Landscapes of Becoming in Lucía Puenzo’s Films

• In Event: The Child/Adolescent Image in Latin American Millennium Cinemas: Memory and Utopia

Abstract

In the films of Lucía Puenzo (Argentina 1976), images of landscapes are central in the representation of subjectivities in transition. The depictions of the adolescent protagonists in XXY (2007), The Fish Child (2009) and The German Doctor (2013) map in different ways the changing spaces of the present, in a constant dialogue with the hegemonic imaginaries of sexuality, gender and nationhood as expressed historically in landscape imagery. In this paper I will discuss different strategies of becoming at the turn of the 21st century through a reading of how the landscapes in Puenzo’s films trace back and reconstruct the relations between nature and culture, humans and animals, in order to critically examine ideas on belonging and becoming in relation to a series of imaginary places, repositories of collective cultural perceptions.

Author

• Anna Forné, University of Gothenburg