The Visual Guillotine

The Cinematic Cut and Politics in Latin America

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by Thomas Matusiak

Type

Studies

Subject

Countries > Latin America

Keywords

Latin America, violence, politics, sociology

Publishing date

2026 (October 27, 2026)

Publisher

University of Minnesota Press

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 304 pages
5 ½ x 8 ½ inches (14 x 21.5 cm)

ISBN

978-1-5179-1553-7

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Book Presentation:
The violence of the cinematic cut in twentieth-century Latin American film

Splice, montage, close-up: modern cinema routinely presents bodies in pieces. Not unlike the guillotine, argues Thomas Matusiak, these techniques have served both overt and symbolic political ends as they accomplish and project the efficient production of severed bodies. In The Visual Guillotine, Matusiak traces the use of cinematic tools of dismemberment in twentieth-century Latin American film to theorize the symbolic and material violence of the cut.

A robust genealogy of Latin American cinematic politics, The Visual Guillotine encompasses national filmmaking traditions; radical and reactionary political registers; and the proliferated aesthetics of narrative, documentary, experimental, and expanded cinema through an innovative critical viewing practice. From the national cinemas of the 1930s to the decapitation videos produced in the Mexican narco-conflict and beyond, Matusiak shows how the cinematic cut has been employed to inspire terror as well as invoke and critique a range of political programs.

A refreshing dialogue between film theory and Latin American cultural studies, The Visual Guillotine offers a new way for film to conceptualize politics. In our present political moment, with rapidly generated and circulated visual media central to a resurgent leftist-populist battle against oligarchy and authoritarianism, this book calls for readers to reassess their viewing position when confronted with violent imagery.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

About the Author:
Thomas Matusiak is assistant professor of Latin American cultural studies in the Michele Bowman Underwood Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami.

Press Reviews:
"Beautifully written and meticulously argued, The Visual Guillotine fills a significant void in Latin American literary and cultural studies and film studies. Articulating a political theory of the moving image, Thomas Matusiak mobilizes cinematic form to expose film’s constitutive violence and its broader ethical and political consequences." ―Erin Graff Zivin, University of Southern California

"The Visual Guillotine is a work of great theoretical boldness and conceptual originality, providing new ways to think about the intersections between film form, technique, and the various violences underlying cinema and culture, by one of the most exciting new voices in Latin American film studies." ―Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, author of Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema, 1988–2012

See the publisher website: University of Minnesota Press