Jorge Acha: A Cinema of the Scream

Abstract

The production of Jorge Acha allows us to investigate the artistic field of recent history in Argentina, emphasizing what is strictly cinematic, always associated to the social field, concurrently, it is possible to notice a large and substantial break with the classical and hegemonic forms of representation.
In the work that follows, we will try to approach Hábeas Corpus, his first feature film, and consequently glimpse one of the most radical breaks with the cinema that preceded, went through and came after: his interest in visualizing and representing the body of an individual during the last military dictatorship. It is a rupture that emerges from a previous break, connected with the forms of visualizing and represent the horror. Hábeas Corpus is the story of a waiting. It is the story of everything that happens inside the body of a man who expects the death that approaches imminently. Acha places the eye in the body of a man and through that body -illustrative of other thirty thousand- expresses one of the darkest pages of our contemporary history (1976-1983).
The work presented here is crossed by issues emerging from two large studies of Gilles Deleuze -Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation and How do you make yourself a body without organs- co-authored with Felix Guattari, allowing an approach solely focused on visualization and representation of the body in Hábeas Corpus.