Acceso usuarios
Patricia Valladares Ruiz
Venezuelan cinema has reached its highest international visibility during the last decade. More recently, the escalation of the political crisis, the massive exodus of artistic and technical talent, as well as the reduction of subsidies have undermined the film industry. Additionally, local filmmakers have been forced to circumvent official censorship. As a consequence, socio-political criticism tends to be subtle and adopts less evident mechanisms of expression, when compared to other cultural practices such as the visual arts, literature, and popular music. Nonetheless, contemporary Venezuelan cinema has become a creative vantage point from which to examine the current social polarization and economic crisis. In this article, I examine male subjectivities in crisis in three films: Lorenzo Vigas's Desde allá (2015), Gustavo Rondón Córdova's La familia (2017), and Jorge Thielen Armand's La Soledad (2016). More particularly, I analyze how—from the intimate sphere—social inequalities challenge the res publica and symbolically question political power through the denunciation of a failed state. In these critical interventions, I pay special attention to the articulation of discourses of hopelessness, individual failure, and loss.
