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Contemporary Chilean Filmmaking
The Aesthetics of Trauma
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Book Presentation:
This book explores how the generation of filmmakers born in the aftermath of the Chilean dictatorship (1973-1990) use cinema to navigate and narrate the complex legacies of their country's turbulent past.
Eva-Rosa Ferrand Verdejo examines the work of the Novísimo Cine Chileno, providing close readings of key films such as Fernando Guzzoni's Carne de Perro (2013),Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña's La Casa Lobo (2018), Manuela Martelli's 1976 (2022), and Pablo Larraín's El Conde (2023). She identifies a recurring trope of blurred boundaries within these films – whether between right and wrong, past and present, fiction and reality, or a blending of genre conventions, – which disorients the viewer and resists any singular understanding of the film. She argues that this disorientation pushes the audience into a more active and critical mode of spectatorship.
Drawing on psychoanalytical theory and political philosophy, she goes on to explore how the aesthetic choices within these films are reflective of an uneasy relationship to Chile's traumatic past. Labelling these the 'aesthetics of trauma', she argues that they challenge official histories and raise broader questions about memory, trauma, and ethical representation in post-dictatorial societies.
About the Author:
Eva-Rosa Ferrand Verdejo is a research assistant at CY Cergy Paris Université, France. She completed her PhD in Film and TV Studies (University of Warwick) and in Hispanic Studies (CY Cergy Paris Université) in 2022.Lúcia Nagib is Professor of Film and Director of the Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures (CFAC) at the University of Reading. Her research has focused, among other subjects, on polycentric approaches to world cinema, new waves and new cinemas, cinematic realism and intermediality. She is the author of World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (Continuum, 2011), Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia (I.B. Tauris, 2007), The Brazilian Film Revival: Interviews with 90 Filmmakers of the 90s (Editora 34, 2002), Born of the Ashes: The Auteur and the Individual in Oshima's Films (Edusp, 1995), Around the Japanese Nouvelle Vague (Editora da Unicamp, 1993) and Werner Herzog: Film as Reality (EstaçãoLiberdade, 1991). She is the editor of Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film (with Anne Jerslev, 2013), Theorizing World Cinema (with Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah, I.B. Tauris, 2011), Realism and the Audiovisual Media (with Cecília Mello, Palgrave, 2009), The New Brazilian Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2003), Master Mizoguchi (Navegar, 1990) and Ozu (Marco Zero, 1990).Julian Ross is a University Lecturer at the Centre for the Arts in Society.
See the publisher website: Bloomsbury Academic
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