The Shopping Centre in the Cinema of Argentina and Chile

Authors

Keywords:

Arcade, shopping mall, Heterotopia, Palimpsest, Historical Memory, Literature and Cinema, Cultural Studies

Abstract

Three films from the last twenty-five years, Buenos Aires viceversa (1996), El abrazo partido (2004), and Ilusiones ópticas (2004), use the shopping centre as the setting for a cinematic fiction. The ways they stage this place allows us to draw a dividing line between a tradition of the arcade of European origin, an essentially horizontal space, characterized by passage, and the shopping mall of US origin, which establishes vertical relations epitomized by the device of the escalator. Based on literary texts and critical essays from Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, we show how these films relate the opposition between horizontality and verticality to the representation of society and historical memory. The model of the shopping mall, a place of multicultural sociability that favors a search for one’s origins, looks indeed opposed to the shopping malls, whose globalized and stratified environment becomes the place of a palimpsest of memory, structured by erasures and resurgences of the past.

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Author Biography

Matei Chihaia, Universität Wuppertal

Universität Wuppertal, Alemania

References

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Published

2022-01-22

How to Cite

Chihaia, M. (2022). The Shopping Centre in the Cinema of Argentina and Chile . Fotocinema. Revista científica De Cine Y fotografía, (24), 45–62. Retrieved from https://revistas.uma.es/index.php/fotocinema/article/view/14155

Issue

No. 24 (2022): Images and sounds of urban geopolitics

Section

ARTICLES

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