(UN)VEILING BODIES : a trajectory of chilean post -dictatorship documentary

Documentary plays an essential role in the struggles over memories of Latin America's dictatorial pasts. Ever since Chile's military coup of 11 September 1973, whether inside the country or in exile, filmmakers have passionately and incessantly documented, created, and reenacted memories from this traumatic event and its aftermath. (Un)veiling Bodies analyses the rich landscape of Chilean documentary during the first two decades after the restoration of civilian rule in 1990. Ramírez-Soto proposes a trajectory that shifts from revealing the bodies of direct victims to unveiling the body of the film itself. This is a journey deeply intertwined with the country's own democratic transition. Informed by the affective turn in film studies, this book offers a novel approach to this largely unexplored field of Chilean cinema by arguing that these heterogeneous works shift from a 'cinema of the affected' to a 'cinema of affect'. By doing so, these documentaries contribute to Chilean society's own restoration of the senses. Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto is Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. Her articles have appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Rethinking History, and Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. She is also the coeditor of Nomadías: El cine de Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento y Angelina Vázquez (2016). Like many of the documentaries it examines, this is a travelling book. It has been written in various places and owes its existence to the contributions of many people and institutions around the world. I am grateful to the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland and to Legenda for supporting this project, and to Laura Rascaroli and Alison Ribeiro for recommending my work to these institutions. My editor, Graham Nelson, has been very supportive from the beginning. The bulk of this investigation was undertaken while I was a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick, where I had the good fortune to have Stella Bruzzi and John King as my supervisors. I could not have dreamt of two better sets of eyes to guide my research. I am grateful for their unrelenting support and encouragement; it is an enormous honour to have them both as my mentors. Stephen Gundle, Alastair Phillips, Charlotte Brunsdon, and the late Victor Perkins also left an indelible mark on me during these formative years.