Massimiliano Coviello and Francesco Zucconi

Soggetti alla violenza. Post mortem di Pablo Larraín.

Abstract

The possibility to build a subject who, exposed to violence, adjusts himself to respect the dictatorial regime is the paper’s key to the interpretation of Post Mortem (2010), the second part of Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s trilogy, dedicated to the story of the dictatorial regime in his country. The events occurred in 1973, the year of the coup d’état carried out by General Augusto Pinochet. The protagonist of the story is Mario, a civil servant in charge of transcribing and typing autopsy reports. By witnessing the daily exercise of violence, Mario fully internalizes the practice of violence since he does nothing but simply recording what happens. Following the civil servant in the performance of his routine, the paper analyzes the strategies with which the movie provides the spectator with the dictatorial regime’s main forms of subjection.