El archivo espectral
Creators: name: Rios Vasquez, Monica
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2016

description: In my dissertation, I use archival theory and practice to study the resonance of three lost films directed between 1917 and 1929 by two Chilean women, Gabriela Bussenius and Rosario Rodríguez, and to examine films directed by exiled Chilean director Valeria Sarmiento between 1990 and 2008. I analyze the multifaceted processes through which their work has been consistently excluded from film history, and show how in Chile that history has been constructed in accordance with discourses of national values. While considering the material disappearance of the films of the silent period and the absence of criticism about all three women’s works, I ask: what prompted Bussenius and Rodríguez to direct films when women did not possess the privileges of citizenship or of authorial prestige? How did Sarmiento incorporate the practices of memory into her films? In what ways are their works radically opposed to the Chilean and Latin American film archive and its institutions? I propose that, through fiction, these three women’s films embody communities of dissent that have a long, albeit forgotten, history of resistance to the paradigms according to which the past has been written. My methodology is inspired in the practice of montage: I juxtapose and analyze different aesthetic objects (articles, publicity, literary texts, visual material) and sociopolitical impulses to illuminate the images that were excised from official histories. In order to counter a dominant film archive created in accordance with national impulses, I study what I term the “spectral archive”, which may be comprised of whatever might point to an object that is lost to history. Through the construction of a spectral archive, I speculate about the reasons for the exclusions I foreground. The first section of the dissertation centers on Gabriela Bussenius’s film La agonía de Arauco o el olvido de los muertos (1917). Criticizing the category of the “author” and its role in the legitimization of particular disciplines, I propose the notion of an “unstable authorship” to describe Bussenius’s figure and the experimental character of the Chilean film industry in 1917. I also explore the capacity of fiction to tell stories that were not registered in official histories. I posit that matrilineal and literary forms of recording constitute a “spectral archive” that allows us to adjust our vision to perceive the opaque zones of knowledge. The relationship between the film’s two protagonists, a woman and a child from a Mapuche community, serves as a point of access into Bussenius’s conceptualization of society as a collaboration between minoritarian subjects that rebel against the aggressions of the nation-state. In the section dedicated to Rosario Rodríguez, I examine how her films, Malditas sean las mujeres (1925) and La envenenadora (1929), appeal to urban, working women. I consider the status of commodities in the emerging modern landscape and the desire to possess luxury goods, the culture of the gaze, and fetishization as mechanisms that obscure women’s lack of civil rights. I also explore how Rodríguez uses the figure of dangerous women and the “rhetoric of the pose” to dissent from accepted models of femininity. I trace the history of female victims, criminals, and assassins as they were portrayed in popular novels of the late 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century, focusing particularly on the case of Corina Rojas, who murdered her husband in 1916 and inspired the first Chilean feature film. The third section is modeled on Sarmiento’s ideas about the role of women in filmmaking and the commodification of memory. As I problematize the conceptual frames mobilized during the Chilean Post-Dictatorship, I study how Sarmiento’s work reshapes the role of fiction film in historiographical processes, creating images that respond to the lack of material records of women’s and workers’ pasts. I also use the term “archive of forms” to describe those conventions that were embedded in the spectators’ retinas by state violence. In my conclusion I reexamine the recent history of the medium of television by considering how it materialized a receptive body for the economic and cultural structure of the Dictatorship, analyzing films and television shows that suffer from “archive fever”. This dissertation traces continuities between different cinematic projects to articulate an alternative history to the one constructed through exclusions. My objective is to bring into view in the present the multiple relationships that have already been forged between art and society over time. In the broadest sense, I consider this project as a contribution to the shaping of communities that escape from those envisioned by the nation-state and cosmopolitan empire.