Changing Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics in Latin American Crime Cinema andNarrative. Narrative.

Latin American Crime Narrative;Latin American Crime Cinema;Arts;Humanities;Romance Languages & Literatures: Spanish

Miguez, CristinaJenckes, Katharine Miller ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Latin American Crime Narrative;    Latin American Crime Cinema;    Arts;    Humanities;    Romance Languages & Literatures: Spanish;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/63686/crmiguez_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation analyzes the shifting role of crime as a symptom of transformation in Latin America from 1990’s.My research begins exploring gang-related drug trafficking and the ways in which they evolve to corporate organizations.Then I continue with property and sexual crimes - assault, kidnapping, human smuggling and trafficking to Europe in prostitution rings.Finally, I compare these common crimes with political crimes committed by anarchists in the 1930s and movements of national liberation from the 1960s.Instead of focusing on the detective, I study the criminal as the leading figure.For him/her any crime – be it a common one or ;;explicitly” political - is considered a political act on the part of the offender.In terms of politics, any crime implies a rejection of or a protest against current social conditions, its institutions or its norms.In these works, criminals make power visible in new ways, and open avenues of resistance and critique, involving modifications of gender, race, and social class.In terms of aesthetics, I explore how contemporary Latin American crime fiction reproduces the glamorous violence of Hollywood crime films or dirty realism in narrative, but privileging a symptomatic and realistic aesthetics of violence.By using a flat, unsurprised, but ironic language; by exercising an ice-cold observation; by shooting with a documentary-like eye to reality, often with a frenetically speeding camera and the video clip montage, these fictions indicate a restructuring of time and space in Latin American big cities.Also the preference for non-professional actors, location shooting, and a propensity to develop collective modes of production contributes to this aesthetics.To conclude this brief summary of transformations, instead of representing crime as a monstrous act, these works insist on normalizing the criminal behavior.As many theories from social sciences have found, in general, crime is not an irrational, dysfunctional, or pathological anomaly in modern urban life.On the contrary, many crimes are rational decisions to solve a problem or situation.As a result, the concepts of innocence or guilt, legal or illegal, true or false redefine our ethics.