Los Hornos Research Articles

Squatting behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic: The case of the informal settlement “Los Hornos” in Buenos Aires

The COVID-19 outbreak magnified territorial inequalities and increased vulnerability among low-income groups. Inhabitants in informal settlements are structurally disadvantaged in coping with communicative diseases such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite that, the pandemic has been accompanied by the proliferation of informal settlements. This study explores how the pandemic caused the squatting on new land with the case of “Los Hornos” in suburban Buenos Aires. We used a random forest algorithm and Google Earth Engine to estimate the rapid growth of a new informal settlement from a series of satellite images from early 2020. We also conducted semi-structured interviews with inhabitants to investigate the link between squatting and COVID-19. The study revealed that squatting on new land during the pandemic was mainly due to economic difficulties, overcrowding in existing informal settlements in the metropolitan center, and speculation in the informal housing market. This case is an example of how the most vulnerable groups bore the brunt of the pandemic, how the households in the existing informal settlement were behaving similar to those in the formal housing market (i.e., away from the urban centers), and how the outbreak had also been an opportunity for collective action of squatting a new land to materialize.

A Ciné-Geography of Militant Cinema in the age of Three Worlds. Making Global History Appear in the Long 1960s

This essay questions the historical narrative of liberation struggles in the long 1960s by looking into two documentary films: La Hora de los Hornos, by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino (Argentina 1968), and Le Fond de L’Air est Rouge, by Chris Marker (France 1977). A comparative analysis of the two films – two long narratives of neocolonialism and anti-imperialism – will allow us not only to revisit the periodization of the sixties, but also the ability of militant cinema to overcome the shortcomings of traditional historiography to render the global geopolitics of its struggles. More specifically, the deployment of montage in La Hora decentred the political hierarchies of the capitalist world-system from the perspective of the third world, thus opening history to a global approach of the long 1960s; as for Le Fond, the film can be seen as a global archive of images reinforcing the worldwide scope of the period’s struggles while simultaneously giving it a sense of historical closure. The formal experiments in La Hora and Le Fond allow us to reflect on these films’ status as forms of historical mediation. Showing 1960s political struggles through the formal procedures of film, however, challenges traditional history in fundamental ways. Accordingly, the essay concludes with a reflection on the historicity of film narratives. In particular, it will try to point to how film montage and duration may constitute appropriate narrative forms to come to terms with some of the major challenges currently put to historiography: the global circulation in the history of capitalism and the temporality of the end of communism.

Brachyoxylon fossil woods with traumatic resin canals from the Upper Cretaceous Cerro Fortaleza Formation, southern Patagonia (Santa Cruz Province, Argentina)

Two silicified fossil woods from outcrops of the Cerro Fortaleza Formation (Campanian, Upper Cretaceous) in Los Hornos Hill, Santa Cruz Province, Argentina are described. Based on their anatomical characteristics, both specimens were assigned to a new species of the fossil genus Brachyoxylon Hollick and Jeffrey, B. patagonicum sp. nov. They are characterized by having distinct growth ring boundaries, absence of axial parenchyma, uniseriate rays, mixed and uniseriate intertracheary radial pitting, and araucarioid cross-fields with 1–8 circular half-bordered pits per cross-field. In turn, one specimen has three rows of axial traumatic resin canals parallel to the growth rings were identified close to the middle of the growth rings or close to the latewood. Approximately 45% of Brachyoxylon species present traumatic resin canals, which suggests that they are a common feature of this fossil genus. Alternatively, the specimen with the canals shows biological remains (hyphae) and wood fungal degradation patterns, which may be thought as some of those of possible organisms contributing to the formation of the resin canals. This record provides fresh evidence attesting to the abundance and widespread distribution of Cheirolepidiaceae in the Cretaceous of Patagonia.

Assessing the origin of pisoids within a travertine system in the border of Puna Plateau, Argentina

AbstractThe origin of pisoids in a diversity of environments has been recently discussed. While traditionally considered physico‐chemical sedimentary products developed in turbulent environments, or even grown in situ, new results show that microbes may influence their development. In the Terma Los Hornos travertine system, two types of actively forming pisoids were recognized: (i) laminated pisoids with a concentrically laminated crust surrounding a nucleus; and (ii) dendriform radial pisoids with no distinct nucleus. Laminated pisoids form in turbulent pools at the base of waterfalls, while dendritic pisoids develop within small depressions between terracettes, and they can occur superposed as a result of episodic transport and recycling within the travertine system (for example, dendritic textures as nucleus of laminated pisoids). The laminated pisoids are characterized by laterally constant laminae thickness with high inheritance and low amounts of randomly distributed organic matter and microbial remains, suggesting a predominantly abiogenic origin. In contrast, the dendritic pisoids exhibit an intimate relationship with diatoms and filamentous bacteria suggesting a stronger biotic influence in their formation. Thus, both abiogenic and biogenic carbonate structures can coexist in the same hydrothermal system. Pisoids found in the stratigraphic record of Terma Los Hornos allowed to test the preservation potential of the primary signals and reconstructing early diagenetic overprints.

“The Impact of ‘Third Cinema’ in the World” [1979

“The Impact of ‘Third Cinema’ in the World” [1979] CinémAction Translated by Jonathan Buchsbaum Introductory note: The journal CinémAction, created in 1978 by Guy Hennebelle and Monique Martineau, was first hosted by friendly journals before establishing itself as an independent journal. In that way, CinémAction assembled the dossier on “The Impact of ‘Third Cinema’ in the World,” published by the journal Revue Tiers Monde in Volume 20, no. 79, “Audio-visual and Development” (Presses Universitaires de France, 1979), directed by Yvonne Mignot-Lefebvre. —Monique Martineau-Hennebelle, 2020 Editors’ note: The CinémAction survey translated here is the third part (Part C) of a dossier devoted to “L’influence du ‘troisième cinéma’ dans le monde” that includes eleven responses to precise questions about the impact of the film and the manifesto in different countries. Part A of the dossier presented a background of Third Cinema and the Cine Liberación Manifesto (“Genèse, en 1968, d’une théorie argentine du cinéma d’intervention”) and Part B contained 15 “salient” excerpts from the Manifesto (“15 points saillants d’un Manifeste de 15,000 mots”), both by CinémAction. For Part C, Hennebelle’s CinémAction group posed the following three questions: 1. Was La hora de los hornos distributed in your country? Did it spark controversies? What were they? If yes, did [the film] contribute to establishing a network of alternative distribution? 2. Was the Manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema” published, translated if needed, in your country? Did it provoke debates, arguments? Which ones? 3. What did you think at the time of the publication of the Manifesto and what do you think of it today? Does it seem still pertinent? [End Page 57] C) The Impact of Third Cinema. Results of an International Survey Certain writers respond in order to the questions; others “mix” them. Some emphasize certain points; others offer general reflections. One can see that the very concept of “third cinema” has elicited quite different interpretations. It seemed to us that the variety of approaches was in itself revealing. For us, this survey could open the possibility of a conference and a reworking of the Manifesto. In Chile: “at first unknown, the Manifesto might, updated, be of use to the cinema of exile” (Jaime Larrain, Chilean, is an architect, filmmaker, and photographer. He worked in the cinema during the Popular Unity government. Exiled in Spain, he collaborates with the journal Interviu, Que, Reporter, Cinema 2002, and Eikonos, imagen y sonido.) “In a situation openly colonial, cultural penetration appears as the complement of the action of the foreign army of occupation; in a neocolonial situation, at certain stages, it is this penetration which plays the most important role. For neocolonialism, the mass media are more effective than napalm.” “Of course it is only after the conquest of political power that a culture and a revolutionary consciousness can be anchored in the masses, but it does not prevent the use of scientific and artistic means together with the political-military means from being able to prepare the ground for revolution to become a reality. And to ensure that the problems following the taking of power are more easily resolved.” These two citations can be read in the work of Solanas and Getino, Cine, cultura y descolonización, which contains the Manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema.” In Chile, The Hour of the Furnaces and the Manifesto were known by a minority of people several months before the presidential election of 1970. This political context has somewhat obscured the experiment distributed by the group Cine Liberación, and in particular the slogans expressed in The Hour of the Furnaces. Still, this is not the only reason for the noncommunication among Chilean and Argentinian filmmakers. We must mention also the too short existence of a national Chilean cinema (two years), the absence of clandestine cinema, and the still embryonic nature of militant cinema. On the other hand, the process that, in Argentina, led the group Cine Liberación to construct the project of a “third cinema” had had its equivalent in Chile after the first meeting of Latin-American filmmakers at Viña-del-Mar (1967), but...

Una historia comparada del cine latinoamericano by Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez

Reviewed by: Una historia comparada del cine latinoamericano by Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez Dennis West Schroeder Rodríguez, Paul A. Una historia comparada del cine latinoamericano. Traducción de Juana Suárez. Iberoamericano-Vervuert, 2020, pp. 481. ISBN 978-8-49192-093-9. Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez’s Una historia comparada del cine latinoamericano is a translation of his Latin American Cinema: A Comparative History published in 2016 by the University of California Press. This latter work was the first comparative history of Latin American cinemas to be published in any language. Its competent translation to Spanish, by Juana Suárez, represents a laudable effort to make this author’s in-depth, wide-ranging, and up-to-date research known to Spanish-speaking scholars who do not read English. Schroeder Rodríguez’s methodological framework is a manifestation of the recent comparative tendency in the field of Latin American film studies. As he acknowledges, this trend has been prominently exemplified by film historian Paulo Antonio Paranaguá in his influential collection of essays entitled Tradición y modernidad en el cine de América Latina (2003). Una historia comparada constitutes an ambitious and unusual work of synthesis since this researcher writes as a film historian, as a theoretician of comparative modernity studies, and as a film critic. Most histories of individual Latin American national cinemas have focused on fiction features; and Schroeder Rodríguez the film historian follows this precedent as he unfurls a chronological and comparative narrative account of the medium’s socioeconomic, technological, and esthetic evolution from its beginnings to the present. The writer concentrates on the production of the three major movie-producing countries of the region: Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. All the major historical periods are examined according to the following periodization: the silent era, studio cinema, neorealism and art cinema, New Latin American Cinema, and contemporary cinema. The author’s comparative perspective situates the region’s national cinemas within the context of the century-old “triangular flow” of moving images amongst Latin America, Europe, and “Hollywood.” Prospective readers should be advised that Schroeder Rodríguez does not propose to sketch a more-or-less comprehensive historical survey in the manner of the standard texts Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America (1990) and Historia del cine latinoamericano (1987) by John King and Peter B. Schumann respectively. Rather, Schroeder Rodríguez tends to concentrate on selected cineastes who have succeeded in creating unique cinematic worlds, such as the contemporary Argentine director Lucrecia Martel, or the Brazilian auteur Glauber Rocha. This approach tends to downplay certain important historical movements, such as Brazilian Udigrudi, and certain popular culture genres, such as the Mexican wrestling movies exemplified by the popular El Santo franchise. Cult figures, such as Alejandro Jodorowsky and José Mojica Marins (Zé do Caixão), also receive short shrift. Documentary production is not examined apart from a few notable exceptions, such as Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s celebrated La hora de los hornos. Schroeder Rodríguez excels as a theoretician of the interdisciplinary field of comparative modernity studies. The scholarly question of Latin America’s modernity remains an unsettled issue; and here he parts ways with Paranaguá in that the latter conceives of a single Latin American modernity while the former postulates multiple forms or discourses of modernity for the region, to wit: liberalism, socialism, corporatism, and the baroque/neobaroque. As Schroeder Rodríguez clarifies, the baroque/neobaroque version of Latin American modernity is the most problematic as its theorization continues to be on-going in the work of scholars such as the late Aníbal Quijano. These discourses of modernity are carefully elucidated by Schroeder Rodríguez; and they have been deeply researched—in the case of corporatism, for instance, from Saint Paul’s description of the body politic (I Corinthians 12:12–28) to Thomism, the dominant ideology in colonial Latin America. The author’s evident abilities as a film critic are on display in the volume’s approximately fifty close textual analyses of paradigmatic films. In the tradition of Marxist-influenced thinkers such as Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson, Schroeder Rodríguez considers films as cultural texts [End Page 514...

Coexisting active travertines and tufas in the southeastern border of the Puna plateau

The Terma Los Hornos is an active hydrothermal system located in the southeastern border of the Andean Puna plateau in Catamarca province, northwest Argentina. It exhibits a complete range from high- to low-temperature Quaternary carbonate products still actively forming. Travertines and tufas can be considered lithological end members within the depositional system, but the lack of clear boundaries has generated confusion when trying to distinguish them in the fossil record. In the Terma Los Hornos a continuum between both extremes is recorded, through a transition of different morphologies and dominant but non-diagnostic fabrics, among which we recognize a variety of crystalline crusts, shrubs, spheroidal particles, encrusted bubbles and reeds, lithoclastic, grumulous micritic and silty-sandy carbonates. These were grouped in the following depositional subsystems: 1) vents and pinnacles, 2) mound-apron, 3) terraced-slope, 4) steep slopes and 5) flooding areas and palustrine. Hydrochemistry results show substantial variabilities ranging from 65 °C, pH = 6.41, 1029 ppm alkalinity and 37 ppm calcium concentrations at the vents site to 21 °C, pH = 8.13 and 800 ppm alkalinity and 14 ppm calcium concentrations at ~1 km downstream, were carbonate precipitation is no longer visible. The set of linked subenvironments tend to merge into a larger scale geobody that defines the travertine system, with a proximal area dominated by physicochemical processes and a distal extent with pervasive microbial and common macrophyte features. The travertine system should not be understood as a fixed model, and its limits as well as the existing subenvironments, their extents and degree of overlapping, will depend mainly on three factors: 1) hydrothermal input, 2) climate, and 3) landscape. Perched past travertine deposits together with internal architectures and extent of the presently active travertine system allows thinking about constructive and destructive stages, respectively thought as dominantly expanding and erosional periods. Alternation of these two evolutionary stages and their balance will dictate the volume of primary facies and potential reworking products. A better understanding of these stages and their litho-stratigraphic products, will allow developing predictive stratigraphic and correlation models based on a sequence stratigraphic approach.

Experiencias de maternidad en la unidad penitenciaria Nº 33 de La Plata, Argentina

This paper describes the exercise of motherhood among female prisoners in Unit No. 33 at the town of Los Hornos, (La Plata, province of Buenos Aires, Argentina). During 2016, practices and perceptions about motherhood and parenting were observed through a questionnaire that included open questions, as well as observations and informal talks in the pavilions. It was possible to make the conflict visible that arises for female prisoners due to the deprivation of their freedom and the gender mandates associated with the “role” of being a mother. They were affected by the impact of their imprisonment on their children, and felt that they had abandoned their obligations by unprotecting those whom they had to take care of. They assumed the damage that their situation caused on the development of their children, whether they were inside or outside the prison.

Comunicación, educación y género: una perspectiva crítica para el análisis de experiencias territoriales

La comunicación/educación se alía a la perspectiva de género para ampliar su reto epistemológico, sus campos sociales de implicancia y sus horizontes políticos de transformación. Tomando prestada la potencia de esta articulación emergente y la dilución de sus fronteras disciplinarias, en tanto clave para re-leer el mundo, el artículo pone en diálogo y analiza los sentidos acerca de “lo educativo” presentes en dos espacios de taller, inscriptos en contextos sociales e institucionales disímiles. En primer lugar, el Taller de Comunicación, Arte y Género en la Unidad Penitenciaria Femenina Nº8 de Los Hornos, ciudad de La Plata; en segundo lugar, la Escuela Popular de Género, en la localidad de Ensenada.

El cuidado infantil entre muros: estrategias de mujeres encarceladas en la provincia de Buenos Aires

The  objective  of  this  article  is  to  discuss  the  notion  of  care,  from  a  political  dimension  (Faur,  2014)  in the context of punitive confinement.The analysis pre-sented  of  interviews  with  different  actors  in  jail,  prison  unit N°33, with mothers and their children in Los Hornos in the province of Buenos Aires.The exercise of care in the case of women in prison, serving a double function, on  the  one  hand  the  (Gentile  &  Tabbush,  2013)  infor-mal  control  of  the  patriarchal  system  that  assigns  com-pulsorily exercise thereof by women, even in for women detained mothers. On the other hand, depending on the characteristics  of  increased  prisonization  women  for  crimes  of  drug  possession,  it  is  investigated  of  these  in  the  illegal  economy,  and  attempts  to  establish  some  re-flections on the mentioned crime and the possibility of reconciling survival strategies economic and care.

An Evolution in Nollywood, Nigeria's New Wave: A Conversation with Chris Eneaji

An Evolution in Nollywood, Nigeria’s New Wave:A Conversation with Chris Eneaji Carmen McCain (bio) “Aren’t we going to watch any Nigerian films in this class?” my student complained. It was the second day of my three-hundred-level Activism and Filmmaking class at Kwara State University in September of 2015. The week before we had watched Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925, Soviet Union), and I had just begun an opening lecture on Third Cinema filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s La Hora de los hornos / The Hour of the Furnaces (1968, Argentina). Her question struck me because it seemed so different from the approach students had taken when I first started teaching Nigerian films. In 2008, the first time I taught film at a Nigerian university, my final-year “Gender and Media” students in the Mass Communications Department at Bayero University, Kano, seemed embarrassed when I brought up Nigerian films. Seven years later, at Kwara State University, Malete, I have not noticed this same sense of embarrassment. The students in the Film Unit of the School of Visual and Performing Arts are there because they want to become a part of the Nigerian film industry. They pass around pirated digital copies of the latest Nigerian films on laptops and phones, and they often seem slightly bored when watching films from outside of Africa. They warm up when I show them Ousmane Sembène’s films La Noire de . . . / Black Girl (1966, Senegal), Borom sarret (1963, Senegal), Mandabi (1968, Senegal), and stay after class to continue discussing them. One student noted in a response paper that the screening of Sembène’s film Mandabi was the first time they hadn’t been bored by the films we watched in the class. In Nollywood studies, we often talk about the disparities between Nollywood films and FESPACO films, of which Sembène’s work is often used as an exemplar, yet seeing the way my students respond to Sembène makes me think that it isn’t that audiences don’t like other African cinema, so much as that up until now there have been few opportunities for most African audiences to see the older films. [End Page 194] With the coming of what is often called the “New Nollywood,” students look to a new cinema tradition, admittedly ideologically quite different from that promoted by Sembène and the activist filmmakers of FEPACI. The “New Nollywood” is not Third Cinema. Indeed, it may be the closest Nigeria has ever had to a “First Cinema” ideal. But these new cinema films draw audiences who prefer Nigerian to American films. These are not the historic open-air theatres of Ouagadougou or Kano or the video parlors that even those without televisions could afford, but instead new multiplexes in malls, tied closely to multinational businesses like the South African grocery store Shoprite or the American fast food restaurant KFC. The ninety- to 120-minute romance and comedy films are marketed toward Africa’s growing, ever more mobile, middle class.1 Viva Cinemas in Ilorin, where I live, screens at least five or six Nigerian films a week, usually for a run of two weeks to a month, alongside American, Indian, Chinese and South African films. And it is these Nigerian films that my students want to write about for their BA theses and these filmmakers they want to do their national youth service with.2 It is a film tradition that has finally been accepted by Nigeria’s once aloof middle class.3 I first saw Chris Eneaji’s 2013 thriller The Secret Room when the final-year exhibition class at Kwara State University projected it in the university auditorium for their final exhibition project in April 2015 (fig. 1). Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Chris Eneaji. Image courtesy of Carmen McCain. With the permission of Eneaji, who is a friend and collaborator with their lecturer Emeka Emelobe, the students printed big posters and advertised the [End Page 195] screening on the radio. They drew in a large crowd of students, who gasped and shouted in the darkened auditorium as the story unwound. Much of the story...

Aislamientos nativos de Trichoderma harzianum inducen resistencia a Zymoseptoria tritici en plantas de trigo.

Aislamientos nativos de Trichoderma harzianum inducen resistencia a Zymoseptoria tritici en plantas de trigo. La Septoriosis del trigo es endémica en las regiones productoras de Argentina, impactando en su rendimiento. Una alternativa de manejo, es el uso de agentes de biocontrol. Se propuso: determinar la efectividad de los aislamientos de Trichoderma obtenidos a partir de suelos de diferentes localidades de la región triguera argentina, sobre el control de la enfermedad y caracterizar la actividad de la serín proteasa (con capacidad antifúngica) del fluido intercelular de trigo generada por los mejores aislamientos. Para determinar la capacidad biocontroladora de los 90 aislamientos de Trichoderma, se sembraron semillas recubiertas con cada uno de los antagonistas y posteriormente las plántulas se inocularon con Zymoseptoria tritici. Se evaluó la capacidad de cada aislamiento del biocontrolador para restringir el progreso de la septoriosis 21 días después de la inoculación. A las plantas tratadas con las 10 mejores cepas de T. harzianum, se les midió el incremento de la actividad proteolítica. Cuatro de los aislamientos (2 y 8, de Los Hornos y 129 y 141 de Manfredi) disminuyeron el porcentaje de cobertura picnidial y se destacaron por el aumento de la actividad proteolítica en un cultivar susceptible. Éste comportamiento se asocia a un mecanismo bioquímico de defensa con un efecto sistémico temprano.

Historical dictionary of South American cinema

The Historical Dictionary of South American Cinema covers the long history of cinema in Portuguese-speaking Brazil and the nine Spanish-speaking countries. These films include Los tres berretines, Prisioneros de la tierra, La balandra Isabel llego esta tarde, La hora de los hornos, El chacal de Nahueltoro, La teta asustada, Abrir puertas y ventanas, El secreto de sus ojos, and NO. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced dictionary entries on directors, producers, performers, films, film studios and genres. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the South American Cinema.

Opciones visuales en torno a la protesta obrera. De La hora de los hornos (1968) a Los traidores (1973)

Este artículo analiza los modos en que el cine político argentino representó las protestas obreras entre mediados de la década de 1960 y comienzos de la siguiente, con particular atención a las ocupaciones de fábricas y la lucha de calles. El estudio focaliza en la correspondencia de las imágenes utilizadas respecto de acontecimientos precisos del proceso histórico. Y recorre las producciones fílmicas realizadas entre dos películas emblemáticas, como La hora de los hornos (1968), del grupo Cine Liberación vinculado al movimiento peronista, y Los traidores (1973), del grupo Cine de la Base vinculado al PRTERP. Asimismo, argumenta sobre una suerte de disputa entre los grupos de cine respecto de las imágenes que consideraban más representativas de las luchas populares del período.

Informe general and the missing link of Third Cinema

This essay argues that Pere Portabella's 1976 film, Informe general sobre algunas cuestiones de interés para una proyección, constitutes a sort of 'missing link' for Third Cinema. Released during the end of the Franco era, it also emerged at a moment when debates around the meanings and imperatives of Third Cinema were at a height. A comparison to the 'canonical' work of the movement – Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino's 1969 manifesto ‘Hacia un tercer cine’ and their film La hora de los hornos (1969) is especially instructive. In many ways Informe general is closer to the idealism of ‘Hacia un tercer cine’ than is La hora de los hornos, and this is especially true of its analysis of nationalism. Portabella's work thus needs to be seen not only as an important part of Spanish and Catalan cinema (which it unquestionably is), but also as a key example of a cinema that is committed in equal measure to rejection of formal convention, radical political analysis, and filmmaking as action, in Solanas and Gettino's words ‘cine-acto, cine-acción’.

The worker's voice in post-1968 Argentine political documentary

In the late 1960s, the political cinema of Latin America gave relevance and a prominent place to the voices of the people. In the case of Argentina, the worker's voice increased its presence in the films during a period of militant cinema that began in 1968 with the legendary La hora de los hornos [The Hour of the Furnaces]. Later films also incorporated the voice of the workers who played a central part in the largest popular uprising of the period, the Cordobazo (1969) and those of the militants in the so-called Peronist Resistance (1955 onwards). Amid criticisms of ‘the limits of direct cinema’ and the proposal of ‘giving voice to the people’ or of directly ‘seizing the right to speak,’ the worker's voice began to share the textual authority of films, an authority hitherto given almost exclusively to an omnipresent voice-over, typical of one important documentary tradition. If in many cases the voices of the people were connected, if not subordinated, to the theses of the filmmakers, they were nevertheless elaborated in all their complexity, with their place negotiated into the ensemble of the film's textual authority. This article analyses various ways of configuring working class voices/testimonies (those of the workers, the farm workers, and the Resistance), and considers the dialogues and negotiations between these voices and the revolutionary theses and imaginaries that were widespread in this period, as put forward in films concerning social protest and class identity in Argentina.

Morphological and Molecular Characterization of a Fungus,Hirsutellasp., Isolated from Planthoppers and Psocids in Argentina

A mycosed planthopper, Oliarus dimidiatus Berg (Hemiptera: Cixiidae), and two psocids, Heterocaecilius sp. (Psocodea: Pseudocaeciliidae) and Ectopsocus sp. (Ectopsocidae), were collected from Los Hornos and La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina between February and September 2007. Observations of mycelia growing on the host revealed that the putative fungal parasite had synnemata supporting monophialidic conidiogenous cells. Likewise, in vitro fungal cultures presented characteristics typical of the fungus Hirsutella citriformis Speare (Ascomycota: Hypocreales: Clavicipitaceae). The identity of the isolated fungi characterized based on morphological aspects was complemented by means of the internal transcribed spacer sequences. The sequences of both isolates were highly homologous to those of Cordyceps sp. (Fries) Link and Ophiocordyceps sinensis (Berkely) G.H. Sung, J.M. Sung, Hywel-Jones, and Spatafora (Ophiocordycipitaceae). We additionally confirmed that both isolates had the ability to infect and kill adults of Delphacodes kuscheli Fennah (Hemiptera: Delphacidae) after 10 days. Therefore, based on the morphology of the isolated fungi, their ribosomal internal transcribed spacer sequence, and their ability to parasite insects, we conclude that the fungi isolated belong to the genus Hirsutella and might have biotechnological potential.

The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema by Laura Podalsky (review)

Reviewed by: The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema by Laura Podalsky Joanna Page Podalsky, Laura. The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 218 pp. Podalsky’s study of the intersection of politics and affect in contemporary Latin American film is admirably subtle in its grasp of the complex and varied ways in which film may mediate between the two. A focus on the sensorial and emotional aspects of film as separate (if related) from its ideology and aesthetics allows Podalsky to map with precision “the range and complexity of the sociopolitical work performed by films’ affective appeals” (20). Rigorously historicized, her analyses are also very attentive to relevant theoretical work. The corpus of films chosen for study is pleasingly and appropriately eclectic, ranging from the well-distributed to the relatively obscure, from the high-budget fiction film to the shoe-string documentary, and from films that are thoroughly anchored in a national context to ones whose directors, subjects and modes of production and distribution are engaged in multiple transnational crossings. Where Podalsky analyzes films which have already attracted [End Page 201] repeated critical attention—such as La hora de los hornos and Amores perros—she does so in a way that makes clear how her readings build on and contest existing scholarship. A concise and provocative introduction situates Podalsky’s work in relation to those theorists and critics whose insights have most influenced her own, notably those working with Deleuzian notions of affect, but also theorists of modernity and the global such as Martín-Barbero, Appadurai and Bauman. Podalsky also signals clearly where her approach differs from the more dehistoricized perspectives of cognitivist film scholars such as Noël Carroll, and from the distinctly disparaging accounts of contemporary media culture in Latin America offered by Beatriz Sarlo, Nelly Richard and Jean Franco, among others. The structure of the book more or less corresponds to the five “formal, thematic, and industrial tendencies” which for Podalsky characterize Latin American cinema of the past two decades (8). The first of these, the representation of the recent past and its relation to the present, provides the focus for a chapter on the New Latin American Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, included here as an important precursor to the more contemporary films discussed in subsequent chapters. Taking issue with the dominant critical emphasis on these films’ eschewal of emotional appeal in favour of Brechtian techniques of distantiation, Podalsky analyzes the “sensorial dynamics” which are key to the political engagement of the viewer (30). She explores a “neorealist sentimentality” in Rio 40 Graus and traces the work of directors like dos Santos and Birri back to the nineteenth-century literary quest to promote nationalist sentiments (33). Discussions of La hora de los hornos and El chacal de Nahueltoro demonstrate these films’ tactical use of emotion, and indeed the extent to which their “sensorial charge” often exceeds their directors’ intentions to provoke a political response in their audiences (56). The second chapter, on the recent reemergence of genre films, explores the use of the thriller—a genre constructed around questions of knowledge and time— to reexamine past social trauma and to construct knowledge of the past as something which goes beyond the rational. In contrast with O Que É Isso, Companheiro?, Podalsky finds that both Death and the Maiden and Açao entre amigos are less interested in historical revisionism and more interested in interrogating how we acquire knowledge of the past and questioning the nature of evidence in historical investigations. This chapter explicitly formulates an important point which underpins much of Podalsky’s work in this book: that “a film’s ideological stance (as measured through its narrative strategies and levels of formal experimentation) is not the sole determinant of the sociocultural work it may perform. Nor do a film’s sensorial appeals always work to serve or uphold its political propositions” (79). This insight is what allows Podalsky to tease out how films such as Amores perros, which has been charged with complicity with the neoliberal agenda by undermining the validity of the utopian projects of the Left, can nevertheless...

Lucrecia Martel’s La mujer sin cabeza : Cinematic Free Indirect Discourse, Noise-scape and the Distraction of the Middle Class

Lucrecia Martel’s La mujer sin cabeza: Cinematic Free Indirect Discourse, Noise-scape and the Distraction of the Middle Class Matt Losada In the period between the first Perón presidency and the last military dictatorship (1955 to 1976), Argentine political opposition privileged the protagonism of the popular masses over that of the intellectual as agent of social change. But the intended audience of opposition cinema – such as that of the Grupo Cine Liberación – was often what populist historical revisionism referred to as the intelligentsia, the middle-class intellectual it intended to inspire to commitment to the mobilization of the masses. As Fernando “Pino” Solanas, co-maker of La hora de los hornos (1968), said in a 1969 interview, his work addressed “the imperious necessity for the militant intelligentsia to root itself in Argentine reality and to contribute to the process of internal liberation of the movement of the masses.”1 In the years since the politically polarized 1960s, the military dictatorship’s repression and the ensuing imposition of neoliberal economic policy – which produced the illusory boom in the 1990s under president [End Page 307] Carlos Menem – have fragmented the collective struggle and destroyed the “militant intelligentsia,” rendering more current (or “modern”) the individual struggle for prosperity. Lucrecia Martel’s La mujer sin cabeza illustrates the predicament of an Argentine opposition politics that has largely lost the middle class, by demonstrating the functioning of the mechanisms that depoliticize and prevent individuals from acting in solidarity with the concerns of other, more exploited sectors of society. Martel is one the central figures in the decade-old rebirth of independent Argentine cinema known as the Nuevo Cine Argentino, film-makers who in the 1990s began to explore alternative funding strategies that later made it possible to produce non-industrial films that engaged with national realities, often through formal experimentation. Her first contribution, the 1995 short Rey muerto, was followed by La cienaga (2001) and La niña santa (2004), both of which brought to light class and gender tensions while avoiding the didacticism that for many contemporary viewers often lessens more explicitly political Argentine films. La mujer sin cabeza is Martel’s third feature film, released in cinema in Argentina and elsewhere in 2008. Like her previous features, it is set in the highly stratified society of the provincial Argentine city of Salta. Where it differs from Martel’s earlier features however, is in its subjective narration: the extent of the information provided to the viewer is restricted to that known to the protagonist, whose psychological perturbations are made visible in the image and sound through the use of what Pier Paolo Pasolini named cinematic free indirect discourse, in which, analogous to its literary equivalent, the filmmakers’ stylistic decisions are based on his or her immersion in the mind of a character. In the resulting variation from cinema’s “objective” formal norms the protagonist’s subjectivity is expressed even when she is seen in the frame, a strategy that allows Martel to explore throughout the film (not just in point-of-view shots of states such as hallucinations, dreams or fantasies) a psychological crisis of a privileged inhabitant of a lingering neocolonial order that naturalizes a social hierarchy based on skin-tone and accent. Pasolini’s theorization of cinematic free indirect discourse demonstrated a clear preoccupation with the effects that one’s social class has on the way they perceive the world: [End Page 308] the ‘gaze’ of a peasant, perhaps even of an entire town or region in prehistoric conditions of underdevelopment, embraces another type of reality than the gaze given to that same reality by an educated bourgeois. Not only do the two actually see different sets of things, but even a single thing in itself appears different through the two different ‘gazes.’ (177) Where Pasolini privileged the subjectivity of the peasantry and the society-changing possibilities inherent to it, Martel’s film explores how a middle-class gaze, instead of catalyzing social change like the militant intelligentsia audience coveted by Solanas, contributes to the conservation of the status quo. By placing a bourgeoise in crisis she is able to explore a perturbed gaze that defamiliarizes the decadent...

Pathogenic fungi of planthoppers associated with rice crops in Argentina

We conducted a survey of pathogenic fungi of planthoppers associated with rice crops in Los Hornos, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and a study of the seasonality and prevalence of these pathogens. Samples were taken in rice for two consecutive years. The plants sampled included rice Oryza sativa L. (Poaceae) and its surrounding weeds. The planthopper Oliarus dimidiatus Berg. (Hemiptera: Fulgoromorpha: Cixiidae) was the most abundant species associated with rice. Two species of entomophthoralean and one species of hypocrealean fungi infected and killed adults of O. dimidiatus in the rice agroecosystem. The fungi were identified as: Pandora sp. (Entomophthorales: Entomophthoraceae), Conidiobolus coronatus (Costantin) Batko (Entomophthorales: Ancylistaceae), and Beauveria bassiana (Balsamo-Crivelli) Vuillemin (Hypocreales: Clavicipitaceae). Pandora sp. was the most predominant pathogen collected. It was recorded from the middle of February to the middle of April 2005, and not found again until the end of March 2006. The report of Pandora sp., C. coronatus and B. bassiana represents the first records of these fungi as pathogens of hoppers associated with rice crops in Argentina.