Confronting the 'Dirty War' in Argentine Cinema, 1983-1993: Memory and Gender in Historical Representations

Abstract

Over the last three decades the political cinema of Latin America has been extensively documented in English-language criticism, raising the question of why we need to return to this theme in a text on Argentina's ‘Dirty War’ cinema. We might also question the return to a particularly national context when transnationalism and border-crossing have become the more popular trends in recent scholarship. What is immediately apparent is that this book-length study on just one decade in Argentina's cinematic history allows for an attention to detail that is often overlooked in other approaches to Latin American cinema. At times this means that new snippets of information emerge, such as the revelation that famed political filmmaker Fernando Solanas began his career composing jingles and directing commercials (p. 46) or that the Argentine press followed La historia official (Luis Puenzo, 1985) from its preproduction stages through to its exhibition (p. 123). The scope of the text also makes it possible for the introduction to offer an in-depth account of the specific Argentine sociohistorical–political processes that defined both the Dirty War and the move to democracy. Highlighting these factors is a useful move considering that the numerous military crises, and their effect on the cinema of twentieth-century Latin America, are often easily conflated.