Affective faces as landscapes in Peruvian films, Rosa Chumbe (2015) and Magallanes (2015)

Abstract

This essay analyzes the use of faces as landscapes in Rosa Chumbe (2015) and Magallanes (2015) by Peruvian filmmakers Jonatan Relayze and Salvador del Solar. These, throughout their plots, show, indirectly and directly, the political and social consequences of past decades in Peruvian society. Above all, the consequences for some women, the anti-subversive policies, and the state of exception that the Peruvian government imposed in the 1990s to try to control the armed movements (Sendero Luminoso and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement). I maintain that these directors transmit in their faces transformed into landscapes a sequence of changes in qualities or affective states that problematize the situation of the women victims of the system. In this sense, two different perspectives on the past, present and future of the protagonists are condensed. Thus, the landscape of faces in the foreground takes center stage in trying to understand the complex framework of Peruvian society at the beginning of the new century. Based on the works on cinematographic landscape by Martín Lefebvre (2006, 2011), Graeme Harper and Johnathan Rayner (2010, 2013); and Gilles Deleuze's (1983) work on film studies, I analyze the narrative and cinematographic strategies used by these filmmakers to turn female faces into landscapes and thus understand the different views of Peruvian society.