Researching Cultures: Film and Dictatorship in Argentina and Chile

3 units

In this course, we will explore the methods by which filmmakers from the Southern Cone of Latin America used film to engage, document, and remember the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s.We will look at the development of protest cinema in the area, the use of documentary filmmaking and resistance, navigating censorship, and the use of film as a nation's memory as we study films for which directors and actors risked (and sometimes lost) their lives. We will accompany our study of film with historical readings, reports on human rights abuses, and theories on memory and trauma. This course will have a strong, mandatory and graded written communications component, and it is taught in Spanish. It also fulfills the Writing Intensive (WI) requirement for Arts & Sciences students. Prerequisite: Span 303 or Span 308D, and one (or preferably two) of the following: Span 341, Span 342, Span 343, Span 370, Span 380 or Debating Cultures. Students who have taken more than four Spanish culture or literature classes are not allowed in this course and must proceed to a Major Seminar.