Dump Reflexes: María Luisa Bombal and cinema

Abstract

This work parts from the notion of a pictorial turn, generated especially by cinema, and which is intensely reflected in literary discourse during the first half of 20th century. In a first step, the text examines the incursion of Chilean writer María Luisa Bombal in cinema as critic and scriptwriter when she lived in Buenos Aires and when she used to go to the movies with Borges. In a second step, the reflexes of cinema in the two novels, La última niebla (1935) and La amortajada (1938), will be analyzed: the construction of space and time in relation to the sceneries, according to the spectrality of cinematic structure; the presence of reflecting surfaces like screens and mirrors in the texts and their relevance for the creation of situations and textual figures; the construction of characters according to patterns of the star system of silent movies; and, finally, the relation between death and cinema, especially relevant in La amortajada.