Forms of Freedom in Pablo Larraín’s No and Neruda

Abstract

For nearly forty years, freedom in Latin American literature has been tied to liberal democracy and state-sponsored terror. Literature, according to this post-dictatorial project, eliminates the division between art and life on behalf of democratic freedom and against human rights violations. What this project ignores is that the dictatorships’ objective was to eliminate all resistance to the market. Or as Eduardo Galeano notes, “People were in prison so that prices could be free.” This essay suggests that Pablo Larraín’s No (2012) and Neruda (2016) begin to challenge the conception of freedom in relation to democracy and dictatorship by insisting that democracy and dictatorship be understood instead in relation to the market. That is, the true force of these two films is found in their insistence on aesthetic form, or what Larraín calls an “illusion,” an illusion that not only rejects the indistinction between art and commodities, but also gestures toward a space of freedom beyond neoliberalism.