Melodrama and (re)enactment of trauma: the role of songs and childhood in Retratos en un mar de mentiras (Colombia, 2010)

Dufays, Sophie
(2017) ACLA Conference Annual Meeting (Panel; Minors, Melodrama and Trauma in Contemporary Hispanic Film) — Location: Utrecht University (6.July.2017)

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  • Dufays, SophieUCLouvain
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Abstract
This presentation discusses the use of melodrama as a space for the re-enactment of (individual as well as collective) trauma in the Colombian film Retratos en un mar de mentiras / Portraits In A Sea Of Lies (Carlos Gaviria 2010). This film employs melodrama along with other genres or modes to tell the story of a melancholic and apparently mute young woman (Mariana) who has been traumatized as a child and who, as an adult, will progressively recover her (childhood’s) memories and her voice in the course of a journey through the country, until a highly melodramatic scene of reenactment. I focus on three interrelated melodramatic ingredients: the strategies to show the presence of the past in the present (the flashbacks from Mariana’s childhood and her visions of dead people), the child figure as an allegory of a traumatic memory, and the functioning of diegetic and extradiegetic songs and music as a mental space which is both intimate and collective.
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Dufays, S. (2017). Melodrama and (re)enactment of trauma: the role of songs and childhood in Retratos en un mar de mentiras (Colombia, 2010). ACLA Conference Annual Meeting (Panel; Minors, Melodrama and Trauma in Contemporary Hispanic Film), Utrecht University. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/178321