Screening through silence: The representation of queerness in Retablo (2017)

Abstract

Retablo is a feature-length film, mostly shot in Quechua language, centred on an Indigenous family who lives in the Peruvian Andes and makes a living as artisans of the eponymous folk art. The main storyline is about Segundo, a 14-year-old only-child and apprentice, whose close relationship with his father and master, Noé, is drastically altered when it is revealed that the latter has sexual relationships with other men. Drawing from decolonial queer theory (Gomes-Pereira, Miskolci, Pelúcio), in this article I rehearse an analysis of Retablo as a case study to reconsider the notion of queer cinema and the representation of queer experiences on the continent. First, I review the use of ‘queer’ in Latin American film scholarship and argue for an understanding of the category not focused on issues such as identity, homophobia and machismo, but on the cinematic formal strategies used to portray local queer practices. Following this line of thought, I engage with Schoonover and Galt’s argument that film is a ‘queerly inflected medium’ to probe how Retablo’s attempt to incite a queer spectatorship using an Indigenous aesthetic grammar illustrates the intertwining between global queer cinema and local elaborations of sexual difference. Lastly, I use the category of ‘silence’ (Sifuentes-Jaúregui) to study Retablo’s alternative representation of queer sexuality. I suggest that the film’s depiction of queer desires resorting to unnaming and concealing is an example of an alternative figuration of queer subjectivity in Latin American cinema, one distanced from the Anglo-American narratives of ‘coming out’.