Olivia Cosentino (University of South Carolina), "Disjunctures: Objective Violence, Affect, and Embodied Spectatorship in Contemporary Mexican Cinema"

Name: Olivia Cosentino (University of South Carolina), "Disjunctures: Objective Violence, Affect, and Embodied Spectatorship in Contemporary Mexican Cinema" — C21 STL
Start: 2020-11-13T10:00:00-0600
End: 2020-11-13T11:30:00-0600

Friday, November 13, 2020
10:00 AM 11:30 AM 10:00 11:30

Google Calendar ICS

We welcome Olivia Cosentino, who received her BA in Spanish and Latin American Studies from WashU before earning her PhD from Ohio State University, back to (virtual) campus for a discussion of her work-in-progress.

ABSTRACT: In the realms of both fiction and non-fiction, Mexican filmmakers have begun to push back against the hyper-aestheticized, “subjective” violence (Žižek 2007) that permeates contemporary print and media culture. This article is interested in the affective potency of a lack of sensationalism in cinematic explorations of violence, an inherent response to the graphic violent imaginary sustained by popular media like Narcos (GIT, 2015-7), Narcos: Mexico (GIT, 2018- ), City of God (Meirelles and Lund, 2002), and Amores perros (González Iñárritu, 2001). David Pablos’ fictional Las elegidas (The Chosen Ones, 2015) and Tatiana Huezo’s nonfiction Tempestad (2016) masterfully engage violence in Mexico without recreating it onscreen. Using a stylistic technique that I call the “disjuncture,” created formally by the jarring mismatch of visual and sonic elements, Las elegidas and Tempestad open affective circuits and expose viewers’ bodies to the virtual. Mobilizing Deleuzian and Massumian affect theory, I propose that these moments of the virtual offer spectators an embodied, ethics-driven understanding of the paradoxes of systemic, “objective” violence and quotidian impunity. This analysis engages disparate debates on affect, slow cinema, and the ethics of representing violence within both film and media studies and Mexican cultural studies, gesturing towards a growing constellation of “slower” Mexican cinema that portrays 21st century violences in innovative ways.

BIO: Olivia Cosentino recently completed her Ph.D. in Latin American Cultural and Literary Studies at The Ohio State University and is an Instructor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina. Her research focuses on aspects of affect, gender, spectatorship, and stardom in post-Golden Age and contemporary Mexican cinema and culture. Olivia has published with The Velvet Light Trap, iMex, and Journal of Cinema and Media Studies and has contributed chapters to The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sex and Latin American Culture and Domestic Labor in 21st Century Latin American Film. Her co-edited volume on the “lost” 1960s-80s Mexican cinema is under review at the University of Florida Press.

To receive the pre-circulated paper and the zoom invitation for this session, please write to Mel Micir at mmicir@wustl.edu. We hope you’ll join us!