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.