translate from screenplay to screen in a Latinx film I wrote (and will be directing) in comparison to how the sound and score designed and composed by Spanish-Chilean writer-director Alejandro Amenábar operate in his 1996 directorial debut Thesis. The goal is to examine how aural elements leap from the page into the film’s final soundscape and paint images that lie not only outside the cinematographic frame but beyond conventional visual perception. This process will be contextualized within the Spanish and Latinx thriller genre, popularized in recent decades by Hispanic filmmakers such as Amenábar, Guillermo Del Toro, Pedro Almodóvar, Jaume Balagueró, J.A. Bayona, Pablo Larraín, Lucrecia Martel, Juan José Campanella and Patricia Cardoso among others.

11 FEB 2023

Hellish Soundscapes: The Visual Aurality of Dreaming the Underworld in Don Quixote, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Mala Coda

SAN MARINO, CA - USA

Invited Talk for the Early Modern Iberian Voices Symposium at the Huntington Library
Invited Talks Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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Hellish Soundscapes: The Visual Aurality of Dreaming the Underworld in Don Quixote, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Mala Coda

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Invited Talks

Using Don Quixote’s cave of Montesinos chapter as a framework for the use of orality and aurality in narrative storytelling, this paper will examine the role of sound in cinematic storytelling as it conjures images outside the frame for its spectators. Specifically, this presentation will explore how sound effects translate from screenplay to screen in writer-director Wes Craven’s 1984 horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street which has been a major influence on a Latinx horror film I am currently writing titled Mala Coda. Both films depict a protagonist that descends into an oneiric “underworld” to confront a demonic figure that embodies a repressed truth about themselves, a journey that mirrors Don Quixote’s waking dream inside the cave of Montesinos which unravels his delusion and the artifice of Cervantes’ novel as a whole. First, I will examine how Don Quijote’s oral retelling of his dream inside the cave conjures up a vision for Sancho, Basilio’s cousin and Cervantes’ “idle reader.” Then, I will explore how aural elements leap from a screenplay’s page into a film’s final soundscape to paint images that lie not only outside the cinematographic frame but beyond conventional visual perception.

1-5 APR 2020

Queer Genres

DENVER - USA

Panel chair for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference (Conference Cancelled due to Coronavirus Outbreak)
Conferences Selected Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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Seeing Through Darkness: Visualizing Soundscapes in the Spanish Thriller

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Conferences Selected

We tend to think of film as a strictly visual medium, reliant on shot composition, color palette, the face of the actors and the movement of the camera to tell its story. However, as George Lucas once reminded us, “sound is half the picture,” because a film’s sound design provides half of the information needed to “fill in” that which lies outside the frame of a cinematographic image. Still, the role of sound in film spectatorship is often overlooked because it operates on such an unconscious level. This paper will trace the role of sound in cinematic storytelling as it conjures images outside the frame for its spectators. It will focus on the writing, producing and sound editing process of making a contemporary Hispanic thriller through the lens of French critic and sound theorist Michel Chion’s book Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen as well as some of his most recent work. Specifically, it will explore how sound effects and music translate from screenplay to screen in a Latinx film I wrote (and will be directing) in comparison to how the sound and score designed and composed by Spanish-Chilean writer-director Alejandro Amenábar operate in his 1996 directorial debut Thesis. The goal is to examine how aural elements leap from the page into the film’s final soundscape and paint images that lie not only outside the cinematographic frame but beyond conventional visual perception. This process will be contextualized within the Spanish and Latinx thriller genre, popularized in recent decades by Hispanic filmmakers such as Amenábar, Guillermo Del Toro, Pedro Almodóvar, Jaume Balagueró, J.A. Bayona, Pablo Larraín, Lucrecia Martel, Juan José Campanella and Patricia Cardoso among others.

27 FEB 2020

Legitimizing Horror

ELON, NC - USA

Invited Talk for the Department of English at Elon University
Invited Talks Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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Legitimizing Horror

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Invited Talks

This paper confronts the paradoxical relationship of certain minorities to the horror genre. For instance, statistics show that the current boom in horror box office with record breaking hits like Andrés Muschietti’s It adaptation and the new Halloween sequel is attributable to an increase in Latinx audiences, yet these films do not feature any Latinx protagonists for these minority audiences to identify with. Why does a genre accused of excluding diversity continue to be primarily embraced by Latinx, African-American and LGBTQ audiences? To tackle this question, this paper examines representations of political otherness in classic horror cinema alongside recent Latinx, Latin American and Spanish films that transform the genre’s gender stereotypes and racial exclusion into narratives that advocate for the underrepresented, the oppressed and the marginalized. Specifically, it repurposes traditional gender studies to reflect gender fluidity in cinematic identification as a disruption of the power dynamics of whiteness in addition to patriarchal structures. It re-examines three classic horror films (Psycho, Halloween and The Silence of the Lambs) through an intersection of critical race, queer and trans theory, placing them in a cinematic trajectory that culminates in Latinx, Latin American and Spanish films by Gigi Saul Guerrero, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Lucrecia Martel, and Pedro Almodóvar.

24 FEB 2020

Quixotic Horror and Latinx Audiences: The Paradox of Latinx Exclusion from the Horror Film

CHAPEL HILL - USA

Invited Talk for Latina/o Studies Program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Invited Talks Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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Quixotic Horror and Latinx Audiences: The Paradox of Latinx Exclusion from the Horror Film

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Invited Talks

This paper confronts the paradoxical relationship of certain minorities to the horror genre. For instance, statistics show that the current boom in horror box office with record breaking hits like Andrés Muschietti’s It adaptation and the new Halloween sequel is attributable to an increase in Latinx audiences, yet these films do not feature any Latinx protagonists for these minority audiences to identify with. Why does a genre accused of excluding diversity continue to be primarily embraced by Latinx, African-American and LGBTQ audiences? To tackle this question, this paper examines representations of political otherness in classic horror cinema alongside recent Latinx, Latin American and Spanish films that transform the genre’s gender stereotypes and racial exclusion into narratives that advocate for the underrepresented, the oppressed and the marginalized. Specifically, it repurposes traditional gender studies to reflect gender fluidity in cinematic identification as a disruption of the power dynamics of whiteness in addition to patriarchal structures. It re-examines three classic horror films (Psycho, Halloween and The Silence of the Lambs) through an intersection of critical race, queer and trans theory, placing them in a cinematic trajectory that culminates in Latinx, Latin American and Spanish films by Gigi Saul Guerrero, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Lucrecia Martel, and Pedro Almodóvar.

7 NOV 2019

Censored Sight in Víctor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive

CHAPEL HILL - USA

Guest Lecture in "Film Culture and the Global Context" at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Guest Lectures Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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Censored sight in Víctor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Guest Lectures

This talk focuses on Víctor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena, Erice, 1973), a Spanish film made at the end of the Franco dictatorship, as it echoes the famous opening scene in Un chien andalou where Buñuel sliced the eye of a woman with a razor. Specifically, it compares the child protagonist from The Spirit of the Beehive and how she processes the violence removed from her sight to the main character (played by the same actress twenty years later) in Alejandro Amenábar’s Thesis (Tesis, 1996), a horror film from the democratic period that deals with the defiance of sight in a direct way.

9 SEP 2019

Race, Gender and Zombies: Haitian Voodoo, The Civil Rights Movement and The Accidental Politics of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead

CHAPEL HILL - USA

Guest Lecture for "Death and Dying" in the Department of Anthropology, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Guest Lectures Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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Race, Gender and Zombies: Haitian Voodoo, The Civil Rights Movement and The Accidental Politics of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Guest Lectures

Cuban-American filmmaker George A. Romero might have conceived of Night of the Living Dead (1968) as just another visceral horror film about the undead attacking the living, but instead it became a film of political and cultural significance. Romero’s unintentional statements about race and gender indicate that the film is not only about the undead, but about how the living interact with one another.

18 MAR 2018

Twin Peaks as Cinematic Antidote to the Serial Addictions of Traditional Narrative

TORONTO - CANADA

To be presented in the seminar "Unbound: New Possibilities for the American TV Series" at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference
Conferences Selected Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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Twin Peaks as Cinematic Antidote to the Serial Addictions of Traditional Narrative

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Conferences Selected

So much of the scholarship on Twin Peaks’s original run centers on quality and auteurism, the emergence of a high-brow aesthetic in a low-brow medium, and revolves around its failure as a televisual product – overlooking in my view what the actual show was doing to televisual seriality by infusing it with avant-garde film’s aesthetic language. The show has mostly been read along its surfaces, its postmodern tropes, but I argue that perhaps its surfaces hide layers that are built to undo its spectators’ own serial compulsion. In my view, Twin Peaks is undoing familiar narrative patterns within the diegesis and through its audiovisual imagery by reflecting the effects of consuming television on its spectators. It specifically mirrors the narcotic influence of two of TV’s oldest genres: the soap opera’s trivialization and commodification of emotion as currency and the police procedural’s mouse trap mystery that hook, line and sinkers the viewer. One mode is associated with the feminine, while the other is generally viewed as masculine. In conflating these two narrative drugs, the soap opera and the procedural, the show not only merges the typically divisive engendered audience, but also reveals the mechanisms upon which these capitalist addictions operate and in turn offers something other than narrative – a path which led to its untimely cancellation as the addictions on which it was built disappear and were replaced by the show’s development of its more surreal elements. The audience in 1990 was not ready for Mark Frost and David Lynch’s challenge to traditional storytelling designed topographically around a map rather than as a narrative interrupted by commercials, and left when the saccharine caffeinated mystery to which they were addicted dissipated in the latter half of Season Two. Twin Peaks returned for a belated third season last summer in a format that annuls both the traditional serial structure of contemporary television and the length of the feature film, reflecting and disrupting the workings of its avid consumer’s addictive neurological tendencies upon the advent of streamed serialization and ‘binge watching.’ For example, the episodes inside the surreal ‘black and white lodges’ come to be a kind of mise-en-abyme of the show as a whole unmasking the debasement on which televisual addiction to serial narrative operates, a genderless addiction to both emotionally-heightened soap operas and crime procedural mysteries involving violence.

30 JAN 2018

Hermetic Space as Abstraction of the Mechanisms of Censorship: Symptomatic ‘Archive Fever’ in Carlos Saura’s La madriguera

ARTICLE PUBLISHED AT BULLETIN OF SPANISH VISUAL STUDIES

Link to Article
Journal Papers Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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Hermetic Space as Abstraction of the Mechanisms of Censorship: Symptomatic ‘Archive Fever’ in Carlos Saura’s La madriguera

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Journal Papers

This article engages in a close reading of Carlos Saura’s understudied La madriguera (1969) by exposing in its use of spatial and material configurations a hermetically sealed Spain under Francoism during the ‘apertura’ period of the 1960s. It seeks to elucidate how Saura’s use of claustrophobic space suggests an unveiling of the process of abstraction embedded in the mechanisms of censorship as they affect the Spanish spectator of the 1960s who sits immobilized in the dark theater, unconsciously juxtaposed to the unassuming agoraphobia foregrounded in the film through its protagonists’ self-imposed hermetism. The film unveils these mechanisms through a metafilmic language by self-reflecting in its domestic fortress, in its theater of its protagonists Teresa and Pedro constantly performing roles of a time out of joint, recollections of childhood and virtual fantasies that have no place in the present.

1 SEP 2017

The Quixotic in Horror: Self-Generating Narrative and its Self-Critical Sequel in Wes Craven's Self-Reflexive Horror Cinema

ARTICLE PUBLISHED AT CERVANTES: BULLETIN OF THE CERVANTES SOCIETY OF AMERICA

Link to Article
Journal Papers Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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The Quixotic in Horror: Self-Generating Narrative and its Self-Critical Sequel in Wes Craven's Self-Reflexive Horror Cinema

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Journal Papers

When Miguel de Cervantes began writing El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605/1615), he set out to write a satirical, self-reflexive spin on the chivalric romance popularized by the success of Amadís de Gaula, an early modern Spain bestseller initially published in 1508 that went on to span twelve sequels throughout the sixteenth century. Although history and academia eventually judged Don Quijote as not only the wellspring of the modern novel but also the canonical text for narrative fiction, early modern Spanish culture saw its publication as merely a satire of these ‘libros de caballería.’ The exercise of mocking yet elevating this popular form of low-brow fiction with perspicacity brings to mind a string of metafictional films released during the 1990s that produced a revival of the slasher horror genre by cleverly mocking and revitalizing its conventions. Through a close reading of how Quixotic techniques are echoed by contemporary filmmaker Wes Craven in his reinvention of the horror genre with films such as Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) and the Scream series (1996-2011), this article asks the question: what does Don Quijote’s self-reflexive narrative devices teach us about not only the significance of horror films in recent times but also the possible academic afterlife of this culturally dismissed genre of teenage popular entertainment? If Cervantes’ metafictional chivalric romance gave birth to the Modern novel, a genre that spanned four hundred years of influential literature, what kind of genre transformations might Wes Craven’s metafilmic horror films give birth to? What is the connection of the horror genre in its metafilmic turn and Cervantes’ novel?

30 APR 2017

‘La casa doblada’: Latin American Gothic Horror in English-Language Spanish Cinema

LIMA - PERU

Presented in the session "Culture on Crisis / Culture in Crisis: Art and the Neoliberal Market" at the XXXV International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association
Conferences Selected Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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‘La casa doblada’: Latin American Gothic Horror in English-Language Spanish Cinema

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Conferences Selected

Many Spanish horror filmmakers working under Franco’s dictatorship used adaptations of gothic literature to circumvent censorship and fund their films internationally. Similarly, contemporary Latin American horror directors like Guillermo del Toro continue to turn to English-language gothic narratives in order to compete globally. Using examples from the horror genre, this paper argues that the contingencies of dictatorship during Spain’s “apertura” period have uncanny parallels with the current economic necessities of neoliberalism. It explores Latin American-born filmmakers working in Spain and directing gothic horror films set in foreign countries to meet the demands of an international market, resulting in their original ideas being encoded in translation. Specifically, it compares Uruguayan-born and Argentinean-raised Narciso Ibañez Serrador’s 1969 Spanish horror film La Residencia, produced in English and set in nineteenth-century France, with Chilean-born Alejandro Amenábar’s 2001 Spanish horror film The Others, originally written to be set in Chile but adapted to a British setting in order to cast Australian movie star Nicole Kidman. Both films portray crisis in a domestic setting, yet due to either censorship restrictions and/or the exigencies of the neoliberal economy, the domestic is translated (or “dubbed”) as a gothic house in England or France as opposed to Latin America. These also were the highest-grossing Spanish horror films in Spain at the time of their release. This paper reads these films as encoded Latin American narratives of domestic crises disguised as an international neoliberal product as the filmmakers yield to the pressures of dictatorial censorship and the global market.

5 APR 2017

The Confined and Delusional Spectator: Striped Minds in Hermetic Spaces in Un Chien andalou (1929) and Meta-film as Virtual Oneiric Simulation in Open Your Eyes (1997) and eXistenZ (1999)

LOS ANGELES - USA

Guest Lecture in "Madness and Vision in Literature, Art and Film" at the University of Southern California
Guest Lectures Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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The Confined and Delusional Spectator: Striped Minds in Hermetic Spaces in Un Chien andalou (1929) and Meta-film as Virtual Oneiric Simulation in Open Your Eyes (1997) and eXistenZ (1999)

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Guest Lectures

Through a comparison with the cave of Montesinos episode in Miguel de Cervantes’ second volume of Don Quixote, this guest lecture builds on Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s use of space and objects in Un chien andalou and addresses psychoanalytic, feminist and game theories to problematize the convergence of the oneiric with the metafilmic in Alejandro Amenábar’s Open Your Eyes (Abre los ojos, 1997) and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), films that are self-reflexive by taking place entirely in a virtual world its protagonists’ inhabit as if they were dreaming them. Echoes of Cervantes’ Don Quixote in these contemporary films signal an epistemic shift toward the virtual as their protagonists insist in replacing reality with delusion.

27 OCT 2016

Luis Buñuel (1900-1983)

ARTICLE PUBLISHED IN SPAIN ARTS & CULTURE'S 2016 FALL/WINTER SPANISH CULTURAL PROGRAM

Article for retrospective Objects of Desire: The Films of Luis Buñuel sponsored by the Embassy of Spain
Other Article Selected Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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Luis Buñuel (1900-1983)

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Other Articles Selected

Spanning six decades, Luis Buñuel’s film career can perhaps be traced back to his rejection of Catholicism at age sixteen when he told his mother he’d been expelled from a Jesuit private institution and opted instead to finish his studies at the local public school in Zaragoza. That realization about the Church’s hypocrisy in a way determined the course of his artistic life – a series of trans-cultural endeavors that would take him from his native Spain where he was part of “La generación del 27” to France where he joined the Surrealist movement, across the Atlantic to failed attempts at a career in Hollywood and where he briefly worked for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, then south of the border to Mexico where he found a filmmaking niche and finally to international success with films marred in controversy but subsequently lauded with acclaim. From the emblematic surrealist short Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog 1929) to the Academy Award winning Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie 1972), Buñuel experimented in every genre imaginable, from documentary to the musical, but all his films bore his distinct style and themes. They are all unmistakably Buñuelian – a combination of a rebellious assault on religious and aristocratic institutions, a rejection of intellectual reason, and an embrace of the irrationality of dreams as a way to combat the imprisonment of structures both moral and social.

13 OCT 2016

The Uncanny Crystals of Le double vie de Verónique / The Influence of Kieślowski on my film The Mirror Maker

LOS ANGELES - USA

Paper presented / artist lecture given at the Conference ‘No End: Twenty Years into Krzysztof Kieślowski's Second Life'
Conferences Selected Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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The Uncanny Crystals of Le double vie de Verónique / The Influence of Kieślowski on my film The Mirror Maker

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Conferences Selected

By discussing Sigmund Freud’s ‘The uncanny’ in conjunction with Gilles Deleuze’s varying crystals from The Time-Image, this paper builds the idea that the film screen is an abyss from which the spectator’s thoughts are uncannily duplicated. It compares a Deleuzian reading of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s La double vie de Véronique (1991) with my film The Mirror Maker (2002) to illustrate an instance in which duality emerges within the diegesis to reflect the uncanny doubling of the spectator’s mental predicament as what is projected visually on the screen.

7 OCT 2016

Respondent to Keynote Lecture 'Reframing Buñuel in the Light of Neuroscience'

LOS ANGELES - USA

Invited respondent to keynote lecture by Marsha Kinder at Symposium 'Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Archive in Spanish Cinema'
Conferences Selected Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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The Quixotic in Horror: Self-Generating Narrative and its Self-Critical Sequel in Wes Craven’s Self-Reflexive Horror Cinema

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Conferences Selected

When Miguel de Cervantes began writing El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605/1615), he set out to write a satirical, self-reflexive spin on the chivalric romance popularized by the success of Amadís de Gaula, an early modern Spain bestseller initially published in 1508 that went on to span twelve sequels throughout the sixteenth century. Although history and academia eventually judged Don Quijote as not only the wellspring of the modern novel but also the canonical text for narrative fiction, early modern Spanish culture saw its publication as merely a satire of these ‘libros de caballería.’ The exercise of mocking yet elevating this popular form of low-brow fiction with perspicacity brings to mind a string of metafictional films released during the 1990s that produced a revival of the slasher horror genre by cleverly mocking and revitalizing its conventions. Through a close reading of how Quixotic techniques are echoed by contemporary filmmaker Wes Craven in his reinvention of the horror genre with films such as Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) and the Scream series (1996-2011), this article asks the question: what does Don Quijote’s self-reflexive narrative devices teach us about not only the significance of horror films in recent times but also the possible academic afterlife of this culturally dismissed genre of teenage popular entertainment? If Cervantes’ metafictional chivalric romance gave birth to the Modern novel, a genre that spanned four hundred years of influential literature, what kind of genre transformations might Wes Craven’s metafilmic horror films give birth to? What is the connection of the horror genre in its metafilmic turn and Cervantes’ novel?

6 JUL 2016

Y te sacarán los ojos: The Defiance of Reconstituted Sight in Dictatorship and Post-Dictatorship Spanish Cinema

ARTICLE PUBLISHED IN STUDIES IN EUROPEAN CINEMA

Link to Article
Journal Papers Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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Y te sacarán los ojos: The Defiance of Reconstituted Sight in Dictatorship and Post-Dictatorship Spanish Cinema

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Journal Papers

This article focuses on the theme of reconstituted sight in Spanish films made at the end of the Franco dictatorship and under the subsequent democratic period as they echo the famous opening scene in Un chien andalou (1929) where Luis Buñuel sliced the eye of a woman with a razor. It revisits The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena, Erice, 1973) and Raise Ravens (Cría cuervos, Saura, 1976) through the eyes of its two main characters named Ana and how they process the trauma of the violence removed from their sight through imagination and playacting. The Ana's imagined relationship to violence in both films will be extrapolated to horror films from the democratic period that deal with the defiance of sight in a direct way, Bigas Luna's Anguish (1987) and Alejandro Amenábar's Thesis (Tesis, 1996). What we could not see in the first two films (both a circumvention of and commentary on Francoist censorship) becomes hypervisible in these films, signaling a resistance to looking away and a determination to confront and vanquish the trauma of Spain's brutal past.

13 FEB 2016

The Quixotic in Horror: Self-Generating Narrative and its Self-Critical Sequel in Wes Craven’s Self-Reflexive Horror Cinema

LOS ANGELES - USA

Paper presented at Conference 'Happy in the Life to Come: 400 Years of Cervantine Afterlives'
Conferences Selected Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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The Quixotic in Horror: Self-Generating Narrative and its Self-Critical Sequel in Wes Craven’s Self-Reflexive Horror Cinema

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Conferences Selected

When Miguel de Cervantes began writing El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605/1615), he set out to write a satirical, self-reflexive spin on the chivalric romance popularized by the success of Amadís de Gaula, an early modern Spain bestseller initially published in 1508 that went on to span twelve sequels throughout the sixteenth century. Although history and academia eventually judged Don Quijote as not only the wellspring of the modern novel but also the canonical text for narrative fiction, early modern Spanish culture saw its publication as merely a satire of these ‘libros de caballería.’ The exercise of mocking yet elevating this popular form of low-brow fiction with perspicacity brings to mind a string of metafictional films released during the 1990s that produced a revival of the slasher horror genre by cleverly mocking and revitalizing its conventions. Through a close reading of how Quixotic techniques are echoed by contemporary filmmaker Wes Craven in his reinvention of the horror genre with films such as Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) and the Scream series (1996-2011), this article asks the question: what does Don Quijote’s self-reflexive narrative devices teach us about not only the significance of horror films in recent times but also the possible academic afterlife of this culturally dismissed genre of teenage popular entertainment? If Cervantes’ metafictional chivalric romance gave birth to the Modern novel, a genre that spanned four hundred years of influential literature, what kind of genre transformations might Wes Craven’s metafilmic horror films give birth to? What is the connection of the horror genre in its metafilmic turn and Cervantes’ novel?

24 SEP 2015

'Restless in its Transvestite Clothes’: Transgendered Televisual Pleasure from Laura Palmer to Maura Pfefferman

LOS ANGELES - USA

Guest Lecture in "Gender Conflicts Across Cultural Contexts" for Gender Studies Program, University of Southern California
Guest Lectures Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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'Restless in its Transvestite Clothes’: Transgendered Televisual Pleasure from Laura Palmer to Maura Pfefferman

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Guest Lectures

Twin Peaks is a reflection of the effects of consuming television on its spectators, specifically the soap opera’s trivialization and commodification of emotion as currency and the police procedural’s mouse trap mystery that hook, line and sinkers the viewer. One mode is associated with the feminine, while the other is generally viewed as masculine. In conflating these two narrative drugs, the soap opera and the procedural, the show not only merges the typically divisive engendered audience, but also reveals the mechanisms upon which these capitalist addictions operate. Lynch’s redeployment of the denigrated soap opera in his avant-garde television show is more than just an exercise of taking a lowbrow form of pop culture and turning it on its head with great success. Its many layers are complex, dual in nature and reflective of its spectators’ own serial compulsion.

23 APR 2015

The Exposure of Murder within Capital Punishment Through Film Aesthetic: The Scopic Case of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Krótki film o zabijaniu (Short Film About Killing) against the Death Penalty in Poland

LOS ANGELES - USA

Paper presented at Graduate Student Conference 'Execution, Spectacle, Law: A Symposium on Capital Punishment with Austin Sarat'
Conferences Selected Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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The Exposure of Murder within Capital Punishment Through Film Aesthetic: The Scopic Case of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Krótki film o zabijaniu (Short Film About Killing) against the Death Penalty in Poland

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Conferences Selected

On March 11 1988, a year before the fall of communism in Poland, Krzysztof Kieślowski released an extended version of the fifth chapter of his Decalogue TV series, the one corresponding to the commandment ‘Thou shall not kill,’ entitled Short Film About Killing. As much a political statement against the death penalty as it is a powerful aesthetic cinematic experience, the film opened amidst heated debate over capital punishment in Poland and was initially rejected by Polish audiences who reacted negatively to its juxtaposition of capital punishment with murder. The last execution in Poland was carried out on April 22, one month and eleven days after the film hit theaters in the Eastern European nation. Even though capital punishment remained in Polish law another ten years, no executions were carried out after that one. This paper seeks to explore the role of Kieślowski’s film not only in deterring further executions in Poland – showing how literature and art can effect political transformation – but also to unmask the spectacle of state-sanctioned executions as a mirror to the senselessness of the murders it claims to punish. Deploying Derrida’s deconstructive rhetoric in Death Penalty Volume I, we will engage in a close reading of the audio-visual techniques Kieślowski employs in his condemnation of Poland’s capital punishment and how they question the validity of state-sanctioned executions in the spectator’s absorption of the narrative.

27 MAR 2015

The Spectral Spectator: The ‘visor effect’ in film

SEATTLE - USA

Paper presented in the seminar "Visualizing Spectrality" at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association
Conferences Selected Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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The Spectral Spectator: The ‘visor effect’ in film

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Conferences Selected

In "Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International," Jacques Derrida uses the figure of the ghost of Hamlet’s father to express what he coins the ‘visor effect,’ that is “the power to see without being seen” (Derrida 8). Taking the terms ‘visor effect’ and ‘spectrality effect’ and applying them to the medium of film, this paper seeks to theorize the presence of the spectator as an invisible specter looking through a raised visor, not of an anachronistic armor but of the lens of a camera, unto a fictional vision of another time, perhaps a representation of the past or that of an imagined future, or, in Shakespearian terms, ‘a time out of joint’. That which we, as spectators of cinema, witness through the visor of the film screen is a nonexistent time that coalesces with the present spectrally, like the projection of a magic lantern to simulate a ghostly apparition, whether it be the return of the dead or an augur of what’s to come. Exploring the interplay of the spectral gaze through instances where films seem to be aware of that presence within the visor, that specter under the helmet, that viewer on the other side of the screen, we will look closely at key scenes from Krzysztof Kieślowski’s "La double vie de Véronique" and "Trois Couleurs: Rouge," David Lynch’s "Lost Highway," Pedro Almodóvar’s "Los abrazos rotos," and Spike Jonze’s "Being John Malkovich." Referring at times to interviews with the filmmakers as well as critical work on the films, we will seek to explore how the ‘visor effect’ and ‘spectrality’ inform the viewership of these works.

20 NOV 2014

The Virtualization and Exsanguination of Capital Punishment in Jacques Derrida’s Death Penalty Vol. I

LOS ANGELES - USA

Guest Lecture in "Crime Stories: Eastern European Fiction From Crime To Punishment" for the Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Southern California
Guest Lectures Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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The Virtualization and Exsanguination of Capital Punishment in Jacques Derrida’s Death Penalty Vol. I

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Guest Lectures

Halfway through the eighth session of his seminars on capital punishment, Jacques Derrida decides to “pause” the seminar, performing perhaps the freeze-framing of his argument as if we, the readers of Death Penalty Volume I, or they, the listeners of the seminar at the time, were actually ‘seeing’ his words in visual form. Through this moment of paucity, Derrida projects his own speech as if it were an image onscreen and calls upon the readers and/or listeners to ‘watch’ what he is about to say, to perhaps imagine it as if they were pausing it on TV. He wants us to see the guillotine, this daughter of Dr. Guillotin, not only as a figure of speech but more importantly as a figure, a virtual representation, an allegory of a machine that is personified in the image of an old, toothless whore carrying out the instructions of her puppeteer, the pimp who manages her, the bourreau, the executioner. For Derrida, desanguinizing the death penalty does not signify an execution without blood, but a mere shift in its economic relations, as the blood we don’t see is but consumed by the mechanism and then virtualized in the spectator's mind.

21 MAR 2014

The Possession of Carlotta’s Necklace Under Revolutionary Cuba: Re-Distribution of the Perceptible through Hitchcock’s Vertigo in Fernando Pérez’ Madrigal

NEW YORK - USA

Paper presented in the seminar "Global Hitchcock" at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association
Conferences Selected Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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The Possession of Carlotta’s Necklace Under Revolutionary Cuba: Re-Distribution of the Perceptible through Hitchcock’s Vertigo in Fernando Pérez’ Madrigal

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Conferences Selected

In The Politics of Literature, Jacques Ranciere expresses that literature’s democratic prowess “is not a matter of some irresistible social influence [but] a matter of a new distribution of the perceptible.” Therefore, aesthetic democracy lies in its freedom to be reconfigured by anyone who grabs its ciphers and attributes it meaning. For Jacques Laçan, image is misunderstood at the ‘mirror stage’ when a reflection of our ideal selves is placed in diametric opposition to our actual physical body creating a fantasmatic superimposition that continues to govern our adult life. If we imbricate Laçan with Ranciere, a mis-identification of self-perception must undergo a new “distribution of the perceptible” in art to dislodge signifiers unto a prism of new signifieds. Hence, I want to propose a reading of Fernándo Perez’ retelling of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in his 2007 film Madrigal in this light. The Cuban film redeploys the ultimate American narrative of phallocentric gaze struggling to exert power over an object of illusive femininity in new and polyvalent ways. Employing an oneiric logic, Pérez engages his Cuban audience with a recurring dream that on the surface evokes a fractured psyche but perhaps is invoking that which hides beneath the images and stands in opposition to the cinematic, causing a political event: the thoughts that cannot be incorporated into revolutionary consciousness – the thoughts that have no part. Can we view Madrigal’s revision of Vertigo as a re-distribution of the perceptible - an aesthetically political act that incorporates new ways of perceiving in Cuba?

7 APR 2013

The Seams of Memory and Post-Dictatorship: The Excision of Guilt in Lucrecia Martel’s La mujer sin cabeza

TORONTO - CANADA

Paper presented in the seminar "History, Memory, and Cultural Discourses: Representations of Violence in Contemporary Literature and Cinema" at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association
Conferences Selected Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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The Seams of Memory and Post-Dictatorship: The Excision of Guilt in Lucrecia Martel’s La mujer sin cabeza

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Conferences Selected

Nelly Richard’s chapter “Ruptures, Memory and Discontinuities” in The Insubordination of Signs describes the post-dictatorship scene in Chile as “suturing the borders of a wound that separates punishment from forgiveness” (Richard 13). With her book, Richard wants to place the hand of the reader over that roughness so he or she can feel the scar left behind by the sutured wound. Lucrecia Martel, in her 2008 Argentinean film La mujer sin cabeza, employs the visual equivalent of Richard’s argument to force the spectator to imagine that which falls out of his or her peripheral vision – the elusive evidence of its main character’s violence against an innocent member of the lower class through a hit and run accident.

In Martel’s seemingly inscrutable film, the main character Verónica initially feigns amnesia in an attempt to avoid the guilt from the crime she committed, but then she pretends to remember it so the men around her can cover it up, thus absolving her conscience. In juxtaposing Richard’s fragmented and reactionary Chilean reality that post-dictatorship democracy smoothes out into passive cohesion with Verónica’s carefully orchestrated non-reactions and subsequent erasure of the cracks in her conscience, we see that Richard’s critical lens and Martel’s visual aesthetics seek to highlight the disruption, the myriad of irreconcilable pieces, beneath the passiveness of Verónica (and her class) and the insistence of post-dictatorship on a single narrative, on stitching together the traumatic wounds to erase its impact – to forget. Martel’s ironic framing and editing obscure key parts of the image and bind together loose fragments to artificially create an official story – one that circumvents a violent secret but can easily fall apart at the seams.

12 DEC 1996

Fact and Fantasy: Puerto Rico's Ferré fictionalizes family history

PRINCETON - USA

Fiction review of Rosario Ferré's The House on the Lagoon, published in The Daily Princetonian, vol. CXX, No. 129
Book Reviews Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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Fact and Fantasy: Puerto Rico's Ferré fictionalizes family history

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Book Reviews

Fiction review of Rosario Ferré's The House on the Lagoon, published in The Daily Princetonian, vol. CXX, No. 129, Princeton, NJ, 1996.

24 OCT 1996

Violence and faith faceoff in King's bloody thriller

PRINCETON - USA

Fiction review of Stephen King's Desperation, published in The Daily Princetonian, vol. CXX, No 101
Book Reviews Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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Violence and faith faceoff in King's bloody thriller

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Book Reviews

Fiction review of Stephen King's Desperation, published in The Daily Princetonian, vol. CXX, No 101, Princeton, NJ, 1996.

22 OCT 1994

Isabel arrived in the island by air: A Conversation with Isabel Allende

SAN JUAN - PUERTO RICO

Interview with Chilean author Isabel Allende, published in Víspera, vol. IV, #6
Other Articles Selected Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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Isabel arrived in the island by air: A Conversation with Isabel Allende

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Other Articles Selected

Interview with Chilean author Isabel Allende, published in Víspera, vol. IV, #6, 1994, San Juan, Puerto Rico.

1 DEC 1991

El espejo

SAN JUAN - PUERTO RICO

Short story, winner of the first place prize at the CSI Literary Contest, published in Víspera, vol. 1, #1.
Fiction Selected Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera
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El espejo

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera Fiction Selected

Short story in Spanish, winner of the first place prize at the CSI Literary Contest, published in Víspera, vol. 1, #1, December 1991, San Juan, Puerto Rico.

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FILM CLIPS & REEL

.04

EDUCATION AND AWARDS

  • EDUCATION
  • 2012
    2017
    Los Angeles

    PH.D. - COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE (COMPARATIVE MEDIA AND CULTURE)

    UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

    Dissertation: “The Veiled Screen: Uncanny Crystallizations in the Moving Image” Committee: Julian Gutierrez-Albilla (Chair), Akira Mizuta Lippit (Co-Chair), Sherry Velasco, Anna Krakus
  • 2012
    2014
    Los Angeles

    M.A. - COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE (COMPARATIVE MEDIA AND CULTURE)

    UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

  • 2001
    2004
    Los Angeles

    M.F.A. - FILM AND TELEVISION PRODUCTION, SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS

    UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

    Thesis Film: “Playing” (35mm Narrative Short) Advisor: Brenda Goodman
  • 1995
    1999
    Princeton

    A.B. - COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

    PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

    Senior Thesis: “Child’s Play: The Tragedy of Reading” Advisors: Luiza Franco Moreira, Claudia Brodsky
  • HONORS AND AWARDS
  • 2020
    2021
    Chapel Hill

    FOUNDATION OF HOPE FOR RESEARCH & TREATMENT OF MENTAL ILLNESS ADVANCED GRANT

    GRANT AWARDED TO PRODUCE A FILM WITH THE PURPOSE OF MEASURING ANXIETY AND STRESS IN COVID-19 HISPANIC NURSES THROUGH GAZE-TRACKING, PUPIL DILATION AND EPIGENETIC ANALYSIS OF BLOOD SAMPLES

  • FALL
    2020
    Chapel Hill

    FALL 2020 ONLINE COURSE DESIGN SUPPORT GRANT

    COMPETITIVE GRANT TO CREATE AND DESIGN ONLINE COURSE ON FILM THEORY AND PRODUCTION

  • 2019
    2020
    Chapel Hill

    CFE/LENOVO INSTRUCTIONAL INNOVATIONS GRANT

    GRANT AWARDED TO THE DIGITAL LITERACY AND COMMUNICATIONS LAB TO BEGIN A NEW INITIATIVE IN GAMING PEDAGOGY AND RESEARCH

  • 2019
    2020
    Chapel Hill

    FACULTY DEVELOPMENT GRANT FOR ONLINE COURSES

    COMPETITIVE GRANT TO CREATE AND DESIGN ONLINE COURSE ON HORROR LITERATURE AND FILM

  • SUMMER
    2018
    Buenos Aires

    SUMMER RESEARCH TRAVEL GRANT

    TRAVEL AWARD TO CONDUCT RESEARCH IN ARGENTINA

  • SUMMER
    2018
    Chapel Hill

    DIGITAL LITERACY PROJECT FUNDING

    GRANT TO PRODUCE INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEO MATERIALS FOR ADOBE EDUCATION EXCHANGE

  • 2016
    2017
    Los Angeles

    USC GRADUATE SCHOOL ENDOWED FELLOWSHIP

    COMPETITIVE ADVANCED FELLOWSHIP FOR OUTSTANDING PHD STUDENTS WHO HAVE COMPELLING RESEARCH PROJECTS AND TIMELY DEGREE PROGRESS

  • SUMMER
    2016
    Barcelona

    DEL AMO FOUNDATION RESEARCH AWARD

    COMPETITIVE AWARD TO CONDUCT RESEARCH IN SPAIN

  • 2015
    2016
    Los Angeles

    USC DORNSIFE COLLEGE GRADUATE MERIT AWARD

    ADVANCED FELLOWSHIP FOR DISSERTATION WRITING AND RESEARCH

  • SUMMER
    2015
    Los Angeles

    CSLC SUMMER AWARD

    COMPETITIVE SUMMER STIPEND FOR DISSERTATION RESEARCH

  • SUMMER
    2014
    Madrid

    DEL AMO FOUNDATION RESEARCH AWARD

    COMPETITIVE AWARD TO CONDUCT RESEARCH IN SPAIN

  • SUMMER
    2014
    Los Angeles

    CSLC SUMMER AWARD

    COMPETITIVE SUMMER STIPEND TO STUDY FOR THE QUALIFYING EXAM

  • 2013
    2014
    Los Angeles

    DEL AMO FOUNDATION ENDOWED FELLOWSHIP

    COMPETITIVE FELLOWSHIP FOR ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE

  • FALL
    2012
    Los Angeles

    FREDERICK AND DOROTHY QUIMBY MEMORIAL FELLOWSHIP

    COMPETITIVE FELLOWSHIP FOR ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE

  • SPRING
    2003
    Los Angeles

    OUTSTANDING STUDENT FILMMAKER GRANT

    THE CAUCUS FOUNDATION FOR PRODUCERS, WRITERS AND DIRECTORS

    Completion grant for post-production of thesis film.
  • 2002
    2003
    Los Angeles

    THE RODOLFO MONTES MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP

    COMPETITIVE SCHOLARSHIP FOR ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE AND LEADERSHIP WITHIN THE LOCAL HISPANIC COMMUNITY

  • 2001
    2003
    Los Angeles

    HAROLD C. LLOYD FOUNDATION SCHOLARSHIP

    COMPETITIVE SCHOLARSHIP FOR EXCELLENCE IN THE STUDY OF MOTION PICTURE

  • SPRING
    1998
    Princeton

    PRINCETON ATELIER

    CREATIVE WRITING SEMINAR WITH TONI MORRISON AND GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

    Workshop with Nobel laureates in collective storytelling, outlining and writing a novel
  • 1995
    1997
    Princeton

    PRINCETON UNIVERSITY SCHOLARSHIPS

    COMPETITIVE SCHOLARSHIPS FOR ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE

  • ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL POSITIONS
  • 2016
    2016
    Los Angeles

    RESEARCH ASSISTANT

    DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE, USC

    Preparing forthcoming book manuscript Aesthetics, Ethics and Trauma in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar by Julian Gutierrez-Albilla
  • 2015
    2016
    Los Angeles

    RESEARCH ASSISTANT

    DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE, USC

    Job duties include organizing Cervantes conference in 2016 and co-designing the Digital Humanities component for an undergraduate course and a graduate seminar, both taught by Professor Sherry Velasco: SWMS 215gp - Gender Conflicts Across Cultural Contexts SPAN 650 - Adapting Through Don Quixote
  • 2002
    2002
    Los Angeles

    LECTURER AND LAB MONITOR

    ROBERT ZEMECKIS CENTER FOR DIGITAL ARTS, USC

    Taught lectures on AVID editing software, media management and supervised the digital post-production lab.
  • 1996
    1997
    Princeton

    RESEARCH ASSISTANT

    PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

    PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

  • 1995
    1996
    Princeton

    STUDENT ASSISTANT

    DEPARTMENT OF RARE BOOKS AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

    PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

    Catalogued the Carlos Fuentes Papers, a collection of the personal and working documents and media materials from Mexican author Carlos Fuentes.
.05

TEACHING

  • CURRENT
  • NOW
    2023

    ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

    DEPARTMENT OF CINEMA AND TELEVISION ARTS, CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE

    CTVA 210 - Television-Film Aesthetics
    CTVA 305 - History of Television
    CTVA 310 - History of American Cinema (including US, Latin American and Canadian Cinema)
    CTVA 410 - Advanced Theory
    CTVA 412 - Classic Filmmakers: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar
    CTVA 500 - Theory and History of Cinema and Electronic Media (Graduate Seminar)
  • TEACHING HISTORY
  • NOW
    2022

    ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

    DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION, SANTA CLARA UNIVERSITY

    COMM 30 - Digital Filmmaking
    COMM 103 - From Page to Screen: The Short Film Adaptation
    COMM 140C - Latinx Cinema
  • 2022
    2017

    TEACHING ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

    DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH & COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, UNC CHAPEL HILL

    ENGL 257 - Video Games and Narrative Cinema
    ENGL 256 - Crafting the Dramatic Film: Theory Meets Practice
    ENGL 164 - Introduction to Latina/o Studies
    ENGL 149 - Digital Composition
    ENGL 148 - Horror
    ENGL 143 - Film and Culture
    ENGL 105 - English Composition and Rhetoric
    CMPL 262 - Film and Politics
    CMPL 254 - Horror and Global Gothic: Film, Literature, Theory
    CMPL 55 - Comics as Literature
    ENGL 691H/692H - English Senior Honors Thesis
  • 2016
    2015

    PROFESSOR'S ASSISTANT

    DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE, USC

    Job duties include assisting Professor Julian Gutierrez-Albilla in preparing his forthcoming book manuscript on Almodóvar and Professor Sherry Velasco with a research project and organizing Cervantes conference.
  • SPRING
    2015

    TEACHING ASSISTANT

    DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, USC

    COLT 102g - On Location: The Place of Literature in Global Cultures, Prof. Roberto Díaz
  • FALL
    2014

    TEACHING ASSISTANT

    DEPARTMENT OF SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES, USC

    ARLT 101g - Crime Stories: Eastern European Fiction from Crime to Punishment, Prof. Anna Krakus
  • 2013
    2014

    ASSISTANT LECTURER

    DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE, USC

    SPAN 120 (Spanish I) & SPAN 150 (Spanish II)
  • 2003
    2004

    TEACHING ASSISTANT

    SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS, USC

    CTPR 480 - Advanced Production Workshop (Spring 2004) CTPR 480 - Advanced Production Workshop (Fall 2003) & CTPR 480 - Advanced Production Workshop (Spring 2003)
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LANGUAGE SKILLS

SPANISH
Native fluency.
LEVEL : EXPERTEXPERIENCE : 42 YEARS
Creative WritingAcademic EssaysOral
ENGLISH
Bilingual fluency.
LEVEL : ADVANCEDEXPERIENCE : 38 YEARS
Creative WritingAcademic EssaysOral
PORTUGUESE
Fluency.
LEVEL : INTERMEDIATEEXPERIENCE : 22 YEARS
Advanced CoursesAcademic EssaysOral
GERMAN
Good reading knowledge and basic language skills.
LEVEL : BASICEXPERIENCE : 6 YEARS
Undergraduate CoursesTravel frequently to Germany
FRENCH
Reading skills.
LEVEL : BEGINNERSEXPERIENCE : 3 YEARS
Reading Texts in Original Language
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FILMS AND SCREENPLAYS

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MFA Thesis Film

Playing

Playing (Writer, Director)

A lonely, reclusive artist has to conceive a painting for her gallery debut, when a mysterious guitar player arrives in her building and clouds her focus. Now she must face him and his music in order to reconnect with her canvas.

Playing is a 35mm short film, student produced at the University of Southern California.

FESTIVALS AND AWARDS
Winner of the 2004 Caucus for Television Writers, Producers and Directors Outstanding Student Filmmaker Award
First look Film Festival at the Director’s Guild of America
Riverside Multicultural Youth Film Festival
Lake Arrowhead Film Festival

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Feature Film

The Shadows

The Shadows (Writer, Director, Producer)

Horror novelist Stephen Grimes is under pressure to complete his latest novel in time for its release date. His publisher and editor are breathing down his neck, his ex-wife is pressuring him about the divorce settlement, his sister keeps interrupting his flow. Then one fateful night, while out on a late night drive, Stephen accidentally hits a young man and rushes him to the hospital. A friendship quickly erupts into a passionate and heated affair, releasing Stephen into a life he’s always held himself back from. But soon the torrid love affair shows signs of cracking and something seems to be hiding in “The Shadows.”

Theatrical Release Date: July 15, 2007

DVD Release Date: October 28, 2008

Available on DVD and Amazon Prime

FESTIVALS AND AWARDS
Dramatic Competition, Outfest International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival 2007
Official Selection, Reeling 26: The Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival
Official Selection, Melbourne Queer Film Festival 2008
Official Selection, Film Out San Diego Film Festival 2008

REVIEWS
“...a thriller/psychological drama that plays like Stephen King meets The Crying Game.” – Here! Magazine
"There are some movies that are beautiful to watch... The Shadows is one of them" - Cinema Pride
"...inspired by Secret Window and the long tradition of chillers featuring identity switches, split personalities, and doppelgangers..." - Chicago Reader

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Feature Film

Sweet Thing

Sweet Thing (Producer, Editor)

It's summer and 19 year-old Liz sets out on a mission to find love while serving drinks at an espresso drive-thru in Seattle. Across town, a young hippie girl, Jody, seeks answers in drugs while shuffling papers at her father's office. When Liz meets a graffiti artist and Jody ditches work to sell ice cream in an old green truck, they seem set for the time of their lives. But the summer takes an unexpected turn the day Jody pulls up to Liz's coffee stand...

FESTIVALS AND AWARDS
Dramatic Competition, Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2009
Official Selection, Seattle International Film Festival 2008
Official Selection, Boston International Film Festival 2008

REVIEWS
“Some of the most earnest performances in an indie in years.” - Cinema-Crazed
“Sweet Thing shines with that ideal of independent film I love so much… personal photography and fresh talent.” - Don Nuemann, Quiet Earth

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Short Film

The Accident

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The Accident (Writer)

After his cousin finds himself in a coma from a terrible car accident, Patrick’s mother sets him up on a birthday blind date with her best friend’s daughter, Jessi. On their night out, a collision never expected will force Patrick out of his own comatose existence.

The Accident is one of four senior thesis films from the undergraduate program at the University of Southern California. A solid creative collaboration between writer Guillermo R. Rodriguez and director David Person, The Accident threads a deep-minded story into reality through a personal connection to the material. A crew of twelve students produced this film in the span of three months, including eight days of production, with a budget of $6,000.

FESTIVALS AND AWARDS
Aired on The Independent Film Channel, June 2005
Official Selection, 2005 First Look Film Festival, Director’s Guild of America

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Screenplay

Baby

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Baby (Feature Film Screenplay)

After getting pregnant by a stranger on a blind date, Bonnie chooses to raise the child. When the boy is a teenager, mysterious things happen, and Bonnie, now juggling two jobs, begins to suspect her son might be the cause.

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Screenplay

The Glad Game

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The Glad Game (Feature Film Screenplay)

After civil engineer Joshua Rollins suffers a tragedy that leaves him agoraphobic, his childhood best friend Trevor hires a woman to entice him out of his shell. But the woman becomes the center of Josh’s delusions and pushes him further into his mind... and possibly murder.

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