ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the place-making tactics deployed by a series of contemporary films from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. It explores a series of larger questions about how film as a medium has contributed to place-making, as well as the limits of that process. The very notion of "Latin American cinema" is predicated on a territorial imagination, one that implies not just a shared geography of production—a complex of national and regional territories from which this cinema harks—but also one that is being mapped out, surveyed, and inhabited by the moving image: a territory into which it invites its spectators. The chapter also explores the notions of architecture and landscape as concepts that allow us to think about two different modes—sometimes antagonistic, sometimes complementary—of "plotting" screen space. It focuses on how films lay claim to a place by way of constructing it through modes of framing and editing.
