cinemas of the south

The Aesthetics of the New Argentinean Cinema
By Sergio Wolf

In 1994, within the grey and sombre context that engulfed Argentinean cinema since the late 1980s, some young directors' short and first films motivated me to make a survey for the magazine Film, which I co-directed at the time. I sent out one single questionnaire for everyone, covering all the way from the filmmakers' training to the link between theory and practice, from advertisement as a training ground to what they considered to be the recurring problems of local cinema. One of the questions asked directors about the roots or filiations of their films with the Argentinean cinema before them. The answer was almost unanimous: "We are a generation of orphans".

Rapado (1992)

Some time later, the boom of film schools, the regulation of the Law for Cinema, the spread of specialised magazines, the lower production costs and the revival of the country's international festivals, started turning these sporadic filmmakers into a part of a group, or at least of a trend. Their occasional works started to have a possible continuity, and perhaps even a certain brotherhood. However, the idea of a "generation of orphans" always seemed to me the starting point that condensed the sense both of what had happened before them and of what was starting to happen with them. The source of the divide that appeared in Argentinean cinema starting in the mid nineties (a more aesthetical than generational divide) can be traced back to this.

Heterogeneity

How to tie together what seems bound to break loose? Or rather, is it necessary to force a bond, to deploy a panoramic view when the landscape still seems to be defining its contours? One thing is clear: New Argentinean Cinema is not a movement, because it lacks a program or a doctrine. Neither is it a generation, because the age of those filmmakers that cleaned the body of Argentinean cinema like a purgative ranged from barely 23 to over 40. In any case, there are at least two generations within the "new generation".

The heart of this New Argentinean Cinema lies in the kind of dialogue that those films establish with Argentina, with the cinema before them, and among themselves. It is in this dialogue that they take position; not in the sense of a soccer team lining up in the field, but in the sense that every artistic renewal movement seeks to "take position" as a way of taking power.

Fine Powder (Picado fino, 1996)

The City and the Outskirts

The films of the directors that can be identified as the beginners of the changes, such as Alejandro Agresti or Raúl Perrone, propose new interpretations of the least visited places of Buenos Aires, or a return to the outskirts. However, these looks will become more varied and intense as new filmmakers start to appear. The city and its periphery will be the passwords, the place where the filmmakers can reaffirm their sense of belonging in order to suspend their orphanhood.

Many of the groups or movements that intended to change a country's representation through cinema began by questioning the way in which the filmmakers that came before them had dealt with their city. Such was the case of Neorealism and of the New Wave, but also of Free Cinema, New German Cinema and even Hong-Kong's cinema of the nineties. Without pretending to compare this generation of orphans to those acknowledged turning points in film history, it wouldn't be exaggerated to say that these Argentinean films focus on those premises, following the steps of the Generation of the Sixties and their recuperation of Buenos Aires . From the very dawn of this new cinema, two visions rise distinguishably: Agresti is the one that tries to regain possession of the city as a testimony of the past in the present, whereas Perrone seems to want to raise the everyday life of the outskirts to the importance of an event.

For Agresti in Love is a Fat Woman (El amor es una mujer gorda, 1987) or Buenos Aires Vice Versa (1996), the city is the speechless testimony that brings together past and present; dictatorship and democracy; utopias that have been lost and never recovered. For Adrián Caetano and Bruno Stagnaro in Pizza, Beer, and Cigarettes (Pizza, birra, faso, 1998), the city is a territory for symbolic and material appropriation. For Esteban Sapir in Fine Powder (Picado fino, 1996), the city is a strange, hallucinated space that we never see from the inside but only from the outside, as if a sacrifice was required to gain entrance. For Martín Rejtman in Rapado (1992) and Silvia Prieto (1999), the city is a carefully sectioned space, segmented into social and cultural ghettos; a feature also present in Juan Villegas' Saturday (Sábado, 2001). On the contrary, for Daniel Burman in Waiting for the Messiah (Esperando al mesías, 2000), Albertina Carri in I Do Not Want to Return Home (No quiero volver a casa, 2001), Lucho Bender in Merry Christmas (Felicidades, 2000) and Ariel Rotter in Just for Today (Solo por hoy, 2001), the city is a contour that seems to contain everything in a totalising effect. It corresponds to an accumulation of places that are there to allow movements between them, and for different generations, social classes, religions, past and present to live together, either in harmony or in discomfort. These travels are always guided by dissatisfaction and by the search for new horizons, whether the characters reach their goal or fail in their attempt. This axis is very clear in the story of the two families of different social classes and the characters that move between the two in I Do Not Want to Return Home .

Saturday (Sábado, 2001)

Additionally, the view of the city from the periphery completes the idea of its significant density: the city is seen as a space to conquer. This can be seen in all the first films of Raúl Perrone, such as Labios de churrasco (1994), Cinco p'al peso (1998) and Graciadió (1997) or Peluca y Marisita (2002), where the city means absence, and the suburbs are a mythical synthesis of what is unpolluted, a reservoir of simple stories, common beings and small, domestic ambitions (even if in his later films like Pajaritos (2005), the same director seems to put this suburban purity through crisis, proposing a rougher and more critical look at the same universe and the same geographical and symbolic space). Also, in Mariano Torres Manzur's Los porfiados (2002), the outskirts are a space for resistance in the logistic and the political sense of the word, though exposed in the tone of a farce through a group that gets together with an anarchist and libertarian goal.

Pablo Trapero's cinema is central in this sense. In his first film, Crane World (Mundo grúa, 1999), he makes his protagonist abandon the outskirts to look for work and survival in the city. In his second film, Buenos Aires (El bonaerense, 2002), the action is completely concentrated in a province of Buenos Aires. Finally, in Rolling Family (Familia rodante, 2004), his third film, he reverses the trajectory of Crane World , with a family leaving the dreary and dull outskirts and travelling to one of the provinces in the border of Argentina.

Diego Lerman also describes this periphery-interior journey in Suddenly (Tan de repente, 2002). And if Gabriela David's Taxi, an Encounter (Taxi, un encuentro, 2001) literally crossed the city, in the omnibus film Mala época (1998) (Salvador Roselli, Mariano de Rosa, Nicolás Saad and Rodrigo Moreno) a series of stories take place precisely between the city and the outskirts. But it is perhaps Ulises Rosell's documentary Bonanza (2001) that provides a synthesis between the city and the periphery, through that strange family that literally lives off the waste that the city throws out to the periphery. And that family is literally, in itself, exemplary of the waste thrown into the most absolute marginality. They are not on the fringes. They are the fringes.

Taxi, an Encounter (Taxi, un encuentro, 2001)

Strictly Contemporary

As if it were proposing a variation of Arthur Rimbaud's famous phrase, "One must be absolutely modern," the so-called New Argentinean Cinema imposed its will to be contemporary by force of evidence. This feature prevails in almost all the films, even if Flavio Nardini and Christian Bernard's 768903 (2000) situates the story of its three vulgar protagonists in a nearly thirty-year period during which they try to fulfil a teenage sex fantasy. However, there are films like Same Love, Same Rain (El mismo amor, la misma lluvia, 1999) or Son of the Bride (El hijo de la novia, 2001), in which Juan José Campanella reflects on what could be recovered of the traditions of modern Argentina, even by going back to genres and formats that most of the new directors seem to have absolutely nothing to do with.

It is symptomatic that to this date the works of the new directors have not tried their luck with the model of period films. On the contrary, the past can sometimes be the object of examination and scrutiny from the present, such as the decadent social class portrayed by Lucrecia Martel in The Swamp (La ciénaga, 2001); or in Crane World, where the main character's trip to the south in search of work can be seen as the reversal of the migration that marked Argentina's society in the forties and fifties.

Confronted with the question of what Argentina is today and what we can say about it, the new filmmakers respond with stories and with representation systems based on an absolute contemporaneity. Even when they revisit the portrait of manners (costumbrismo), that seems to be the stigma that ruined the films of the eighties, they do it by recovering those keys in the here and now. This recycling of costumbrismo is the model for the gastronomic stereotype of Gustavo Postiglione's Barbecue (El asadito, 2000), in which a group of friends gets together to eat the most typical local food and wait for the new millennium.

Lucrecia Martel on the set of The Swamp (La ciénaga, 2001)

But there is also a recycling of costumbrismo in the melancholy for past times, such as the successful past as a musician of Crane World's main character, or the one that connects the group of friends in 768903 , or in Campanella's films - especially in Moon of Avellaneda (Luna de Avellaneda, 2004). Or when Ulises Rosell, Andrés Tambornino and Rodrigo Moreno revisit the pattern of the people from Buenos Aires trying to make the deal of their lives in a provincial town in El descanso (2002); or when El Oso, in Adrián Caetano's Red Bear (Un oso rojo, 2002), recalls his peaceful family life in a province of Buenos Aires. Or even in Good Life Delivery (Buena vida delivery, 2004) where the beginner Leo Di Cesare deals with the voracious war for survival confronting the poor against the poor, also in the outskirts, now turned into a wild arena.

Contemporaneity is the challenge of telling the present Argentina through the present of the characters, eradicating flashbacks or the recollection of past times from almost all the fiction films of the new generation, even if they tell several parallel stories and if they work on the characters' past. This can be seen in Waiting for the Messiah , and even more clearly in Lost Embrace (El abrazo partido, 2004). The character has almost no memories of the past and sees the world through a shopping centre of the seventies, recycled through the presence of newly arrived Latin Americans and Asians from the most recent immigration waves. This recovers the idea of the integration of foreigners that had marked Argentinean culture in the thirties.

This intention of making contemporaneity a narrative goal is what allows to link films set in Buenos Aires such as Pizza, Beer, and Cigarettes with others that take place in the province of Salta, such as Lucrecia Martel's The Swamp or The Holy Girl (La niña santa, 2004), or Rodrigo Moscoso's '73 Model (Modelo 73, 2001).

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