Crime, sexuality and conurbano in José Celestino Campusano’s

Abstract

This article examines the figures of crime and sexuality within Argentine cinema with the interest of reflecting on the way they construct images on certain bodies in narrative processes that expose the subjects represented in contiguity with ideas of the cultural order. These are symbolic procedures that, by linking concrete bodies with practices and behaviors through the audiovisual register, establish social reproduction parameters. The position of the camera does not answer the question of the relevance of adopting the perspective of the victim or the perpetrator, but involves reflecting on the way in which appearance of a precise face and body in multiplication and contiguity (with aspects that imaginatively connect class, ethnicity, and gender) is linked to a referentiality that repeats or reverse a process of social affirmation. With a methodology that takes up the practices of cinematographic analysis, the tools of art historiography, and the proposals of political philosophy as a background for certain theoretical concerns, these problems are developed from a journey through the notions about genre cinema, some contemporary films that portray the conurbano, and particularly the cinema of José Celestino Campusano.