The Labor of Attention and Spectatorship in Latin American Cinema: Fernando Eimbcke’s Temporada de patos (Duck Season, 2004)

This essay presents a reading of creative spectatorship in Latin American films in the dual context of hegemonic Hollywood films, with their privileged forms of consumption, and the new economies of attention within what has been called a “cinematic mode of production.” This new mode of capitalistic production is characterized by its dependence on the value-producing labor of spectators engaged in the consumption of images. My contention here is that Eimbcke’s film directly engages with the cinematic thus conceived and proposes, instead, an exploration of forms of liberatory film spectatorship and subordinated memories in neoliberal times.

In the end Temporada de patos is an attempt at performing the dual cultural work many Latin American films have set for themselves in times of neoliberal globalization. It is concerned both with exploring the modes of representation and spectatorship that have constituted Latin American publics as consumers of the forms and films of others (centrally Hollywood) and with actively producing a cinematic representation that is both appropriable and recognizable by an “us”—a national public not reduced to the educated political and intellectual left avant-gardes—and, simultaneously, by a wider international audience crucial to its industrial viability. It is both an interruption (of our regular, comfortable ways of seeing and being politically, culturally, socially) and a creative invitation to reflect on the regimes of visuality and spectatorship, actual and potential, that are increasingly constitutive of who we are and could be.