Friday December 5, 2025 | 1:45PM-3:30PM

LBC 210 McKeever

Session Abstract

In the wake of Bazin, classical film theory privileged the question of temporality, anchoring, as Philip Rosen has argued, the concept of indexicality within modern conceptualizations of historicity. More recently, the affective turn has marked a radical shift away from this framework by centering the intensities moving images release in the audience. This development in film and media theory has important consequences for our understanding of cultural politics. Affect theory gained ground within the humanities in part by challenging the teleological and totalizing paradigms that explain, predict, and organize social change. Within cinema and media studies, this entailed a shift from concerns with the material trace of the past in the image and the ideology of the apparatus towards the embodied experience of spectatorship. Subsequently, the question of the affective capacity exercised by the moving image makes possible the construction of a collective becoming rooted in the materiality of a body affected in community.

This panel explores how affect functions as a site of political struggle in contemporary Latin American media and visual culture by privileging the problem of temporality. We propose to examine the establishment of a common temporality that opposes what Walter Benjamin describes as the homogeneous and empty time of progress through the affective dimension of durational media. The Benjaminian concept of homogenous time is a condition of possibility for a form of progress that, as the contemporary political landscape makes clear, is driven by the uncontrollable yet organized drift of the death drive and its devastations. Through their capacity to affect the audience, cinema and media hold the potential to disrupt such teleological models by transmitting affects across time and space. Through various objects that attempt to establish habitable temporalities, this panel will discuss aspects such as the possibility of a post-Enlightenment re-enchantment of the world that does not detach itself from techné nor myth, the effects of populist forms of revisionist audiovisual media, and the rejection of neoliberal time through the stubborn exercise of poetic persistence. In these interventions, affect emerges not as a retreat from film theory’s classical conceptualization of the political but as its very terrain: a means of confronting the residues of authoritarianism, reactivating historical memory, and gesturing toward alternative temporalities and forms of collective life.

Presenters

• Oriele Benavides (Princeton University), “Archival Affects: Los archivos del Cardenal, a political telenovela”

Perhaps no literary genre has exploited affect as efficiently as the 19th-century newspaper serial novel. Its direct descendant is the contemporary televised soap opera. Between 2011 and 2014—shortly after the Concertación lost its first presidential election since the return of democracy in 1990—Chilean public television produced and premiered two seasons of the docufiction series Los archivos del cardenal (“The Cardinal’s Files”). The series is structured around two parallel storylines. On one hand, it follows the romantic entanglements of a middle-class young woman torn between two lovers from different social classes who represent opposing political ideologies: Christian Democracy (DC) and the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR). On the other hand, it focuses on the roles these characters play in relation to the Vicaría de la Solidaridad (1973–1992), an ecclesiastical institution founded after the coup d’état against Salvador Allende to defend human rights.

Blending political noir, romantic fiction, and a social fresco of recent Chilean history, Los archivos… offers a unique activation of the most emblematic cases handled by the Vicaría, and a formally unprecedented approach to the memorialization of recent state terror. This presentation focuses on two key aspects of the production. First, the melodramatic love triangle formed by the protagonists and its function as an allegory of a foundational fiction for the democracy to come—already in question by the time the series was released. Second, the creation of a paratext in the form of a documentary archive, developed in collaboration with Diego Portales University, which contextualizes the episodes of political violence embedded in the storyline.

• Thomas Matusiak (University of Miami, chair and moderator), “The Politics of Enchantment in the Animation of León & Cociña”

In their exhibition Brujería: animación contemporánea en Chile, filmmakers Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña locate animation at the intersection of media technology and the occult. In proposing this definition, León & Cociña question Max Weber’s conclusion that modernity disenchanted the world by displacing myth and magic with reason. In conquering what it viewed as superstitions, the Enlightenment produced new forces of irrationalism that provoked the disasters of modernity (Horkheimer & Adorno). Chief among these, fascism governs by manipulating the organized delirium of the masses. To counter such reactionary forces, Georges Bataille concludes that antifascism must appeal to affect, through which fascism seduces the multitude, and channel these energies towards emancipatory ends.

In this presentation, I inscribe León & Cociña’s experimental animation practice within the tradition of radical re-enchantment espoused by Bataille. La casa lobo (2018) and Los huesos (2021) ground their stop-motion technique in affectively laden forms such as the fairy tale and ritual. I argue that these films politicize animation’s potential to affect the spectator. My reading associates the affect of enchantment with the contemporary project of antifascism. Through their references to the history of fascism in Chile – from the ex-Nazi sect of Colonia Dignidad to the reactionary ideologue Jaime Guzmán – León & Cociña address the political realities of post-dictatorial Chile, leading up to and following the 2019 estallido social. I conclude that the filmmakers craft an antifascist mythos that combines magic and technology to reclaim the affective intensities that reactionary politics have weaponized.

• Isabella Vergara (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), “María José Arjona’s Corporeal Media and Temporal Disobedience”

 This paper explores the long-durational performance practice of Colombian artist María José Arjona as a radical form of moving media. Arjona’s work challenges the commodification and spectacle of performance by embracing ephemerality, duration, and affective labor. Her performances—often lasting hours or days—unfold as choreographies of endurance and resonance, where the body, no longer a stable subject, becomes a porous medium that vibrates with fragments, oracles, and sonic intensities. Drawing on Fred Moten’s theory of the resistance of the object and André Lepecki’s politics of ephemerality, I analyze how Arjona’s performances inhabit the threshold between the human and the material, the visible and the infra-sensory. Works like “Como es adentro, es afuera” and “Hay que saberse infinito” resist archival capture and instead propose an intermedial poetics in which movement, sound, and silence migrate across skin and space. Through scores rooted in suspension, slowness, and repetition, Arjona reconfigures perception and duration as political acts—insisting on a time of persistence rather than possession. This paper situates her work within broader hemispheric conversations on affect, political violence, and the afterlives of colonialism in Colombia, arguing that Arjona’s “long-durational poetry” enacts a refusal of neoliberal time, inviting new imaginaries of embodiment and media beyond representation. Performance, here, is not what disappears, but what returns—haunting the present with the affect of its remains.

• Susannah Rodríguez Drissi (University of California Los Angeles), “Gentlemen Prefer Silence: Autofiction, Archive, and the Visual Performance of Intimacy”

Gentlemen Prefer Silence is a multi-platform autofiction project that blurs the line between public narrative and private address. Originating on Instagram through a series of ephemeral stories, reels, captions, and visual fragments, the project has since migrated to Substack (https://gentlemenprefersilence.substack.com), where it unfolds as a serialized, diaristic meditation on memory, desire, authorship, and digital spectatorship. Drawing on Latin American literary traditions, feminist theory, and performance studies, the series explores what it means for a woman to write toward her past without certainty of audience, anchoring its voice in the ambiguous space between message and misdelivery.

The work engages audiovisual and digital media not only as platforms of dissemination but as integral components of the narrative form: original music compositions, photographic self-portraiture, and voiceover recordings are woven into the storytelling, creating a layered, immersive experience across media. The project also lives on Instagram at @susannadrissi (https://www.instagram.com/susannahdrissi) and as podcast on Spotify, where its origins remain archived in visual and audio form.

In this theory-practice presentation, I will screen a short-form video essay composed of excerpts from Instagram stories, original music, and narrative text, interwoven with commentary on the project’s conceptual stakes. I consider how affect circulates through disappearing media, how silence performs as both constraint and seduction, and how digital autofiction may resist institutional frameworks while inviting new forms of academic and personal witnessing.

Ultimately, Gentlemen Prefer Silence reflects on what it means to archive longing in the age of disappearing stories—and what forms of intimacy may yet be retrieved from the feed.