Cinema of Crisis and the Documentary Impulse: The UPF Masters in Creative Documentary
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I analyse the relationship between contemporary Spanish documentary and the two crises that have deeply affected the country’s film industry in the last years: the financial crisis and the crisis of legitimacy of Spanish cinema amongst spectators and critical discourse. Specifically, I look at how the Masters in Creative Documentary of the UPF (Universidad Pompeu Fabra) has fostered an alternative documentary culture aimed at reconciling cinema’s role as a critical observer of neoliberal development in Spain. I focus on the university institution itself as a state-funded space of resistance to the ‘unthinking’ dynamics of the Spanish commercial film industry, especially in terms of its relation to actuality. To examine such issues in detail, I look at a paradigmatic case study from the UPF context: the film La plaga (Neus Ballús, 2013 La plaga. 2013. Directed by Neus Ballús (DVD). Barcelona: Barcelona: Cameo. [Google Scholar]), which depicts the struggles of people in the periphery of Barcelona as globalised capitalism remaps and redefines their lives. Although humble and modest, the ‘UPF model’ is perhaps the seed for a future Spanish cinema that can speak both to the public’s reality and against the neoliberal conquest of every realm of society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".