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.