Beyond Memory: An Introduction

The introduction situates the Special Focus section “Chilean Film and Media: Fifty Years Later (1973/2023)” in its historical and cultural context. The year 2023 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the coup that toppled the socialist government of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. To reflect on the role of film and media in relation to the coup demands a move away from mere commemoration and, more broadly, from memory studies as the overarching critical framework that has dominated studies of Chilean cinema. This Special Focus section seeks to move beyond memory without neglecting the duty to remember. It is a project of reactivation, reappropriation, and repoliticization of the cinematic memory of the coup. This approach favors continuities between films made throughout the last five decades under different historical moments—the socialist years of Allende, the dictatorship, the postdictatorship, and the estallido social (social uprising) of October 2019.