The Latin-American Hyper-Violence Aesthetic towards Cinema Lumpen Noir

Abstract

In the corpus of what we consider Contemporary Latin-American Cinema, a major group of films have focused on showing the Latin American world of crime, for example, La virgen de los sicarios (1999), Amores perros (2000), or Cidade de Deus (2002). In the 1990s, this film productions had an intense acceleration, in line with the recent process of neoliberal capitalist modernization. In general, this phenomenon has been researched in the intersection between society and cinema, i.e. how the movies reflect the criminalization process of the Latin American popular subject and the Latin American socio-economic transformations, for example, in the works of Christian León or Andrés Vélez Cuervo. However, this article questions the films from their aesthetic dimension, to prove how these works have created their own Latin-American cinema genre, in dialogue with social cinema of the so called New Latin-American Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s.