TY - JOUR
T1 - Madness and migration
T2 - Broken geographies in Peruvian cinema
AU - Cuya, Lorena
N1 - Funding Information:
15 Madeinusa has been awarded the best Latin-American Narrative Feature, the Mar de Plata Film Festival award, the Cine Ceará Festival Nacional de Cinema award, Fipresci Prize, the International Film Festival Rotterdam award, and the Havana International Film Festival award for the Best Original Screenplay among others recognitions.
Funding Information:
As Deborah Poole observes, visual regimes have a constitutive material presence in history, and to understand how they influence our perceptions and knowledge, one must look at the ways they intersect with specific social end economic formations (9). In the Peruvian context, the military regime led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968-75) implemented the 1972 cinema law, which increased tax breaks and provided economic stimulus and flexibility for a range of filmmakers with varying ideological approaches to develop the creation of a national film industry (Barrow 42; Martínez). This law reflected Velasco’s governmental model, which promoted the integration of marginalized populations into national discourses, indigenous rights, and his famous 1969 Agrarian Reform Law.2 However, the stimulus given by the 1972 cinema law ended in 1993, during the presidency of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000). Fujimori spurred stronger neoliberal policies and intensive privatizations. He also introduced a more market-oriented cinema law that reduced the state’s support and prompted filmmakers to seek funding from commercial and philanthropic institutions, such as Project Ibermedia, Ashoka, and UNESCO.3
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Washington University in St. Louis. All rights reserved.
PY - 2018/10
Y1 - 2018/10
N2 - In the last four decades, geographic displacements have emerged as a recurrent theme in Peruvian cinema. Through a close examination of Grupo Chaski’s Gregorio (1984) and Juliana (1989), and Claudia Llosa’s Madeinusa (2006) and La Teta asustada (2009), this article discusses two distinctive film geographies. A comparison of radically different systems of spatial organization among these films suggests that their distinct images can be understood as two visual and ideological approaches to representing social margins. While Chaski’s productions contest old social divides by producing horizontal geographies, wherein the viewer can see the migrant’s interactions within a relatively balanced and homogenous space, Claudia Llosa’s filmmaking practices illustrate long-standing racial differences through the construction of visually vertical geographies inhabited by mad and ill migrants. Both projects represent two different strands in contemporary Peruvian cinema: the films produced under the 1972 cinema law and those produced under the 1993 neoliberal law, which epitomize fracture zones that I call broken geographies. The transition from horizontal to vertical geographies demonstrates deep historical fractures that accompany socio-economic changes affecting filmmaking practices in Peru during the 1980s and 2000s.
AB - In the last four decades, geographic displacements have emerged as a recurrent theme in Peruvian cinema. Through a close examination of Grupo Chaski’s Gregorio (1984) and Juliana (1989), and Claudia Llosa’s Madeinusa (2006) and La Teta asustada (2009), this article discusses two distinctive film geographies. A comparison of radically different systems of spatial organization among these films suggests that their distinct images can be understood as two visual and ideological approaches to representing social margins. While Chaski’s productions contest old social divides by producing horizontal geographies, wherein the viewer can see the migrant’s interactions within a relatively balanced and homogenous space, Claudia Llosa’s filmmaking practices illustrate long-standing racial differences through the construction of visually vertical geographies inhabited by mad and ill migrants. Both projects represent two different strands in contemporary Peruvian cinema: the films produced under the 1972 cinema law and those produced under the 1993 neoliberal law, which epitomize fracture zones that I call broken geographies. The transition from horizontal to vertical geographies demonstrates deep historical fractures that accompany socio-economic changes affecting filmmaking practices in Peru during the 1980s and 2000s.
KW - Cinema law
KW - Migration
KW - Neoliberalism
KW - Peruvian film
KW - Race
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U2 - 10.1353/rvs.2018.0065
DO - 10.1353/rvs.2018.0065
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85060291786
SN - 0034-818X
VL - 52
SP - 759
EP - 785
JO - Revista de Estudios Hispanicos
JF - Revista de Estudios Hispanicos
IS - 3
ER -