cinemas of the south

The Aesthetics of the New Argentinean Cinema

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In Search of Lost Styles

Just as it happened in movements that left a mark in the history of cinema, the similarities and stylistic resemblance between the directors are as notorious as the differences among their work.

How could one relate films in which dialogue is worked in such a gloomy way as in Silvia Prieto (1999) or Saturday, to others like Freedom (La libertad, 2001), Fine Powder or Parapalos (2004) by Ana Poliak, where there is an almost absolute absence of speech?

Anyhow, it is clear that these new filmmakers' works try to escape Argentinean cinema's traditional system, always shooting in real locations and on the street. This is true both for Pizza, Beer, and Cigarettes and for Nine Queens (Nueve reinas, 2000) which seeks to gain the spectator's empathy with the characters by choosing physical types instead of established actors, often incorporating non-professional actors. Some of them later formed the star-system of the new cinema: Luis Margani in Crane World, Héctor Anglada in Pizza, Beer, and Cigarettes , Damián Dreizik in Rapado and Just for Today, and above all Daniel Hendler, who after Waiting for the Messiah and Lost Embrace (Burman), and Saturday and Los suicidas (Juan Villegas, 2005) seems to be turning into the face of the new cinema. Then there is also the recovery of more colloquial ways of talking, far from what could be considered correct. But I will deal with this later.

Daniel Hendler in Lost Embrace (El abrazo partido, 2004)

The truth is that these choices are made around stories that the directors know well, either because they are representative of their generation or because they are personal stories. It is not a matter of telling just any fiction, but those in which they can get involved. That is why the characters, the places and the way of talking form a unity that seems to efface the limits between fiction and documentaries, to extremes where you cannot tell the two apart, such as in Freedom .

It is not a question of saying that all the films are alike, but of proposing one same backbone, even if in the specific use of the material the differences become huge. For instance, the classic editing and the naturalistic lighting of films like Silvia Prieto or The Magic Gloves (Los guantes mágicos, 2003) is radically opposed to the systematic cut in movement in Pizza, Beer, and Cigarettes, or the stylised photography, with post-production treatment in Just for Today. One could also contrast the kind of associative and discontinuous editing in Fine Powder with the sequence-shots in Freedom.

But that backbone that relies on the aesthetic choices as well as in the design of possible films is also the bond that limits them, such as in the narrative level. It is not a matter of expecting the new filmmakers to go back to classicism, like in the case of Nine Queens and Son of the Bride, or even in Taxi, an Encounter . It is a matter of having some real exploration of how to tell a story. In this sense, there are some highlights in films like Fine Powder, Silvia Prieto, The Swamp, Adrián Caetano's Bolivia (2001), Luis Ortega's Black Box (Caja negra, 2002), Suddenly and Lisandro Alonso's Los muertos (2004).

Language as a Subject

If we were to compare this cinema with the one that came before, we could say that in the eighties filmmakers used language, whereas in the nineties the new Argentinean filmmakers recovered speech. In other words, they used to recur to the dictionary, and now to the ear.

Silvia Prieto (1999)

At the occasion of the shooting of Rapado, I had the chance to observe a situation that seems very revealing of this change in concepts. The scene was being shot in the second or third floor of an apartment building, so the camera was up there. However, director Rejtman was in the street, by the truck, with his headphones on. He was not looking at the scene, neither through a monitor nor next to the camera. The framing had been previously established, so now what mattered most to the filmmaker was clearly the tone of the dialogue, as if the scene's final nature, and thus that of the entire film, were determined there, in the characters' speech.

This recovery of speech is associated to multiple aspects, from the way of relating different idiosyncrasies to the interweaving of urban tribes; from the multiplication of jargons to the sociodialects and their different levels of sense. It is an irrefutable proof: there is no renewal without the appropriation of the language. The language of the Argentineans as a live, changing and shifting matter.

Although the fiction worlds that the new filmmakers build seem to be confined to a few places, within a limited timeframe, the films' (seen together and in perspective) all-comprising will is expressed in the wide range of speech. From the dissected, flat speech in Silvia Prieto or Saturday to the almost complete lack of dialogue in Lisandro Alonso's Freedom, to the more cultivated or "high" use of language in Mariano Llinás's Balnearios (2002); from the lunfardo (the local argot) of two different generations in Crane World , to jargon used as a password for belonging in Pizza, Beer, and Cigarettes or Suddenly. Or even in the use of the Buenos Aires' way of speaking, its speed serving as a narrative strategy in Fabián Bielinsky's Nine Queens or in Damián Szifrón's Tiempo de valientes (2005). In fact, films like Juan José Campanella's Same Love, Same Rain or 768903 seem to make a subject of these changes in Argentinean speech in the past twenty-five years. Or even forty, like in Moon of Avellaneda . A film can also be sceptical about that speech that seems so distant, and from a personal and critical view of the world, it may prevent this speech from manifesting, as Albertina Carri did in The Blonds (Los rubios, 2003).

The Blonds (Los rubios, 2003)

Simple Stories about Simple Characters

This will to be contemporary and the fact that in every case the directors were at the origin of the stories they are telling, are directly related to the strict correspondence between the new cinema's stories and the directors' generation.

As if they were tired of the way Argentinean films used to tell stories, these filmmakers took possession of this territory, like if they were stabbing a flag into virgin land. Their gaze is almost an anthropology of manners that comprises all classes, from the lumpen youngsters of Pizza, Beer, and Cigarettes to the well-off preteens in The Swamp. It can also embrace all the different attitudes towards adulthood, from total disregard like in Suddenly to the difficult incorporation in Waiting for the Messiah and Lost Embrace , including the frustrated dreams of Just for Today or the wish to make it in El descanso . It can also propose a wide range of looks at budding love, from the coy tenderness of '73 Model to the extreme rationality of Saturday ; from the impossibility in Silvia Prieto or the irony in Love is a Fat Woman (the first part) to the late initiation in Pizza, Beer, and Cigarettes, love affairs can also be the very subject of a film, in a tone of strangeness and perplexity, like in Ezequiel Acuña's two films: Swimming Alone (Nadar solo, 2003) and Como un avión estrellado (2005), but always aiming at telling stories with a strong personal intensity.

These stories escape the ambition of synthesising the whole of Argentina, and instead choose to draw small portraits of specific destinies, by smoothening any tendency to be emphatic, taking barely moments of the characters' lives rather than developing them in time. Limiting, lightening, subtracting: those are the verbs that move their worlds of fiction.

The Tremor of the Influences

Saying that this is a generation of orphans in no way means to say that it is a group of filmmakers without cinematographic lineage or filiations. Quite the contrary: there had never been a generation of filmmakers in the history of Argentinean cinema whose origins were so connected to cinema, than the generation of the nineties.

But it is difficult to identify these influences because the sources are digested, to the extent that often all that is left is a situation, such as the handicapped attacked by the main characters in Pizza, Beer, and Cigarettes, taken from Buñuel's Los olvidados (1950), even if the two films seem aesthetically very far from each other. Or take the scene with the two technicians trying to repair an appliance in Buenos Aires Vice Versa, virtually a re-shoot of the scene at the beginning of Cassavete's Faces (1968).

Bolivia (2001)

What these new Argentinean filmmakers do regarding their influences is a (syncretic?) operation, closer to the appropriation of shots, tones, moments, framings, and isolated characters, instead of trying to transfer complete aesthetic systems. Nor do they propose a (phagocytosis?) to cover the lack of ideas by plagiarizing original models. The case of Fine Powder is utterly clear. The film tells the story of two youngsters and their particular perceptions of the world around them. The director weaves in such a way the stylistic features of the avant-gardes of last century that they are at the same time visible but impossible to identify in each shot. Such is also the case of Fernán Rudnik's El nadador inmóvil (2000).

Nevertheless, it is true that you can find a certain solitary and bitter tone, quite typical of the independent US films of the eighties, mixed with the slightly bittersweet humour of the Italian comedies of the sixties, in Merry Christmas. And 768903 seems to take inspiration from some of Scorsese's films like After Hours (1985). Image is treated in Just for Today in a way that reminds us of Wong-kar Wai's Chungking Express (1994), and in Graciadió , there are connections to certain fragments of Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho (1991). A certain rational sense of humour in Waiting for the Messiah and Lost Embrace seems close to some of Woody Allen's works. And Suddenly appears to pay tribute to the Nouvelle Vague, whereas the character of el Rulo and his work problems in Crane World relate to the topics so dear to Italian Neorealism. It's as if Trapero had mixed the subject of Il posto (1961) in the era of globalisation with the main character of Umberto D (1952), just that now he doesn't even have a dog to keep him company.

In another tone, seeking to avoid declamatory excess and sentimental costumbrismo, several directors go for dissected dialogue and dull acting to tell stories of young people revolving around love affairs. They have often attained this by using Bresson's concepts, like in Rapado and Silvia Prieto, pushing the premises to almost absurd limits. In other cases, such as '73 Model and Saturday, they have incorporated Erich Rohmer's Comedies and Proverbs system. Or they have mixed some of his procedures with others that are easy to find in the films of Abbas Kiarostami, like in Celina Murga's Ana and the Others (Ana y los otros, 2003).

In the cases of films more overtly industrial in their production modes, they of course focus on different guidelines. The swindle within the swindle in Nine Queens is typical of David Mamet's films, whereas the duo that changes and exchanges roles in Tiempo de valientes could be connected to films like Analyze This! (1999) and Lethal Weapon (1987). There is a certain nostalgic intention in Same Love, Same Rain in the style of Ettore Scola's We All Loved Each Other So Much (C'eravamo tanto amati, 1974), and more in the line of Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946) in Son of the Bride.

But all these are speculations, which can just as well be valid or deceiving when it comes to explaining the origins of each film. If one thinks about The Swamp or Freedom, two singular and unique films in which the amalgam of influences has been woven together with such conviction that they are no longer apparent. There are hints of some other works, like those of Leonardo Favio and Leopoldo Torre Nilsson in one case, and perhaps Sharunas Bartas in the other. But they are there more like a misty perfume than like a fact.

The Magic Gloves (Los guantes mágicos, 2003)

This tremor of the influences, hence, seems to be digested by the new directors. The models that inspire or that form part of the filmmakers' cinematographic world are not easy to pin down. Even if the final sequence in Alejo Taube's One or the Other (Una de dos, 2004) revisits the scene in the first part of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960). Or if Buñuel's presence can be felt in the religion classes in The Holy Girl , and if the sea and the character himself in Rodrigo Moreno's The Custodian (El custodio, 2006) seem to recall the films of Takeshi Kitano. But these influences do not take the dimensions of a debt, nor do they determine the films through their derivations or effects, like what happened to several films of the so-called New Argentinean Cinema of the Sixties.

Brotherhood, Orphanhood and Transformation

So we go back to the question of what ties together that which seems bound to break loose. A tentative answer, merely conjectural, approximate and inevitably speculative could be that all these filmmakers, regardless of their personal tastes and choices, their references and their stumbles, make in their films a space of belonging and learning, a place for exploration and coexistence. Thus, this 'generation of orphans' is no longer adrift, but in a state of brotherhood.

After almost a decade, however, in the past two years this brotherhood has begun to show its differences (just like any group or community), though more in the kind of projects they choose than in their ways of filmmaking. None of the new directors had tried out a period film, but Adrián Caetano does Pase libre-crónica de una fuga (2001), about the only escape during the Argentinean dictatorship. The films of the 'new cinema' took distance from popular genres, but Ulises Rosell's Sofacama (2006) follows the tradition of classic comedy, as Albertina Carri's Géminis (2005) follows that of Greek tragedy. Pablo Trapero, on his side, recovers the comedy of manners with Rolling Family , and Tiempo de valientes observes the codes of police adventures. And even if for most of these filmmakers cinema was seen as an autonomous art, independent of other artistic disciplines, there are tight connections to theatre in Luis Ortega's Monobloc (2005) and Santiago Loza's Cuatro mujeres descalzas (2005).

In a way, this transformation has gradually eliminated what was a main feature of the new cinema: the faded limits between documentary and fiction are now giving way to a clearer choice for fiction. Without compromising their position as authors or their will to explore the potentials of language, these filmmakers have taken some distance from what is real. The topic of shattered families in Rosell's films, the rise of violence in Caetano, the claustrophobic suffocation in Martel, the hopeless difficulties of bonds in Villegas, or the families in crisis from their very origins in Carri, all mark the persistence of their universes, though the procedures have become more classic in their narrative formulation. What does not change stagnates. And just like it would not be reasonable to say that the filmmakers of the renewing waves made the same cinema throughout their lives - from Godard to Truffaut, from Rossellini to Pasolini - it would not be reasonable either to expect these new directors to go on making the same film.

Sergio Wolf
© FIPRESCI 2006

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