Abstract
Pablo Larraín’s cinema has broken with the nostalgic and traumatic approach that once prevailed in post-authoritarian Chilean film. Though affiliated to social tradition by the New Latin American Cinema, this intervention breaks with sensibilities first proposed in the 1960s, and which have persisted since then. Larraín’s output is constructed through an incorporation of a creative subjectivity consolidated under the rubrics of state terrorism and the neoliberal model. This rupture is then enacted through cynicism, by focusing on characters inhabiting interstitial geographical or psychological landscapes, and by imitating genres rooted in the commercial culture industry. It is with respect to Larraín’s films’ self-positioning as both social critique and aesthetic rupture that we may refer to them as comprising a macabre baroque cinema.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my colleagues Gwyn Fox, Kathryn Lehman and Camilo Diaz Pino for assisting me in translating this article from Spanish into English.
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Pino-Ojeda, W. (2018). Social Cinema in Neoliberal Times: The Macabre Baroque in the Films of Pablo Larraín. In: Sandberg, C., Rocha, C. (eds) Contemporary Latin American Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77010-9_11
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