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This entry is a work of videographic criticism. The object on which the video is based is a masterwork of the New Latin American Cinema, El Chacal de Nahueltoro/ The Jackal of Nahuletoro (Miguel Líttin, Chile, 1969). While little known in the Anglo-American context, it is one of the greatest political films about law, crime, criminal justice institutions ever made. It is based on a real story about a desperately impoverished man who kills a desperately immiserated woman and her five children and is then sent to a rehabilitative prison only to receive the death penalty in the end. The film is a kind of bilbungsroman, and has a very complex narrative structure, as the plot shuffles the story chronology through the use of flashforwards and flashbacks, sonic and visual.
Besides being a critical treatment of a single film, my experimental video essay explores both the formal problem of how to broach narrative in a short-form like the video essay and it raises some fundamental questions about law and morality.
Directed by Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky (USA)