When the Copywriter is the Protagonist. History and Intermediality in Pablo Larraín’sNo(2012)

• Authors: Francesco Zucconi
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Through films such as Tony Manero (2008), Santiago 73, Post Mortem (2010), and No (2012), the productions of Chilean director Pablo Larraín have focused on the historical and political themes that marked the last decades in the life of his country: the putsch against Salvador Allende and Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. This paper analyses the last film of the trilogy, dedicated to the 1988 Chilean national plebiscite and the communication battle between supporters of the “Yes” and “No” sides. Why does Larraín identify the copywriter René Saavedra as the main character of the film? And why does the film accord such importance to the advertising campaign in recounting the historical reality of democratic transition? How does the fictional film remediate the archival footage of the 1988 campaign? To answer these questions, this paper investigates the film as an audiovisual form of interpretation of historical events and film montage as an intermedial “authentication” of the archival documents relating to this traumatic past.

Keywords

EN

the Chilean democratic transition; heterotopia and utopia; history and intermediality; intermedial “authentication”; Pablo Larraín’s cinema

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 129-147

Dates

published

2016-09-01

online

2016-09-24

Contributors

author

Francesco Zucconi

• École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris ()

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/ausfm-2016-0007