(Re)Writing With the Feet: The Flâneur as Urban Cartographer in Alicia Scherson’s Film Play (Chile, 2005)

Abstract

This article approaches Chilean filmmaker Alicia Scherson’s first feature-length film, Play (2005), from the perspectives of mobility and social cartography in relation to the spatial practices of the main characters. Through the paradigmatic figure of the flâneur, the article explores the representative function of both the characters’ and the camera’s drifting itineraries across the city, as they subtly perform a peripatetic cartography of present-day Santiago. The diegetic threads that are spun by the characters progressively interlace to weave an urban text which lays bare – as they are transgressed – a series of frontiers that cut across the cityscape. The film maps out two very different human geographies of post-dictatorship Chile, a lived urban space that reveals the stark social divide propping up the nation’s neoliberal economic structure. Scherson’s roving camera engages in a politics of perception which invites the spectator to view the city differently, thus exploring the possibility of upsetting this divide.

Keywords:

• Chile
• cinema
• space
• mobility
• post-dictatorship
• neoliberalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements:

This article was co-authored as part of the international research project Transit: Transnationality at Large Researcher Mobility Project, sponsored by the European Union Marie Curie IRSES scheme, co-funded by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and led by the KU Leuven. Travel to Chile was sponsored by the Newcastle University Early Career Travel Fund.

Notes

1. I walk around with calm, with eyes, with shoes, / with fury, with forgetfulness, / I pass, I cross by offices and orthopedic shoestores, / and courtyards where clothes are hanging from a wire: / underdrawers, towels and shirts that weep / slow, dirty tears. Translated by Donald D. Walsh. In Neruda, Residence on Earth, 121.

2. One comes upon a shaking ragman, who / staggers against the walls, as poets do, / And disregardful of policemen’s spies, / Pours from his heart some glorious enterprise. Translated by James McGowan. In Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 217.

3. See Hollevoet 1992, 25.

4. Without wishing to provide an exhaustive list of festival appearances and prizes, we can cite amongst the most prestigious awards: for ‘Best Emerging Director’ at the Tribeca Film Festival (2005); selected as the Chilean entrant from the Oscars (2006); prize for ‘Best New Director’ at the Skip City Festival in Japan (2006); awarded the ‘Public’s Prize’ at the Santiago International Film Festival (2005) and the Festival of World Cinema in Montreal (2005); prize for ‘Best First Feature Film’ at the La Habana Film Festival in Cuba (2005).

5. Like all critical labels, the term ‘Novísimo Cine Chileno’ [Very New Chilean Cinema] should not be taken as a cohesive movement, in either thematic or aesthetic terms, or in terms of any consensus among those associated with its emergence. It represents an exciting new wave of film production by young directors in Chile, who are benefitting from a more conducive production context in terms of training and funding support. See Ascanio Cavallo and Gonzalo Maza, eds. (2010) for a catalogue of the most prominent filmmakers in this wave. Scherson has since made two other feature-length films: Turistas (2009), which very much continues with the theme of mobility and identity, taking them out of Santiago and into the countryside, and Il futuro (2013), which is a film adaptation of Roberto Bolaño’s novella Una novelita lumpen (2002).

6. See Cavallo and Maza 2010, 9–16.

7. Ibid., 15.

8. See Barraza Toledo (2012 and 2015), Ríos (2010) and Wright (2013).

9. See Ríos 2010, 13.

10. See Barraza Toledo (2012 and 2015), Ríos (2010) and Wright (2013). In particular, Barraza Toledo has used the figure of the flâneur as a frame of reference in her analysis of Alberto Fuguet’s cinema (another of the directors included in Cavallo and Maza’s catalogue of ‘novísimo’ Chilean filmmakers), although as a symbol of what she terms ‘detatchment’; a depoliticisation resulting from the ‘disaffection’ felt amongst Santiago’s affluent youth (2015, 442), as opposed to the flâneur – or flâneuse, rather – as a figure of resistance, as read by Ríos and Wright.

11. De Certeau 1984, 97.

12. In the closing credits of the film, Scherson includes the iconic Hotel Carrera in her thanks, along with the acronym ‘QEPD’ (Que en paz descanse [R.I.P. or Rest In Peace]) in brackets. Located in the Plaza de la Constitución, with a privileged vantage point over the Presidential Moneda Palace, this luxury 5-star hotel was an iconic building in Santiago. This subtle reference in the credits demonstrates Scherson’s engagement with the issue of Santiago’s changing urban landscape under neoliberalism. It was auctioned off and closed its doors in 2004, becoming the main headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

13. This is something that Scherson continues in her second feature, Turistas (2010), with a vibrant almost zoological aesthetic that privileges extreme close-ups of insects, which contrasts to references in the background to the construction of a motorway that will desecrate part of the Siete Tazas National Park.

14. See Debord 1958 for the original theoretical proposition. The concept of play, as defined by Dutch historian Johan Huizinga in his book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1949), inspired the Situationist architect and urbanist Constant Nieuwenhuys’s utopic, anti-capitalist and nomadic city of New Babylon. The concept of play further inspired Nieuwenhuys’s contemporary Aldo van Eyck’s urban plans to revitalise post-war Amsterdam with a grass-roots approach to urban planning by creating lots of playgrounds. Scherson seems to base her portrayal of Santiago on a similar premise. The playground in the Plaza Brasil is an important setting in the film Play, the narrative is configured somewhat like a videogame at times, with several characters reappearing quite randomly in different places dressed identically and performing the same action: the girl picking at a scab on her knee and the man in a Hawaiian-style shirt cleaning his ear with a cotton bud reappear like characters would reappear in completely different contexts in a video game.

15. The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their invaluable advice on a previous draft of this article, in which they suggested that this aspect of the analysis be emphasised.

16. The synergy between urban space and cinematic space is established in the opening credits, whereby the credits themselves are integrated into the urban space, appearing and disappearing amidst the passers-by. The 3D graphic perspective that is created aligns the credits along the walls of the street, or lays them on the road surface for Cristina to walk over them, thus cementing the relationship that Mark Shiel refers to as the ‘telling correlation between the mobility and visual and aural sensations of the city and the mobility and visual and aural sensations of the cinema’ (2001, 1).

17. Tester 1994, 1. Tester’s edited volume provides a wide range of approaches to the figure of the flâneur, providing a comprehensive overview of the contemporary debates surrounding this literary figure within the field of literature and beyond. This includes sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s use of the flâneur in his discussion of modern and postmodern identity politics, which is a key point of reference in this piece. The concept of ‘flâneur’ has previously been applied to Play by Rios (2010), Barraza Toledo (2012) and Wright (2013). However, none of these articles discusses the notion of the flâneur in detail.

18. See Tester 1994, Bruce Mazlish 1994, Kathryn Kramer and John Rennie Short 2011, Zygmunt Bauman 1994 and Mike Featherstone 1998.

19. See Benjamin and Jennings 2006.

20. Bauman 1994, 138–57.

21. Rancière 2004, 3.

22. De Certeau 1984.

23. Despite the fact that official reports painted a rose-tinted picture of general prosperity and continued growth following the so-called ‘golden decade’ of the 1990s, the former Minister of Economics under Allende, José Cademartori, argued in 2003 (just two years prior to the release of Play): ‘the benefits of “modernity” have been concentrated in a small minority who enjoys First World standards of living while the population remains firmly ensconced in the Third World’. It is also important to reiterate here that Chile was the neoliberal guinea pig and first nation to experiment with the neoliberal economic model. For a more detailed statistical analysis of the nature of the inequalities undermining the neoliberal, see Cadematori 2003, 79.

24. The ‘mobile turn’ is defined as follows in the Editorial of the founding issue of the journal, Mobilities: ‘Mobility has become an evocative keyword for the twenty-first century and a powerful discourse that creates its own effects and contexts. The concept of mobilities encompasses both the large-scale movements of people, objects, capital and information across the world, as well as the more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public space and the travel of material things within everyday life’. See Hannam, Sheller and Urry 2006, 1. An emerging paradigm in the social sciences, the concept of mobility is ripe for further exploration in relation to representations of movement in contemporary Chilean cinema.

25. Bauman 1994, 138. In this chapter on the postmodern flâneur, Bauman begins with the Larousse definition of the verb ‘flâner’: ‘Errer sans bout, en s’arrêtant pour regarder’ [to wander without aim, whilst stopping to watch].

26. It is in this sense that the flâneur differs from the tourist. The tourist is an avid walker and spectator, but his or her activity can take place in both an urban and a rural context. It can also be aimless or with a definite destination. Scherson’s second feature-length film, Turistas (Chile, 2009), for example, portrays the journey of two city-dwellers from Santiago who embark on what turns out to be a kind of existential tourism in the Parque Nacional Siete Tazas some 250 km south of the capital.

27. Tester 1994, 1.

28. Shields 1994, 62.

29. Mazlish 1994, 46.

30. Baudelaire 1995 [1840], 12.

31. Ibid., 7–9.

32. Mazlish 1994, 50. The two writers were not only contemporaries, but Baudelaire’s translations of Poe (including The Man in the Crowd) into French were amongst the first and most highly reputed.

33. See Bauman 2003.

34. Tester 1994, 5.

35. See Amereida 1967, 11–12. Amereida found expression architecturally in the creative project, ‘Ciudad Abierta’ [Open City, citing Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 neorealist film, Roma città aperta] in Ritoque. The city is conceived on the basis ‘that architecture should be born out of poetry’ (see Giancarlo De Carlo’s Foreword to Pendleton-Jullian 1996, x).

36. Wright 2005, 230.

37. Benjamin 1999, 166–72.

38. Wright 2013, 231.

39. See Quaker Oats Company website: http://www.quakeroats.com/about-quaker-oats/content/quaker-history.aspx. Chicago is of course the birthplace of the neoliberal model.

40. Whilst beyond the bounds of this particular investigation, the significance of Street Fighter II and the conflation of the streets of Santiago and the videogame space serve as an interesting point for discussion as to how the crisis of identity in Play may also be attributed to the increasingly hybrid lives that the younger generation now lead, navigating continuously between organic and virtual spaces. Street Fighter II acts as a strong symbol of the infiltration of the global in the local context of Santiago de Chile, invariably associated with the free-market economic structure as prescribed by the neoliberal regime.

41. Ibid., 155–6.

42. Cuvardic García 2012, 30, our translation.

43. Marks 2000, 164–70.

44. Baudelaire 1995 [1840], 7.

45. Ríos 2010, 9; Wright 2013, 236.

46. De Certeau 1984, 115.

47. Ibid., 92–3.

48. Wright 2013, 234.

49. The Chilean state and economy were the first to undergo restructuring into a neoliberal configuration. This process, in many ways, served as a test bed for subsequent neoliberalisation elsewhere (not least in the United States themselves). Chile’s ‘neoliberal turn’ was engineered by a group of local economists – nicknamed the ‘Chicago Boys’ due to their training at the University of Chicago – whom General Pinochet drafted into his government shortly after the coup in September 1973 which ousted President Salvador Allende. The installation of the neoliberal state is, as David Harvey argues (2005, 7–9), in the case of Chile inextricably linked to authoritarianism and the violent repression of labour and social movements. The key tenets of neoliberalism were, however, to outlive the Pinochet regime. This discourse of neoliberal continuity underpins Pablo Larraín’s recent film No (2012), which demonstrates how the success of the ‘No’ campaign in the 1988 plebiscite to decide on the future of the Pinochet regime hinged on its ideologically questionable, yet highly effective, appropriation of the discourses of advertising more readily associated with the political position of the incumbent dictatorship.

50. Cadematori 2003, 79.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid.

53. Fuguet and Gómez 1996, 17, our translation.

54. See Barraza Toledo 2015, 442.

55. Lev Kuleshov was part of the Soviet Montagist group, who believed that montage was the single most important aspect of film language. Kuleshov devised an experiment in film montage in order to demonstrate that meaning in film, as opposed to single-shot still photography, can only be created in the dialectic between juxtaposed images.

56. Macauley 2000, 7.

57. Ibid., 4, original emphasis.

58. De Certeau 1984, 92.

59. Wright 2013, 233.

60. Barraza Toledo 2012, 123.

61. Baudelaire 1995 [1840], 12.

62. Wright 2013, 236.

63. Ríos 2010, 13.

64. Domingues 2008, 129–30.