Maria Chiara D'Argenio | University College London (original) (raw)

Papers by Maria Chiara D'Argenio

Dynamic and Unstable Grounds: Peruvian Cinema in the Twenty-First Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 2021

F. Montero Diaz and F. Winter, Citizenship in the Latin American Upper and Middle Classes (Routledge), 2019

Journal of Latin American Studies, 2017

This essay focuses on a series of pictorial reportages on the city of Cuzco and the surrounding r... more This essay focuses on a series of pictorial reportages on the city of Cuzco and the surrounding region published in the Peruvian illustrated magazine Variedades in 1924 and 1925. Looking at the interplay of the aesthetic and documentary value of photographs, I analyse how the reportages on Cuzco’s architecture and ruins contributed to the indigenista proposal of regional and national identity and how, in so doing, they articulated an idea of modernity which opposed the main narrative of Western modernization produced by the magazine. I argue that Variedades became the discursive place of an interplay between opposite ideas of modernity since it afforded its readers-viewers a dual, almost conflictive, experience. Moreover, I posit that the magazine ‘mediated’ the regional discourse for the Limeño readers through the discourses of tourism and the picturesque familiarizing them with those ‘unknown’ regions. By comparing the reportages with similar documents published in the same decade by the Argentine magazine Plus Ultra, I also show that this was not something exclusive to Peru, but rather part of a broader Americanist trend that was shaping the relationship between native tradition and modernization as well as giving form to a proposal for a ‘pan-American’ identity in the 1920s.

This article explores the relationship between inhumanity, monstrosity, war and memory in two Lat... more This article explores the relationship between inhumanity, monstrosity, war and memory in two Latin American films: Días de Santiago (Peru, 2004) and La sombra del caminante (Colombia, 2004). These aesthetically innovative films tackle the internal armed conflicts that have occurred in Colombia and Peru in recent years. Focusing on former soldiers' reintegration into civilian life, they display war as a traumatic experience that produces monstrosity, understood as a dehumanisation of the individual. By analysing the tropes of monstrosity and the haunting past, and the films' aesthetics, I show how the performance of the monster articulates a tension between inhumanity and humanness, which can be read as a metaphor for the tension between the acts of remembering, investigating and forgetting within post-conflict societies.

Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas, vol 11: 2, 2014

This article proposes that the ‘poetic’ be conceived as an interpretative category for Santiago Á... more This article proposes that the ‘poetic’ be conceived as an interpretative category for Santiago Álvarez’s film experimentalism. The poetic nature of Álvarez’s cinema includes the use of poems, metaphors, songs, still photography and found footage and a ‘poetic’ approach to documentary, characterized by non-discursive forms such as music, the absence of conventional narration and narrative forms, a dynamic editing of visual and aural associations and juxtapositions, and an emphasis on the film’s rhythm. By analysing these patterns in films made between 1965 and 1970 and by discussing the concepts of urgency, empathy and performativity, I argue that Álvarez’s experimentalism aims to create a new type of critical and revolutionary public. In this sense, he supports and follows the official cultural policy of the Revolution and the politics of other cultural practices, such as revolutionary poetry and Cuban posters. The poetic nature of his films is, however, ambivalent since it coexists with what can be seen as the anti-poetic par excellence: the narrative.

Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies vol. 8, issue 1, 2013

Claudia Llosa’s films Madeinusa (2006) and La Teta Asustada (2009) are two interesting case studi... more Claudia Llosa’s films Madeinusa (2006) and La Teta Asustada (2009) are two interesting case studies of representation of indigenous people in contemporary cinema. Madeinusa tells about an isolated Andean village and its encounter with ‘modernity’; La Teta Asustada depicts Andean migrants who moved to the outskirts of Lima after the Peruvian 1980s Dirty War. Despite the several prizes the films were awarded (La Teta Asustada, for example, was awarded the Golden Bear at the 2009 Berlin festival), their national and international reception gave rise to controversy over the ways in which indigenous people were portrayed. This essay analyses the patterns and roots of Llosa’s representation of the Andean world. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of Llosa’s works, 19th-century novels, and early-20th-century and contemporary visual works, I identify and discuss a number of cultural and aesthetic strategies in the films: the actualization of a colonialist-style discourse; the employment of pre-existing models of representation of the Andean subjects developed by Indigenista artists; and the reformulation of these models through anthropological sources, kitsch and magical realism. I argue that those strategies allow Llosa to create a new contemporary Andean type, which is ultimately an unproblematic and accessible way of thinking of and symbolically representing ‘otherness’.

A. De Los Reyes and D. Wood (eds), Cine mudo latinoamericano: inicios, nación, vanguardias y ocaso (México DF: UNAM)

Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 88.2, 2011

Conference Presentations by Maria Chiara D'Argenio

Programme of the international conference Periodicals on the Periphery? Magazines and Print Cultu... more Programme of the international conference Periodicals on the Periphery? Magazines and Print Cultures in Latin America, co-organised by Maria Chiara D'Argenio, Claire Lindsay and Lauren Rea, at UCL on 27-28 June 2019.

Conference Branding Latin America. University of Cambridge

Symposium Culture and Visuality in Latin America. King’s College London

Symposium Personal Belongings: Mobility in Contemporary Hispanic Cinemas. King’s College London

Workshop Re-vistas and the Expanded Present. University of Cambridge

Books by Maria Chiara D'Argenio

A volume co-edited by Maria Chiara D'Argenio and Claire Lindsay (University of Florida Press, for... more A volume co-edited by Maria Chiara D'Argenio and Claire Lindsay (University of Florida Press, forthcoming).

Palgrave Macmillan, 2022

This book delineates a turn in recent Latin American filmmaking towards inter/cultural feature fi... more This book delineates a turn in recent Latin American filmmaking towards inter/cultural feature films made by non-Indigenous directors. Aimed at a global audience, but played by Indigenous actors, these films tell Indigenous stories in Indigenous languages. Over the last two decades, a growing number of Latin American films have screened the Indigenous experience by combining the local and the global in a way that has proved appealing at international film festivals.

Locating the films in composite webs of past and present traditions and forms, Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema examines the critical reflection offered by recent inter/cultural films and the socio-cultural impact, if any, they might have had. Through the analysis of a selection of films produced between 2006 and 2019, the book gauges the extent to which non-Indigenous directors who set out to engage critically with colonial legacies and imaginaries, as well as with contemporary Indigenous marginalization, succeed in addressing these concerns by ‘unthinking’ and ‘undoing’ Western centrism and coloniality.

Drawing on a wide range of disciplines and considering the entire cinematic process – from pre-production to the films’ production, circulation and critical reception – Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema makes the case for a holistic cultural criticism to explain the cultural and political work cinema does in specific historical contexts

Revista Iberoamericana 267, 2019

Este nuevo volumen constituye un importante aporte al estudio de la prensa ilustrada puesto que a... more Este nuevo volumen constituye un importante aporte al estudio de la prensa ilustrada puesto que abarca diversas publicaciones latinoamericanas, presenta un diálogo entre perspectivas críticas diversas y brinda al lector interesado tanto casos de estudio como herramientas conceptuales y analíticas para vincular lo textual a lo visual en el contexto histórico y sociocultural de la naciente sociedad de masas. Los estudios aquí reunidos discuten la relación entre visualidad, modernidad y prensa ilustrada serial tal como se desarrolló en varios países de América Latina. Se enfocan en temas que son parte clave de los discursos de la modernidad (la nación, las clases sociales, las "razas", el género), en prácticas que conformaron la nueva cultura del ocio (el deporte, el cine, el turismo), en géneros artísticos visuales y visotextuales (retrato, caricatura, historieta), en tecnologías gráficas (dibujo, grabado, fotografía), en diferentes tipos de publicaciones ilustradas (almanaques, periódicos, revistas populares, magazines, revistas de cine y de viajes). Traen consigo también una incursión en las historias regionales de la prensa ilustrada latinoamericana. Este volumen mapea muchas de las tecnologías, prácticas y temas que conformaron la estratificada cultura de finales del siglo XIX y primera mitad del siglo XX. Sobre todo, nos dan una idea de cómo la prensa ilustrada determinó no sólo ideas sino también formas de mirar y medió la modernidad para su público formando a la vez parte esencial de aquella.