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14 qr 4 AntidictatorshipNeobaroqueCinema Raúl Ruiz’s Mémoire des apparences and María Luisa Bemberg’s Yo, la peor de todas I am not an ideologue of the baroque. I am simply Latin American. I can’t help but be baroque. Allegory for me is much more than a game or an element of style. —Raúl Ruiz, Sydney, February 3, 1993, quoted in Laleen Jayamanne, “Life Is a Dream” The artistic outlook of the baroque is, in a word, cinematic. —Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, vol. 2, Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque Film and the Baroque are natural allies. They share a central aim: the creation of illusion. —Stephen Calloway, Baroque Baroque This chapter builds on the previous one for its delineation of the revival of baroque expression as a response to the dictatorships that engulfed Latin America in the seventies and beyond. The neobaroque turned out to be particularly useful for the purposes of the post-Boom literature of defeat and disillusionment that arose in the wake of the coups. Against the deceptive illusionism of the fascist state’s official narratives of progress, neobaroque antidictatorship literature mobilizes a critical poetics of artifice and disillusionment. Neobaroque fragmented allegorical images thus come to haunt the simulacra of the authoritarian state: to unmask the dictatorships’ official narratives, the antidictatorship neobaroque employs the Benjaminian strategy of brushing history against the grain and revisioning it under the sign of melancholia and the untimely, thereby exposing Latin American civilization under the dictatorships as a wasteland of ruins, strewn with the rubble of the discarded cultural residues of the violently destroyed past. Here I focus on visual culture, and film in particular, in the contexts of political authoritarianism and the “memory battles” that have erupted in 184 AntidictatorshipNeobaroque Cinema the wake of the Southern Cone dictatorships. This chapter discusses two neobaroque films that also belong to the antidictatorship context, the exile Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz’s Mémoire des apparences (1986; Memory of Appearances, also known as Life Is a Dream) and the Argentine feminist filmmaker María Luisa Bemberg’s Yo, la peor de todas (1990; I, the Worst of All). Like Donoso’s and Eltit’s fictional narratives, Ruiz’s and Bemberg’s cinematic narratives portray the struggle against authoritarian regimes. In both cases, protest is made indirectly and allegorically, via adaptations of the literature and culture of the historical baroque: Ruiz’s film is an adaptation of a masterpiece of the Spanish Golden Age, Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s play La vida es sueño (1635; Life Is a Dream).1 Bemberg’s film is a cinematic biography of the celebrated seventeenth-century Mexican poet and nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648?–1695),2 who was acclaimed as the Tenth Muse during her lifetime and was one of the foremost writers of the transatlantic Hispanic baroque. Ruiz’s and Bemberg’s films are excellent further examples of the revival of the historical baroque that is a characteristic of neobaroque literature and visual culture from Eliot and the Generation of ’27 across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Indeed, Bemberg’s film is part of an ongoing Sor Juana revival, which has yielded a burst of creative adaptations of the poet’s life by Latin American and U.S. Latina (as well as non-Hispanic) writers, artists, and playwrights. This chapter moves from neobaroque literature to film, and examines cinema , which—along with contemporary entertainment media—has eclipsed literature as the main medium of transmitting institutionalized and hegemonic discourses. Cinema’s illusionism—its potential for simulating artificial realities that mask as natural and real—is much greater than that of the traditional visual arts and literature. Exploiting hyperbole across the board, the neobaroque sensibility maximizes all registers of cinema: employing spectacular mise-en-scène, it manipulates cinema’s real-world material (what is staged before the camera—setting, lighting, acting, costume, etc.). It also flaunts the constructivist and expressive resources of cinematography (the manipulation of the film strip in the shooting and editing phase). Ruiz’s and Bemberg’s films combine a neobaroque aesthetics—hyperrealist miseen -scène, lavish cinematography, and discontinuous or theatrically visible editing—with critical readings of the official, authoritarian culture of the baroque (Maravall). Released seven years after the end of military rule in Argentina, Bemberg’s film constructs explicit analogies between Sor Juana’s tribulations under the colonial state baroque and twentieth-century fascism. In parallel ways...

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