UC Irvine

Deregulated Cinema: Post-Dictatorship Film and the Neoliberal Transition in Chile and Argentina offers a selective reading of neoliberal era Chilean and Argentine films and texts to suggest how Southern Cone cinema has responded to the transformation of modes of production and organizations of power imbricated with the transition. Part one of Deregulated Cinema illustrates the emergence of neoliberal spatial arrangements through the films of Patricio Guzmán to suggest the scale by which the sensorium has been altered and interpolated to work by transformations in visuality because, as Guzmán’s films indicate, such transformations have important implications not only for cinema but concepts like history and nostalgia. Similarly, I propose that the films of the Nuevo Cine Argentino (NCA), which have tended to be read as anti-allegorical, respond to the conditions of expropriation that defined the neoliberal period in Argentina, with images that underline the relations of labor and looking. In this way, Deregulated Cinema contributes to contemporary debates about post-dictatorship Latin American cultural studies as well as film and media theory.