Blurred Lines: The Exploration of Screenwriting as a Literary Form & Youtube’s Relationship with Contemporary Cinema

The department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures is proud to announce that two graduate students, Tom Winterbottom and Samuel Gibson, will be joining Professor Jorge Ruffinelli in Guadalajara, México on March 20th and 21st for the Fifth International Colloquium of Contemporary Ibero-American Cinema. The colloquium, titled: “From Cinematographic Culture to Screen Culture: Narrative, Technological, and Consumer Keys in the New Audiovisual Landscape.” This year Professor Ruffinelli will begin the conference with a discussion titled “From the Big Screen to Youtube, From Youtube to the Big Screen” The colloquium will also function as the opening for the Guadalajara International Film Festival. Both events will give our students the opportunity to meet prominent Latin American screenwriters and directors as well as the chance to sit in on the world renowned documentary workshop, Doculab. Tom and Samuel plan to use these interactions to bolster their research, which examines screenwriting as a literary art form in the Latin American context. At Stanford, Professor Ruffinelli and the two students run the Screenwriting Research Unit, looking at the interaction between books, screenplays, and movies. A co-authored paper on the Uruguayan film and screenplay Whisky is forthcoming in 2014, and they are at work on another project studying Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, and its adaptation into a screenplay and film by the Coen Brothers.