Filming the Chilean Road to Socialism: Aesthetics of Contradiction in Compañero Presidente (Miguel Littín, 1971)

Authors

  • José Miguel Palacios New York University

Abstract

The article focuses on the linguistic operations of Miguel Littin's documentary, in order to identify a series of dislocations regarding the position of the speaker in relation to the utterance, where the ultimate displacement is that of the speaker as the producer of discourse, which is transferred from the film to the viewer itself. The spectator's consciousness is awakened through a complex process of dialectical relations that problematize reality and turn it into a series of utterances in the form of contradictions -what I call an aesthetics of contradictions, which constitutes the documentary's main discursive strategy so as to become a vehicle for producing social intelligibility.

Keywords:

Revolution, Documentary, Contradiction, Popular Unity