La Teta Asustada Research Articles

Roles de género en el cine peruano. Personajes femeninos en Madeinusa (2006), La teta asustada (2009) y Loxoro (2012)

This study analyzes the gender roles of female characters portrayed in Peruvian cinema, in comparison to the feminist approach taken in other regions of the world, with the aim of exposing their characteristic features. For this qualitative analysis, the first three films of Claudia Llosa Bueno have been taken as a sample: Madeinusa (2006), La teta asustada (2009) and Loxoro (2012) are taken as a sample. As a general result, it will be noted that there are particularities that are very specific to Peru, according to the customs, memories, bodies, voices and binaristic thoughts that will determine a differentiated representation of the female characters according to their entirely national construction.

Indigeneity at the Limits of Transculturation: Decolonial Aesthetics in Claudia Llosa's The Milk of Sorrow

Abstract: Elaborating decolonial and intersectional methods, aesthetics has developed rich tools for tackling power differences. A philosophical question arises about the nature of gendered embodied experience and materiality: How to comprehend the cultural field if it is at once a site of heinous expropriation and violence and one of vital social and political possibility? This essay explores this question through a reading of Claudia Llosa's film The Milk of Sorrow ( La teta asustada ) (2009). The film, we show, reworks racial, gendered, and colonial logics and supplants a model of transculturation, magical realism, and syncretism and its attendant figuration of resistance by a cultural vision of a web of multivalent, pluri-directional aesthetic promises and threats. Thus it presents a young Indigenous woman as a contemporary decolonial actor who, in encounter with popular culture and the global marketplace, renders memory livable and opens up unforeseen futures for her young town and country. We signal the implications for the positioning of the decolonial feminist spectator or culture maker and for a decolonial aesthetics. Aesthetic existence at the intersection of oppression and liberation, although impure and troubled, functions as a bountiful font of feminist energy and sustenance and a site of communal caring and imagination.

“Films for Humanity”: De-victimization of the Female in At Five in the Afternoon and The Milk of Sorrow

Within today’s cinema and other media, there is a dominant and problematic depiction of female vulnerability and victimization that renders women victims, helpless subjects to be pitied, particularly women from non-Western regions of the globe. This article explores the ways in which Samira Makhmalbaf’s Iranian film At Five in the Afternoon (Panj é asr, ) and Claudia Llosa’s Peruvian film The Milk of Sorrow (La teta asustada, ) seek to destabilize the problematic presentations of female victimization that dominate modern screens. The findings reveal that both films grant their female protagonists agency through both external and internal factors such that material objects and their own voices redefine female vulnerability, in turn creating filmic narratives that speak to broader issues shared by humanity.

A tuberous fetish

Peruvian director Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada (2009) has often been analysed in academic literature. Such discussions frequently focus on the film’s central female character, Fausta, as a means either to critique the representation of indigenous Andean characters within the film or to celebrate themes of female empowerment. In contrast, this article provocatively suggests that a potato that Fausta inserts into her vagina is the true protagonist of the film. Drawing on the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Laura U. Marks, it will be demonstrated that Fausta’s potato is an unusual tripartite fetish: a commodity; a materialization of psychical power; and an intercultural object imbued with agency. In this way, the article proposes that Llosa manipulates Peruvian cultural history in such a way that the film is rather more complex and ambiguous than it may at first appear.

Feminine Desire in Claudia Llosa’s "The Milk of Sorrow" and Shirin Neshat’s "Women Without Men" in Dialogue with Irigaray’s Philosophy of the Caress

An exploration of feminine desire through the lens of Luce Irigaray’s caress is afforded here through the feminist film-philosophical analysis of Claudia Llosa’s The Milk of Sorrow (La teta asustada, 2009) and Women Without Men (Zanan-e Bedun-e Mardan, 2009), by Shirin Neshat. Drawing on key scholarship (Watkins 2000; Bainbridge 2008; Bolton [2011] 2015; Quinlivan [2012] 2014), this article offers a novel contribution through its emphasis on the Irigarayan caress. Despite important limitations and silences in Irigaray’s work (Rifeser 2020; Ingram 2008; Bloodsworth-Lugo 2007; Deutscher 2003; Jones, 1981), here the usefulness of Irigaray’s caress is discussed. An exploration of the narrative, formal and aesthetic strategies of Llosa’s and Neshat’s feature films attune the viewer to the embodied, lived experiences of the main women characters, sothat we can envision the Irigarayan caress and the lived experience of feminine desire as woman with oneself, as well as the desire for the other.

How the scripts of Latin American screenwriters Lucrecia Martel (Argentina), Anna Muylaert (Brazil) and Claudia Llosa (Peru) have made a mark on the world stage

The films of Latin American female screenwriters, Lucrecia Martel (Argentina), Anna Muylaert (Brazil) and Claudia Llosa (Peru), have achieved international prominence in recent years. In this article we create new insights into the ways in which these screenwriters have developed scripts for films that have made a mark on the world stage. To this end we will investigate how this acclaim has been enabled by their screenwriting decisions which focus on the creation of women-centred films, as well as their use of the family story as a means of exploring contemporary social and political themes, to tell universal stories that highlight the global in the local. In doing so we canvas the personal, industrial and social factors which have impacted Martel, Muylaert and Llosa’s screenwriting careers which have been instrumental in the script development of the films: La Ciénaga (The Swamp) (Martel 2001); Que Horas Ela Volta? (The Second Mother) (); and La Teta Asustada (The Milk of Sorrow) (). The research for this article is based on personal and media interviews with the writers, as well as contemporary information available only in Spanish and Portuguese, as translated from the original Spanish and Portuguese by Clarissa Miranda.

Populating the Margins: Hope and Healing in Claudia Llosa's La teta asustada

In La teta asustada (The Milk of Sorrow, 2009), Peruvian director Claudia Llosa explores the lasting effects of the violence that dominated her home country from about 1980 to 2000. Llosa's story, with national implications, is centered on the pain of one individual, Fausta, a young Quechua woman, who believes that she has inherited the trauma of her Indigenous mother's rape. Llosa represents Fausta's personal suffering by placing the protagonist physically in the margins of the frame, a metaphorical mise-en-scène that is repeated in the barren and impoverished neighborhood where she lives on the outskirts of Lima. And yet Llosa's film is not deterministic; rather, it is a search for personal and national healing through families and communities.

La teta asustada: de Theidon a Llosa

Cuando se difundió el filme La teta asustada (2009) dirigido por Claudia Llosa, quienes habían leído Entre prójimos. El conflicto interno y la política de la reconciliación en el Perú (2004) --investigación realizada por la antropóloga médica Kimberly Theidon en siete comunidades ayacuchanas entre 1995 y 2000-- se preguntaron por la relación de dicho estudio con la película de Llosa pues el término “teta asustada” es una traducción que hace Theidon de la expresión quechua Mancharisqa Nuñu que refiere a la enfermedad que trasmitieron las madres a sus bebes durante la época del conflicto armado en el Perú. Pese a que en el filme no se cita el libro ni se lo menciona como una fuente, en más de una entrevista Llosa declaró que la lectura de Entre prójimos fue el punto de partida para su película. De otro lado, Theidon se enteró de “La teta asustada” cuando la película ganó el “Oso de Oro” en el Festival de Berlín (2010). En el presente trabajo me interesa indagar, desde una perspectiva intertextual, en el diálogo que se establece entre ambos textos y la manera como Llosa “lee”, ficcionaliza, se acerca y también se distancia de la investigación realizada por la antropóloga.

De las aulas a festivales de cine internacionales Reseña del Festival Internacional de Cine de Viña del Mar (2017).

El Festival Internacional de Cine de Viña del Mar reúne cada año las obras más representativas de cine independiente latinoamericano. Es curioso conocer que siendo uno de los más longevos de la región, al cumplir 50 años, tuvo sus inicios en la década de los sesenta como un cineclub liderado por un pediatra y cinéfilo porteño, nacido en 1923. Entre las variadas categorías competitivas que promueve el festival tenemos la Competencia Internacional de Escuelas de Cine, en la que el proyecto de titulación que dirigí, El Rey del Muyuyo, tuvo su estreno internacional. Este cortometraje documental de corte etnográfico, pero a la vez ensayista y de observación fue desarrollado en la modalidad de “Proyecto Integrador”, como parte del proceso de graduación de la carrera de Producción para Medios de Comunicación. Como sujeto participante contamos con Bonifacio Crespín, artesano de este material vegetal quien residía en el cantón General Villamil, Playas. También tuvimos el honor de incluir piezas originales de Selma Mutal, laureada compositora de cine con títulos como La Teta Asustada (2009).

Imágenes de sobrevivencia: del realismo urbano del Grupo Chaski al Perú contemporáneo de Claudia Llosa

El artículo analiza los trabajos iniciales del Grupo Chaski y de Claudia Llosa, dos puntos de referencia en el cine peruano contemporáneo. A través de la crítica al argumento y las características de las películas de estos cineastas, se construye una imagen del Perú, un país que volvió a la democracia en 1980 y, desde entonces, ha sido gobernado por presidentes posteriormente acusados de corrupción y abuso de poder como Alan García, Alberto Fujimori, Alejandro Toledo y Ollanta Humala. Las películas de Chaski inciden en la pobreza y vulnerabilidad de niños enfrentados a la gran ciudad, Lima, y se anticipan a ese cine de la marginalidad que en los años 90 produjo cintas tan logradas como Pizza, birra, faso, La vendedora de rosas, Ciudad de Dios o Ratas, ratones, rateros. La obra de Claudia Llosa, por su parte, llamó la atención internacional por el triunfo de su segunda película, La teta asustada, en el Festival de Berlín. Esta película, que marca una continuidad respecto de la primera, Madeinusa, es un retrato de los años posteriores a la guerra interna, los de la barbarie de Sendero Luminoso y la respuesta de las Fuerzas Armadas. El artículo aspira a ofrecer una mirada global de la sociedad peruana de los últimos treinta años, marcados por la pobreza estructural, el terrorismo, la aplicación de reformas neoliberales y la corrupción a todo nivel del estado.

Madness and Migration: Broken Geographies in Peruvian Cinema

In the last four decades, geographic displacements have emerged as a recurrent theme in Peruvian cinema. Through a close examination of Grupo Chaski's Gregorio (1984) and Juliana (1989), and Claudia Llosa's Madeinusa (2006) and La Teta asustada (2009), this article discusses two distinctive film geographies. A comparison of radically different systems of spatial organization among these films suggests that their distinct images can be understood as two visual and ideological approaches to representing social margins. While Chaski's productions contest old social divides by producing horizontal geographies, wherein the viewer can see the migrant's interactions within a relatively balanced and homogenous space, Claudia Llosa's filmmaking practices illustrate long-standing racial differences through the construction of visually vertical geographies inhabited by mad and ill migrants. Both projects represent two different strands in contemporary Peruvian cinema: the films produced under the 1972 cinema law and those produced under the 1993 neoliberal law, which epitomize fracture zones that I call broken geographies. The transition from horizontal to vertical geographies demonstrates deep historical fractures that accompany socio-economic changes affecting filmmaking practices in Peru during the 1980s and 2000s.

Dos “performances” de Magaly Solier: construyendo una imagen cultural

This article analyzes two public appearances of the actress and singer Magaly Solier, early in her career: the Berlinale 2009 Award Ceremony, where the film La teta asustada obtained the most important award; and the interview given to a Peruvian blog while visiting the “Yuyanapaq” photo exhibit. Both are interpreted as the construction of a personal narrative: a young woman, inheritor of the memory of violence caused by the internal armed conflict, who becomes a mediator between her tradition and mass media. The text summarizes chapter four of the thesis entitled “Made in Huanta. Transits and scenarios of Magaly Solier: the construction of a cultural text” (Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, August 2012).

Memory, Trauma, and Phantasmagoria in Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada

The film La teta asustada (Claudia Llosa, 2009) was inspired by the text titled Entre prójimos: El conflicto armado interno y la política de la reconciliación en el Perú by the medical anthropologist Kimberly Theidon. In this study, Theidon compiles the testimonies of a group of indigenous women who were sexually assaulted by members of revolutionary groups and the Peruvian army during a period of intense political and economic turmoil in the country. Llosa reinterprets the essence of the testimonies and the imprint of trauma in the film without depicting explicit violence, but rather through a highly poetic narrative and aesthetics. This study highlights the significance of breast milk in the film, the fear that invades the protagonist’s body, and the use of singing as a catalyst of oppression. Walter Benjamin’s “phantasmagoria” is the central theoretical concept used to examine physical patterns associated with the distress hidden in the individual and collective unconscious. The potato plant, the arid landscape, and the old aristocracy relics that carry high metaphorical signification are discussed using this theoretical framework, while also emphasizing the effectiveness of Llosa’s visual subtleness in depicting the essence of trauma as a shocking consequence of violence against civilians in a state of war.

Cultural Identity in Claudia Llosa’s The milk of sorrow

Abstract Focusing on the main character Fausta in the film The milk of sorrow / La teta asustada by Claudia Llosa, this article applies a narratological and postcolonial queer analysis to the process of Fausta’s identity creation to reveal in the text certain cultural identity negotiations. It is suggested that by means of the representation of cultural identity, a critique is posed to the current (un)balance of power that is directly relatable to coloniality. The study concludes that cultural identity is based on character(s)-construction and their relation to chronotopes, i.e. representations of temporal and spatial categories or ‘time-space’. It is also suggested that the text questions traditional models of power, although the critique is less potent in parts of the text.

Historical dictionary of South American cinema

The Historical Dictionary of South American Cinema covers the long history of cinema in Portuguese-speaking Brazil and the nine Spanish-speaking countries. These films include Los tres berretines, Prisioneros de la tierra, La balandra Isabel llego esta tarde, La hora de los hornos, El chacal de Nahueltoro, La teta asustada, Abrir puertas y ventanas, El secreto de sus ojos, and NO. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced dictionary entries on directors, producers, performers, films, film studios and genres. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the South American Cinema.

La memoria de la violencia: las consecuencias del conflicto armado contra Sendero Luminoso representadas en una película y dos novelas peruanas

The peculiar situation of violence experienced in Peru of the 1980s and the 1990s shows a society immersed in the trauma, suffering and pain. The literature as well as the film have become a means to reflect the painful experience of the society. The aim of this article is to analyse some of the main characters of the novels: 'La hora azul' (2005) by Alonso Cueto, 'Abril rojo' by Santiago Roncagliolo (2006), and the film: 'La teta asustada' (2009) by Patricia Llosa in order to show the effects of traumatic experiences of the past and an attempt to return to normal life.

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

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’.