After the feel: A conversation about cinema, realism and capitalism

During the first semester of this year, I proposed to a group of students and researchers of the Doctorate in Philosophy with mention in Aesthetics of the University of Chile, where I teach, a seminar on Jim Jarmusch. I called it Still is Cinema. The idea was not to instruct or specialize in Jarmusch, but to open a sustained discussion about his particular cooking -his processes, his knotting, his superimpositions of heterogeneous materials- so that each person could define his own methodology for his thesis and research, of a freer and more experimental nature. What we proposed was the possibility of rethinking poetic and aesthetic forms not as objects of disciplinary knowledge, but as pieces immanent to the research method itself, and with this purpose we dedicated ourselves to reviewing some of the most relevant materials that the filmmaker historically took from when he outlined his unique community of images, voices and texts: the films of Bresson, Ozu, Cassavetes, the experimental images of Jonas Mekas, the paintings of Hopper, the photographs of Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Walker Evans, the soundtracks of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Tom Waits, Neil Young, RZA or Mulato Astatke, the poems of William Blake, Emily Dickinson or William Carlos Williams, the essays of Burroughs, the writings of Carver, the beatnik imaginary, etc. We were about to close the semester when Laura Lattanzi offered us to record and transcribe a conversation for La Fuga Magazine about the figures of cinema and the current miseries of capitalism. Isdanny Morales, Eduardo Simpson, Alejandro Torres, Leonardo Arriagada, César Castillo and I got together, prepared a good meal and had the following conversation.