A Contemporary Andean Type: The Representation of the Indigenous World in Claudia Llosa's Films

Abstract

Claudia Llosa's films Madeinusa (2006) and La Teta Asustada (2009) are two interesting case studies of representation of indigenous people in contemporary cinema. Madeinusa tells about an isolated Andean village and its encounter with ‘modernity’; La Teta Asustada depicts Andean migrants who moved to the outskirts of Lima after the Peruvian 1980s Dirty War. Despite the several prizes the films were awarded (La Teta Asustada, for example, was awarded the Golden Bear at the 2009 Berlin festival), their national and international reception gave rise to controversy over the ways in which indigenous people were portrayed. This essay analyses the patterns and roots of Llosa's representation of the Andean world. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of Llosa's works, 19th-century novels, and early-20th-century and contemporary visual works, I identify and discuss a number of cultural and aesthetic strategies in the films: the actualization of a colonialist-style discourse; the employment of pre-existing models of representation of the Andean subjects developed by Indigenista artists; and the reformulation of these models through anthropological sources, kitsch and magical realism. I argue that those strategies allow Llosa to create a new contemporary Andean type, which is ultimately an unproblematic and accessible way of thinking of and symbolically representing ‘otherness’.