Contemporary Argentine Cinema Research Articles

Ideological fan-tasy: desire and drive in football fanship representations in contemporary Argentine cinema

Ideological fan-tasy: desire and drive in football fanship representations in contemporary Argentine cinema

Vohnsen, Mirna (2019) Portrayals of Jews in Contemporary Argentine Cinema: Rethinking Argentinidad, Tamesis (Woodbridge), xi + 193 pp. $99.00 hbk.

Vohnsen, Mirna (2019) Portrayals of Jews in Contemporary Argentine Cinema: Rethinking Argentinidad, Tamesis (Woodbridge), xi + 193 pp. $99.00 hbk.

The Sexual Politics of Beauty: Reflections on Contemporary Argentine Cinema

A sketch of the imagery of feminine beauty in contemporary Argentine cinema focusing on the history of regional beauty pageants, the way bodies are displayed, and the critique of conventional aesthetic parameters contributes to a comparative analysis of the documentaries La reina (2013), by Manuel Abramovich, and La más bella niña (2004), by Mariano Llinás, which demonstrate new approaches to old questions about the sexual politics of beauty. Un esbozo de la historia de los certámenes regionales, las condiciones de visibilidad de los cuerpos y la crítica de los parámetros estéticos convencionales contribuye a un análisis comparativo de los documentales La Reina (2013), de Manuel Abramovich, y La más bella niña (2004), de Mariano Llinás, que demuestran nuevas derivas para enfocar viejas preguntas alrededor de la política sexual de la belleza.

La poética de Pablo Trapero: impotencia, catábasis y corrosión de la ley

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar algunos rasgos de la poética de Pablo Trapero, uno de los directores más relevantes y prolíficos del cine argentino contemporáneo. Para eso se recorta un corpus de cuatro films –El bonaerense (2002), Leonera (2008), Carancho (2010) y El clan (2015)–, representativos de distintas etapas de su filmografía. El estudio apela a una perspectiva autoral, conciliándola con una lectura sociológica de los films. El análisis de la poética autoral de Trapero se despliega en función de tres ejes: la construcción de los personajes, la configuración diegética del hogar familiar y la emergencia de un diagnóstico sobre lo social signado por la corrosión de la ley y la normalización de la transgresión en la Argentina post crisis de 2001. El abordaje autoral aporta a la comprensión del llamado “Nuevo Cine Argentino” y del devenir industrial de algunos de sus representantes, entre quienes Trapero ocupa un lugar destacado.

MIRNA VOHNSEN, Portrayals of Jews in Contemporary Argentine Cinema: Rethinking Argentinidad. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2019

MIRNA VOHNSEN, Portrayals of Jews in Contemporary Argentine Cinema: Rethinking Argentinidad. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2019

Politics of Architecture in Contemporary Argentine Cinema by Amanda Holmes

Reviewed by: Politics of Architecture in Contemporary Argentine Cinema by Amanda Holmes Paul Merchant Holmes, Amanda. Politics of Architecture in Contemporary Argentine Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 162 pp. ISBN: 978-3-319-55191-3. In this study of the political role played by architecture in six Argentine fiction films, Amanda Holmes contends that “[i]n Argentine cinema since the mid-1990s, architecture has become a political signifier of contemporary socioeconomic conditions” (2). After this point in Argentine history, Holmes argues, architecture on film largely abandons representational or symbolic functions, but rather evokes political and nostalgic memories, marks economic marginalization, and explores the possibility of community in an increasingly fragmented urban context. The book makes a persuasive case for its focus on politics and architecture as a means of elucidating the social significance of the works studied. It is surprising, therefore, that there is no fuller consideration of the changing relations between Argentine cinema, society and the state in the period covered, or of the circulation of the films themselves. There are hints of this in the discussion of media landscapes in Chapter 6, but it could have been productively extended into other areas of the analysis. The films selected cover a range of genres and geographical locations, from Buenos Aires to Salta and Patagonia: Pizza, birra, faso (Caetano and Stagnaro 1997), Mundo grúa (Trapero 1999), Nueve reinas (Bielinsky 2000), La niña santa (Martel 2004), La antena (Sapir 2007), and El hombre de al lado (Cohn and Duprat 2009). This selection allows the author to address topics including the intersection of architecture and the media, class divisions, and globalization. There is, however, relatively little consideration of relations between these films, either in the introduction or in the main chapters: it is strange, for example, that the shared interested in hotel spaces in Nueve reinas and La niña santa is not addressed more fully. A reader might also wonder, given the book’s stated aim of addressing “contemporary” Argentine cinema, why the corpus reaches only 2009, and consists in large part of films that have already garnered significant critical attention. Briefer reference is made to other works, including Buenos Aires vice versa (Agresti 1996) and Medianeras (Taretto 2011), but one is nonetheless left with the impression that a different selection of material might have strengthened the book’s principal arguments. It is surprising, given the importance of gated communities in the framing of the arguments in the introduction and conclusion, that cinematic representations of these are not dealt with more fully. The analysis makes good use of historical detail (for instance in its evocation of the past of the Hotel Termas in Salta in Chapter 5, and the discussion of the Obelisco in Chapter 2). This information grounds the close readings of the films, which [End Page 176] are attentive to formal detail and make original observations. The book draws on a range of critical writing concerning the relationship between film and architecture, with the evocation of Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin in the discussion of Nueve reinas (Chapter 4) being particularly effective. The author’s relationship to existing critical writing on Argentine cinema of this period is somewhat less productive: the analysis draws quite heavily on existing readings, especially those of Joanna Page (Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema, 2009), and does not always make clear how these are being built upon or contested. The clarity of the author’s argument is, at times, hampered by awkward expression: take, for example, the statement that films such as Los rubios (Carri 2003) and Bar El Chino (Burak 2003) are “characterized” by “distinctions between documentary and fiction” (5), when it is rather a blurring of the boundary between these categories that emerges most strongly in the films cited. There is, nonetheless, considerable value in the book’s conclusion that architecture in films from this period points towards new forms of community, family, and social interaction, which resonates with James Scorer’s discussion of inclusive urban futures in Argentine culture (City in Common, 2016). Holmes’s book will be of use to students of Argentine culture and Latin American cinema, especially for its integration of historical architectural detail. Its conclusions...

Portrayals of Jews in Contemporary Argentine Cinema: Re-thinking argentinidad by Mirna Vohnsen

Vohnsen, Mirna.Portrayals of Jews in Contemporary Argentine Cinema: Re-thinking argentinidad. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2019. 193 pp.

Self-referentiality and neoliberalism in contemporary Argentine cinema

ABSTRACTThis chapter examines ways in which filmmaking becomes a self-referential theme in Argentine films in the neoliberal era. Three films will be referred to: Adolfo Aristarain’s Martín (hache) from 1997; Daniel Burak’s Bar El Chino from 2003, and Alejo Flah’s Sexo fácil, películas tristes from 2014. These films all depict the making of international film co-productions primarily between Argentina and Spain and are explicitly concerned with the figure of the Argentine filmmaker, who in the process of filmmaking experiences neoliberalism from the margins of the world economy and more often than not succumbs to its international demands. This body of films criticizes while simultaneously testifying to neoliberal filmmaking practices of the last two decades. The films thus raise meta-critical questions about both their cinematic context and the prevailing economic system in contemporary Argentina to which they belong.

Panorama de los estudios sobre cine argentino contemporáneo

El objetivo de este artículo es abordar algunas discusiones que atraviesan la bibliografía sobre el cine argentino contemporáneo con base en un recorrido por los principales estudios sobre el tema. En primer lugar, se reconoce la influencia de la crítica cinematográfica en los abordajes académicos sobre el cine argentino reciente. Luego, se aborda el vínculo entre el Nuevo Cine Argentino y la crisis de 2001 y se presentan algunos ejes de debate en relación con este corpus fílmico: el abandono de la alegoría, la reconfiguración de la dimensión política, las distintas concepciones del realismo y el retorno de lo real, entre otros.

Private Narratives and Infant Views: Iconizing 1970s Militancy in Contemporary Argentine Cinema

This article analyses the connections between the subjective turn in the representation of militancy, iconicity, and historical examination in Infancia clandestina, a recent Argentine film that portrays the 1970s armed struggle through a child’s lens. Breaking with the leading interpretation that praises the movie because of its original exposition of left-leaning violence, I contend that this coming-of-age story fits within a version of militancy that originated in the mid-1990s and that has become quite common since the advent of the Kirchner administration in 2003. This particular version relies on a privatized and archaic image of activism that is at the core of the global iconization of 1970s militancy. An analysis of the filmic use of an infant perspective and of anime-style cartoons illuminates how contemporary Argentine cinema both registers and participates in this iconizing process.

Modern Argentine Masculinities ed. by Carolina Rocha (review)

Reviewed by: Modern Argentine Masculinities ed. by Carolina Rocha Patrick O’Connor Rocha, Carolina, ed. Modern Argentine Masculinities. Bristol: Intellect, 2013. 299 pp. Carolina Rocha’s sociological approach to literature and film has been immensely productive for her: in the last seven years she has published her own book Masculinities in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (Palgrave, 2012), and no less than five edited or co-edited anthologies. This most recent collection definitely shows her own shaping hand. Less obviously, it is an intervention on the conflictive field of Argentine identity. The book’s introduction argues that the question of Argentine masculinity is relatively untouched territory, perhaps with the exception of Eduardo Archetti’s 1999 book on early twentieth-century masculine models in tango, soccer, and polo. Rocha cites heavily Australian sociologist R. W. Connell’s work on masculinities [End Page 608] since 1995, and seems to have encouraged her other contributors to do so, in part because Connell’s work emphasizes plural and conflictive ideas about manhood within “hegemonic masculinities,” but also, one suspects, because Connell’s work argues that traditional masculinity has undergone further shifts in the last thirty years due to neoliberalism. None of the sixteen essays is bad, and some are terrific. Of the ones covering the early twentieth century, Pablo Ben’s brief piece questioning the “Mediterranean” model of homo/hetero relations is perhaps the liveliest: through examination of court cases, bathroom graffiti, and dirty poems of the pre-1920 world, Ben calls into question the idea that active and passive roles in gay sex would have defined the active male as masculine. Most of the other authors of these essays take their material from loftier cultural productions. And yet not too lofty: as the essays march from nineteenth-century statesman poets through Arlt, then Quiroga, then Peronist film melodramas, the reader may notice the absence of Florida and the Sur intellectuals, from Rojas and Girondo, through Borges and Bioy, through Cortázar and Bianco. Of course, one can’t cover everybody, but the book’s introduction gives space to those topics that Rocha feels have been covered well by others—work on the compadrito or the tango singer—with the result that all upper-class masculinities disappear in these chapters. Rocha thus seems to be equating Argentine identity with mid-century Peronism, the working-class movement brought into the middle class but devastated by the military junta of the seventies and by deindustrialization; it is this “modern” Argentine masculinity that the book as a whole focuses on. Within this self-limitation, the essays cover ground not always part of an Argentine cultural historian’s purview. Currie Thompson notes the irony that the cult of sacrificial heroism in military film melodramas was invoked but not actually practiced by the various military governments that funded these propaganda films; correspondingly, Erin Redmond reads Puig’s thoroughly ironic take on Perón-era machismo in La traición de Rita Hayworth. Rocha mentioned in her introduction the next lacuna in the book’s range: she remarked that gender roles loosened in the sixties except among Argentina’s guerrilla groups, which “followed Peronism’s traditional gender-role doctrine” (7); the chapters leap over these years. In any case, Rocha’s greatest interest is in Argentina’s neoliberal turn, imposed by Menem and only fitfully undone by the Kirchners. Masculinity in the age of neoliberalism tends to combine the reality (or identity) of the loser, and the practices (or the identity) of the criminal. Nicolas Poppe studies the delinquents of disaffected youth culture in the new Argentine cinema: aggrieved masculinity results from the loss of working class options and values, and is performed within the gangs of Pizza, birra, faso (among other films). Viviana Plotnik’s essay reads father-son conflicts in three films where the “loser” son rejects the successful upper-class father who has adopted neoliberal internationalism; the sons accept the loser identity as a more authentic Argentinity than the father’s model. Assen Kokalov returns to criminality, in his reading of Piglia’s Plata quemada and Piñeyro’s film adaptation, marking the homophobia of the novel’s 1963 moment and the questioning of it in the 1990s novel...

New Argentine and Brazilian cinema: reality effects

1. Camera lucida Jose Carlos Avellar 2. Footprints: Risks and Achievements in New Argentine Cinema David Oubina PART I: RETURNS OF THE REAL: RE-ENACTMENT, MEMORY, AND THE UNCANNY 3. Documentary Cinema and the Return of Past Events Andrea Franca 4. Re-Enactment and Transmission in Contemporary Cinema Ivone Margulies 5. The Return of the Natural: Landscape, Nature and the Place of Fiction Edgardo Dieleke 6. Beyond Reflexivity: Acting and Experience in Leon, Rejtman and Coutinho Joanna Page 7. The Scene and the Inscription of the Real Cesar Guimaraes PART II: ARCHIVES OF THE PRESENT 8. Global Periphery Ivana Bentes 9. Exploding Buses: Jose Padilha and the Hijacking of Media Tom Cohen 10. December's Other Scene: New Argentine Cinema and the Crisis of 2001 Jens Andermann 11. Archival Images - Memories of Labor: Citation, Recycling and Appropriation in Contemporary Argentine Cinema Mariano Mestman 12. In Praise of Difficulty: Notes on Realism and Narrative in Contemporary Argentine Film Domin Choi 13. The I as Other: the Real, the Archive and the Witness Alvaro Fernandez Bravo 14. The Documentary Between the First and the Third PersonL Gonzalo Aguilar

Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema - written by Joanna Page, Durham-London: Duke University Press, 2009

Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema - written by Joanna Page, Durham-London: Duke University Press, 2009

Toronto International Film Festival 2011

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2011 Programming for TIFF's 36th edition (8-18 September 2011) was suitably taut and continued its pragmatic fixation on politically dominant cinemas, but the routine also allowed some room for bold selections, notably in the inclusion of Mark Cousins' epic 15-hour documentary, The Story of Film: An Odyssey, along with Lav Diaz's challenging 6-hour drama, Century of Birthing. In its third year, the 'City to City' section looked to Buenos Aires and premiered ten new titles to highlight the vigour of contemporary Argentine cinema. And although Toronto rashly abandoned its short-lived Southeast Asian section some years ago, it was ironic that Southeast Asia enjoyed its best presence ever at the festival. For the first time by sheer coincidence, the event's extensive line-up berthed at least one representative film from (or about) the region's largest states: Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam....

Joanna Page. Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema

Joanna Page. <i>Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema</i>

Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (review)

Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (review)

Las Formas Políticas del Cine Argentino: Montajes, Disrupciones y Estéticas de una Tradición

El articulo indaga y analiza las formas politicas del cine argentino desde los anos sesenta a la actualidad, pero centrandose especialmente en el cine argentino contemporaneo (1995-2010). Se propone hablar de «formas politicas» y no de «cine politico» como ejercicio para pensar la politica y la estetica en sus relaciones inmanentes. Asi, establece tres periodos: los anos sesenta y setenta como la irrupcion de la politica en el cine; los anos ochenta como el desplazamiento de la politica por la denuncia moral y los anos noventa y post 2001 como un retorno de lo sensible o como el advenimiento de las «politicas de lo sensible». Asi, se indaga en las formas politicas del cine y conjuntamente se interroga el dispositivo de representacion estetica de la cinematografia.

El imaginario literario argentino sobre el mítico Sur en el road movie patagónico

This is an analysis of the many ways in which contemporary Argentine cinema appropriates literary elements, in particular the representation of the South as a motif. In this regard, road movies related to New Argentine Cinema visit travel narratives by twenty-first-century English travelers, literature of the Pampa, French novels imported to Argentina at the beginning of the twentieth century, and, of course, Jorge Luis Borges's literature as well as his deconstruction of that literary tradition. The extensive motif of the South in Argentine literature informs the films to ratify an imaginary in which the Pampa and Patagonia are geographical zones that encompass a mythical and remote landscape.

Crisis and capitalism in contemporary Argentine cinema

Sobre Page, Joanna. Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema . Durham, North Carolina, EEUU, Duke University Press, 2009 Palabras clave : resena, Joanna Page, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema

Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (review)

Reviewed by: Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema Graciela Michelotti Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema. Duke University Press, 2009. By Joanna Page. Joanna Page starts her excellent overview of contemporary Argentine cinema with the following quote from Gilles Deleuze: "Money is the obverse of all the images that the cinema shows and sets in place, so that films about money are already, if implicitly, films within the film or about the film." These words set the stage for a careful and intelligent analysis of Page's book main subject: films "about money" (and its dematerialization), produced in Argentina after the economical crisis that saw its climax in December 2001. In her introduction Page adjudicates the presence of big numbers of films in the years surrendering the crisis not only as a marker of a new cultural and political material and the imperative to find new techniques to reflect it, but also as a result of the implementation of the Cinema Law (1995), "the revival of international film festivals," "the explosion of new film schools" and "the rise in film criticism." Page concentrates on what each film analyzed in her study says about this historical moment while contrasting it with films from previous periods and with what the international markets expect of Third World Cinema. Particularly "... in an era in which culture and politics are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish" (7) this book offers a dual vision of Argentine films of the '80s, '90s and early twenty-first century from an international perspective at the same time that does not lose sight of the continued importance of the national framework in which these films are positioned. The films, Page would argue, produce a reaction to the crisis and, at the same time, offer an introspective gaze on their own means of construction that is essentially political. Crisis and Capitalism achieves its goal based on a solid blend of film analysis and criticism, references to Karl Marx, as well contemporary cultural theory (Frederic Jameson, Beatriz Sarlo, among others), and examples of the Argentine literary corpus. In particular, this latter inclusion becomes an important contribution of Joanna Page's study. She works with well-known literary texts and authors as important tools to complement her analysis. Texts by Roberto Arlt, Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo, Eduardo Pavlovky add depth to her readings and provide a larger picture of Argentina's contextualized cultural efforts to explain and define itself. Page states her intention is "... to explore how cinema has registered, and indeed helped to construct, certain modes of subjectivity relating to Argentina's experience of capitalism, neoliberalism and economic crisis" (3). She is interested in the relationship between the "intrinsic" and "extrinsic" construction of this subjectivity and its meaning. At the same time, the book pays attention to the Argentine film effort "to chart the decline of the state and to question its legitimacy [End Page 383] while reasserting national identity and rebuilding a community mobilized around the idea of the nation" (17). Page questions what "realism" can and cannot say about a specific historical circumstance. She clearly marks the connection between the minimalist techniques presented by these films and the minimal economic resources available to their producers and directors. On one hand her study arranges together films from different directors by genre or themes while in other cases analyzes films by the same director: Fabián Bielinsky's Nueve reinas and El aura are contrasted while Lucrecia Martel's La ciénaga and La niña santa are seen as complementary. In chapter 1: "Nation State and Filmmaking in Contemporary Argentina" Page offers the analysis of two films from the previous era, in order to contrast them with films in which "neo-realism" takes central stage. In La nube (Solanas, 1998) Page sees an intent to present resistance through art while in No te mueras sin decirme dónde vas (Subiela, 1995) appears a "New Age optimism" that understand films as a form of mass entertainment. In chapter 2: "New Argentine Cinema and the Production of Social Knowledge," while focusing on the " . . . universally canonized as the founding text of New Argentine Cinema" (37): Pizza, Birra, Faso (Caetano, Stagnaro, 1997) and...