Intimacy and violence in contemporary Latin American film

Abstract

This article analyzes how commonsensical perceptions of violence are disputed and resignified from formal and narrative experimentation around intimacy in some recent films from Mexico and Latin America. To this end, it examines examples of productions, as well as production and circulation dynamics around three modalities of violence: narco-violence (linked to forced disappearance and state violence), historical memory, and racial and gender violence. I conclude that these proposals challenge the conventional notion of the public sphere as something separate from the private and mainly rational, to think about the impact of these works in the transformation of sensibilities and subjectivities that, although generally relegated to the private sphere, are in fact crucial for public life and for the reconfiguration of the common. When intimate ways of looking, desiring, yearning, imagining futures, producing sense and meaning become collective, these contribute to transforming 'structures of feeling'.