The Visual Guillotine: The Cinematic Cut and Politics in Latin America

The violence of the cinematic cut in twentieth-century Latin American filmSplice, montage, close-up: by these means, modern cinema routinely presents bodies in pieces.Not unlike the guillotine itself, argues Thomas Matusiak, these techniques have served both overt and symbolic political ends as they accomplish and project the efficient production of severed bodies.In The Visual Guillotine, Matusiak traces the use of cinematic tools of dismemberment in twentieth-century Latin American film to theorize the symbolic and material violence of the cut. A robust genealogy of Latin American cinematic politics, The Visual Guillotine encompasses national filmmaking traditions; radical and reactionary political registers; and the proliferated aesthetics of narrative, documentary, experimental, and expanded cinema through an innovative critical viewing practice.From the national cinemas of the 1930s to the decapitation videos produced in the Mexican narco-conflict and beyond, Matusiak shows how th