Beyond Bare Life: Affection-Images of Violence in Latin American Film

Abstract

Audiovisual imagination in Latin America can be perceived to have generated affective territories in its own right. Many films that were produced during the 1990s and afterward, in Mexico and Colombia, Argentina and Brazil, as well as in other countries, have started to intervene in peculiar ways into cinematic spaces that are saturated by hegemonic networks of “fear production.”¹ To the extent that filmic works originating in the globalized South occupy significant realms of either artistic recognition or commercial distribution, some of them can be perceived to be strong indicators of an epistemic change. These works have generated aesthetic-affective assemblages that introduce new features into mainstream perceptions and images of violence.