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Abstract
This essay examines the films of Chilewood, a collaboration between Chilean director Nicolás López and U.S. director Eli Roth and which is based in Santiago, Chile. Chilewood’s films underscore a stylistic fragmentation in contemporary Chilean cinema, which largely rests on a distinction between genre cinema and auteur cinema. Within the Chilewood endeavour, Chile serves as a node of production for genre cinema (romantic comedies, comedies, disaster films, thrillers, horror) for both domestic audiences and international audiences. While Chilewood’s films provide an instance to examine different forms of transnationalism through production, financing and content, these same facets can be assessed for their neoliberal aspects that vary with each production.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Though Chilewood is an endeavor announced in 2014, in January 2015 Sobras International Production’s home page featured a prominent banner that read ‘Welcome to Chilewood’ and included all the films mentioned above. The retroactive inclusion of the multiple films suggests that they uphold Chilewood’s vision: genre films made in Chile to appeal to transnational audiences. See http://www.sobras.com/ to view the list of 12 films. If one accesses Sobras International Pictures’ website via a search engine, the page featuring the banner is no longer viewable.
2. Horror cinema critics and fans often consider Roth a horror genre auteur for his directorial success with Cabin Fever (2002), Hostel (2005), and Hostel: Part II (2007). López has attained an auteur status with romantic comedies such as the Qué pena trilogy and Promedio rojo and, though a failure at the box office, the romantic comedy/superhero/fantasy hybrid Santos.
3. In ‘On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism,’ Mette Hjort offers two sets of terms, or better, two spectrums of transnationalism: ‘strong vs. weak transnational’ and ‘marked vs. unmarked transnational’ (Citation2010, 13–14). The terms enable a discussion of the nuances of transnationalism in cinema (exhibition, distribution, production, and/or content) and which transnational aspects of a particular film are more salient than others.
4. In Contracting Out Hollywood: Runaway Productions and Foreign Shooting Locations, Greg Elmer and Mike Gasher allude to the television program The X-Files as an example of a runaway production ‘which was widely critiqued [by fans] for its use of Canadian landscapes as American “body doubles”’ (Citation2005, 9).
5. The Pedro Sienna Awards are the annual national awards for Chilean film production.
6. See, for example, Fuguet’s novel Mala onda and the semi-autobiographical Las películas de mi vida. Freak Power, composed of Mike Wilson, Álvaro Bisama, Jorge Baradit and Francisco Ortega, draws on ‘elements characteristic of fantasy and science fiction […] and references from vernacular culture, movies, comics, pop music, everyday events, and historical arcana’ (Henríquez C. Citation2013, 295).
7. My translation of López’s first column is inexact. In Chile, ‘pingüino’ refers to a grade school student who wears a uniform.
8. Ascancio and Cavallo periodize the start of novísimo cine chileno in 2005 when En la cama (Matías Bize), La sagrada famila (Sebastián Lelio), Play and Se arrienda (Alberto Fuguet) were screened at the Festival Internacional de Cine de Valdivia. Though she does not allude to any particular festival or exhibition space, Urrutia enacts a similar periodization with specific Chilean films made between 2005 and 2010.
9. Cavallo and Maza mention films by Sergio Bravo, Raúl Ruiz, Patricio Guzmán, Miguel Littín and Pedro Chaskel as exemplars of nuevo cine chileno.
10. Given their criteria, Cavallo and Maza’s inclusion of Ernesto Díaz Espinosa under the rubric of novísismo cine chileno represents a paradoxical selection. Díaz Espinosa often is considered a pioneer of action and martial arts films in Chile and clearly draws on those genres and exploitation and superhero films and buddy-cop comedies.
11. Rancière boils down the notion of the pensive image as ‘something in the image which resists thought – the thought of the person who has produced it and of the person who seeks to identify it’ (Citation2009, 131). While Rancière illustrates this idea in various ways throughout the essay, Urrutia is most interested in that facet of the pensive image that ‘arrives to suspend narrative logic in favour of an indeterminate expressive logic’ (Rancière Citation2009, 122). The pensive image as part of a novel or film (e.g., a moment of abstraction) perturbs the primary ‘narrative chain’ and creates multiple regimes of expression (Rancière Citation2009, 124). That is, a novel’s or film’s main narrative sequence in which ‘intrigue and dénouement’ persists, yet the pensive image ruptures that chain and introduces a ‘chain [or chains] of micro-events’ (Rancière Citation2009, 124) that defies the cause-and-effect logic typical of classical Hollywood cinema. For Deleuze, images make visible relationships of time, and his notion of a crystalline image is related to and perhaps constitutes the apotheosis of a time-image. Rodowick’s characterization of the crystalline image is helpful to illuminate the connection between the two types of images and their relationship to Urrutia’s notion of centrifugal cinema as distinct from Hollywood-style cinema: ‘Indiscernibility is the key to understanding what Deleuze means by a crystalline image. For Deleuze, the time-image is crystalline because it is multifaceted. […] What indiscernibility makes visible is the ceaseless fracturing or splitting of nonchronological time’ (Citation1997, 92), or time as it is actually experienced. Time-images appear most often in experimental cinema. In contrast, Deleuze contends that Hollywood genre cinema, especially prior to World War II, provides only indirect images of time (movement-images) that are presented chronologically according to a cause-and-effect logic.
12. The prominent position that the Pinochet dictatorship occupies in Chilean cinema is well known. On message boards that appear below articles about Chilewood productions, several individuals expressed qualified admiration for films such as Promedio rojo, often for being a Chilean film that is not about the dictatorship. See, for example, the message boards under articles written by Laborde Citation2013 and ‘“Chilewood”: Cintas grabadas’ Citation2015. Chilewood’s films are not the only Chilean productions or co-productions in which the Pinochet dictatorship is absent. Claudia Bossay (Citation2011) alludes to films by the likes of Olguín, Díaz Espinosa and Bize, and animated cinema and teenpics (including Promedio rojo) as evidence of a diversity of themes in contemporary Chilean cinema.
13. See, for example, Barnes Citation2014 and Madrigal Citation2014.
14. Film Commission Chile is a collaboration between Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes and ProChile, the latter of which is an agency of the Ministry of Foreign Relations that promotes the export of Chilean products and promotes foreign investment and tourism in Chile. For additional information about the Film Commission Chile, see www.filmcommissionchile.org/.
15. Instances of product placement can be seen in other recent Latin American films. Misha MacLaird alludes to instances of product placement in recent Mexican films, such as Sexo, pudor y lágrimas, Matando cabos and Temporada de patos (Citation2013, 69). Product placement also happens in another Mexican film, Nosotros los Nobles, and in several Peruvian films (Asu Mare, Asu Mare 2 and A los 40).
16. Entel is the largest telecommunications company in Chile, Huntcha was a social media dating site started in Chile and Mall Plaza is a Chilean chain of malls that has expanded to Colombia and Peru.
17. In August 2014, VTR Globalcom S.A. purchased Bazuca’s streaming services and no longer uses the Bazuca name.
18. Galician and Bourdeau acknowledge that the taxonomy comes from an unpublished master’s thesis entitled Gimme a Bud! The Feature Film Product Placement Industry by S. Turcotte (1995) at the University of Texas, Austin. In Branded Entertainment, Jean-Marc Lehu offers an alternative, yet similar, taxonomy of product placement (Citation2007, 9–19).
19. For example, in their analysis of the changes in product placement in commercial US cinema, Galician and Bourdeau write, ‘The history of Hollywood is a tale of the collision of art and commerce’ (Citation2004, 16). One can see an early example of product placement for Wrigley’s gum in the German context in no less of a film than Fritz Lang’s M (1931).