Unit name | Impressions of Dictatorship in Argentine and Chilean Cinema |
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Unit code | HISP30085 |
Credit points | 20 |
Level of study | H/6 |
Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) |
Unit director | Dr. Paul Merchant |
Open unit status | Not open |
Pre-requisites |
None |
Co-requisites |
None |
School/department | Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies |
Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
Argentina and Chile spent much of the 1970s and 1980s ruled by military dictatorships, regimes which left a profound mark on society and culture. In this unit, students will analyse films that deal with the consequences of this period: from the disappearance, torture and murder of political opponents to the break-up of families and the violation of private spaces.
Covering a period from the 1980s to the 2010s, the unit will examine the changing aesthetic strategies employed to approach moments of trauma, from melodrama and allegorical narratives to experimental documentaries and postmodern fiction. Students will consider cinema’s potential to effect political change, and its relation to discourses of memory and ‘postmemory’ in the years and decades after violent dictatorial rule. Considerable emphasis is placed on political and economic contexts, and their impact on the modes of cinematic production and distribution.
By the end of this unit students will be able to:
1 x 2 hour seminar per week, including plenary presentation, class discussions and small group work.
Group presentation (15-20 minutes) and individual 1,000-word write up (30%: 15% group mark for presentation, 15% for individual write-up) testing ILOs 1-6; 4,000-word essay (70%) testing ILOs 1-6.
Films
Luis Puenzo, La historia oficial (1986)
Pablo Perelman, Imagen latente (1987)
Fernando Solanas, Sur (1988)
Albertina Carri, Los rubios (2003)
Patricio Guzmán, Nostalgia de la luz (2010)
Benjamín Ávila, Infancia clandestina (2011)
Pablo Larraín, No (2012) (and, if desired, previous films in Larraín’s loose ‘Pinochet’ trilogy, including Tony Manero [2008])
Books
Gonzalo Aguilar, Other Worlds: New Argentine Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
John King, Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America (London: Verso, 2000 [1990])
Michael Lazzara, Chile in Transition: The Poetics and Politics of Memory (Gainesville: University Press of Floria, 2006)
Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012)
Ana Ros, The Post-Dictatorship Generation in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay: Collective Memory and Cultural Production (London : Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
Beatriz Sarlo, Tiempo pasado: cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2005)