Blanco en blanco/White on White (Court 2019): The viewer, the pleasure and the ominous in the focal point1

Through the analysis of Blanco en blanco/ White on White, this article examines both the cinematographic gaze and photographic practice in relation to an oppression of the female body and the extermination of the Indigenous communities of Tierra del Fuego (1880–1910). Blanco en blanco integrates ethics and aesthetics to question the (passive) gaze of the audience and to denounce the role of the photographic practice in the violent construction of accounts about the Republic of Chile. This deconstructionist approach sets up a debate about cinematographic spectatorship, photographic montage and historical discourse as montage.