Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Since the early 2000s, a series of documentaires have portrayed a Chili where indignation progressively gained ground, calling into question the discourse of defeat impose by the 1973 coup d’état and 17 years of dictatorship. This process would culminate in the social outbreak of october 2019, symbolically called “despertar” (awakening), whose most striking consequence will be the transformation of an urban space, reappropriated and resignified to change the course of the History. Chili woke up in the street and from the street will be achieved what the politial agreements could not: put an end to the most despotic of the Pinochetist power holdouts, the constitution of 1980. After a brief study of the “poetics” of the occupation of the city of Santiago, this article will focus on the analysis of Hoy y no mañana (Today and not Tomorrow, Josefina Morandé, 2018), one of the documentaries that, studied from the perspective of the revolt (and gender), allows us to delve in that Santiago de Chili, become the ground for the conquest of chilien people, once again, owner of its own destiny.

The representation of the city has been a constant since the beginnings of cinema, among other reasons because its birth coincided with the growth, expansion and development of cities. Western political thought has sought to improve the living conditions of the inhabitants through the design of cities, one of the main concerns of utopias. However, cinematographic fiction usually offers us the creation of dystopian imaginaries that incorporate an architectural ensemble that responds to the thought and ideals of Modern Architecture. This article analyzes the influence of these assumptions on the representation of the dystopian city in film, from two different approaches. On the one hand, the projection of real spaces as the setting of dystopia (Gattaca, 1997), and, on the other, the construction of the dystopian city from the director's notion of it (Blade Runner 2049, 2017). To this end, a previous study of the thinking underlying the architectural styles emanating from the principles of Modern Architecture and the possible representations of the city in the cinematographic realm framed in the socio-cultural historical context in which they were born is carried out

This study investigates the rebellious potentiality of the carnival grotesque (Bajtin, 1974) from the figures of “relajo” and “pelado”, two fundamental concepts of the Mexican cinematographic imaginary. For this, the film by the filmmaker Luis Estrada A wonderful world ( 2006), which together with Herod's Law (1999), Hell (2010) and The Perfect Dictatorship (2014) can be considered a tetralogy about the current sociopolitical situation in Mexico, share themes, a critical and satirical perspective to portray social history and recent politics in Mexico, denouncing the murky relationships between political corruption, organized crime, large economic corporations, and the media. It is finally verified how through grotesque Mexican humor, the ambivalence of laughter, parody, and carnival investment, the mechanisms of oppression in the establishment and maintenance of inequality between social classes are revealed and the distribution of wealth.

The work proposes to investigate everyday life to generate forms based on the image as a performative device. In this way, the text is articulated from the concept of image performativity from the creative process of Chantal Akerman, to recover the image-forming power and the importance it acquires in our lives, in the face of a reality anesthetized by the repetition of the pictures. Thus, the work is intended to answer these images from performativity to open possible imaginaries. For this, the text is organized according to an approximation to the work of the filmmaker Chantal Akerman. Working with the image through the autobiographical, everyday life and memory, experimenting with the elements offered by the artistic medium to create new relationships, annotations for an artistic investigation from performativity as an emergency.

Science fiction has always been closely linked to utopia and shows distant planets, strange creatures and unknown technology in order to make the viewer think about a very familiar reality, our life on Earth and its future. This is why cities, a central element of our life and utopia alike, play such an important role in the works of science fiction. An excellent example is Luc Besson’s film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017), on which our article focuses. We analyze how the film’s different cities (the Pearls’ idyllic villages, the invisible city in the desert representing a relentless capitalism and above all the gigantic interplanetary metropolis Alpha) serve as a starting point for reflections about the organization of our future society. The remarkable presence of the grotesque in the film will be of special interest for our observations. One central characteristic of the grotesque, the transgression of all borders, will finally lead us to the work’s transnational dimension, which is of capital importance for Besson’s film.

Our research is framed in the context of relations between cinema and city, which aims to analyze a contemporary urban symphony: El juego de la vida (Grupo de Arte Callejo -GAC-, 2007). Now, unlike the urban symphonies of the 20s, which organized the images through montage with classical music; in the case of El juego de la vida, the soundtrack is made up of zapping noises, camera and gun shots, and chaotic and abstract urban voices. Thus, we propose to apply a conceptual creation methodology in order to extract the ideas inherent to the film: the city-screen, the city-panopticon and city-deterritorialized. These concepts are going to plot the rhythms that constitute the regulation of urban existence in various ways: from the interweaving between the alienating rhythms of zapping and the rhythms of television images (city-screen) and between the rhythms of the shots and the rhythms of mosaic images (city-panopticon). However, rhythms can also generate emancipatory movements, symbolized by the nexus between the rhythm of street voices and the rhythm of images-traffic and images-flow (city-deterritorialized).

Two of the most awarded films in 2019, Todd Philipps' Joker and Bong Joon-ho's Parasites, are about the city. Both start from a certain vision of the city as an exterior landscape to come to show the existence of an agglomeration that affects the inner life of the citizens. It shows a city where mental imbalances destabilize human relations, but also as a space of tension. Critics referred to them as two films that speak of revolt and citizen unrest, even using the concept of class struggle to define the way they show the imbalances between the powerful and the disinherited of society. This article analyses the urban tensions depicted in both films by starting from the concept of infrapolitics, understood as something that arises from the failure of all interrogation, of all ethical demands on politics. It is something that stems from the human need for self-revelation, without purpose or calculation. The subversion that both films explore does not aim to transform society but to generate a noise that serves to highlight how the new metropolises are also a space for marginalisation and mental alteration.

This article analyzes the representation of current youth in the urban setting in Latin American fiction cinema, addressing various tensions related to a changing city, away from its traditional representation and adapted to the performative identity of young people, who provide a sensitive sense to the spaces they inhabit. The analysis will focus on the films Ya no estoy aquí by Fernando Frías (Mexico, 2019), Ema by Pablo Larraín (Chile, 2019) and El auge del humano by Eduardo Williams (Argentina, 2016), all starring adolescents. In them we identify verbally hermetic characters who emancipate themselves in their urban wandering, building fabrics or transit surfaces where both their artistic/cultural affinities and their immersion in the digital world; all this considering the mediation of the local context of the characters and their belonging to a globalized community.

Desde sus inicios el cine ha configurado un imaginario colectivo a través de las imágenes urbanas de la pantalla, retratando tantos tipos de ciudades como lecturas de estas pueden hacerse desde el punto de vista del audiovisual y la fotografía. Las ciudades son tejidos de imágenes y sonidos que conjugan emociones y experiencias de las que el cine ha sabido apropiarse ya desde los años 20 y 30 con las sinfonías urbanas que marcaron un intercambio vivo entre las imágenes y el montaje. Escenarios de los relatos fílmicos o protagonistas de ellos, las ciudades han sido objeto de estudio de numerosas disciplinas artísticas que han sabido interrogarlas sobre cuestiones de índole geopolítica a partir de creaciones sonoras y visuales planteadas por el espacio urbano. El presente dossier monográfico se centra en el estudio de las imágenes y los sonidos de estas geopolíticas urbanas, organizando los trabajos de reflexión en cuatro categorías -Ocupar el espacio urbano; Visiones apocalípticas y futuristas; Geopolíticas sonorizadas; y Representaciones socio-históricas del espacio urbano-, creando un recorrido a través de los recovecos del caleidoscópico identitario de los universos urbanos audio-logo-visuales.

Our study explores the sounds of the city in its relationship with the movies in the intention of observing how an imaginary of the city of Barcelona has been built and deconstructed through contemporary cinema. Seen as a whole it provides a plural, polyphonic and heterogeneous vision of Barcelona’s city. Relying on an audiovisual corpus of extremely diverse objectives, durations, cinematographic genres and modes of communication such as video-clips, fictional movies, official films of the Olympic Games and several documentaries, we will try to show that the sounds with which the city has been associated, taken as a whole, have played a fundamental role in the configuration of a complex imaginary of the city of Barcelona, thereby contributing to reveal its multiversal character. In its dialogue with images, sound establishes, contradicts and reinforces intertextual threads between various productions, making a trace in a collective memory that contributes to performative reinterpretation.