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- Convenors:
-
Fernando Sdrigotti
(Royal Holloway)
Santiago Oyarzabal (Warwick University)
- Location:
- Malet 351
- Start time:
- 3 April, 2014 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to look at the way in which many of the films of the last 20 years have represented and re-imagined Latin American urban space, many times affecting the way the Latin American city is perceived and experienced
Long Abstract:
The last twenty years have seen a rebirth of Latin American cinema, both in terms of the production output in the area as well as with regards to the international recognition achieved by many of the names associated with this generation of filmmakers. This is an interesting phenomenon which overlaps with one of the most devastating economic crises the region has ever seen. The city, in its many forms from utopia to dystopia, has been one of the privileged settings during these years, many times becoming the centre through which these works articulate a dialogue with their present and their political and economic contexts. This panel aims to look at the way in which many of the films of this period have attempted both to represent and re-imagine Latin American urban space, many times affecting the way the Latin American city is perceived and experienced.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Fernando Sdrigotti (Royal Holloway)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper will analyse a recurrent theme in New Argentine Cinema: the exploration of urban decay, and social and economic crises, through flâneur-like figures.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper will analyse what I argue is a recurrent theme in many of the films of New Argentine Cinema: the exploration of urban decay, and social and economic crises, through flâneur-like figures. I will argue that, although not unproblematic, this figure - made popular by the likes of Baudelaire, Benjamin, Kracauer, et al - still has analytic potential, while it also remains particularly unexplored in relation to New Argentine Cinema. Concentrating mainly in La fe del volcán (Poliak, 2001) and Ronda nocturna (Cozarinsky, 2005), but referring also to more canonical films of this movement, such as Pizza, birra, faso (Stagnaro and Caetano, 1998) and Rapado (Rejtman, 1992), I will also show how through the figure of the flâneur it is possible to produce readings that do not depend solely upon narrative (many times weak in these films), thus inserting the films within a broader socio-political context that many times is not at first sight evident.
Geoffrey Kantaris (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
Elefante blanco (2012), set in the Ciudad Oculta slum in Buenos Aires. provides a complex set of visual and architectural metaphors framing issues of political and filmic representation in the megacity. I place the film in dialogue with On Populist Reason (2005) by Argentine theorist Ernesto Laclau.
Paper long abstract:
The film Elefante blanco (dir. Pablo Trapero, 2012) is set in Ciudad Oculta, a notorious villa (shanty town) in the south west of Buenos Aires, and casts several of the slum's residents in supporting roles alongside a trio of professional lead actors. But its distinctive feature is its translation and framing of populist political ideology via a series of powerful tropes of abandonment, sublimation and affective capture. The trope of abandonment is condensed in the "White Elephant", a populist project to build the largest hospital in Latin America in the 1930s. Never completed, the huge abandoned building provides the symbolic carcass in the ruins of which the inhabitants of the villa continue to live out their lives, not figuring in official maps and not counted in any census. The trope of sublimation, which connects to both the Kantian and the postmodern sublime, is suggested via the contemporary work in the villa of a group of priests belonging at least in spirit to the erstwhile Movement of Priests for the Third World, led by the charismatic Carlos Mugica before he was assassinated by the Triple A in 1974. Via a reading of the film that places it in dialogue with the ideas of the Argentine political philosopher Ernesto Laclau, I argue that the building becomes a condensed metaphor for the failed populist projects of Church and State, together with an obstinate materiality - both lack and excess - which blocks the affective, political, and indeed filmic capture of these marginalized populations.
Michael Pigott
Paper short abstract:
Through a formal analysis of the films Hacerme Feriante (Julián D’Angiolillo, 2010) and Fantasma (Lisandro Alonso, 2006), this paper will explore the representation of time and its local specificity in relation to the geography of Buenos Aires.
Paper long abstract:
Through a formal analysis of the films Hacerme Feriante (Julián D'Angiolillo, 2010) and Fantasma (Lisandro Alonso, 2006), this paper will explore the representation of time and its local specificity in relation to the geography of Buenos Aires.
Hacerme Feriante is an observational documentary, capturing both a transitional period in the history of La Salada (one of the largest informal markets in South America), and the speeds and rhythms of life and labour experienced by the stallholders, workers, and inhabitants of the market and its surrounding villas. Sited at the edge of the city, the market draws customers from around the interior of the country. Fantasma, on the other hand, presents a complex meta-fictional commentary on displacement and duration, as we watch two characters from Lisandro Alonso's previous films roam (separately) around the empty, desolate hulk of the Teatro San Martin in the very centre of the city. We associate both characters/actors with the brooding loneliness of the rural settings of La Libertad (Alonso, 2001) and Los Muertos (Alonso, 2004), where the routines of labour and speeds of travel also determined the rhythms of the films. Fantasma places those figures into a profoundly different context, creating a rupture through which a dream vision of the spaces of urban Buenos Aires may be considered in relation to class and cultural difference.
Maria Paz Peirano (Universidad de Chile)
Paper short abstract:
Contemporary Chilean cinema has consistently recreated certain urban imaginaries, which express unsettled perceptions of the post-dictatorship Chilean society. The persistence of deserted and intimate urban spaces in these films critically reflects on the lived experience of the neoliberal model.
Paper long abstract:
In Chile, there has been an upsurge of national film production the last 20 years, largely promoted by the Chilean state, after the end of Pinochet's dictatorship. Local film production, although highly diverse, has been expressing and reflecting in one form or another some of the socio-cultural transformations of Chilean contemporary society. Much of these transformations are related to the continuation of the neoliberal economic model imposed in Chile during the authoritarian regime. This paper focuses on feature films that reconstruct certain material and social landscapes -or 'ethnoscapes'- of Chilean contemporary cities, which have framed the urban experience during this period of democratic transition ("transición"). Through persistent cinematographic images, such films elucidate unsettled aspects of the lived experience of Chilean neoliberal society, usually expressed in imaginaries of empty and liminal spaces, which reflect on the city as an alienated place. The paper is based on a comparative analysis of the urban spaces and trajectories represented in the "popular" local films of the 1990s, as well as the more "cosmopolitan" films of the 2000s. Particularly, it examines deserted spaces, which are imagined as threaten, hopeless urban environments; as well as the recreation of secure but lonely home refuges in recent films. I argue that these films reveal some of the fragmented and troubled social relationships in contemporary Chilean society, providing consistent critical imaginaries on the neoliberal model.
Nicola Runciman (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers Scherson's engagement with urban spaces where the flows, movements and flexibilities of the city meet with friction and stasis. I use Foucault's notion of the heterotopia to explore these spaces as a critique of the neoliberal utopia of fluidity.
Paper long abstract:
Play (dir. Alicia Scherson, 2005), is often cited as a key work within the constellation of aesthetic and thematic concerns that have been discussed under the label of 'el novísimo cine chileno'. The film offers a distinctively colourful and ludic take on 21st century Santiago, a city that has been at the heart of a neoliberal test case over the past few decades.
On the surface, Scherson's Santiago is a space of transiency, movement and flexibility, crossed by flows of people, traffic, capital and information. It seems to be offering possibilities for exploration and encounter, casting the urban consumer in a landscape of choice and hinting at the possibility of playful reinvention.
However, this paper is concerned with what I refer to here as 'slow spaces' - spaces where flows encounter obstacles, where movement contends with friction and where choice runs up against limits. I argue that these spaces are where Scherson's urban imaginary is at its most critical; this is where the illusory nature of consumerist utopias becomes spatialised.
By placing these spaces in dialogue with notion of the heterotopia, I explore the construction of these 'slow spaces' in critical relation to the utopian promises of consumerism at work in the neoliberal city and the experience of these spaces as a disruption to the rhetoric of possibility