Pedro Noel Doreste Rodríguez
Biography
Pedro Noel Doreste Rodríguez is Assistant Professor in the Film Studies program at Michigan State University. As a historian of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx film he is interested in cinematic contact zones between the Global North and South, studies of media infrastructures, documentary, and diasporic or exile film.
"My primary objects are the transnational cinemas in and of the Hispanic Caribbean, in particular Cuba and Puerto Rico, and how they have historically connected to global formations of film culture. Since Caribbean film production can be defined by its many starts, stops, and absences, I take a comparative approach to what I call the “film infrastructures” of the Hispanic Caribbean to broaden the idea of cinema beyond the image onscreen. I conjure and/or consult cine-clubs, film libraries, microcinemas, film archives, lost films, journals and magazines, unfilmed scripts, banned or censored films, obscure co-productions, amateur film, etc. to piece together expressions of film culture ratified offscreen or underground—and often neglected by conventional film historiography. In this way, my methodology identifies in the precarious media infrastructures of the Hispanophone Caribbean and its diasporas those potential histories which escape or resist the discipline’s critical fealty to the national-cinematic framework and re-center the small places from which the medium’s most radical innovations once emerged."