Jeffrey Middents - Writing National Cinema: Film Journals and Film Culture in Peru

This project first came to light in 1998 and therefore there are many people to thank. First and foremost, I must warmly thank Carina Yervasi, Margarita de la Vega-Hurtado, Catherine Benamou, and Santiago Cols, who helped shepherd and steer this project while I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan. My colleagues at American University provided much-needed support, critique, and encouragement, especially Chuck Larson, Richard Sha, Marianne Noble, Keith Leonard, Erik Dussere, and Despina Kakoudaki. In addition, I thank Joan Catapano, Tamara Falicov, and Silvia Spitta for their extensive commentaries that proved essential to getting this project to fruition. My extended colegas in the Society of Cinema and Media Studies Latino/a Caucus opened my world to the myriad facets of Latin American cinema and showed me how all of our work intersects into the fantastic tapestry that makes up our discipline. I am especially grateful to those with whom I had the honor to present various portions of this work at SCMS conference panels in Washington, D.C., London, and Vancouver, as well as at an ACLA panel in Puebla, Mexico, and an ASA panel in Atlanta. My students at American University also deserve a round of applause, especially those in my summer 2006 seminar on short films and my spring 2007 honors colloquium on film criticism; these students (somewhat unwittingly) pushed me to define crucial points of my overall argument. Various friends in Ann Arbor, Monterey, and Washington, D.C., made getting through this project that much easier: a shout-out therefore to Marcy, the Zanzibar crew, Eric, Marit, Todd, Jen, Mike, and Meipo for keeping me sane all these years. Many people, too many to thank individually, were extremely supportive as the project headed to its final stages; nonetheless, Richard Pult and the folks at University Press of New England deserve an extra round of applause for the warm embrace they gave this project.

Most of the primary research on film journals was done on location in Lima, Peru, for which I am grateful to have received funding from both the University of Michigan and the College of Arts and Sciences at American University. In Lima, I am indebted to Norma Rivera, director of the Filmoteca de Lima (now housed at the Pontificia Universidad Catlica del Per), for allowing me unlimited access to the full collection of Hablemos de cine as well as for helping to secure permissions for the artwork in this volume: without her gracious help over the years, this project would certainly never have come to fruition. Many thanks also to the number of cinephiles and directors in Peru and elsewhere for granting the time for interviews, including Issac Len Fras, Federico de Crdenas, Ricardo Bedoya, Melvin Ledgard, Augusto Cabada, Francisco Lombardi, Federico Garca, Miguel Reynel, Desiderio Blanco, Augusto Tamayo, Marianne Eyde, Alberto Durant, Alvaro Velarde, Mario Cabos Castro, and Gabriel Quispe. My extended family in Lima, particularly Elsa and Jaime Ruiz-Huidobro, also deserve un beso enorme, along with the late Rosemary Singer. My parents, John and Alicia Middents, started me on this journey by dragging me to live in Lima in 1986 where I slowly learned Spanish and fell in love with what was already my second country. I can never thank them enough for their love, inspiration, and support.

Finally, as trite as it sounds, my deepest gratitude and love goes to the two people whose lives were completely taken up with mine in the process of writing the book, the two people to whom this book is truly dedicated: my wife, Angela Dadak, who put up with so much and who loved me nonetheless; and my son, Alexander, whose appearance in the midst of the writing process made it that much more important to complete.