• They Live: Violence, Horror and Spectres in Four Contemporary Argentine Films

    Author(s):
    Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha (see profile)
    Date:
    2022
    Group(s):
    Red de Investigación Mujeres en el Cine Latinoamericano
    Subject(s):
    Horror films, Collective memory, Ghosts, Feature films, Argentina
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    Hauntology, Latin American Women's Filmmaking, Lucrecia Martel, Jimena Monteoliva, Sofía Brockenshire, Verena Kuri, Laura Casabé, Argentine contemporary film, Horror film, Ghosts and memory
    Permanent URL:
    https://doi.org/10.17613/zbrr-vg92
    Abstract:
    In the Argentine film "The Headless Woman" ("La mujer sin cabeza", Lucrecia Martel, 2008), the protagonist Vero is haunted by the possibility of killing someone in a hit-and-run. Although hinting at the crimes committed during the last dictatorship in Argentina, "The Headless Woman" refers more to a mechanism of the past that is transformed and updated within contemporary society. In this essay, Martel’s film acts as a starting point in the exploration of recent Argentine films that deal with spectres from the past that pervade everyday life in the present: "Clementina" (Jimena Monteoliva, 2017), "One Sister" ("Una hermana", Sofía Brockenshire and Verena Kuri, 2017) and "The Returned" ("Los que vuelven", Laura Casabé, 2019). In a decade in which we can notice a remarkable growth of the horror genre in Argentine cinema, these films embrace several codes and characters from the horror genre to approach the Argentine reality. The author discusses how these filmmakers adopt similar aesthetic features from the horror genre to invoke and address the violence that permeates Argentine society today, with special attention devoted to ghosts, a key figure to understand an ongoing history of brutalities that usually go unresolved.
    Notes:
    Available at http://www.acta.sapientia.ro/acta-film/C22/film22-05.pdf
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    10.2478/ausfm-2022-0013
    Publisher:
    Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania
    Pub. Date:
    2022
    Journal:
    Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies
    Volume:
    22
    Page Range:
    77 - 96
    ISSN:
    2066-7779
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    11 months ago
    License:
    Attribution
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