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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part I The Female Body in Débora Arango
- Part II Gender, Identity and Desire in Laura Restrepo
- Part III Women's Documentary Film: Slipping Discursive Frames
- 5 Re-reading Chircales: Interiority, the Girl and Documentary Desire
- 6 Mother's Body, Daughter's Voice: Female Genealogy, Invasión and Cinema in La mirada de Myriam
- 7 Gender Performances and Narratives of Place, Modernity and Desire in La Sierra
- Conclusion
- Works Cited
- Index
5 - Re-reading Chircales: Interiority, the Girl and Documentary Desire
from Part III - Women's Documentary Film: Slipping Discursive Frames
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part I The Female Body in Débora Arango
- Part II Gender, Identity and Desire in Laura Restrepo
- Part III Women's Documentary Film: Slipping Discursive Frames
- 5 Re-reading Chircales: Interiority, the Girl and Documentary Desire
- 6 Mother's Body, Daughter's Voice: Female Genealogy, Invasión and Cinema in La mirada de Myriam
- 7 Gender Performances and Narratives of Place, Modernity and Desire in La Sierra
- Conclusion
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Chircales is a canonical text of the New Latin American Cinema, a movement which, according to Zuzana Pick, ‘by underscoring class as the primary instance of social relations [has] rarely taken into account gender-specific forms of social and political oppression’ (p. 66). Chircales, though, with its insistent focus on some of the basic tenets of feminist theory of the era, could only have been classified as solely class-based by a gender-blind criticism, making it, paradoxically, somewhat atypical of the New Latin American Cinema movement. Whilst both Pick (pp. 66–96) and B. Ruby Rich have argued that the movement's feminist shift did not occur until the 1980s, Chircales, released in 1972, fractures a purely Marxist rhetoric in its expository insistence on addressing key features of women's subordination which it clearly shows as contributing to the oppression that it documents. Continually slipping out of the ideological framework that it constructs for itself, the film's intentions and overt, self-proclaimed Marxist approach, are constantly displaced onto other (though related) concerns, and the finished text therefore exceeds their boundaries. Whilst David Wood has observed that the relationship of the subjects of the documentary to dominant culture ‘is defined by a system of attractions and repressions too complex to be subsumed into any univocal political discourse’ (p. 91) critical work on the film has given less attention to the way in which heroic, revolutionary and patriarchal discourse becomes conspicuously flawed as the film is constantly displaced onto the private and women's lives and relationships, discourses which seep out of the ideological framework of the film.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Painting, Literature and Film in Colombian Feminine Culture, 1940–2005Of Border Guards, Nomads and Women, pp. 147 - 161Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012