MÓNICA RÍOS

My research is motivated by what has been overlooked by various disciplines, and how fiction, as a political practice, can bring to light. I take on film and literature to understand how they intervene in historical and social processes, and their implications for a society that systemically erases the modes of relation imagined by minorities. I am interested in the persistence of lost items, stories, and subjects; how despite consensual storytelling insists on weaving unambiguous common sense, the specters of the lost or forgotten persist in the fictional representations of Latin American societies as a counterhegemonic practice.

 

I am currently completing my dissertation Agonías, secretos y venenos: el cine de tres mujeres chilenas frente al archivo nacional de los siglos XX y XXI, where I use archival theory and practice to reconstruct the remnants of three lost films directed between 1917 and 1929 by two Chilean women, Gabriela Bussenius and Rosario Rodríguez, and to examine films directed by exiled Chilean director Valeria Sarmiento between 1990 and 2008. I analyze the processes through which their work has been excluded from film history, and how filmic history in Chile has been constructed in accordance with the consolidation of a transformational ideology informed by the renewal of national values, similar to those of the 19th century. Pursuing metaphors of archival research used in other work in early film studies, I contextualize film criticism in order to argue that these women filmmakers introduced perspectives on gender and ethnicity that were all subsequently discarded by the power structure of the nation and the archive. My analysis considers all sorts of “minor” records, and it is also informed by feminist debates and work on the circulation of commodities within a dependent capitalist system. Throughout Agonías, secretos y venenos I examine the emergence of an archival consciousness in the Southern Cone region, showing how it has served to pacify emerging social movements that have reappeared throughout the 2000s through the reevaluation of recent history.

 

Among my published articles and book chapters I have written about contemporary Hispanic literature and film, and I am currently part of a study group that examines collectivity as a methodology.