A Contemporary Andean Type: The Representation of the Indigenous World in Claudia Llosa's Films

Abstract

Claudia Llosa's films Madeinusa (2006) and La Teta Asustada (2009) are two interesting case studies of representation of indigenous people in contemporary cinema. Madeinusa tells about an isolated Andean village and its encounter with ‘modernity’; La Teta Asustada depicts Andean migrants who moved to the outskirts of Lima after the Peruvian 1980s Dirty War. Despite the several prizes the films were awarded (La Teta Asustada, for example, was awarded the Golden Bear at the 2009 Berlin festival), their national and international reception gave rise to controversy over the ways in which indigenous people were portrayed. This essay analyses the patterns and roots of Llosa's representation of the Andean world. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of Llosa's works, 19th-century novels, and early-20th-century and contemporary visual works, I identify and discuss a number of cultural and aesthetic strategies in the films: the actualization of a colonialist-style discourse; the employment of pre-existing models of representation of the Andean subjects developed by Indigenista artists; and the reformulation of these models through anthropological sources, kitsch and magical realism. I argue that those strategies allow Llosa to create a new contemporary Andean type, which is ultimately an unproblematic and accessible way of thinking of and symbolically representing ‘otherness’.

Keywords:

• Claudia Llosa
• film
• Peruvian arts
• indigenous world
• type
• otherness

Notes

1. Regarding the films’ positive reception, see Benavente (2006) and Forns-Broggi (2007) on Madeinusa and see Miró Quesada (2009) and Cánepa-Koch (n.d) on La Teta Asustada.

2. Scholarship has referred to the colonialist and Eurocentric patterns of Madeinusa’s representation of Indigenous people. See particularly Pagán-Teitelbaum (2008) and Kroll (2009). Kroll states that Madeinusa’s representation of Andean culture follows colonial-era stereotypes on Indigenous people's ‘ocio-embriaguez-idolatría’ (2009, p. 114).

3. All translations from Spanish are mine, unless otherwise noted.

4. According to some critics (Beasley Murray, 2007; Forns-Broggi, 2007), the character of Madeinusa (and particularly her gesture of killing her father, accusing Salvador and escaping to Lima) represents, on the contrary, a symbolic subversion of the indigenous people's ‘subaltern’ condition.

5. We find this type of landscape in many of Camilo Blas's paintings.

6. The image is not included in this essay due to copyright restrictions.

7. The image is not included in this essay due to copyright restrictions.

8. A different discussion of Madeinusa’s syncretism and carnival can be found in Kroll (2009).