Rhetorics of Chilean Cinema (Pablo Corro, 2014)

Pablo Corro's 2014 book Retóricas del cine chileno (Rhetorics of Chilean Cinema) is a wide-ranging examination of the style and concerns that have come to characterise Chilean film-making from the 1950s to the present day. Corro demonstrates how ideas of 'national cinema' are always to some extent dependent on transnational currents of cinematic ideas and techniques, as well as on local political contexts. The chapter presented here, 'Weak Poetics', adapts Gianni Vattimo's notion of 'weak thought' to discuss the growing attention paid by Chilean films to the mundane, the everyday and the intimate. Corro's dense, allusive writing skilfully mirrors the films he describes, in which meaning is fragmented and dispersed into glimpsed appearances and acousmatic sounds. Corro's historicisation of this fracturing of meaning allows the cinema of the everyday to be understood not as a retreat from politics, but as a recasting of the grounds on which it might occur.