Part talk, part screening, this experimental presentation makes its way into the question of law and crime through a master-film of the jurisprudential genre little known in the Anglo-American context. El Chacal de Nahueltoro (Miguel Littín, 1969) is no ordinary object. With its complex negotiation of the fabula/syuzhet distinction, it dramatizes the 1960 case of a peasant man who kills a woman and five of her daughters in a rural part of Chile. Exploring the critical possibilities of the videographic essay, the presentation is as much a methodological provocation as it is a jurisprudential one.

Speaker

Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Her first book, The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor (Duke University Press, 2020), won the 2021 Best First Book Prize from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Her essays have appeared in Cinema Journal, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Social Identities, Hispanófila, and in The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema. Skvirsky’s current project, “Filming the Police,” is supported by a Howard Foundation grant and a Mellon New Directions fellowship and involves formal training in legal studies.

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