Donde habita lo real. Los cruces entre ficción y no ficción en el cine y la narrativa latinoamericana contemporánea

Abstract

This dissertation explores one of the distinctive features of contemporary literary and filmic production in Latin America: the so-called return of the Real and the blurry boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. Framed in an academic debate that proposes different renewals of realism in fictional works, in this work I propose to go beyond those discussions through the analysis of a set of texts and films that explicitly blur the limits between the fictional and what is perceived or read as "real". My main hypothesis is that in this ambivalent distinction of fiction and non-fiction we might discuss a change in the status of the real, a status that reveals a fictional logic not in the sphere of art, but in reality.

The focus of the introduction is centered on the theoretical debate regarding the construction and the access of the real, as well as the concept of realism both in Literature and Film. My main concern is to propose a contingent understanding of what is perceived as fictional or as non-fictional. In this manner, it is of major importance the analysis of the context as well as the zones and languages by which the "real emerges". I propose that certain zones of exclusion and extreme realities (such as the favelas, or cities in crisis) convey a change in the perception of what is perceived not just as "realistic", but as the "real" itself.

Chapter 1 addresses these issues specifically in the recent Brazilian Cinema. My main concern is to explore a group of documentaries and feature films that construct a generic ambivalence through the representation of extreme zones and events: the lives and crimes of the favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Chapter 2 discusses the same problems in novels and films from Argentina right before and after the Crisis of 2001, a radical social change that, in my hypotheses, displaced the source of fiction. My corpus seems to reveal, through the unstable genres used, the fictional logic of the real and the way it is established. It is then a chapter on the crisis of the real and its effects on form and fiction.

Finally, Chapter 3 focuses on a more extreme emergence of the real and its fictional/non-fictional nature. Centered on the crimes of women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, at the end of the XXth century, I explore how the violent nature of the real burdens the fictional laws of the novel as well as those of the chronicle. Once again, the texts analyzed here seem to propose an unreal, extreme fictional character of our contemporary times.