Carlos Valladares

Education History:

B.A., Phi Beta Kappa at Stanford University (2018) in Film and Media Studies and American Studies (joint degree)

Research Interests:

performance, American photography, Manny Farber, Roland Barthes, classical Hollywood, French New Wave (Demy-Rivette-Truffaut), Mexican cinema, cinephilia, the global 1960s (music, fiction, sculpture, etc.), acting ensembles, ekphrasis, Black and white race relations in American fiction and film, film adaptation, film music, criticism

Publications (select articles):

“The Art of Perception: Richard Serra’s Films” — Gagosian Quarterly — Fall 2019 — feature on the films by the American sculptor and artist Richard Serra (forthcoming)

“Jim Jarmusch: Ludlow Drifter” — Notebook MUBI — July 2019 — observations on drift and the films of Jim Jarmusch, subject of a retrospective at the Metrograph theater in New York City

“Pasolini’s Faces” — Gagosian Quarterly — Summer 2019 — feature on the cinema of the Italian director and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini, the subject of a comprehensive retrospective at the Metrograph theater in New York City

“Feeling Seen: Roberto Gavaldón—Misanthrope” — Film Comment — 22 May 2019 — survey of the films of Mexican director Roberto Gavaldón, who was active during the Mexican Golden Age of Cinema (Época de Oro) between the 1940s and the 1970s; Gavaldón was a subject of a recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, curated by Dave Kehr

“Jimmy the Gent” — Notebook MUBI — 25 April 2019 — analysis of the early 1930s performance of the classical Hollywood actor James Cagney

“After decades, Christ Stopped at Eboli gets rare stateside screening” — The San Francisco Chronicle — 19 June 2019 — essay on a new restoration of Francesco Rosi’s 1979 opus Christ Stopped at Eboli, based upon the 1945 memoir by the anti-Fascist painter and writer Carlo Levi and long-unavailable in the States)

“Many Arms to Hold You: Ensemble Acting in the 1960s Films of Richard Lester” — Stanford Univeristy senior honors thesis — Spring 2018 (unpublished)

“California Streamin’: What can make us laugh on Netflix? Richard Pryor, that’s what” — The San Francisco Chronicle — 30 May 2019 (inaugural entry in my column in the San Francisco Chronicle on streaming sites; appears weekly in the Chronicle’s Sunday pink section)

““Criterion Month: Françoise Dorléac in The Soft Skin and The Young Girls of Rochefort” — Much Ado About Cinema — 19 July, 2018

“Argentine director Lucrecia Martel to attend Berkeley retrospective of her work” — The San Francisco Chronicle — April 16, 2018 — profile of and interview with the Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, in anticipation of her newest film Zama

““A colder, more brutal ‘Twin Peaks’ is still riveting” — The San Francisco Chronicle — Dec. 22, 2017 — recap/analysis of David Lynch’s and Mark Frost’s 2017 miniseries Twin Peaks: The Return, whose episodes I recapped and analyzed each week for the Chronicle in a weekly column, “Postcards from the Lodge”

“Chaplin’s maligned ‘Countess from Hong Kong’ a worthy endeavor” — The San Francisco Chronicle — Oct. 3, 2017 — revisionist defense of Charlie Chaplin’s critically reviled final film, A Countess from Hong Kong (1967)

“Alexander Nemerov: Stanford’s art history preacher” — The Stanford Daily Magazine — April 7, 2017 — feature story on Alexander Nemerov, art history professor, critic, scholar, and chair of Stanford’s Art & Art History Department

““Dance and the Postmodern Sublime in Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)” — Stanford Undergraduate Research Journal (SURJ) — Spring 2016

“‘Daughters of the Dust’ director Julie Dash talks filmmaking, shaping the Black female

image” — The Stanford Daily — Nov. 20, 2016 — extended interview with Julie Dash, who was in Mill Valley, California to present a 20th anniversary restoration of her 1991 masterpiece Daughters of the Dust

“The Stanford Theatre: Blast from the Past, and Key to the Future” — The Stanford Daily — Nov. 5, 2016 — feature story in the Stanford Daily Magazine on the history of the Stanford Theatre, a movie house in Palo Alto that has continued running since 1925

Biography:

Carlos Valladares is a writer, critic, video essayist, and Ph.D student in the History of Art and Film and Media Studies departments. He was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. He has a broad interest in the cinema as it’s been since 1895 and where it’s going beyond 2019; he is especially interested in the works of Jacques Demy, Jacques Tati, Jacques Rivette, John Cassavetes, Robert Altman, Michael Snow, Preston Sturges, Elaine May, Vincente Minnelli, Burt Lancaster, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Kelly Reichardt, the filmmakers of the L.A. Rebellion (Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Larry Clark), Richard Lester, and Studio Ghibli (Miyazaki and Takahata). His research centers on the cinematic ensemble, and how different directors and actors have approached the concept of group (dis)harmony—especially in the global 1960s. His video essay “Minnelli Red” on the classical Hollywood director Vincente Minnelli was screened in competition at the 54th Pesaro Film Festival.

He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University in 2018 with a dual-degree B.A. in Film and American Studies. He was awarded the 2018 Deans’ Award for Academic Achievement, and nominated by six Stanford faculty members for his “rare gift of being able to extend his astute insights into film beyond the classroom to his fellow students and the broader public.” In 2017, as a junior, he curated and wrote the wall texts for an exhibition, “Abstraction and the Movies,” at the Anderson Collection, which placed movies in dialogue with paintings from the Anderson’s permanent collection of 20th century American artists, including Frankenthaler, Pollock, Rothko, and others; KQED Arts and the San Francisco Chronicle’s David Wiegand listed it as a must-see arts event in the Bay Area. In 2016, he co-founded Untitled (Manicule), Stanford University’s first research journal dedicated to scholarship in art history and film & media studies (run by undergraduates).

His criticism has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Gagosian Quarterly, Film Comment, MUBI Notebook, the Criterion Collection, and the Metrograph Edition; he currently writes a weekly column for the Chronicle called “California Streamin’,” which highlights films available to watch on streaming sites. He has worked as a research assistant on two books: Christina Mesa’s The American History of Black and White Race Relations in Film (Routledge, 2020) and Marci Kwon’s Enchantments: Joseph Cornell and American Modernism (Princeton University Press, 2020). He loves to mentor young students; he has taught creative and essay-writing to kids and young teens at the Writopia Lab in New York City. He loves the Beatles, Motown, social dance, animals, and wandering.