ABSTRACT
This essay is driven by the emergence (or reemergence) of water as an important register for conflict worldwide and the resulting problematization of what we might call, following Jacques Ranciére, the sense (a regime of meaning) and sense (a mode of sensory presentation) of water. In particular, the question is what it means to think about how visual media comes to present, stabilize, abstract or contain water in its different forms (either water-as-water or water embodied in river, rain or oceans) given that films, both fictional and documentary, have been one of the principle means through which conflicts over water have been registered and circulated in Latin America. Three of the films analyzed are shaped by a neo-extractivist vs. counter-extractivist polarization (Icair Bollín’s Even the Rain (2010), Abuela grillo (2009), Carolina Caycedo’s Land of Friends (2014)) whereas the fourth, Paz Encina’s Viento Sur (2012), falls outside this paradigm.
