A new open access and peer reviewd article by Susana Viegas is out now! The article "Memória e Ausência na "Trilogia do Chile" (2010-2019) de Patricio Guzmán" is published in Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens 62 (2025) - We are always the afterlife of others: a map for a pro-memory, edited by Catarina Laranjeiro and Inês Sapeta Dias.
What can cinema do when death leaves no trace? In this newly published piece, Susana Viegas explores the impossibility of representing death on screen through the lens of "thanatopolitics", a concept developed by Michel Foucault, and applies it to the hauntingly poetic "Chile Trilogy" by Patricio Guzmán: "Nostalgia for the Light" (2010), "The Pearl Button" (2015), and "The Cordillera of Dreams" (2019). The article addresses the challenge of evoking death and disappearance in cinema when no visual evidence remains. With no archival footage or images of the crimes committed under Pinochet’s regime, Guzmán turns instead to landscape, memory, and the cosmos, crafting a cinematic language of absence and resistance. By engaging Guzmán’s work through a philosophical lens, the article proposes that when film cannot show death, it can still make absence felt—becoming a space where the invisible is mourned, remembered, and politicized. Recommended for those interested in film-philosophy, memory studies, and the aesthetics of the political and the invisible.
Read the full article here.
