Theorizing Violence in Latin American Cinema

This panel will gather papers that theorize the aesthetics of violence in Latin American Cinema by examining both cinema’s representational capacity and its aesthetic composition or form. Departing from the theoretical position that films not only tell a story but they can also produce thought, our papers will look at various films made in and about Latin America to interrogate whether violence can operate distinctly as an aesthetic or affective tool to think (about) the social and the political. As part of this examination, the panel’s discussion will trace a partial history of how Latin American films mobilize various forms of violence as particularly eloquent ways to relate the human body and senses to the abstract constructs that are the social and the political. Is the violence of one necessarily the violence of many? Our papers will also trace a history that pays heightened attention to the specific limitations and freedoms that govern in the Latin American film industry. After all, cinematic aesthetics is influenced by not only human creativity and style but also in/surmountable production constraints. The aesthetics of violence in cinema offer suggestive forms whereby the eternal becomes finite, the fleeting fixed, and the disembodied corporeal. Finally the panel will propose that a particular theory of the visible and audible can be distilled from how cinema assembles varying aesthetic and thematic permutations of violence.

Panel Chairs: Eunha Choi (California State University at Long Beach) and Arturo Serrano (Universidad Católica Andrés Bello)

DEADLINE: Friday August 22nd.

Please send abstracts before FRIDAY AUGUST 22nd (maximum 250 words) to aserrano@ucab.edu.ve. The subject heading of this email should be: LASA 2015.
Any information can be requested by writing to aserrano@ucab.edu.ve or eunha.choi.la@gmail.com
IMPORTANT: In order for a panel to be admitted to the LASA Congress, all proponents have to be LASA members before the final proposal is sent (Friday September 5th).