Falling bodies, feeling bodies. family archives, queer memory, and haptic language in three recent Latin American documentaries
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25145/j.clepsydra.2021.21.09Keywords:
latin american cinema, the body, first-person documentary, queer archiveAbstract
This essay compares the formal elements shared by three recent documentaries from Latin America: 108 (dir. Renate Costa, Paraguay, 2010), Memories of a Penitent Heart (dir. Cecilia Aldarondo, Puerto Rico, 2016), and Silence is a Falling Body (dir. Agustina Comedi, Argentina, 2017). Based on Laura Marks and Vivian Sobchack’s contributions, it is possible to affirm that these films recreate the physical presence of absent subjects by using haptic language and other cinematographic tools that reconstruct a past affective network. To do
so, the films use three distinctive resources: 1) the capture of tactile objects that pass from hand to hand and that evoke a physical presence, 2) the use of images from personal archives and 3) the intervention or experimentation of images, either from the archive or from the director’s own camera, to evoke an unrecovered memory.
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