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Rielle Navitski

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Associate Professor

Rielle Navitski is a film historian whose research looks at Latin American cinema through a transnational lens. She teaches courses such as Latin American Film and Media, Latinx Film and Visual Culture, and Genre Cinema: The Global Crime Film.

Dr. Navitski's major research projects explore the formation of media publics and taste cultures both "high" and "low," tracing the political and geopolitical reverberations of popular sensationalism and art cinema. Other lines of inquiry she has pursued include cinema's links with print culture and the international circulation of film stars and genres. Her work has been supported by the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation and the Institute for International Education.

Her book Transatlantic Cinephilia: Film Culture Between Latin America and France, 1945-1965 (University of California Press, 2023) explores the blossoming of film-related organizations - cineclubs, archives, festivals, and film schools - in postwar Latin America in close collaboration with French cultural institutions. These developments lent social prestige to Latin America's growing urban middle classes while advancing the aims of French cultural diplomacy in a polarized Cold War climate.

Dr. Navitski's previous book Public Spectacles of Violence: Sensational Cinema and Journalism in Early Twentieth-Century Mexico and Brazil (Duke University Press, 2017) looks at how early films and illustrated newspapers and magazines in the two nations staged graphic spectacles of violence that were framed as signs of local modernity. It was based on her Ph.D. thesis, recipient of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies dissertation award in 2014, and was a finalist for the Richard Wall Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association.

Dr. Navitski is also the co-editor (with Leslie Marsh) of Latinx Media: An Open-Access Textbook (University of North Georgia Press, 2022) and (with Nicolas Poppe) of Cosmopolitan Film Cultures in Latin America, 1896-1960, an anthology of critical essays and primary texts in English translation (Indiana University Press, 2017). Her work has also appeared in Cinema Journal/Journal of Cinema and Media StudiesScreenFilm History, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and TelevisionJournal of Latin American Cultural StudiesRevista de Estudios Hispánicos, and Revista Iberoamericana.

Education:

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley

Research Interests:

Transatlantic Cinephilia

Search for a film title, director, club name, or location. Currently includes information on over 2500 unique screenings of films during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s at six clubs operating in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay. 

Events featuring Rielle Navitski
Room 400 | Fine Arts Building

To mark the release of a new book by Dr. Rielle Navitski, Transatlantic Cinephilia: Film Culture Between Latin America and France, 1945-1965 (University of California Press), the Department of Theatre and Film Studies and the Willson Center's Interdisciplinary Modernisms workshop will host a screening of Margot Benacerraf…

More of My Students

PhD Performance Studies

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