Mercedes Chavez is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. At Cal State LA, Dr. Chavez teaches writing and media studies courses that connect aesthetic analysis to production history and industry economics. Courses taught include Intro to Media Writing, with graduate courses including contemporary Media Theory, Post WWII Media history, and more.
Dr. Chavez’s research focuses on focuses on transnational production, history, and aesthetic theory of independent US cinema and Latin American cinemas with attention to women and queer filmmakers. An unrelentingly cheery feminist killjoy, her work explores the intersections and overlaps of race, gender, sexuality, class, and geopolitical location in cinematic narratives. She is especially interested in the intersection of culture, technology, and settler colonialism and their ecological underpinnings in slow cinemas.
Dr. Chavez’s current book project, Origin Stories, tracks the emergence of a sensual, slow cinema aesthetic in transnational film festival directors: Lucrecia Martel (Argentina), Alfonso Cuarón (Mexico-U.S.), Natalia Almada (Mexico-U.S.), Kelly Reichardt (U.S.), and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand). Applying decolonial and feminist frameworks to cinema aesthetics and history, this project centers sensorial approaches which trouble narratives of modernity in the hemispheric Americas and its imagined frontiers. This methodology triangulates these directors’ work as transnational exports for the art cinema market, navigating Eurocentric expectations for marginalized and global South cinemas, and yet, still regionally inflected cinemas asserted through landscape and sensorial signifiers. Proceeding from the conditions of contemporary transnational distribution and production, Dr. Chavez aims to connect the directors’ films to regional film economic histories and their rejection of, or collusion with, settler colonial visualities.
Published work may be read in Afterimage with The University of California Presses and forthcoming in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies with The University of Michigan Press. Her book project, Origin Stories, examines aesthetics and counter-narratives of contemporary slow cinemas in relationship to ecological discourse. In addition to her scholarly work, Dr. Chavez collaborates on film projects with husband and creative partner, Mike Kash.
Office Hours can be scheduled directly from her Calendly page: https://www.calendly.com/profchavez
Publications:
Chavez, Mercedes. “Imagined Pasts: Contemporary Transnational Cinemas and Re-Visioning History in Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017).” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. (Forthcoming).
Chavez, Mercedes. “Vernacular Landscapes: Reading the Anthropocene in the Films of Kelly Reichardt.” Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism. The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism. Vol. 48, no. 1 (March 1, 2021): 37–53. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2021.48.1.37.
In Production:
With Grace, directed by Jonathan R. King
Logline: How can art and collaboration create radical spaces for joy despite loss and trauma? What does it mean to remember with someone, or to reconcile the hard along with the good? Blending imaginative reenactment, archival media, and performance, With Grace investigates the healing power of creative play and the fluidity of memory through the practices of Grace Zabriskie — sculptor, poet, and performer.