• The Return to the Social through the Collective “I”: Disrupting the Uneventful Face of Neoliberal Precariousness in the Chilean Documentary El otro día

    Author(s):
    Walescka Pino-Ojeda (see profile)
    Date:
    2018
    Group(s):
    Latin America and the Caribbean
    Subject(s):
    Latin Americans--Social life and customs, Culture--Study and teaching, Motion pictures--Social aspects, Neoliberalism
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    Latin American cultural studies, Film and society
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6KC6G
    Abstract:
    Produced 21 years after the return to institutional democracy in Chile, Ignacio Agüero’s El otro día (The other day, 2012) picks up a set of social topics that were left in suspension under authoritarianism. In doing so, it evidences two main divergences in this renewal of social projects. Firstly, rather than adopting old hierarchies of detached narration, this film adopts a contemplative, self-referential first-person perspective. Secondly, it frames the encounter with the social—not in a depiction of public space, but in the secluded, private space of domesticity and family life, hence marking a fundamental difference from the monumental autobiographical voice that still defines the first-person subject in the modernist artistic tradition. Following Deleuze’s theory of the time-image (Cinema II: The Time-Image. London: Continuum, 2005), it is suggested that El otro día demonumentalises the positioning of the artist through intimacy, and through the use of a contemplative form of narration that actualises the uneventful face of neoliberal poverty, thus constructing a social critique in which action is subordinated to time rather than to movement. Picking up on the concept “singular plural”, it is proposed that what takes place in this film is a “collective I”, this in order to emphasise Chilean documentary’s own tradition within the legacy imprinted by authoritarianism.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    10.1080/02560046.2017.1405054
    Publisher:
    Informa UK Limited
    Pub. Date:
    2018-2-7
    Journal:
    Critical Arts
    Volume:
    31
    Issue:
    5
    Page Range:
    28 - 44
    ISSN:
    0256-0046,1992-6049
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    5 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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