5 - Re-reading Chircales: Interiority, the Girl and Documentary Desire

Summary

Chircales is a canonical text of the New Latin American Cinema, a movement which, according to Zuzana Pick, ‘by underscoring class as the primary instance of social relations [has] rarely taken into account gender-specific forms of social and political oppression’ (p. 66). Chircales, though, with its insistent focus on some of the basic tenets of feminist theory of the era, could only have been classified as solely class-based by a gender-blind criticism, making it, paradoxically, somewhat atypical of the New Latin American Cinema movement. Whilst both Pick (pp. 66–96) and B. Ruby Rich have argued that the movement's feminist shift did not occur until the 1980s, Chircales, released in 1972, fractures a purely Marxist rhetoric in its expository insistence on addressing key features of women's subordination which it clearly shows as contributing to the oppression that it documents. Continually slipping out of the ideological framework that it constructs for itself, the film's intentions and overt, self-proclaimed Marxist approach, are constantly displaced onto other (though related) concerns, and the finished text therefore exceeds their boundaries. Whilst David Wood has observed that the relationship of the subjects of the documentary to dominant culture ‘is defined by a system of attractions and repressions too complex to be subsumed into any univocal political discourse’ (p. 91) critical work on the film has given less attention to the way in which heroic, revolutionary and patriarchal discourse becomes conspicuously flawed as the film is constantly displaced onto the private and women's lives and relationships, discourses which seep out of the ideological framework of the film.