Past: Chilean Short Films & Book Launch

(Un)veiling Bodies analyses the rich landscape of Chilean documentary in the two decades after civilian rule was restored in 1990. Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto, Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University, proposes a trajectory that shifts from revealing the bodies of direct victims to unveiling the body of the film itself. The journey is deeply intertwined with the country’s democratic transition.

Informed by the affective turn in film studies, the book offers a novel approach to an under-studied field of Chilean cinema, arguing that these heterogeneous works shift, from a “cinema of the affected” to a “cinema of affect”. Through that shift, the documentaries contribute to the restoration of Chilean society.

Ramírez-Soto’s articles have appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Rethinking History, and Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. She is also the coeditor of Nomadías: El cine de Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento y Angelina Vázquez (2016).