Transnational media imaginaries: Cinema, digital technology and uneven globalization

This dissertation analyzes different modalities of movement in the current cinematic arena. Through an analysis of the multiple media platforms through which films circulate, I conceptualize a theoretical framework to understand the variety of encounters between historical events, ideological discourses, film texts and spectators. This project attempts to mobilize a transnational paradigm in the analysis of film practices with the purpose of mapping some of the fundamental ways in which the producers and consumers of culture encounter each other. It embarks thus on a discussion of a series of physical and cultural bodies meeting in the cross-fertilizing spaces between the cinematic and the social.; The dissertation specifically focuses on the movement of bodies across geopolitical and media spaces. This entails the exploration of four kinds of migration. First, it engages in a critical analysis of the role of film trailers in the digital age. It maps the manners in which media circulates in the different "windows" of the film market while specifically evaluating the different forms of spectatorship that Web navigation constructs. Second, it studies films that draw competing cartographies of the millennium global cityscape. It explores the manners in which filmmakers represent the constitution of the megalopolis' multicultural fabric to give an account of the contending forces at play in shaping its economic and social structures. Third, it analyzes the works of directors that have followed diverse cross-cultural migration trajectories: John Woo---from the arena of Hong Kong commercial film to Hollywood---Alejandro Amenabar---appropriating several Hollywood genres to conquer a share of the Spanish national film market and project his work internationally---and Quentin Tarantino---who has rearticulated other, non-U.S., cinematic traditions to move from American independent film into the wider arena of the mainstream. Fourth, this project examines films that deal specifically with the physical migration of bodies from economically disfavored countries into the West. In addition, it analyzes films that narrativize the mediation of corporate and mass consumption in the configuration of human subjectivity.