Led by Judy Werthein and Eduardo Abaroa

Each instructor selected a few texts and chose one film.

Judy Werthein chose extracts from Severo Sarduy and the film F for Fake by Orson Welles. Eduardo Abaroa chose the texts On Violence by Hannah Arendt, the short story The Door and the Pine by Robert Louis Stevenson and the film Funny Games by Michael Haneke.

The clinic addressed the themes of the simulacrum and violence in the formation of masculine identity through films and texts.

Werthein was interested in the simulacrum, and the figures of the falsifier, the avant garde artist (Picasso) and the filmmaker as such (in the figure of Welles). Individual personality was diluted in a game of constant mirroring between original and falsification, between a concrete person and his legend, and between the artifice of cinematic narrative and montage. Sarduy’s texts added a peculiar consonance to the film, since they addressed themes such as miming, cross-dressing, tattooing and body paint, among others.

In Abaroa’s case, the selection had to do with the use of the simulacrum as an element of power, and specifically of masculine power; whence Arendt’s critique of Fanon’s radical violence and the subtle, homicidal contraption in Stevenson’s tale. Haneke’s film analyzed intense violence through the banal simulacrum and repetition as a counterpoint to the violence of slasher films in their function as an expression of masculine fantasies of domination and destruction.

The participants also broadly discussed the presentations at SITAC and the intense controversies that emerged around the representation of gender violence. Discussion was at times impassioned, though Judy’s departure took away some of the impulse that characterized the earlier sessions of the clinic.