Contemporary Chilean Cinema: Film Practices and Narratives of National Cinema within the Chilean ‘Film Community’

This thesis presents an anthropological perspective on the film production practices and narratives underlying the construction of contemporary Chilean national cinema. Based on a multi-sited ‘travelling’ ethnography, it reflects on small, peripheral film production in a transnational neoliberal context, where ‘local’ and ‘global’ trends converge, and focuses on the case of Chilean cinema, which has expanded its production, global circulation and exhibition. The research is grounded in the film experiences of the Chilean film community, a network of film professionals (filmmakers, critics, exhibitors and other film agents) involved in the construction of national cinema.

The thesis provides a contextually-based perspective on national film, which is uncommon in both Anthropology and Film Studies, seeking to expand the still emerging field of anthropology of cinema. More than as a group of ‘national’ films, Chilean cinema is understood as both an art world and a field of cultural production, arguing that ‘national cinema’ is both a cultural artifact and a social practice, which is constructed in permanent negotiations between Chilean professionals and other agents in the field. The thesis claims that the film experience of Chilean professionals is part of a broader experience of globalisation, and discusses the formation of artistic, professional and national subjectivities in the neoliberal context, where the identity of Chilean ‘national’ cinema is often contested. It then deconstructs the idea of national cinema as a bounded cultural product, highlighting the overlapping social and cultural traits that affect Chileans’ creative processes.

The thesis examines the ways in which Chilean professionals have made sense of this transnational context, reshaping both their social performances and their cinematographic imagination. By referring to the case of Chilean cinema, the thesis shows the complexities of building a contemporary peripheral film industry. It discusses the construction of national communities, cultural commodification, precarious global labour conditions, and the role of national and international social networks in media production. It argues that Chilean cinema practices, particularly at international film festivals, evince overlapping narratives of art and business as well as localism and cosmopolitanism, revealing some of the cultural paradoxes of local film production.