PhD | Disempowered Cinema: Desire, Frustration and Enjoyment in Transnational South American Film

PhD-Candidate: Karen Sztajnberg | ASCA, UvA | Supervisors: Prof. Patricia Pisters and Dr. Abraham Geil

Desire, Frustration and Enjoyment in Transnational South American Film will use Theory of Desire as a methodology to explore a cumulative corpus of South American cinema that is increasingly transnational in its production and reception. My aim is to conceptualize “disempowered cinema” by pondering the question “what does s/he(filmmaker) want from me(viewer)?” to explore how formal, narrative, and receptive devices carry the Latin American tradition of subversive art rendering the periphery a productive space. While aware of its limited power in the global hierarchy, “disempowerered cinema” inches away from procuring ideational centrality into the uncharted waters of anti-centrality, where meaning production is never static, always negotiated in seductive interplay, and evocative spectatorship.

Keywords: Spectatorship, Psychoanalysis, Subversive Art, Subalternity, Aesthetic of Address

Photo Credit: Fabula Films, Chile