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There has been a significant surge in recent Argentine cinema, with an explosion in the number of films made in the country since the mid-1990s. Many of these productions have been highly acclaimed by critics in Argentina and elsewhere. What makes this boom all the more extraordinary is its coinciding with a period of severe economic crisis and civil unrest in the nation. Offering the first in-depth English-language study of Argentine fiction films of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first, Joanna Page explains how these productions have registered Argentina’s experience of capitalism, neoliberalism, and economic crisis. In different ways, the films selected for discussion testify to the social consequences of growing unemployment, rising crime, marginalization, and the expansion of the informal economy. Page focuses particularly on films associated with New Argentine Cinema, but she also discusses highly experimental films and genre movies that borrow from the conventions of crime thrillers, Westerns, and film noir. She analyzes films that have received wide international recognition alongside others that have rarely been shown outside Argentina. What unites all the films she examines is their attention to shifts in subjectivity provoked by political or economic conditions and events. Page emphasizes the paradoxes arising from the circulation of Argentine films within the same global economy they so often critique, and she argues that while Argentine cinema has been intent on narrating the collapse of the nation-state, it has also contributed to the nation’s reconstruction. She brings the films into dialogue with a broader range of issues in contemporary film criticism, including the role of national and transnational film studies, theories of subjectivity and spectatorship, and the relationship between private and public spheres.
Examines how recent Argentine horror films engage with the legacies of dictatorship and neoliberalism. Argentina is a dominant player in Latin American film, known for its documentaries, detective films, melodramas, and auteur cinema. In the past twenty years, however, the country has also emerged as a notable producer of horror films. Blood Circuits focuses on contemporary Argentine horror cinema and the various “cinematic pleasures” it offers national and transnational audiences. Jonathan Risner begins with an overview of horror film culture in Argentina and beyond. He then examines select films grouped according to various criteria: neoliberalism and urban, rural, and suburban spaces; English-language horror films; gore and affect in punk/horror films; and the legacies of the last dictatorship (1976–1983). While keenly aware of global horror trends, Risner argues that these films provide unprecedented ways of engaging with the consequences of authoritarianism and neoliberalism in Argentina. “Blood Circuits is an important and much-needed contribution to the fields of Latin American cinema and popular culture, and genre film studies with a focus on horror cinema. It offers original and innovative directions that will pave the way for new studies in different areas of film studies: the internationalization of horror that unfolds a problematic relationship between the United States and the Global South, the use of punk horror as a form of affect, and the development of new kinds of pleasures and displeasures in the spectator.” — Victoria Ruétalo, coeditor of Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas, and Latin America
This book considers how architectural landmarks, imagined buildings and urban landscapes take part in the production of meaning in contemporary Argentine cinema. From the iconic Buenos Aires Obelisk to the Hilton International Hotel, the shopping center to the café and the Le Corbusier-designed Curutchet House to the gated community, architecture in these films evokes the political. Tracing architecture’s expression through six films produced since the 1990s—Pizza birra faso, Mundo grúa, Nueve reinas, La niña santa, La antena and El hombre de al lado—Amanda Holmes studies how architecture in cinema elicits political memory, underscores marginalization and class discrepancies, creates nostalgia for neighborhoods and re-evaluates existing communities. Generously illustrated and carefully researched, the book offers an in-depth reading of key contemporary Argentine films and a fresh architectural approach to film analysis.
"Foster discusses ten Argentine films, including Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Official Story, and Man Facing Southeast to examine the transformation of social topics into motion pictures and the relationship between commercial filmmaking strategies and Argentine redemocratization."--Publishers website.
An in-depth study of the presence and representation of Jews in contemporary Argentine film, focusing on films shot since the year 2000. Runner-up for the AHGBI-Spanish Embassy Doctoral Publication Prize for 2017 Notwithstanding the current visual prominence of Jewish life and Jewish culture on the Argentine big screen, surprisingly little has been written about Jewish film characterization in academic scholarship. In order to fill this lacuna, Portrayals of Jews in Contemporary Argentine Cinemaexplores the depiction of the Jews of Argentina in modern Argentine cinema with particular attention to the ways in which Jews and Jewishness interact with issues of national identity. The central aim of the book is to investigate how Argentine cinema negotiates the argentinidad of Jewish Argentines, thereby adding to the mosaic that is the imagined community of Argentina. To this end, key films by both Jewish and non-Jewish directors are scrutinized, shedding light on three main areas: the masculinity of the Jewish gaucho, the effects of the 1994 AMIA bombing and family relations, including fatherhood and the intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles. Organized around these topics, the book comprises four chapters and with the exception of the first, which is a historical exposition of Jewish presence in Argentina and Argentine film, all subsequent ones take a theme-centered approach. Mirna Vohnsen is a faculty member in Spanish and Latin American Studies at Maynooth University.
In Transition Cinema, Jessica Stites Mor documents the critical role filmmakers, the film industry, and state regulators played in Argentina's volatile and unfinished transition from dictatorship to democracy. She shows how, during periods of both military repression and civilian rule, the state moved to control political film production and its content, distribution, and exhibition. She also reveals the strategies that the industry, independent filmmakers, and film activists employed to comply with or circumvent these regulations. Stites Mor traces three distinct generations of transition cinema, each defined by a seminal event that shifted the political economy of national filmmaking. The first generation of filmmakers witnessed and participated in civil uprisings, such as the Cordobazo in 1969, and faced waves of repression, violence, and censorship. This generation gave rise to vibrant underground exhibitions and film clubs and eventually became symbolically linked to the Peronist Left and radical militancy. Following the 1983 return to civilian rule, a second generation of political filmmakers emerged at the center of public debates, when Buenos Aires became the locus for state-level cultural programs to address human rights and collective memory. Building on that legacy, a third generation of filmmakers explored new modes of activist and political filmmaking aided by digital technology. They pioneered new genres such as the street phenomenon of cine piquetero and introduced resistance politics and social movements into highly visible public spaces. In this captivating work, Stites Mor examines how social movements, political actors, filmmakers, and government and industry institutions, all became deeply enmeshed in the project of Argentina's transition cinema. She demonstrates how film emerged as the chronicler of political struggles in a dialogue with the past, present, and future, whose message transcended both cultural and national borders.
Houses, in the Argentine and Chilean films of the early twenty-first century, provide much more than a backdrop to on-screen drama. Nor are they simply refuges from political turmoil or spaces of oppression. Remaking Home argues that domestic spaces are instead the medium through which new, fragile common identities are constructed. The varied documentary and fiction films analyzed here, which include an early work by Oscar winner Sebastián Lelio, use the domestic sphere as a laboratory in which to experiment with narrative, audiovisual techniques, and social configurations. Where previous scholarship has focused on the social fragmentation and political disillusionment visible in contemporary film, Remaking Home argues that in order to understand the political agency of contemporary cinema, it is necessary to move beyond deconstructive critical approaches to Latin American culture. In doing so, it expands the theoretical scope of studies in Latin American cinema by finding new points of contact between the cultural critique of Nelly Richard, the work of Bruno Latour, and theories of new materialism.
Respected film critic Gonzalo Aguilar offers a lucid and sophisticated analysis of Argentine films of the last decade. This is the most complete and up-to-date work in English to examine the 'new Argentine cinema' phenomenon. Aguilar looks at highly relevant films, including those by Lucrecia Martel and Sergio Rejtman.
Comprehensive examination of how Indigenous peoples have been represented in Argentine film. Affectual Erasure examines how Argentine cinema has represented Indigenous peoples throughout a period spanning roughly a century. Cynthia Margarita Tompkins interrelates her discussion of films with the ethnographic context of the Indigenous peoples represented and an analysis of the affective dimensions at play. These emotions underscore the inherent violence of generic conventions, as well as the continued political violence preventing Indigenous peoples from access to their ancestral lands and cultural mores. Tompkins explores a broad range of movies beginning in the silent period and includes both feature films and documentaries, underscored by archival and contemporary film stills. She traces the initial erotic projection, moving through melodrama to the conventions of the Western, into the 1960s focus on decolonization, superseded by allegorical renditions and the promise of self-expression in late twentieth-century documentaries. Each section includes an introduction to the sociohistorical events of the period and their impact on film production. Analyzed chronologically, the films evidence different stages in the projection of the hegemonic Argentine imaginary, which fails to envision the daily life of Indigenous peoples prior to conquest or in colonial times—and remains in denial of their existence in the present. “Cynthia Margarita Tompkins’s book is the most comprehensive analysis of the cinematic representations of Argentinean Indigenous peoples ever written. Her writing is lucid, insightful, grounded in a thorough familiarity with the films, and aware of the most current theoretical debates in film/theory and cultural studies. The book will surely become a breakthrough in its field.” — Santiago Juan-Navarro, author of Archival Reflections: Postmodern Fiction of the Americas (Self-Reflexivity, Historical Revisionism, Utopia)
Contemporary Latin American Cinema investigates the ways in which neoliberal measures of privatization, de-regularization and austerity introduced in Latin America during the 1990s have impacted film production and film narratives. The collection examines the relationship between economic policies and the films that depict recent transformations in many Latin American countries, demonstrating how contemporary Latin American film has not only criticized and resisted, but also benefitted from neoliberal advancements. Based on films produced in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru since 2010, the fourteen case studies illustrate neoliberalism’s effects, from big industries to small national cinemas. It also shows the new types of producers that have emerged, and the novel patterns of distribution, exhibition and consumption that shape and influence the Latin American filmscape. Through industry studies, reception analyses and close readings, this book establishes an informative and accessible text for scholars and students alike.