“Thank goodness there are still film genres to discover! Covering a broad historical and geographical range, from Japan to Chile and from early cinema to YouTube, Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky’s study of the cinematic work of work is both meticulously argued and strikingly original.”
About the Book
From IKEA assembly guides and “hands and pans” cooking videos on social media to Mister Rogers's classic factory tours, representations of the step-by-step fabrication of objects and food are ubiquitous in popular media. In The Process Genre, I introduce and theorize the process genre—a heretofore unacknowledged and untheorized transmedial genre characterized by its representation of chronologically ordered steps in which some form of labor results in a finished product.
I am an Associate Professor in the Cinema and Media Studies Department at the University of Chicago. I joined the department in 2015. Before that I taught cinema at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Latin American and Latino Studies Program and, before that, in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
My main research interests are in Latin American cinema and media, documentary cinema and media, cinema and labor, and race and representation. I have also written about useful cinema and melodrama. My first book, The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor, was published in March 2020 by Duke University Press. Currently, I am working on two book-length projects—one about the talking head and one, tentatively titled “Filming the Police,” about police on screens.
I received my PhD in 2009 from the University of Pittsburgh, where I wrote a dissertation on political cinema in Brazil and the United States.
You can see my CV here.
In-Press and Forthcoming
"Must the Subaltern Speak?: On Roma and the Cinema of Domestic Service.” Essay commissioned for the inaugural issue of the journal FORMA: Aesthetic Form and Politics in Latin American Culture and Theory, January 2020.
“The Latin American Process Film.” In Films that Work Harder II, edited by Vinzenz Hediger, Florian Hoof, and Yvonne Zimmermann. Amsterdam University Press.
Recent Publications
The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.
“On the Talking Head and Las muertes chiquitas.” In On Women’s Films: Across Worlds and Generations, eds. Ivone Margulies and Jeremi Szaniawski, 125-146. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.
“Realism, Documentary and the Process Genre in Early New Latin American Cinema.” In The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinemas, edited by Laura Podalsky, Ana Lopez, Marvin D’Lugo, 119-132. London: Routledge, 2017.