Capturing Carceral Critique: Prison, State, and Cinema in Argentina, 1930s-2010s (Illuminations)

Description

Capturing Carceral Critique brings together prison studies, film studies, and Latin American cultural studies to examine the contested relationship between incarceration and cinema in Argentina. Drawing on a diverse corpus of fictional films from the 1930s to the 2010s, including melodrama, comedy, sexploitation, and horror, it challenges reductive understandings of prison-based films as purely stigmatizing or merely reformist. Instead, it argues that, in Argentina, these films consistently undertake structural critiques of the state. By combining close filmic analysis with examination of industrial collaborations between prison authorities, politicians, and filmmakers, Wilson-Nunn pushes beyond genre-based approaches to the "prison film" to trace a more complex genealogy of the critical relationships between cinema and carcerality. Across five key historical moments, Capturing Carceral Critique interrogates the entanglement of state power and visual culture to reveal the ideological heterogeneity, social inequalities, and affective intensity that underpin critical accounts of the carceral state.