#  The Chinese Shoe (El zapato chino) 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **September 25, 2023** 

 07:00PM - 07:00PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy Street**  



 

 



 

 Directed by Cristián Sánchez  
With Felisa González, Andrés Quintana, Fernando Andía  
Chile, 1979, DCP, black & white, 72 min  
Spanish with English subtitles  
DCP source: Cineteca Nacional de Chile

 Shot clandestinely on a shoestring budget, the second feature by prolific filmmaker and theorist Cristián Sánchez bears an uncanny, yet ultimately only vague, resemblance to *Taxi Driver* (1976) with its story of a cabbie who spontaneously rescues a young woman from a brothel only to develop an obsessive yet platonic love for her. By keeping all violence and sexuality deliberately off-screen Sánchez, however, shapes his film as a darkly absurdist fable of desire anxiously displaced and never realized. Making radical use of voiceover to fracture time and grant an interiority to characters that often seem impervious to conventional reason, Sánchez channels the spirit of Buñuel and Kafka to animate *The Chinese Shoe* with a sense of inertia that renders vivid and strange the paranoia and fear of life under dictatorship. The furtive qualities of Sánchez’s characters and narrative are given a further charge by the film’s documentary yet unreal images of Santiago as a hauntingly empty city, not unlike Atget’s photographs of Paris described by Walter Benjamin as having the uncanny aura of a crime scene.

 This screening is part of [Chile Año Cero / Chile Year Zero](https://harvardfilmarchive.org/programs/chile-ano-cero-chile-year-zero)

 *Special thanks: Haden Guest, Director, Harvard Film Archive*

 *Presented in collaboration with [Harvard Film Archive](https://harvardfilmarchive.org/)*



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Cambridge ](/locations/cambridge-office)
- [ Art, Film, & Culture ](/programs-initiatives/art-film-culture)
- [ Film Series ](/programs-initiatives/film-series)
 
 

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