About

Cristina Martínez-Carazo is a Professor of Spanish at UC Davis, with a Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis. Her research interests encompass Spanish Peninsular culture and film, the history of art, and 19th-century Spanish literature. She has contributed extensively to the fields of literary and visual studies, focusing on the visuality in literature and film, as exemplified by her work on Leopoldo Alas 'Clarín' and the novel 'La Regenta'. Her scholarship explores the intersection of literature, cinema, and visual culture, with particular attention to Spanish film and literature, including the works of Pedro Almodóvar and Luis Buñuel, as well as issues of exile, multiculturalism, and immigration in Spain. Martínez-Carazo has authored and edited numerous publications, including books and articles, and has taught graduate and undergraduate courses on Spanish film and literature, as well as leading study abroad programs in Madrid. Her academic contributions are characterized by a focus on visuality, cultural identity, and the political dimensions of Spanish cinema and literature.

Research topics

• Humanities
• Sociology
• History
• Art
• Political Science
• Art history
• Law
• Psychology
• Literature
• Visual arts
• Psychoanalysis

Selected publications

• Electra (1910): Daring Memories of Galdós’s Most Polemic Success

  Liverpool University Press eBooks · 2023

  • Psychology
  • Art
  • History

  The purpose of this study is to contextualize the controversial play, <italic>Electra</italic>(1910) by Benito Pérez Galdós, at the moment of its premiere, explaining its success based on the topicality of its main theme, both because of the alliance between the upper-classes and the church, and because of its association with the “Ubao case,” and, finally, justifying its consignment to oblivion on the basis of Spain’s willingness to distance itself from the past in order to enter into modernity. A review of the historical context, the text, and its reception aids this study in understanding how <italic>Electra</italic> dialogued with the times in which it premiered and Spain’s past, as well as the speed with which it was eclipsed despite its spectacular initial success. Memory operates as the driving force in this work. On one hand, Galdós evokes Greco-Latin mythology by proposing a personal interpretation of the Electra myth. On the other hand, he brings to the present the burden of radical Catholicism, which, since the fifteenth century, conditioned the construction of Spain as a nation and the definition of its identity.

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• Electra (1910):

  Liverpool University Press eBooks · 2023-03-13

  book-chapterSenior author
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• Multisensorial Empathy: The Skin of Memory in Almudena Carrecedo’s El Silencio de Otros (2018)

  Hispanófila/Hispanófila · 2022 · 1 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Political Science
  • Art

  Multisensorial Empathy: The Skin of Memory in Almudena Carrecedo’s El Silencio de Otros (2018) Katherine O. Stafford and Cristina Martínez-Carazo Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar had just finished the filming of El silencio de otros (2018), a documentary about the fight for justice by a group of Spanish victims of the Franco dictatorship, when Pedro and Agustín Almodóvar called and told them they wanted to see the film. After viewing several sequences, the Almodóvar brothers enlisted their company, El Deseo, to help with the executive production of Carracedo’s documentary. Agustín Almodóvar said later: “Es que no había visto una película tan tierna sobre este tema” (Qtd. in Martínez-Carazo and Rodrigues Poletti 231). Agustín Almodóvar’s short and simple summary of Carracedo’s documentary encapsulates both the curious power and improbable success of this film. Historical memory of the Spanish Civil War is hardly a new and original topic for Spanish cinema, and documentary films very rarely attract large, new, and diverse audiences. However, after winning a Goya for best documentary film in 2019, El silencio de otros became a national “trending topic”, reaching millions of Spanish viewers on National Television and in theaters (Martínez-Carazo and Rodrigues Poletti 229).1 [End Page 17] Later, it was shown extensively in both small theaters and classrooms around the globe, also winning an Emmy award for best documentary in 2020.2 Currently, it is available for streaming on Netflix. Prizes and hashtags aside, important questions remain: What could another documentary film about the memory of the Spanish Civil War possibly contribute to the political discussion and the quest for justice in the twenty-first century? What differentiates this film from the many others of its subgenre? Why was it so successful? Elizabeth Jelin asserts: “We know that the past gains its meaning in its links to the present through the acts of remembering and forgetting. This implies that the meaning of the past is located in the present, which is a space where past experiences and the yet-to-be or not yet experienced future converge” (62). El silencio de otros offers a new kind of perspective of and meaning for this issue because it is a film where past experiences of loss and a (somewhat) hopeful future converge with the present. A key part of the film’s power is the way it manages to emotionally connect with the viewer and bring them into a different kind of epistemological space, regardless of their personal connection to the polemical topic of historical memory in Spain. Part of this unique emotional potency can be attributed to the haptic cinematographic language that brings the audience nearer to the subjectivity of the characters and the director. We understand haptic cinema as a kind of visuality that activates the diversity of human senses (not only sight and hearing, the two senses traditionally most associated with film, but also touch, taste, and smell). As Silvia Guillamón-Carrasco points out: “Haptic visuality refers to the cinematic work that looks into new ways of appealing to the audience through multisensory images that make for a more complex spectatorial experience, which has traditionally been restricted to omnipotence of the spectator’s gaze and voyeuristic forms that hegemonic cinema has used exhaustively throughout its history” (139). Both Vivian Sobchack and Laura Marks’s theories of haptic cinema argue for an understanding of film spectatorship as an embodied experience that expands and redefines the role of the spectator. Sobchack says: “We matter and mean through processes and logic of sense-making that owe as much to our carnal existence as they do to our conscious thought” (3). Marks’s research examines films that propose a different kind of relationship between viewer and image: one of mutuality, rather than mastery, and one that engages the five senses (184). This type of cinema, defined as haptic, contests and deconstructs the hegemonic (and patriarchal) ocularcentrism of viewing that tends to objectivize and distance the “cinematic other.” Haptic cinema implies “touching the screen,” making the spectator feel co-present. El silencio de otros offers this haptic experience to the...

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• Sexualidades disidentes. Un acercamiento fílmico desde la prostitución y pornografía by Txetxu Aguado

  Hispanófila/Hispanófila · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Sexualidades disidentes. Un acercamiento fílmico desde la prostitución y pornografía by Txetxu Aguado Cristina Martínez-Carazo and Georgina Oller Bosch Aguado, Txetxu. Sexualidades disidentes. Un acercamiento fílmico desde la prostitución y pornografía. Dykinson, 2019. 318 pp. ISBN: 978-84-1324-162-3. Sexualidades disidentes: un acercamiento fílmico desde la prostitución y pornografía propone una mirada desprovista de prejuicios y de estrecheces a dos temas que, más allá de su innegable problematicidad, admiten múltiples lecturas. La disidencia a la que alude el título aspira a explorar la sexualidad fuera del marco establecido como predominante y busca reflexionar sobre estos temas más allá del modelo machista, puritano y patriarcal que tradicionalmente ha definido ambas prácticas. El cuidadoso y bien informado trabajo de Txetxu Aguado, que no elude lo aberrante de la trata de mujeres con fines de explotación sexual, aporta una visión no convencional en un contexto contemporáneo. La originalidad del trabajo de Aguado radica en su capacidad para escapar de la constricción del estar a favor o en contra de una u otra problemática. El autor, en función de un contexto u otro, y siempre con un claro posicionamiento, defiende posturas proprostitución o antiprostitución. Asimismo, participa de argumentos antipornografía o respalda la operación conceptual llevada a cabo por el postporno, también llamado porno feminista. En palabras del mismo Aguado, "no se trata de tomar partido siempre en un mismo sentido, sino de evaluar lo que se propone y cómo se propone" en textos, principalmente films, cuya selección no tiene "ánimo exhaustivo" y es "parcial e influida por los gustos personales del autor" (15–16). El libro se estructura en dos grandes apartados. El apartado sobre la prostitución consta de doce secciones que tratan un amplio abanico de temas, entre ellos su reprobación como un mero contrato mercantil entre iguales o su cuestionamiento por la existencia de unos supuestos instintos masculinos incontrolables. En este apartado se da prioridad a la situación profesional de las prostitutas sobre las consideraciones morales asociadas a la misma; se rechaza su victimización por considerarse paternalista y no dar voz a las implicadas y se deconstruye la negatividad vinculada a dicha actividad partiendo de los estudios de Silvia Federici y de su análisis sobre la represión de sexualidades diferentes en los albores del capitalismo. Se aborda a continuación el análisis de filmes que reflejan la prostitución y la pobreza (Dead End de William Willer y Mamma Roma de Pier Paolo Pasolini) y la dificultad de la mujer que se prostituye para reinsertarse en la sociedad por el estigma que la acompaña (Le notti de Cabiria de Federico Fellini y Matrimonio all'italiana de Vittorio de Sica). Finalmente, se examina la diferente consideración social del hombre que se [End Page 215] dedica a esta profesión siempre y cuando se mantenga dentro de la norma heterosexual (Sunset Boulevard de Billy Wilder) y se habla de la prostituta más allá de las consideraciones morales o del estigma social (The Girlfriend Experience de Steven Soderberg o Like Someone in Love de Abbas Kiarostami). Esta primera parte del estudio concluye con el análisis de una serie de películas españolas que se aproximan al tema desde diferentes ángulos: Bilbao de Bigas Luna; el cine de Almodóvar, que en opinión de Aguado "nos incomoda sin apenas molestarnos" (118); Princesas de Fernando León de Aranoa; Amic/Amat de Ventura Pons y Evelyn de Isabel Ocampo. El siguiente gran apartado del volumen de Aguado, centrado en la pornografía, se divide a su vez en 15 secciones y se abre con los orígenes de la norma sexual predominante, instaurada por el patriarcado capitalista occidental y explicada por la ya antes referida Federici y por Paul-Beatriz Preciado. A continuación, disecciona la correlación implícita entre masculinidad-machismo y el uso-abuso de todos los demás cuerpos, principalmente el femenino, como fuente de placer. Más adelante, con base en los estudios de Andrea Dworking...

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• El ideario ecológico de Delibes: entre la querencia y el peripatetismo

  Archiletras científica: revista de investigación de lengua y letras · 2021

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  Publisher

• Almudena Carracedo frente a su obra: Una reflexión sobre <i>El silencio de otros</i>

  Letras Femeninas · 2019-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Pedro Almodóvar

  Oxford Bibliographies Online Datasets · 2017-11-29

  dataset1st authorCorresponding
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• "También la lluvia" o la tela de Penélope

  Crítica hispánica · 2016-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• El documental cinematográfico y televisivo contemporáneo. Memoria, sujeto y formación de la identidad democrática española

  Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies · 2015-01-02

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Almodóvar global: mapa de ruta

  Miríada hispánica · 2014-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Esther Fernández

  6 shared

• Sebastiaan Faber

  Oberlin College

  3 shared

• Mark Dinneen

  2 shared

• Patrick Williams

  2 shared

• Luis Albuquerque García

  Unidades Centrales Científico-Técnicas

  2 shared

• Catherine Connor-Swietlicki

  2 shared

• Donald L. Shaw

  2 shared

• James Whiston

  University of Warwick

  2 shared