Melancholic ethos: Temporal resistances and decelerations in contemporary certain Chilean cinema

Abstract

This article sets out to propose, in an essayistic manner, a point of rupture within the matrix of performance of Real Capitalism through the cinematographic, which can be seen as the configuration of a time other than productive time, invested in the figure of the melancholic, as the one who tensions the psychoanalytic triad of the contemporary neurotic: object, desire and loss. Through the latency or waiting (the art of patience or slothful) that is represented in certain Chilean cinema of the last decade, and which will make of the cinematographic image the portrait of non-desire, where things and objects are the basis of the episteme that constructs the narrative and culture. A horizontal cinema that does not travel to meet a conflict, and remains in the radical exposure of the founding elements of the culture in question, arranged in a mise-en-scène, which, like a baroque base, will function from the surfaces, distancing meaning from its conventional enunciative act and arranging objects as the only depositaries of an episteme capable of reordering the fictionality of meaning itself. We will also review, within this conceptual framework, elements that define concrete cinematographic operations, allowing us to clarify, in an introductory way, the sources of nomination that will serve us to deal with specific phenomena of cinematographic events, within the framework of current Chilean cinema.