Between the "sacred" and the "profane": cultural fantasy in "Madeinusa" by Claudia Llosa

Abstract

Upon initial viewing, Peruvian writer and director Claudia Llosa's 2006 film Madeinusa resembles an indianist fantasy exploiting cultural practices of the Andean highlands. The film elaborates a tense artistic vision in which an Odysseus-like Lime?o is drawn into the fictionalized Holy Week practices of an Andean village in which God cannot see human sin between the time of Jesus' death on Good Friday and his resurrection Easter Sunday. The film's eponymous heroine's own cultural escapism is achieved through a Penelope-esque patience whereby she elaborates symbols that guard her imagined route to cosmopolitan consumerism and femininity, a route that seeks to replicate her mother's escape to Lima some years prior to the action of the film. Main character Madeinusa's (Magaly Solier) song is shown to attract and cast a spell upon the Lime?o visitor, Salvador (Carlos de la Torre), who will end up becoming both her talisman and scapegoat for a flight from a village marked by magic, incest, and alcoholism. Close inspection of Madeinusa, however, reveals themes from European myths of the era of Atlantic exploration and images of cultural alterity that have characterized Western perspectives on Andean indigeneity. Themes incorporated into the film include the reification of religious syncretism, the confusion of incomplete modernity, the prevalence of cultural figures such as the siren, the study of ritual use of alcohol and religious symbol-objects {divinidades objeto, Marc Aug?) in the Andes, and the insistent dichotomy between the sacred and the profane.1 Additional topics of importance to this study include the film's reference to postmodern trends examining the urban versus the rural, the global and the local, and the use of the internationalized, hybrid genre of cinema as a free-flowing artistic canvas. The film dramatizes Andean cultural phenomena such as the Mi A. Kroll University of St. Thomas

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