Theorizing Violence in Latin American Cinema

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel gathers papers that theorize the aesthetics of violence in Latin American Cinema by examining both cinema’s representational capacity and its aesthetic composition or form. Departing from the theoretical position that films not only tell a story but they can also produce thought, our papers look at various films made in and about Latin America to interrogate whether violence can operate distinctly as an aesthetic or affective tool to think (about) the social and the political. As part of this examination, the panel’s discussion traces a partial history of how Latin American films mobilize various forms of violence as particularly eloquent ways to relate the human body and senses to the abstract constructs that are the social and the political. Is the violence of one necessarily the violence of many? Our papers also trace a history that pays heightened attention to the specific limitations and freedoms that govern in the Latin American film industry. After all, cinematic aesthetics is influenced by not only human creativity and style but also in/surmountable production constraints. The aesthetics of violence in cinema offer suggestive forms whereby the eternal becomes finite, the fleeting fixed, and the disembodied corporeal. Finally the panel proposes that a particular theory of the visible and audible can be distilled from how cinema assembles varying aesthetic and thematic permutations of violence.

Sub Track

• Film Studies

Session Organizers

• Arturo Serrano Alvarez, Universidad de las Artes (Guayaquil)

• Eunha Choi, California State University Long Beach

Chair

• Arturo Serrano Alvarez, Universidad de las Artes (Guayaquil)

Individual Presentations

• Violence and the Precarious Body in Latin American Film - Victoria L Garrett, West Virigina University

• Where Violence meets Aesthetics: Charting Chilean Experimental Cinema from Raúl Ruiz to Pablo Larrain - Eduardo Ledesma, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• All the Silent Ladies: Attempted Female Catharsis in Fernando Meirelles’ City of God and Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden - Julia I Martins, American University

• The Elite Squad and the Aesthetics of Brazilian Social Violence - Daniela Pozzobon de Souza

• Psychological Violence in Buñuel's "Él - Arturo Serrano Alvarez, Universidad de las Artes (Guayaquil)

Discussant

• Eunha Choi, California State University Long Beach