Allegorical Cities: Bodies and Visions in Colombian Urban Cinema

Abstract

Filmic mappingThis paper compares two Colombian films, Rodrigo D. No futuro by Víctor Gaviria and La estrategia del caracol by Sergio Cabrera, [1] in an attempt to show how, in their different ways, they try to map the lines of intersection between body, screen, and social space. Both films are set within a cityscape which provides an allegorical backdrop for a visible politics of space, from the dissolution and recombination of (local) place under the speculative flows of economic (and cultural) capital, to the decorporealization of space within the aggressive (global) realm of visualization and the simulacrum. In order to theorize these links, I employ some of the categories for the analysis of social and urban space developed by the French Marxist thinker Henri Lefebvre and extended by cultural geographers such as David Harvey and Derek Gregory. The resonance (or coincidence) of these analyses with the thinking of Gaviria and Cabrera is, I believe, quite striking. Moreover, and perhaps beyond Lefebvre's insistence on the dictatorship of the image, both of their films seem to link processes of envisioning to the projection of an enigmatic, faintly sketched blueprint for resistance.