{"id":2745,"date":"2020-10-26T08:58:40","date_gmt":"2020-10-26T08:58:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/?p=2745"},"modified":"2020-11-01T15:28:01","modified_gmt":"2020-11-01T15:28:01","slug":"dancing-larrains-ode-to-valpo-and-emas-very-own-myth-of-recreation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/2020\/10\/26\/dancing-larrains-ode-to-valpo-and-emas-very-own-myth-of-recreation\/","title":{"rendered":"Dancing Larra\u00edn\u2019s Ode to Valpo and Ema\u2019s Very Own Myth of (Re)Creation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Link to <\/em>Ema Dossier Index<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By *Philippa Page, Newcastle University<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Valpara\u00edso, \/ qu\u00e9 disparate \/ eres, \/ qu\u00e9 loco, \/ puerto loco, \/ qu\u00e9 cabeza \/ con cerros, \/ desgre\u00f1ada, \/ no acabas \/ de peinarte,<\/em> nunca tuviste \/ tiempo de vestirte, \/<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

[\u2026]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

el polvo \/ te cubr\u00eda \/ los ojos, \/ las llamas \/ quemaban tus zapatos, \/ las s\u00f3lidas \/ casas de los banqueros \/ trepidaban \/ como heridas \/ ballenas, \/ mientras arriba \/ las casas de los pobres \/ saltaban \/ al vacio \/ como aves \/ prisioneras \/ que probando las alas \/ se desploman.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pablo Neruda, from \u201cOda a Valpara\u00edso\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pablo Neruda\u2019s evocation of Valpara\u00edso as a mad, dishevelled and poorly clad figure with burnt shoes in some ways finds its embodiment in Ema<\/a> <\/em>(2019), the eccentric and seductive (anti-) heroine of Pablo Larra\u00edn\u2019s eponymous film. Just as Neruda personifies Chile\u2019s rambling and enigmatic Pacific port in his canto, Larra\u00edn makes the city \u2018the heart\u2019 of his drama. \u2018I think it\u2019s another character of the film\u2019<\/a>, he noted in a recent interview (2020). Ema<\/em> marksLarra\u00edn\u2019s return to Valpara\u00edso. It provided the setting for a few scenes in his quirky biopic, Neruda<\/em><\/a> (2016), and was the mise-en-sc\u00e8ne of his first feature-length, La fuga<\/a> <\/em>(2006).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this, his most recent release, dancer Ema patters to a very different rhythm. But the film remains a fugue of both a visual and musical kind. Larra\u00edn\u2019s fluid relationship to genre melds various popular forms with techniques more often associated with auteur pieces. At times, the film feels like a decadent sort of science fiction; at others it has the slickness of a music video; at others the static and very deliberate framing, the sharp and disjunctive dialogue seem part of a comic strip centred around Ema\u2019s quirky flame-throwing superhero-like alter ego. This fusion of styles not only captures the hybridity or palimpsestic character of the location in which the film is set, but it also gives its narrative a \u2018polyphonous\u2019 quality that playfully foregrounds the liminal as the space in which the film\u2019s story will unfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This reading of Ema <\/em>suggests approaching the film through the frame of performance. Ema belongs to a dance troupe that is directed by her husband Gast\u00f3n (Gael Garc\u00eda Bernal), a choreographer of contemporary dance and happenings. The group dance routines that are performed at regular intervals throughout the film invite us to look specifically at the meaning that can be traced in the film\u2019s rhetoric of movement (de Certeau 1984: 100). If walking is \u2018a space of enunciation\u2019 (de Certeau 1984: 98), the movement of a body that writes itself into the greater urban text, then the corporeal idiom of dance emphasises the film\u2019s peripatetic cartography of Valpo with an intensity and an affective texture of its own, one that gives contour to what might be argued is a structuring tension at the heart of the film\u2019s diegesis between centripetal and centrifugal forces. The clearest example of this is the way in which the characterisation of both Gast\u00f3n and Ema serves to criticise the conservative, hypocritical authorities that are governing the child adoption service and the public-school system. \u2018El sistema est\u00e1 hecho para eliminar a gente como ustedes\u2019, they are told by the corrupt and homophobic agent who arranged their adoption, a poignant statement that goes far beyond reference to the couple\u2019s perceived unsuitability as parents and comments on the systemic exclusion of those who do not fit the productive societal \u2018model\u2019 that has been predominant since the dictatorship. However, far from positing a Manichean configuration that contrasts a centrifugal act of resistance with the centripetal forces of authority and normativity, what the film lays bare is the constant tension that exists between these two forces within each and every enunciation (Bakhtin 1981).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chilean film critic Carolina Urrutia uses the category of \u2018centrifugal cinema\u2019 as an organising frame for her recent work on contemporary Chilean cinema (2013). It is important to note, however, that whilst Urrutia\u2019s conceptualisation of the centrifugal offers a fruitful approach to the specific films she analyses, her use of the term is different. She emphasises the ways in which contemporary \u2018centrifugal\u2019 films have distanced themselves from the Hollywood narrative mode. Larra\u00edn\u2019s relationship to Hollywood and to the establishment is altogether more complex.[i]<\/a> More instructive here is Mikhail Bakhtin\u2019s use of the term centrifugal, which is seen as inextricably interrelated to the centripetal: \u2018Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear. The processes of centralization and decentralization, of unification and disunification, intersect in the utterance\u2019, he argues (1981: Kindle Locations 3851-3852).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The opening sequence of the film cross cuts between the dance performance that the troupe is currently staging and the calamitous event that has led to the couple giving back their adopted son, Polo. Polo has set fire to his aunt, Ema\u2019s sister, now in hospital recovering. Juxtaposed in dialectic, the fluid, free style of movement typical of contemporary dance might be read as an affective release from the rather static and emotionally contained scenes that are intercalated to depict the drama of Ema\u2019s ailing marriage and her failed attempt at motherhood. Yet, there is something quite Dantean about the tightening circularity that characterises Gast\u00f3n\u2019s creation as the ring of dancers gradually closes in on Ema, their arms stretching out to grab her and swallow her up as she reaches out in a gesture of escape (Figures 1 and 2). All of Gast\u00f3n\u2019s performances seem to be characterised by this enclosing centripetal motion, one that we learn must ultimately always revolve around him, the author at the centre. Ema is clearly portrayed as desiring to break free from these centripetal pressures upon her, whether marital or institutional, as captured by the bodies closing in on her during the performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Figure 1 The ring of dancers circles inwards during the performance<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Ema looks up towards the projected image of the molten sun behind the dance troupe. She is at the centre of the groups of dancers who reach up trying to grab her as she reaches out from the centre of the circle (Figure 2).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Figure 2 Ema at the centre of the group of dancers<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Her childish pleasure in the centrifugal sensation of riding on the carrousel and the spinning teacups during one of her solitary evening ambles around the port area is clear (Figure 3). The sensation of each throws her away from the centre, although never further than the circumference of the circle (still caught inside the \u2018discourse of the circuit\u2019?). It might be tempting to read these scenes in relation to what critics have referred to as the \u2018aesthetics of disaffection\u2019 (Lie 2018: 13) and \u2018detachment\u2019 (Barraza 2015: 442) to describe a series of young people characterised by \u2018a lack of enthusiasm and even apathy\u2019 (Lie 2018: 13), one that might be read as a rejection (albeit often a very passive one) of the expectations of productivity placed on them by the neoliberal system. Ariel, the protagonist of Alberto Fuguet\u2019s Vel\u00f3dromo <\/a><\/em>(2010) springs to mind on account of his solitary night wanderings on his bicycle. But Ema is not a drifter without aim or affect. Neither is she an automatic writer of the city. She is singularly determined and compelled by a very specific goal: to experience biological motherhood. The line of flight she draws out of the circle is perfectly linear and has a specific goal. The expression and fulfilment of desire is not an end, but a means to reach this goal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Figure 3 Ema sits in a spinning teacup on the carrousel. She leans back into the centrifugal force that pulls her away from the centre<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Figure 4 Ema and her friends rehearse one of their reggaeton numbers. Of note is the group’s linear alignment, although at other times the young women dance around Ema, who remains at the centre of the circle<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Where the tension between the centrifugal and the centripetal becomes most abrasive, then, is in the film\u2019s rather confusing gender politics. When asked if he considers Ema <\/em>to be a feminist film, Larra\u00edn remarks that: \u201cE<\/em>ma <\/em>was shot, written, and directed by men [prominent playwright Guillermo Calder\u00f3n is the screenplay writer], so I would say that what we intended to do was share a vision on the issue, to express a sensibility and understand how important and strong the role of women in society is<\/a>\u201d. Ema and her friends exercise their freedom of movement and expression through the carefully choreographed and rehearsed reggaet\u00f3n routines that they perform in multiple locations around the city. As Ema seeks a palpable connection with the earth, water, fire and the air at various moments in the film, there is something very organic about their embodied narration of the city (Figures 5, 6 and 7). There is a real sense that these young women are remaking the street on and in their own terms. Yet, their choice of dance genre again points to the internal contradictions of this act, one that Gast\u00f3n is quick to point out. The sorority that forms around Ema finds expression in carefully rehearsed and synchronised dance routines to a genre of music that is known for its violence and misogyny. Ema\u2019s sense of thrill when she launches napalm flames at objects in the city comes from the fact that she imagines that it feels like a male dinosaur\u2019s ejaculation. There is a subversive element to this matriarchal appropriation of the reggaeton genre and Ema\u2019s desire to simulate the sensations of the male body, but Ema\u2019s ultimate goal of finding all the pieces of the nuclear family, which she builds around herself as centre, seems to undermine this. As Ema dances Larra\u00edn\u2019s \u2018Ode to Valpara\u00edso\u2019, she dances her own very urban myth of creation. This is a myth that is still founded on the necessarily centripetal notion of the nuclear family\u2014albeit with a less orthodox set of members\u2014and a rather normative experience of motherhood. With her magnetic peroxide aura, as Larra\u00edn himself suggests, Ema is the sun around whom everyone else must orbit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Figure 5 Image showing the force of the elements Ema connects with: Fire<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Figure 6 Image showing the force of the elements Ema connects with: Water<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Figure 7 Image showing the force of the elements Ema connects with: Air<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

*Bio<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Philippa Page is a Lecturer in Spanish and Film at Newcastle University<\/a>. Her research explores expressions of the social imaginary in contemporary film, theatre and literature of the Southern Cone. She is author of the monograph Politics and Performance in Post-Dictatorship Argentine Film and Theatre<\/a><\/em> (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2011) and co-editor of the volumes The Feeling Child: Politics, Childhood and Affect in Contemporary Latin American Literature and Film<\/a><\/em> (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2018) with Inela Selimovi\u0107 and Camilla Sutherland, and Entre\/telones y pantallas. Afectos y saberes en la performance argentina contempor\u00e1nea<\/em> (Buenos Aires: Libraria, in press) with Jordana Blejmar and Cecilia Sosa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays<\/em>. Austin: University of Texas Press Slavic Series. Kindle Edition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barraza, Vania. 2015. From “Sanhattan” to “Nashvegas”: The Aesthetics of Detachment in Alberto Fuguet’s Filmmaking. In Hispania<\/em>, Special Focus Issue: The Scholarship of Film and Film Studies<\/em>. Vol. 98, No. 3 (September), pp. 442-451.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life<\/em>. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lie, Nadia. 2018. The Aesthetics of Disaffection in the Latin American Festival Film. In L\u2019Atlante<\/em>, (July-December), pp. 13-25.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Urrutia, Carolina. 2013. Un cine centr\u00edfugo<\/em>. Ficciones chilenas 2005-2010<\/em>. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Cuarto Propio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[i]<\/a> Although maintaining his spirit as an independent filmmaker, Larra\u00edn also has a foot in Hollywood. In 2016, Larra\u00edn released Jackie<\/em>, a biographical account of Jackie Kennedy in the aftermath of John F. Kennedy\u2019s murder, thus marking his d\u00e9but in Hollywood. He is also set to film Spencer<\/em>, a portrayal of Diana, Princess of Wales.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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