Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World ed. by Vania Barraza and Carl Fischer (review)

Chilean cinema in the twenty-first-century World illuminates the rich and exciting evolution of Chile's contemporary cinema since 1990. This international collection, featuring scholarship from Chile and the United States, provides a robust, cinema-focused addition to existing scholarship on Chilean cultural studies. Editors Vania Barraza and Carl Fischer focus collective discussion on the complex ways in which the nation navigates crafting films with local sensibilities that resonate with global audiences. Charting the entwined histories of Chile and cinema in the introduction, Barraza and Fischer suggest five analytical lenses by which they organize the collection. The book begins with an exploration of the exhibition, distribution, and consumption of Chilean film in the first section, "Mapping Theories of Chilean Cinema in the World," which is followed by a genre-specific study of Chilean horror and martial-arts films in the second section, "On the Margins of Hollywood: Chilean Genre Flicks." Adaptation and its expansive, extracinematic possibilities animate the third section, "Other Texts and Other Lands: Intermediality and Adaptation beyond Chile(an Cinema)," while Chile's addition to international discourses regarding "sexual difference and dissidence" (19) organizes the fourth section, "Migrations of Genre and Gender." The collection's final section addresses the many dimensions of memory in "Politicized Intimacies, Transnational Affects: Debating (Post)memory and History."

In the volume's first chapter, María Paz Peirano examines the multiplicity of social and cultural forces that have led to the creation of national films for international reception. She demonstrates that the increasing participation of Chilean filmmakers in the international film-festival circuit, and Chilean film's resulting increase in "symbolic, cultural, and social capital" (34), has directly contributed to the ongoing project of globalizing Chilean film production. Maintaining focus on the sociopolitical and cultural forces transforming Chilean cinema, Carolina Urrutia Neno returns to the concept of "centrifugal cinema," a term she coined in 2013; she finds that whereas the films of centrifugal cinema were primarily marked by experimental narratives that indirectly gestured toward sociopolitical issues, contemporary Chilean film boldly highlights the traumatic aftereffects of military dictatorship and a multitude of related political and social concerns. In the section's final chapter, Paola Lagos Labbé observes an opposite shift in contemporary Chilean documentary filmmaking and tracks this movement toward a "more subjective, introspective gaze" (71) across four proposed categories: (1) modern "sociopolitical exposés" that critique neoliberal systems, (2) intimate narratives about diversity and visibility, (3) community-focused documentaries marked by unique technological and production innovations, and (4) critical documentaries complicating aesthetic and ethical realities.

The collection's second section shifts attention to Chilean horror and martial-arts films. Jonathan Risner's chapter traces the contours of Chile's horror cinema culture and examines its engagement within larger international horror film communities. The author convincingly argues that through the cinematic contributions of many internationally known Chilean horror directors, as well as the vast network of newspapers, websites, and online fan groups devoted to national horror cinema, the Chilean horror community enriches its national cinema as well as the genre's greater transnational community. Moving from horror to martial-arts cinema in the following chapter, Moisés Park sheds light on the ongoing career of Chile's most well-known martial-arts actor, the Arab Chilean Marko Zaror. The author examines recurring themes of "Oriental" masculinity, the exploitation of the male body for combat, and historical revisionism in films such as Chinango (2005), Kiltro (2006), and Zambo Dende (2017). Concluding with a look at the actor's increasingly globalized current career, Park asserts that while such global stardom can "problematize Zaror's status as a 'Chilean' film star" (130), Zaror's body of work emphasizes the enduring relevance of Chilean martial-arts icons within global cinema.

The three chapters of the third section center on cinematic adaptations of Chilean narratives and the expansive possibilities for these narratives outside the nation and film itself. Mar...