The Return to the Social through the Collective “I”: Disrupting the Uneventful Face of Neoliberal Precariousness in the Chilean Documentary El otro día

Abstract

Produced 21 years after the return to institutional democracy in Chile, Ignacio Agüero’s El otro día (The other day, 2012) picks up a set of social topics that were left in suspension under authoritarianism. In doing so, it evidences two main divergences in this renewal of social projects. Firstly, rather than adopting old hierarchies of detached narration, this film adopts a contemplative, self-referential first-person perspective. Secondly, it frames the encounter with the social—not in a depiction of public space, but in the secluded, private space of domesticity and family life, hence marking a fundamental difference from the monumental autobiographical voice that still defines the first-person subject in the modernist artistic tradition. Following Deleuze’s theory of the time-image (Cinema II: The Time-Image. London: Continuum, 2005), it is suggested that El otro día demonumentalises the positioning of the artist through intimacy, and through the use of a contemplative form of narration that actualises the uneventful face of neoliberal poverty, thus constructing a social critique in which action is subordinated to time rather than to movement. Picking up on the concept “singular plural”, it is proposed that what takes place in this film is a “collective I”, this in order to emphasise Chilean documentary’s own tradition within the legacy imprinted by authoritarianism.

Keywords:

• Chilean documentary
• memory
• neoliberalism
• popular social subject
• collective “I”
• time-image