Chilean cinema has developed alongside the political changes of the past decade. Its aesthetic is one of discordance or disjuncture (desajuste), in which political and social issues seep into the country’s films through a variety of formal practices. Films made between 2010 and 2020 oscillate between an adherence to realism and the principle of “processualism” (procesualidad) as a way of revealing the mechanisms of representation and thus highlighting their own mediation. This article examines such an aesthetic of disjuncture by studying the cinematic representation of the conflict between the state and the Indigenous Mapuche people through the films El verano de los peces voladores (The Summer of Flying Fish, Marcela Said, 2013), Mala junta (Bad Influence, Claudia Huaiquimilla, 2016), Rey (King, Niles Atallah, 2017), and Notas para una película (Notes for a Film, Ignacio Agüero, 2022).
Wallmapu in Contemporary Chilean Cinema: Struggles over Indigenous Land
Iván Pinto is a film critic, researcher, and teacher. He is the coauthor of Visiones laterales. Cine y video experimental 1957-2017 (Metales Pesados, 2018) and coeditor of Raúl Ruiz. Potencias de lo múltiple (Metales Pesados, 2023), Estéticas del Desajuste (Metales Pesados, 2022), El cine de Raúl Ruiz. Fantasmas, simulacros y artificios (Uqbar, 2010), and La zona Marker (Calabaza del Diablo, 2022). He is the editor of the film studies online journal laFuga.
Carolina Urrutia is associate professor in the School of Communications at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She is the author of Un cine centrífugo (Cuarto Propio, 2013), coauthor of Bordes de lo real en la ficción (Metales Pesados, 2020) and coeditor of Estéticas del Desajuste (Metales Pesados, 2022). She is the director of the film studies online journal laFuga.
Iván Pinto, Carolina Urrutia, Carl Fischer, Lucy Engle; Wallmapu in Contemporary Chilean Cinema: Struggles over Indigenous Land. Film Quarterly 1 September 2023; 77 (1): 56–65. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2023.77.1.56
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