(Re)Writing With the Feet: The Flâneur as Urban Cartographer in Alicia Scherson’s Film Play (Chile, 2005)

Abstract

This article approaches Chilean filmmaker Alicia Scherson’s first feature-length film, Play (2005), from the perspectives of mobility and social cartography in relation to the spatial practices of the main characters. Through the paradigmatic figure of the flâneur, the article explores the representative function of both the characters’ and the camera’s drifting itineraries across the city, as they subtly perform a peripatetic cartography of present-day Santiago. The diegetic threads that are spun by the characters progressively interlace to weave an urban text which lays bare – as they are transgressed – a series of frontiers that cut across the cityscape. The film maps out two very different human geographies of post-dictatorship Chile, a lived urban space that reveals the stark social divide propping up the nation’s neoliberal economic structure. Scherson’s roving camera engages in a politics of perception which invites the spectator to view the city differently, thus exploring the possibility of upsetting this divide.