Papers by Susana Domingo Amestoy
Domestic Labor in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, 2020
Domingo Amestoy’s chapter analyzes the aesthetics of politics in Alicia Scherson’s Play (2004), t... more Domingo Amestoy’s chapter analyzes the aesthetics of politics in Alicia Scherson’s Play (2004), the first digital film produced in Chile for wide distribution, in relation to the defamiliarizing techniques that make the global neoliberal city an object of desire for the Mapuche maid/care worker. Drawing from Jacques Ranciere’s theory on aesthetics, Domingo Amestoy argues that by defamiliarizing the maid and constructing a representation of spectatorship, Scherson presents a social critique that defies a more social realist cinema as presented in the later film La nana/The Maid (Sebastian Silva, Chile, 2009), in which the family remains the idealized figure for social relations.
Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 2022
La estética comprometida de Pablo Perelman: del trauma y la historia al melodrama de La lección d... more La estética comprometida de Pablo Perelman: del trauma y la historia al melodrama de La lección de pintura.
Abstract
This essay analyzes the cinema of Chilean director Pablo Perelman, and in particular his film La lección de pintura (2011). Set during the agrarian reforms undertaken by Allende’s administration that would end with Pinochet’s military coup, Perelman’s film extends representations of national history into the twenty-first century through the melodrama of a talented young painter, his mother, and the man that tries to help the young prodigy develop his artistic skills. Despite the fact that melodrama as a film genre tends to focus on the intimacies of the family, often leaving aside historical analysis, Perelman’s film aims also to foreground the historical achievements of Allende’s period. Drawing on recent discussions of film and historicity, this essay argues that Perelman's film draws on a productive tension between the genres of historical fiction and melodrama with the intention of coping with commercial conditions to which co-production logistics have given rise.
Resumen
35 mm
Este ensayo analiza el cine del director chileno Pablo Perelman y en particular La lección de pintura (2011). Ambientado durante el periodo de la reforma agraria de la administración de Allende que termina con el golpe militar de Pinochet, el filme de Perelman extiende las representaciones de la historia nacional en el siglo XXI junto al melodrama de un niño pintor, su madre y el hombre que potencia las habilidades artísticas de un niño prodigio. A pesar de que el género del melodrama tiende a enfocarse en el núcleo de la familia, apartando el análisis histórico, el filme de Perelman subraya los logros del periodo de Allende. Basándose en debates recientes sobre cine e historicidad, este ensayo arguye que el filme de Perelman tensa el melodrama y la ficción histórica con el fin de hacer frente a unas determinadas condiciones comerciales derivadas de la logística de coproducción.
ReFocus: The Films of Pablo Larraín. , 2020
The Blurred Image: The Aesthetics of Impunity in Pablo Larraín’s No and El Club
This chapter ana... more The Blurred Image: The Aesthetics of Impunity in Pablo Larraín’s No and El Club
This chapter analyzes two works by the Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín, No (2012) and El club (2015), in relation to what can be described as his aesthetics of impunity. Rather than simply seek an appropriate dramatic structure, Larraín employs filters that simulate old anamorphic lenses and natural lighting as means to achieve what he describes as a certain “tone” or “texture.” The director’s desire for an image that captivates the senses has everything to do with the subject matter of his films, particularly as these relate to the legacy of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship and the theme of impunity. In this way, Larraín’s cinematic techniques can also be said to engage with what Jacques Rancière calls the politics of aesthetics, a “distribution of the sensible” that determines “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception,” in other words, the relationship between the “sensible” or that which is given to sense perception. Larraín’s cinematic style goes together with a community or society unable to evolve to a new state, a stasis derived from a legacy of impunity, presented in both films: the neoliberal legacy of Pinochet and the unpunished crimes of the Catholic Church. Larraín’s aesthetics is analyzed in relation to the national and international reception and signature style of these films.
“De-familiarizing the Maid: Alicia Scherson’s Play.” Domestic Labor in 21st Century Latin American Cinema. Ed. Elizabeth Osborne and Sofía Ruiz-Alfaro, Palgrave Macmillan. , 2020
This chapter maintains that Alicia Scherson’s film offers a keen sense of what the interface betw... more This chapter maintains that Alicia Scherson’s film offers a keen sense of what the interface between aesthetics and politics looks like within cinema today. I analyze Scherson’s Play (2004), the first digital film produced in Chile for wide distribution, in relation to the defamiliarizing techniques that make, Santiago, the global neoliberal city, an object of desire for the film’s protagonist, Cristina, a Mapuche maid/care-worker. Turning to Jacques Rancière’s “aesthetics of politics,” I argue that placing the maid at center stage serves to render her role within the family and society at large unfamiliar. More precisely, by presenting the maid as a spectator at the margins, Scherson produces a nuanced critique of Chilean society and its class divisions that, at the same time, mark the limits of both cosmopolitanism and the social realist cinema of films like Sebastián Silva’s La nana [The Maid] (2009).
Collapse, Catastrophe and Rediscovery: Spain’s Cultural Panorama in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Ana Maria Medina et al. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 111-132.
This chapter examines the dynamics of nation, family, and memory in Fernando León de Aranoa’s fil... more This chapter examines the dynamics of nation, family, and memory in Fernando León de Aranoa’s films and in relation to the neoliberalization of Spain that marked the 1990s and early 2000s. In Léon de Aranoa’s films and screenplays, the family emerges as the primary figure for the nation: from the family as a microcosm of the neoliberal nation marked by a lack of collective memory in Familia (1996) to the family as synecdoche of social class in Los lunes al sol (2002).
This paper analyzes Roberto Bolaño’s Amuleto (1999), and in particular its interest in the contem... more This paper analyzes Roberto Bolaño’s Amuleto (1999), and in particular its interest in the contemporary limits of political resistance. The essay subsequently juxtaposes the novel’s depiction of the massacre at Tlateloco with Carlos Fuentes’ Los 68: Paris, Praga, México (2005), and its use of both a non-fictional memoir of Paris in 1968 and a fictionalized account of Tlateloco. Ultimately, this essay demonstrates how Los 68 attempts to recuperate a kind of subjectivity in which utopian imaginaries defined the 1960s, but which Amuleto’s mobilization of allegory reveals as emptied out.
Book Reviews by Susana Domingo Amestoy
Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 99.2 , 2022
International Journal of Iberian Studies, 2018
Encrucijadas Globales is a timely collection of essays that explores redefinitions of Spain in th... more Encrucijadas Globales is a timely collection of essays that explores redefinitions of Spain in the global era from an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on globalization studies, postcolonialism, new historicism, discussion of collective memory theory, political science, and transatlantic studies. The matrix that supports this ambitious book is how to examine the present, in which, on one hand, structures of power relegate history to oblivion, and which, on the other hand, is marked by the emergence of new discourses trying to counteract the global reach of neo-liberalism. Citing Manuel Castells (1997), José Colmeiro explains in his introduction that the idea of what Spain is today is deeply connected to the effects that globalization has had on its economy, politics, ideology and culture, to say nothing of the increased porousness of its borders that, in many ways, have eroded the idea of the nation itself. For this reason, Colmeiro explains, this volume aims to draw the reader's attention not just to Atlantic and European contexts, but to the relation between peripheral nationalisms and transnational perspectives as well, all of which demands a more thorough examination of the concept of the nation today. In an attempt to understand this imbrication of the global and the local, Colmeiro's volume brings together a set of essays that ultimately provides a sense of how this redefinition of the nation is animated by the articulation of history, memory, national allegories and discourses of global justice (particularly in relation to Spanish Human Rights campaigns in the Southern Cone following the end of the dictatorships).
Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, May 2015
Thesis Chapters by Susana Domingo Amestoy
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Papers by Susana Domingo Amestoy
Abstract
This essay analyzes the cinema of Chilean director Pablo Perelman, and in particular his film La lección de pintura (2011). Set during the agrarian reforms undertaken by Allende’s administration that would end with Pinochet’s military coup, Perelman’s film extends representations of national history into the twenty-first century through the melodrama of a talented young painter, his mother, and the man that tries to help the young prodigy develop his artistic skills. Despite the fact that melodrama as a film genre tends to focus on the intimacies of the family, often leaving aside historical analysis, Perelman’s film aims also to foreground the historical achievements of Allende’s period. Drawing on recent discussions of film and historicity, this essay argues that Perelman's film draws on a productive tension between the genres of historical fiction and melodrama with the intention of coping with commercial conditions to which co-production logistics have given rise.
Resumen
35 mm
Este ensayo analiza el cine del director chileno Pablo Perelman y en particular La lección de pintura (2011). Ambientado durante el periodo de la reforma agraria de la administración de Allende que termina con el golpe militar de Pinochet, el filme de Perelman extiende las representaciones de la historia nacional en el siglo XXI junto al melodrama de un niño pintor, su madre y el hombre que potencia las habilidades artísticas de un niño prodigio. A pesar de que el género del melodrama tiende a enfocarse en el núcleo de la familia, apartando el análisis histórico, el filme de Perelman subraya los logros del periodo de Allende. Basándose en debates recientes sobre cine e historicidad, este ensayo arguye que el filme de Perelman tensa el melodrama y la ficción histórica con el fin de hacer frente a unas determinadas condiciones comerciales derivadas de la logística de coproducción.
This chapter analyzes two works by the Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín, No (2012) and El club (2015), in relation to what can be described as his aesthetics of impunity. Rather than simply seek an appropriate dramatic structure, Larraín employs filters that simulate old anamorphic lenses and natural lighting as means to achieve what he describes as a certain “tone” or “texture.” The director’s desire for an image that captivates the senses has everything to do with the subject matter of his films, particularly as these relate to the legacy of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship and the theme of impunity. In this way, Larraín’s cinematic techniques can also be said to engage with what Jacques Rancière calls the politics of aesthetics, a “distribution of the sensible” that determines “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception,” in other words, the relationship between the “sensible” or that which is given to sense perception. Larraín’s cinematic style goes together with a community or society unable to evolve to a new state, a stasis derived from a legacy of impunity, presented in both films: the neoliberal legacy of Pinochet and the unpunished crimes of the Catholic Church. Larraín’s aesthetics is analyzed in relation to the national and international reception and signature style of these films.
Book Reviews by Susana Domingo Amestoy
Thesis Chapters by Susana Domingo Amestoy
Abstract
This essay analyzes the cinema of Chilean director Pablo Perelman, and in particular his film La lección de pintura (2011). Set during the agrarian reforms undertaken by Allende’s administration that would end with Pinochet’s military coup, Perelman’s film extends representations of national history into the twenty-first century through the melodrama of a talented young painter, his mother, and the man that tries to help the young prodigy develop his artistic skills. Despite the fact that melodrama as a film genre tends to focus on the intimacies of the family, often leaving aside historical analysis, Perelman’s film aims also to foreground the historical achievements of Allende’s period. Drawing on recent discussions of film and historicity, this essay argues that Perelman's film draws on a productive tension between the genres of historical fiction and melodrama with the intention of coping with commercial conditions to which co-production logistics have given rise.
Resumen
35 mm
Este ensayo analiza el cine del director chileno Pablo Perelman y en particular La lección de pintura (2011). Ambientado durante el periodo de la reforma agraria de la administración de Allende que termina con el golpe militar de Pinochet, el filme de Perelman extiende las representaciones de la historia nacional en el siglo XXI junto al melodrama de un niño pintor, su madre y el hombre que potencia las habilidades artísticas de un niño prodigio. A pesar de que el género del melodrama tiende a enfocarse en el núcleo de la familia, apartando el análisis histórico, el filme de Perelman subraya los logros del periodo de Allende. Basándose en debates recientes sobre cine e historicidad, este ensayo arguye que el filme de Perelman tensa el melodrama y la ficción histórica con el fin de hacer frente a unas determinadas condiciones comerciales derivadas de la logística de coproducción.
This chapter analyzes two works by the Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín, No (2012) and El club (2015), in relation to what can be described as his aesthetics of impunity. Rather than simply seek an appropriate dramatic structure, Larraín employs filters that simulate old anamorphic lenses and natural lighting as means to achieve what he describes as a certain “tone” or “texture.” The director’s desire for an image that captivates the senses has everything to do with the subject matter of his films, particularly as these relate to the legacy of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship and the theme of impunity. In this way, Larraín’s cinematic techniques can also be said to engage with what Jacques Rancière calls the politics of aesthetics, a “distribution of the sensible” that determines “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception,” in other words, the relationship between the “sensible” or that which is given to sense perception. Larraín’s cinematic style goes together with a community or society unable to evolve to a new state, a stasis derived from a legacy of impunity, presented in both films: the neoliberal legacy of Pinochet and the unpunished crimes of the Catholic Church. Larraín’s aesthetics is analyzed in relation to the national and international reception and signature style of these films.