TP5. Viewing Communities: Cinema as transcultural public sphere in Mexican exile

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Matei Chihaia
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 523073917

The subproject examines the role of cinema in the development of a transcultural public sphere in post-revolutionary Mexico, which distinctly sets itself apart from the traditional local and national communities of the theater (institutionalized in urban stages, national stages, or state theaters). The significance of the cinematographic "viewing communities" – this being the central heuristic concept – in the Mexican context and their correlation to various exiles, is a research desideratum that may be relevant to different disciplines represented in the other subprojects: literary avant-garde history and cultural translation studies, cultural anthropological materiality research, as well as social science network research (Fellow Project). The corresponding networks and community designs are reconstructed based on two significant Mexican film magazines, Cinema Reporter, published from 1938 to 1965, and Nuevo Cine, which appeared in 1961 and 1962. To confirm the hypothesis of the overall research project of the research group, the function of exiles in this context must be examined. Trans-exilic networks can be modeled from 1938 to 1962. To explore the articulation of community in the medium of these magazines, the textual contributions in sample years that are transhistorically evaluable for conceptualizations of community and aesthetics will be focused on. Ultimately, it is these contributions, especially when comparing the two magazines with each other, that make narrative imaginations and revisions of community discernible. The subproject has four objectives, which will be implemented through corresponding work packages: The construction of the corpus to be examined includes the (supplementary) digitization of the magazines Cinema Reporter and Nuevo Cine. The completion of the first work package is marked by the availability of a digitized corpus as the first milestone. In this corpus, the networks of actors can then be modeled by extracting relevant metadata and linking them to a network graph – the second milestone of the subproject. A third goal is to analyze the articulations of aesthetics and community in sample years of the magazines. Manual annotation and quantitative topic modeling will be employed for this purpose. The associated milestone here is a monograph (dissertation). Finally, the fourth goal is to reconstruct narratives of community in the same samples. The central instrument for this is the concept of "narrative aggregation" (Sommer). As a milestone, a workshop will be organized, whose contributions will be published in a special issue of the journal DIEGESIS (open access, peer review).

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5700: TransExile. Negotiations of aesthetics and community in postrevolutionary Mexico
• International Connection: Mexico
• Co-Investigators: Dr. Friedhelm Schmidt-Welle; Professor Dr. Christof Schöch; Professor Dr. Roy Sommer
• Cooperation Partner: Tania Ocampo