Sixteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

In a 1986 essay entitled “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Fredric Jameson suggests that Latin American cinema is necessarily allegorical insofar as the private stories function as metaphors for the ties between the personal and the political; the individual and the national; the private sphere and the larger sphere of history. This phenomenon is attested in an especially compelling way by Colombian cinema. The release in 1990 of Víctor Gaviria’s Rodrigo D constituted an epochal event that marked the course of Colombian cinema in the twenty-first century. As John Beverly (2019) points out, Gaviria’s debut feature “is put together in a nervous, rapid, «masculine» style, founded on a cinematic simulacrum of punk rock and the effects of cocaine, marijuana, and amphetamines” (113). Through this frantic style, Rodrigo D captures the social turmoil of 1990s Colombia in a way that has often been blamed for commercially exploiting the social malaise of Medellín’s slums to satisfy the expectations of “dirty realism” that define today’s global cultural market. This paper explores the ethical dilemmas that are at the core of Gaviria’s exploration of the potential of cinema to articulate a non-historiographic approach to contemporary history from the global margins. In addressing those dilemmas, my analysis seeks to show how Gaviria’s cinematic exploration of the human effects of structural violence in Latin America leads to an unprecedented approach to the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in contemporary world cinema.