ABSTRACT
As a formative infl uence on the dissemination of the snuff movie legend from the mid-1970s on, Snuff (Michael Findlay, Roberta Findlay, 1976) continues to have an afterlife in excess of its textual properties. The unusual circumstances surrounding the fi lm’s production, reputation, and cultural legacy have been widely reported: Johnson and Schaefer (1993), Kerekes and Slater (1993), and Petley (2000) are all informative sources. The majority of accounts deal with Snuff’s signifi cance in debates about media violence, pornography, and censorship. Most quote the infamous advertising tagline, used in American and British campaigns and still used on the currently widely available DVD: “the fi lm that could only be made in South America-where life is CHEAP!” Few discuss how ‘South America’ functions here. This essay looks at how competing notions of ‘South America’ operate in the fi lm and in the discourse around it. I argue that while many of the fi lm’s constructions of the region in which it is set manifest a ‘neocolonialist’ point of view, they by no means do so uniformly or without internal contradiction. Certain images of place and space, for example, are sited within a sometimes perplexing geography that resists containment by ‘Latin American’ stereotypes. I also suggest that the fi nancially led decision to transplant a ‘North American’ story to Latin American soil-along with the rough-and-ready assemblage of this “exquisite corpse exercise in fi lmmaking” (Hawkins, 2000a: 136)—creates textual ruptures and tensions which menace the binary model of the colonizer’s hegemonic vision pitched against, and successfully silencing, the subaltern Other. Many aspects of Snuff and its marketing practices clearly invite this model, but it does not go unchallenged in the fi lm.
