Networks of South-South Solidarity and Cold War Argentine Filmmaking

Abstract

Argentine filmmaking has since 1983 taken on the role of narrating politicized visions of the country's recent history of dictatorship and human rights repression and of serving as a key site of historical debate for widening communities of intellectuals, activists, and popular audiences, not only in Argentina but around the world. During the Cold War, predominantly independent producers were able to construct complex international networks of solidarity and to shape a transnational public in the service of support for human rights and an end to military violence. This chapter examines the work of filmmakers to renegotiate the political economy of production as a means of claiming agency and presenting challenging counternarratives to that of the Argentine state. Filmmakers used the transnational circulation of their film to mobilize not only ideas but also labor into a powerful South-South transnational organizing space. The transit of these films brought a new form of awareness of Cold War dynamics, which made its way into new film work from the late 1990s onward. The chapter also considers the convergences within spaces in which films were viewed and critiqued, networks of collaborative production, and the sites of film study, within which filmmakers encountered critical theoretical consideration of neoliberalism and imperialism. It responds to the larger question of how creative communities assert ideological viewpoints and disseminate understandings, and it argues for the crucial need to examine the relationship between ideas about transnational solidarity with the “global south” as embedded in artistic movements in action and the trans-local political and social patterns they encourage.