Filming the Chilean Plebiscite: Trauma and Resistance in Pablo Larraín’s No

The Visual Politics Strategic Research Program invites you to a seminar with Marguerite La Caze. Marguerite’s publications include Ethical Restoration after Communal Violence (2018), Wonder and Generosity (2013), The Analytic Imaginary (2002), Integrity and the Fragile Self, with Damian Cox and Michael Levine (2003), the edited collections Phenomenology and Forgiveness (2018), and Contemporary Perspectives on Vladimir Jankélévitch, with Magdalena Zolkos (forthcoming 2019).
No presents the television campaign for the 1988 plebiscite on whether the Pinochet regime should stay as the government for eight more years (‘Yes’) or hold democratic elections (‘No’). The ‘No’ campaign uses the Aristotelian idea that happiness is an intrinsic value and thus the best concept to galvanise a traumatised nation in favour of change. My paper examines the film’s presentation of how a response to the trauma of the regime becomes transformed into resistance through the idea of a possible future happiness.