Convened by Berenike Jung and co-hosted by the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) and the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory (CCM), roundtable discussion Believing the Image: Political Torture on Film will take place online on 10th February 2022.
All are welcome to this roundtable discussion and launch of Berenike Jung’s The Invisibilities of Political Torture: The Presence of Absence in US and Chilean Cinema and Television (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).
The discussion will engage with questions surrounding the aesthetics and ethics of responding to violent events and collective memory on film; the truth value of digital images and politically engaged cinema; past and current politics of amnesia in the US and Chile regarding their separate and entangled histories.
The invited panel will discuss these topics in relation to Jung’s new book, which examines how US and Chilean film and television make the emotional and collective consequences of torture experientially available to the audience, thereby expanding our conception of torture to include long-term and seemingly ‘invisible’ repercussions.
Speakers:
Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Warwick
Vania Barraza Toledo, Professor of Spanish at the University of Memphis
Victor Fan, Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London
Dr Berenike Jung, Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Groningen
Two of the films discussed during the event will be made available to registered participants prior to the event to watch them in their own time:
Carne de Perro (Chile. Directed by Fernando Guzzoni, 2012)
NO (Chile. Directed. by Pablo Larraín, 2012)
Carne de Perro shows a complicated week in the life of Alejandro. A 55 year old, solitary, fragile and unpredictable man crushed by the hostility of his past. Here we have someone anxious for a new identity who becomes lost amid his ghosts and his obsessions. A man with a distorted view of reality who begins to disintegrate dangerously. A present-day story of a former torturer who tries to reinvent his life and give it a new meaning.
NO is based on the unpublished stage play El Plebiscito written by Antonio Skármeta. Mexican actor Gael García Bernal plays René, an in-demand advertising man working in Chile in the late 1980s. The film captures the advertising tactics in the political campaigns for the 1988 plebiscite, when the Chilean citizenry decided whether or not dictator Augusto Pinochet should stay in power for another eight years.
All are welcome to attend this free online event, starting at 16:00 GMT (UK Time) on Thursday 10 February 2022. (Please be sure to check your local time). You will need to register in advance to receive the online joining link. Please click on the Book Now button below to register.
Listen Desde la Tundra PODCAST (with subtitles in ENGLISH)