Abstract
This article explores the relationship between inhumanity, monstrosity, war and memory in two Latin American films: Días de Santiago (Peru, 2004) and La sombra del caminante (Colombia, 2004). These aesthetically innovative films tackle the internal armed conflicts that have occurred in Colombia and Peru in recent years. Focusing on former soldiers’ reintegration into civilian life, they display war as a traumatic experience that produces monstrosity, understood as a dehumanisation of the individual. By analysing the tropes of monstrosity and the haunting past, and the films’ aesthetics, I show how the performance of the monster articulates a tension between inhumanity and humanness, which can be read as a metaphor for the tension between the acts of remembering, investigating and forgetting within post-conflict societies.
Highlights
In Dawes’s reading – and, arguably, in our common use – monstrosity seems to be defined as the ultimate other
War traumas engage with both history and memory
I would like to read the trope of the monstrous and investigate the link between inhumanity, monstrosity, war and memory in two Latin American post-conflict films released in 2004: the Peruvian Días de Santiago [Days of Santiago] directed by Josué Méndez and the Colombian La sombra del caminante [The Wanderer’s Shadow] directed by Ciro Guerra. Both opere prime and aesthetically experimental, these films tackle the traces of war within the historical political contexts of Peru’s and Colombia’s post-conflict period,[7]
Summary
In Dawes’s reading – and, arguably, in our common use – monstrosity seems to be defined as the ultimate other.
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