This thesis explores representations of landscape in Chilean fiction cinema from 2008 to 2014, through a corpus drawn from the so-called novisimo cine chileno, a generation of young filmmakers who have attracted significant critical attention both within Chile and on international festival and arthouse circuits. The thesis is built on close readings of the selected films within a conceptual framework informed by interdisciplinary perspectives from the developing field of landscape studies. It aims to show how these cinematic landscapes function beyond the limitations of narrative setting or symbolic imagery and are instead represented in ways which capture landscape's processual, experiential and polysemic nature, which in turn throws light on landscape as an approach to a wide range of thematic concerns within these films. It begins by placing the selected corpus within a broader cultural history of the Chilean landscape and maps out the conceptual framework which will be applied and developed through the thesis, considering landscape as experience and process, as well as image. The thesis then sets out the foundations for the thesis' close readings by demonstrating how such a conceptual approach can reveal the inherent tensions of film landscapes - between being inside and outside, contemplation and immersion, proximity and distance - and can also uncover the multisensory and embodied aspects of landscapes on screen, with particular attention to the roles of sound and haptic imagery. In the remainder of the thesis, this approach to landscape is developed through further close analysis of selected films in order to demonstrate how landscape functions in relation to certain thematic concerns - what contact between body and landscape reveals about materiality and mortality, how the cinematic landscape both invites and resists its framing as territory, and how film as a medium has a particular capacity to evoke the multiple temporalities at work within landscape. As a whole, the thesis works to illuminate the aesthetic, formal, narrative and thematic functions of landscape in the chosen films and argues for the usefulness of interdisciplinary conceptual approaches in the study of cinematic landscapes in order to reach a more nuanced understanding of film's representation of the relation of people and place.

Entre 1939 et 1973, le cinéma chilien a tenté au moins deux modèles de développement : dans les années quarante, on a essayé d’industrialiser l’activité cinématographique avec la création de studios, entre autres, tandis que dans les années soixante et soixante-dix, on a tenté de produire un cinéma artistique et révolutionnaire. Le passage d’un cinéma à un autre a eu lieu grâce à une transition de quinze ans lors de laquelle les cinéastes et individus liés au cinéma ont réinventé les concepts et les pratiques cinématographiques. La trajectoire que le cinéma chilien a tracé pendant ces années-là est le sujet de cette thèse, qui tente de comprendre et de considérer toute la complexité de ce parcours particulier, tendu entre plusieurs pôles, qu’il s’agissent de demandes, de besoins, de problèmes et de désirs, tant économiques, que politiques, artistiques, techniques et culturels. / Between 1939 and 1973 Chilean cinema attempted at least two models of development: during the 1940s it tried to industrialize cinematographic activity through, amongst other things, the creation of studios, while in the 1960s and 1970s the efforts were placed on the production of artistic and revolutionary cinema. The advancement from one cinema to the other took place thanks to a 15-year transition during which film-makers and people tied to cinema reinvented the cinematographic concepts and practices. The trajectory traced by Chilean cinema during those years is the theme of this thesis, whose focus seeks to understand and consider all the complexity of this particular process, tensioned by various poles, demands, necessities, problems and desires, as much economic as political, artistic, technical and cultural.

Le cinéma de l'Argentine, le Chili et la Colombie entre 1990 et 2005 a dû faire face à divers changements liés aux modèles politique, économique et culturel. En particulier, les lois relatives à la production du cinéma ont changées dans les années ci-dessous, ce qui a permet de configurer un cinéma hétérogène par rapport aux thèmes et moyens de raconter. Dans cette thèse, nous nous proposons d’étudier un phénomène particulier situé temporellement dans un moment de transition et envisagé à travers un corpus clairement sélectionné. Le dit phénomène se présente à travers la relation que le cinéma entretient avec la réalité, relation qui, à cette époque, se caractérise par une grande ambigüité. Il s’agit principalement d’un élargissement des frontières de classifications des productions en vertu de sa relation avec la réalité qui, traditionnellement fut séparée en deux grands groupes définis comme fiction et non fiction. Pour cette raison, nous avons développés un cadre théorique autour du réalisme comme une catégorie d'analyse du corpus. Aussi, nous avons fait une analyse basée sur les approches des Études Culturelles d'Amérique Latine, l’Analyse Critique du Discours et l'Analyse de Cinéma. Notre travail a été de systématiser et de mettre en relation les processus qui ont permis la consolidation du cinéma contemporain d'Amérique Latine. Également, nous avons confirmés le besoin de contextualiser et de nourrir l'analyse de film avec la connaissance de l'histoire sociale, politique et économique comme une condition pour 'interpréter et analyser le récit de l'Amérique Latine. / Argentine, Chilean and Colombian Cinema of the period between1990-2005 had to face several changes related to political, economic and cultural models. In particular, laws related to film production changed over the years, allowing the configuration of a heterogeneous cinematography regarding its topics and ways of narrating. The main problem of this research is studying the relationship between cinema and reality and how the strategies of construction of fiction and nonfiction narratives are put into tension during the period above mentioned. For this reason, we developed a theoretical framework around the realism as a category to get an approach to the corpus. Additionally, we carried out an analysis of our corpus based on the Latin American Cultural Studies, Critical Discourse Analysis and Film Analysis approaches. We systematized and correlated the processes that have allowed contemporary Latin American films to consolidate as a reference. In this project, we have been able to confirm the need to contextualize and nourish film analysis using knowledge of the social, political and economic history as a condition to interpret and study Latin American Narratives.