The Secret in Their Eyes

Writing the New Argentina in Juan José Campanella’s

El Secreto De Sus Ojos/The Secret In Their Eyes

 

 

 

 

 

Juan José Campanella’s Academy Award-winning film El secreto de sus ojos/The Secret in Their Eyes (2009), has been praised for its technical prowess, and for “engaging emotion as well as intellect” [1]. Campanella´s Hollywood-learned technical skills have been welcomed by Argentine critics and State industry commentators as an example of  how Latin American film can  address complex political issues while remaining commercially viable at the national and international levels.

The film has also been praised for its ability to confront a difficult period of Argentine history, that of the dictatorship of the 1970s and 80s, and the policies of “forgetting” that were promoted by the State in order advance national reconciliation: “Ben and Irene as they separately examine the decisions they made back in the 1970s. For both of them, as for their country, accurate remembrance of that period is crucial.”[2] The protagonists are brought together by their common sense of justice and their desire to challenge and even subvert the power structure that has been perverted by powerful interests in order to solve a brutal rape-murder case that took place in the early 1970s. It is in this common spirit of resistance in the face of injustice that their bond develops and grows, contributing also to the film’s “official” allegorical meaning: the return to Argentina of a fair system of justice.

Academically, the film has been studied as a psychological exploration of the complexities and contradictions that resulted from the dictatorship of the “Dirty War,” an allegory of the dynamics of “forgetting” that followed the country’s transition to democracy, and the slow reconstruction and association of events that link the political horrors of those years and the lives of the protagonists. (Moraña) Some cultural critics have focused on the parallels between the oneiric resolution of the love story and the shocking resolution of the murder, the latter being also the resolution of the political plot of the film. (Solomianski).

But the existing allegorical explorations overlook an element of the relationship between the protagonists: their class status. This paper uses the theories of national allegory advanced by Fredric Jameson to offer an interpretation of how the relationship between the two protagonists, Irene and Benjamín, including the way the political situation of Benjamín’s is resolved, generating a conflictive reading of the film’s vision of history. This vision results in an illusory alliance between the emerging bourgeoisie, represented by Benjamín, and the traditional oligarchy, represented by Irene, as well as by the class role ascribed to other characters in the film, and exposes a different way of understanding the film’s attempt at confronting both the unresolved issues of Argentina’s political past and its possible future.

The film is told in a series of flashbacks that trace the memories that paralegal (not lawyer, he insists through the film) Benjamín Esposito is trying to awaken in order to tell the story of a murder he investigated in his youth. The murder, which is not political in nature, ties into the political reality of the Argentina of the 1970s through the association of the murderer to police squads that acted with impunity during the dictatorship. Through the flashbacks we follow Benjamín´s early attempts at resolving the murder, often circumventing legal technicalities with the support of Assistant Judge Irene, but his efforts are eventually thwarted by the obstacles and threats produced by the dictatorship´s ideological bureaucracy already in place before 1976. Many of the more complex reading s of the film, like Moraña´s, focus their analysis on the resolution of the murder-mystery aspect of the film, a reading that leaves unresolved the other subplot of the story, the long unspoken love affair between Espósito and Irene.

In her book El cuerpo del delito. Un manual, Argentine critic Josefina Ludmer explores the concept of crime according to different schools of thought, and concludes that a “crime” is a four-cornered structure that involves the criminal, the victim, the state, and civil society. This quadrangular structure, according to Ludmer, implies that all crimes are political (18-20). Most critics have focused their analysis of the political meaning of Campanella´s film in the resolution of the traditional crime: Benjamín discovers that, given the State´s obstruction of the legal system, it is up to civil society (both the victim´s husband, and Benjamín acting outside of the realm of the legal profession he represents, (although within the SPIRIT of the law)) to punish the criminal –or, in the case of Benjamín—to overlook the transgressions of the victim in order to embrace a sort of poetic justice that, according to Moraña, allows us to focus on the fear of forgetting that seems to engulf Espósito, and that leads him not only to develop the novel that serves as an engine for the plot, but also an engine  of memory for Espósito and Irene, who are then driven to pursue the “real”  outcome of the story years after the crime had been officially closed. For Moraña, this exercise in memory is a way of seeking justice for the victims by rescuing them from the anonymity of the official story, which has rendered them twice harmed: first by the original crime, and then by allowing the criminal, who also commits criminal acts in the name of the corrupt state, to remain at large. In shielding the criminal, the state loses its legitimacy and justifies the extrajudicial action of the social actors. As Solomianski states, “the end says something we don’t´seem to understand amidst the confusion (…): when the State fails to fulfill its public function, individuals must abandon the private realm to take control of the public one.” (775).

But critics seem to have overlooked an important element of the story:  the way it forges private alliances across traditionally conflictive elements of Argentine society in order to overcome the passivity or the criminality of the state. In this case, this alliance is given also as the redeeming element of the exercise in memory that is the recreation of the crime: the culmination or realization of the love story between Benjamin and Irene, which represents also the point of closure of the conflict of the film.

 

From our point of view, this part of the resolution of the plot forces an alliance between traditionally antagonistic social and economic forces in Argentine society, that of the oligarchy, represented by Irene Menéndez Hastings,  (of Scottish ancestry in traditionally anglophile Argentine society;  US-educated  (in Cornell, not Harvard –we could joke a second-tier oligarch because of these shortcomings in her pedigree), who gains access to the lower tiers of the justice system thank s to her father´s influence (although she will still have to “make her way to the top”) vs Benjamín Expósito, an ambitious child of the working class (an issue repeatedly mentioned in the film and that is also suggested by his last name, Expósito, a surname often given to children of unknown parentage in Argentine orphanages) who, we surmise from the plot references, has managed, through his perseverance and intelligence, to overcome the barriers to his social class and achieve a position of responsibility in the magistrate´s office despite, again, as we learn repeatedly, of him not being a lawyer but a paralegal.  Benjamin and Irene ´s alliance allows the former to perform investigations into the crime despite illegitimate barriers built into the legal system by the state´s  repressive apparatus to defend its henchmen, and developing the coping mechanism of the “other” in the violent world of the pre-dictatorship, the reliance on extrajudicial actions justified by their certainty in the guilt of the suspect, Ordoñez.  It is thanks to this complicity that Expósito gains access to the clues of the crime, in what is both an act of rebellion and resistance that is cut at the root by the increasing violence of the system (the crime and initial investigation take place in 1974, the violence era when the State´s own AAA (Alianza Anticomunista Argentina) began paramilitary activities against the left-wing opposition, violence  that would culminate in the 1976 coup, the moment when, after the murder of Pablo Sandoval, Expósito´s assistant, and the chilling encounter with the murderer in an elevator, convince both Irene and Benjamin of their inability to fight the system.

In her excellent Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema, Joan Page (134-135) describes how film production in Argentina develops strategies of reterritorialization that respond to the realignment of political and economic forces after the dictatorship, but also the attempt at legitimating the new social and especially economic order. Like Tamara Falicov in her The Cinematic Tango. Contemporary Argentine Film, Page sees in many Argentine film productions supported by the government-run INCAA (Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales)  and developed for the international market (as had been the case with an earlier Oscar winner, La historia oficial, 1985) an attempt at constructing a narrative that justifies the inaction of the population during the dictatorship by emphasizing the irrational, random, and merciless nature of the repressive acts of the State.  In the  case of El secreto de sus ojos, the resulting story reconciles many of the paradoxes created by the new paradigms of democratic Argentina, especially those related to the economic crisis resulting from the privatization of national industries and the embracing of neoliberal economic policies of free trade  --here it is important to note that the “present” time of the film takes place in 1999, two years before the collapse of the Argentine economic system that might have culminated the neoliberal experiment in the country.  

Chilean  critic Nelly Richard has theorized extensively on the attempts of post-dictatorial southern cone governments to develop narratives of post-dictatorship reconciliation that explained the embrace of the neoliberal capitalist order in the new democracies, a move that to many critics, including Richards herself, simply legitimized the actions of the representatives of the traditional economic order (the alliance of local oligarchies and transnational corporate interests) to continue the economic policies that the dictatorship was installed to defend  against the interests of the working class.

The love story between Benjamín and Irene follows this logic of reconciliation but also builds a logic of submission between what would traditionally be socially antagonistic parties that are forced into an alliance against a common enemy who seems to have simply vanished from the scene, and whose punishment is left to those who were directly victimized by the irrational violence of the State (here it would be interesting to explore further the relationship between social violence– the of Liliana Coloto, presented as a truly innocent victim, vs. the murder of Sandoval, who is killed for political motives but who is never “avenged”).  At the same time, the 25-year gap between the initial investigation of the murder is truncated by the dictatorship that forces Espósito into internal exile in northern Argentina (a pseudo-disappearance of sorts) that is encouraged by Irene and negotiated by her father, making him (the invisible, benevolent, patriarchal hand of the traditional Patrician oligarchy) the saving deus ex machina.  The closure the film offers Benjamín and Irene is in reality a return to the traditional order: Irene has become a judge; Benjamín, now retired, is further able to find closure by offering his narrative of the crime (although it is never resolved through the legitimate authority of the State, but rather through its “parallel” reconstruction by Espósito, another paradox that deserves further study but matches our reading of the film as reactionary). The legitimacy of this resolution (although, again, official justice is never achieved), is enshrined by the consummation of Irene and Benjamín´s romance, which signals the overcoming of the trauma produced by the irrational actions of the State. Irene´s new position can be read allegorically as the legitimation of the “new” legal system, which although still in the hands of the traditional oligarchy, is now given a “feminized”, “maternal” form, that opens its doors (and its rose) to Esposito, the rebel who is brought back into the fold of the authority of the new State.

Even the resolution of the psychological/subliminal element of the story points at this appeasing class reconciliation. Espósito becomes aware of his feelings for Irene when he solves the mystery of the word that recurrently comes to him in his dreams as he is trying to find subconscious clues to solving the crime. He repeatedly wakes up and writes the words “Temo” (I fear), which trouble him; finally, he realizes that what he had been writing all along is “Te amo” (I love you) and that his subconscious has been telling him all along does not have to do with the crime, but with his feelings towards Irene. While some critics have interpreted this illumination as the transforming moment that allows the protagonist to close the historical gap created by political violence, we can also read it as the filmmaker´s attempt at appeasing class conflict: The proletarian´s subconscious fear of the oligarch is magically transformed by her seemingly accepting his desire, which could be seen as a moment of overcoming of the class taboos, another “sign” of Argentine progress? but which in the film becomes surrender (in the closing shot, Benjamín enters Irene´s office and the door closes behind him), and therefore acceptance of the established order, not the emergence of a new one, or the emergence of a new order that follows the rules of the old.

 El secreto de sus ojos has been hailed as a work that uses traditional Hollywood techniques of “intensified continuity” to explore the complex dynamic of reconciliation undergone in Argentina after the dictatorship.  But the goal of the film is not to confront or challenge the efficacy of the policy of forgetting  that was officially established  during the transition to democracy in order to avoid  further violence and secure the survival of the nation, but rather to take advantage of, or even manipulate that amnesia in order to build and alternate narrative of reconciliation that, instead of fueling a  reinvention of the State that takes into consideration the failures and shortcomings of the previous paradigm, reverts to the old one and justifies the perpetuation of the status quo. The film´s private, secret solution to the original murder turns collective injustice and horror (the unjust application of the law during the Dirty War) into an individual act of revenge, and in traditional Hollywood mode justifies and privileges individual action (the victim´s husband acting as judge and executioner) when the legal system fails the citizenry and the nation, a resolution that is as problematic as the perpetuation of the fossilized social structure it seems to defend. The logic of authority upheld in the film seems more a reflection of the appeasing policies of reconciliation advocated by the defenders of the amnesty laws of the transition than an attempt at redefining the imaginary of the nation in order to confront the errors of the past and reinvent itself.

The film is an example of how government subsidies that allow filmmakers to take advantage of the sophisticated and expensive game of smoke and mirrors that is CGI (one of the most commented scenes of the film, that of the soccer stadium, was produced using the software used in the production of The Lord of the Rings and took 9 months to develop)  can be used to give viewers (in Argentina and abroad) a false sense of closure.

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[1] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/movies/reviews/2010-04-23-mcaps23_ST_N.htm. Accessed Oct. 15, 2014. 

[2] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125996195). Accessed Oct. 15, 2014.

La Cíénaga/The Swamp

Lucrecia Martel’s La ciénaga(The Swamp, 2001) is perhaps one of the best early examples of the New Argentine Cinema and of this style’s desire to resist the imposition of fixed meanings to the film (as we discussed in relation to Pizza, Beer, Smokes. The idea of fixed meanings (that certain circumstances, situations, actions, or characters represent something BEYOND the immediate meaning assigned to them in the film, that is, that they are ALLEGORIES. For example, Falicov discusses amply, and we mentioned in class how the characters and relationships established in La historia official or La película del rey function as allegories of Argentina’s political or economic challenges to the middle class, in the former, and of the situation of art or the film industry in the latter. An allegory is a level of meaning that is not directly stated in the film, but that can be construed by the reader/spectator from the resemblances or relationship between the literal meaning of the story presented and another possible reading that is hidden. In our discussions of Mundo grúa and Pizza, birra, faso we also discussed how filmmakers purposefully established a distance between the viewer and the narrative, which results in a sense of ambiguity for the audience. By refusing to establish a historical frame of reference for the audience --avoiding giving us sufficient background information to judge whether the characters are "good" or "bad" or specifying an underlying motive for their actions-- and everything happens “in the present,” the viewer is forced to create a relationship between the situations presented and events or elements external to the plot, actively participating in creating "meaning" to the story, a meaning that also becomes highly individualized.

 

Something similar seems to happen in The Swamp, but the relationships between the mood established in the film and the social reality of Argentina as presented, for example, by Solanas in Memoria del saqueo/Social Genocide, or by the historical background presented by Falicov, seem a bit more clear: The opening scene, where we are exposed to the tired, stumbling, old bodies of the drunken characters lounging by a pool that doesn’t work, under the foreboding natural surroundings –overcast skies, thunder, oppressive heat-- can easily be read as a reflection on the moral and social degradation and stagnation of the Argentine middle class, of which the two main families in the film are members. This, together with the different plot lines, seems to be begging for a reading that goes beyond the obscure, literal meaning of the plot, and suggests a socio-political/ allegorical reading, although it also works as a psychological portrait of the middle class. However, there is enough ambiguity in the film to prevent a straightforward political or social commentary.

 

The sense of alienation, of fear, of apathy, of claustrophobia related by the fragments of stories we get from the characters is also reflected in the framing and camera use; the interiors are dark, old, disheveled, like the lives of the characters themselves. Their lives are fragmented, broken or breaking, but we are barely given enough information to understand the origin of this dysfunction. One critic said this ambiguity produced a “lack of literal meaning” in the film that prevaents us from establishing any DIRECT relationship between the filmic and the “real.” This, we mentioned, might well be due to the director´s desire to force a more individualized reading of the work, or to invite a more complex exercise of interpretation by closely trying to follow any apparent hint of meaning   The stories (and this is emphasized by both the dialogue and the truncated narrative(s) also the fragmented, almost elliptical montage, that leaves everything unresolved) are shrouded in a constant sense of foreboding and imminent danger that is never resolved –perhaps until the end, when the child falls, but does he? We are always left disoriented, wondering what is going to be significant to the plot and what isn’t ; our anxiety is never quelled by resolution. If we feel this way as an audience, how would the characters feel? In your blog today, again, point at an element of the movie --a character, an event, a line, an element of the plot or the imagery that you found hinted at a symbolic or allegorical  interpretation of the film.   

Pizza, Birra, Faso (Pizza, Beer, Smokes) and Mundo Grua (Crane World)

undo Grúa / Pizza, birra, faso

The two films we have selected for today are representative of the work of many of the young filmmakers who came onto the Argentine film stage in the mid-1990s to create what has become known as the New Argentine Cinema (Falicov calls it by several names, but this is the one that stuck, and that critics now use capital letters to refer to it means it is now an academically recognized concept). Although Falicov suggests these were young minds set on preserving the ideals of a national or independent cinema in the Argentina of Menem’s “blockbuster” era, on closer scrutiny it is important to see how they also take advantage of the opportunities afforded them by the system (after enormous hardship, it must be stated). I don’t think this should be taken as a criticism, but rather reflects on these young professionals’ training in the film schools that had proliferated since the early 90s. In our discussion of the last few films, especially Caballos Salvajes and Nine Queens, we had questioned how these movies, which depended for their success on a working class audience, represented those characters they tried to portray. Falicov points out in Ch. 4 that, although in the 1990s the INCAA gave preference to funding the projects of directors with higher-budget commercial films over younger or independent film directors, the organization also instituted a fund for young filmmakers that resulted in a “new, gritty, urban style of filmmaking by fresh, young talent.” (115) The style, Falicov points out, had been seen in Historias breves (1995), which was actually a compilation of several Argentine shorts presented to an INCAA competition. The films we are watching today were made by these students who emerged from the Buenos Aires film schools in the 1990s that “contested the imitative style of Hollywood, and yet they often rejected the auteuristic approach of the well-established Argentine film community.”

 

By 1997, according to INCAA, there were a large number of film institutes in Argentina, especially around the capital, Buenos Aires, with enrollment numbering between 4 and 10,000 students (Falicov 117). These produced films that received national and especially international acclaim through their focus on the social reality ignored by blockbusters. In today's films we can speak of the return to a neorealist aesthetic (which had dominated the social films of the golden age, and the political films of the 60s and early 70s, centered on stories that followed the hardships of working-class characters whose reality seemed to have disappeared from the commercially-successful films) and the low budgets available to the younger filmmakers added to the gritty look of the films, and reinforced some of the positions of the advocates of Third Cinema thirty years earlier, who had argued that the visual style of films produced in the Third World was both a reflection of a specific reality and of the economic conditions under which they were produced. As Falicov points out, although these filmmakers are addressing the social issues that affect the Argentine public, “their stories are told from a different standpoint, and they are not necessarily openly polemic or ideological.” (120). Interestingly, this is one of the THEORETICAL characteristics of neorealist cinema, which aims not at exposing poverty as a social ill, but rather exposing the viewer to its existence and its consequences.

 

When discussing Mundo Grúa, Falicov emphasizes 27 year-old director Pablo Trapero’s desire to use a Neorealist style , including his reliance on mostly non-professional actors, in order to underscore the reality of the working class, but also because, in the 1990s, it represented an aesthetic “born out of necessity and urgency, and not as a movement that sprung out of a bourgeois experiment” (Falicov, 122). I question this statement (which, to be fair, is not Falicov’s). I think that there is a deep theoretical base to these films , their composition often follows contemporary theoretical issues from the philosophy of film (French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s two volumes on “The movement image” and the “Time image” are at the heart of much of the discussion on Italian neorealism, and also of some interesting interpretations of contemporary Argentine film, including an analysis of Pizza, Birra, Faso that focuses on the temporal and geographical DYNAMICS of these films (how the camera works in time and space, the temporal structure of the film, the way the ACTION develops in space and time, etc., some very interesting considerations we have not had time to contemplate in the class.)

It is this relationship to the bourgeois that also ties these films to many of the arguments regarding the audience’s expectations of the representation of its own experience, where these films become relevant. It is interesting to notice that the filmmakers, in both instances, are not too preoccupied with HISTORY, with what comes before or after the stories. This has interesting political ramifications (there is no sense of history, there is no past), but also denies us, as viewers, the comfort of the historical narrative (what has brought these characters to the situation they are facing in the film's plot?) something that will explain to us the present circumstance of the characters, that will allow us to identify with the characters. This gives a different depth to the viewing experience. After viewing Pizza, birra, faso in class a couple of years ago, some of the students judged the characters in the films very harshly, in part perhaps because we are not given that traditional insight into the underdog characters that make us empathize with them, as, for example, in Disney's Aladdin, where we are given a context that allows us to relate to the plight of the socially-transgressive characters, to feel sorry for them. In the Disney cartoon the audience did not hope for the hero to get caught or imprisoned as he keeps "One jump ahead of the breadline, one jump ahead of the sword" just because he "steals only what I can´t afford"... "gotta eat to live, gotta steal to eat," and what does the crowd tells us? he is "a one man rise in crime" "I´d blame parents 'xcept he hasn´t got any". The distancing from the characters not only takes place through this lack of historical setting, but it functions also as a disarticulation of the plot that allows for some of the most interesting aspects of Mundo Grúa, which are also present in Pizza, birra… : In both films the story is organized in jolts, and rather than witnessing a complete story, this style of narrative isolates the characters and make the actions that appear in the screen secondary; in a way, we fill in the blanks of what takes place in the interstices of the story we are seeing, WE give it a sense of continuity.

 

In some way, in Mundo Grúa we find some of the positive Argentine traits we had been shown in Nueve Reinas and Caballos salvajes; specifically, among Rulo and his friends there is a sense of solidarity and enjoyment of life that that we had commented in the barbecue of the blue-collar workers of Caballos, or even in the friendship of the group of crooks in the closing scene of Nueve Reinas. But here we experience this reality at eye-level, without making heroes of those forced to live it, without making political or moral statements about their condition, without creating a struggle between good and evil, an environment that allows these characters to just BE. And it is in that being, in the way that these stories are bereft of allegory, their endings open-ended, their characters minor, where we can perceive these films’ ability to relate to an audience. Perhaps not to the “good” audience --bourgeois, educated, wealthy or at least able to pay for a ticket-- but rather the type that is left to think and ponder about the exercise and the utility of

filmmaking as art or as social statement.

 

Pizza, Birra, Faso (Pizza, Beer and Smokes, 1998), falls under the same category of films made by young film school graduates – here Bruno Stagnaro and Adrián Caetano-- with limited resources. The film uses neorealist techniques to tell the socially-relevant story of a group of unemployed youths surviving in the Argentine capital during a time of crisis. We mentioned, early on in the semester, the influence a young cast has on the audience, especially in a film like this, about the negligence of the past, the difficulties of the present and the challenges of the future –if there are any. The audience (an Argentine bourgeois audience looking at the reflection of its own world, left to come to terms with a social reality it has created and from which, it seems, the only escape is to leave the country? At the end of La historia oficial we were left to ponder Gaby’s future. Here the future is Cordobés and Sandra’s child, and hope comes through the voice of the police speaking to the radio dispatcher (a very Hollywood concept), who talks of “un nene masculino, aparentemente sin vida por herida de bala” (A male child, apparently dead from a bullet wound). It is one of the very few times that the filmmakers allow for emotion to break into the narrative, and barely.

 

I mentioned how in previous screenings of the film I was shocked by some students' cheering for the kids’ death, and spent a good deal of time looking for some intelligent interpretations of the film that would allow us to redeem these characters. Joanna Page, a critic that writes about the film in the book Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema, states eloquently: “in New Argentine Cinema we rarely see explicit denunciations of the dictatorship or of Menemist policies pursued during the 1990s or, indeed, any appetite for unrooting past causes or laying blame at a particular door. The youths of Pizza birra, faso are not simply victims: the film clearly shows their position within a larger chain of exploitation, as others, hungrier than they, eat the food they discard; we see them dispassionately robbing those with less, as well as with more. The psychological explanations of behavior advanced in Hollywood cinema are denied to us here: we join the action in media res, … and are afforded no privileged knowledge of the boys’ childhood experiences that might explain their current actions. The rigor of New Argentine Cinema lies in its refusal to grant its spectators access to comforting narratives or continuities that are out of reach for the characters themselves. Its gaze deliberately distances us, refusing to … satiate our hunger for explanations.” (40, my emphasis) What these films are doing is turning us into observers, not letting us be “part of the action”.

 

In both films we can see the awkward position in which the camera places us in some shots of both movies, as if we were there, witnessing the events, … (we talked about how the hand-held camera produces a “documentary effect”) but we are always passive observers, and perhaps it is in that passivity that makes us uncomfortable and makes us want to see more action.

Nueve Reinas

By the late 1990s, Patagonik, an Argentine TV production company that had branched out into the film business by making big-screen versions of its most successful television series, was a model of the type of industrial filmmaking that the government of Carlos Menem had encouraged during the times of financial hardship. Perhaps it was the ongoing financial crisis, perhaps shame over film projects that garnered the company some of the biggest national profits for the industry together with the lousiest reviews, but something, in 1999 drove Patagonik to decide that its next film project would be awarded through a script contest. That is how Nueve reinas (Nine Queens), a film that seems to break with the traditional requisites of an Argentine film, came to be. Up until that point, Fabian Bielinsky, the winning script’s author, had had little experience as a professional filmmaker -- he had co-written the script of a sci-fi film, La sonámbula, and been assistant director in a few projects over a 10 year period-- but was given carte blanche in the development of the project. Falicov reminds us that at the turn of the milennium there was a wave of filmmakers considered “…‘the orphaned generation’ in terms of their cinematic influences” and that “…the work produced by this new group…include the fact that they generally choose marginalized figures in Argentina society, do not conform to the same styles of camera angles and cuts that earlier directors used, and they typically do not make genre films (130).” But this went against the needs of a private enterprise, and Patagonik chooses a different approach; one that appealed to broader audiences through its dialogue not with specific genres, but a sophisticated plot developed in an Argentine context.

From the get go it is clear that Bielinsky’s approach to filmmaking does not follow the traditional industrial model developed in Argentina under Menem, the one that sought to attract as many viewers as possible to the theaters by reproducing the slick style of Hollywood blockbusters, or by appealing to an array of disjointed audiences in the way of Caballos salvajes. Nor is the film close to Solana’s revolutionary concept of Third Cinema, or to the auteuristic, “hyperintellectualized” notion of film held by the directors of the Nueva Ola. Instead, Bielinsky shows a passion for “classical” Hollywood film, an approach to the craft that, in the best style of Hitchcock’s most paranoid films, is driven by the internal twists and turns of a plot that, despite its preposterousness, keeps the viewers on the edge of their seats. To me, as a viewer, the beauty of these films is in the tension created by their very absurdity, and in the ability of the director to keep that tension going –and making sense—up to the even more absurd twists expect at the end through attention to the most minute details of the plot. 

Any fissure in the storyline will make the whole film fall like a house of cards. 

The film had great success in Argentina, where it reached the magic number of 1 million viewers, and abroad, where it earned accolades no Argentine film had received in 10 years. Like other international films of the era (it came out around the same time as Guy Ritchie’s Snatch, Run Lola Run by Germany’s Tom Tykwer, and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros), it successfully married an intelligent plot with sharp visuals in a manner that Hollywood seems to have forgotten. The result is a film that would make any international producer proud… But how would an Argentine critic react?

Thursday, January 7

Caballos Salvajes/ Wild Horses

Today’s class focused on the era of the blockbuster during the Menem years. Falicov explains how, under Alfonsín, Argentina had begun the transition from an economy driven by a concept of national capitalism (where the state controlled and administered enterprises considered important for the “national interest”) to one that followed a global capitalist model, where transnational corporations were allowed into the country to compete with these enterprises. In her discussion of La historia oficial, Falicov had pointed at some of the effects this shift had in Argentine film --in chapter 3, her analysis of “the whiskey shot”, which she used to underscored how Puenzo’s experience as a director of commercials had “helped the film to conform to the established conventions of an international (read U.S.) style of filmmaking,” what Frederic Jameson calls a “geopolitical aesthetic” (71).  
This shift towards global capitalism is accelerated after the hyperinflation crisis of 1989, Alfonsín’s resignation and the rise to power of Peronist Carlos Menem. Although the Peronists had opposed Alfonsín’s privatization of state-run enterprises, almost immediately after Menem’s election  they reneged on their promises of welfare state intervention and adopted a strong policy of privatization, establishing strong ties with global corporations in order to alleviate the nation’s foreign debt. As part of this economic shift, the state also curtailed its financial support of cultural institutions, and placed many of the administrative positions associated with that realm in the hand of members of the business community, creating an unprecedented relationship between business and culture that the world of the arts had always tried to prevent in order to preserve the values of the “unique, auteur-inspired work.” (77)
The effects of this new relationship between government, business, and culture resulted in a dramatic shift in the focus and the direction of the Argentine film industry. Falicov calls it the “culture of the shopping mall” and quotes a statement by then Secretary of Culture Julio Bárbaro “My identity hinges on the suit I wear or the car I drive”. Argentine cultural policy moved away from the European model, where the state supports cultural production, to one where culture is left “exposed to the laws of savage capitalism” (77-78).These changes, however, were also partially aimed at reestablishing the relationship between the film industry and the Argentine public, a distancing that had been criticized, among others, by Octavio Getino, who was director of the INC for a year, from October, 1989 to November, 1990. His position, like Solanas’, had been critical of filmmakers’ reliance on state subsidies to finance “hyperintellectualized” films; he felt the industry needed to regain its contact with the working class audience. Initially, the results seem to have been the opposite: the eight films produced under the new subsidy rules in the first quarter of 1991 reached less than 5000 viewers each, which meant the state invested US $1920 per viewer on those films.
Through the Menem years, the approaches to the film industry shifted back and forth between different proposals to preserve and promote national culture. Earlier in the class we mentioned two of the lines that emerged, “cine rico” (rich cinema), supported by directors who wanted the film institute to fund higher-budget ventures from high-profile, established filmmakers, and  cine pobre, “poor cinema”, whose supporters advocated for the funding of low-budget films that could also showcase the talents of a younger generation of filmmakers. Antonio Ottone, who took the reins of ICA (now known as INCAA  to incorporate the broader concept of “audio-visual” production to its realm)  in 1994, was a proponent of the latter model: “Argentina, as a Latin American country, needed to conceive of film production not as a commercial industry, but instead as a cultural form that could be produced on a small scale and still be noteworthy” (93). Ottone resigned in 1995 under pressure from the representatives of the “cine rico”. 
The film we watched today, Caballos Salvajes (Marcelo Pineyro, 1995), is an excellent example of the type of film that emerged from these debates. New York Times critic Stephen Holden compared the film to Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994) for its attitude towards fame and media circuses, but the film also tries to overcome –from my perspective, very ineffectively—the conflicts affecting the Argentine film industry at the time. Ineffectively because, although Caballos salvajes seems to present an apt resolution to these conflicts, it does not make any effort to move its intended audience (the Argentine working class public) to action against the forces that it presents as “evil”, resulting in a product that is often, to quote Holden, “giddily naïve”.On the other hand, Caballos salvajes resorts to many of the strategies many critics saw as necessary to renew the national cinema: It used corporate sponsorship to supplement the support it received from state subsidies; presented a picturesque view of rural Argentina that might appeal to potential tourists at home and abroad (allowing it to qualify for state support), and built its protagonists –a retired old anarchist victimized by the system and a young, naïve banker whose choices are proof of a strong moral character—into working-class heroes fighting a corrupt system whose tentacles include powerful politicians, bankers, thugs, and policemen. The “untameables” escape to Patagonia to the rhythm of a soundtrack rich in Argentine rock tunes, and are pursued by an idealistic television journalist (whose boss is also part of the cabal), joined by a young, rebellious woman with a gun, and helped by an array of blue-collar workers –ranging from truckers to gas-station attendants and a smuggler, all willing to help them get away from the dark forces of the establishment. The question that remains is: What does this film DO for its intended audience? How does it help the plight of the unemployed, of the destitute victims of the radical economic policies of the Memem government? How does it advance the cause of the liberation of Argentina from neocolonial powers? Has the omelet turned? To paraphrase the song sung in the film, who is eating bread, who mierda, mierda?

Wednesday, January 6

Over the last couple of days we have discussed two types of filmmaking that were influential in the development of Argentine cinema, differentiating between a form of cinema that followed the entertainment model set by the Hollywood tradition, and that included traditional comedies and dramas, and one more “high brow,” which also followed two directions, one, inspired by Italian Neorrealism --focusing on social and political issues that were common to all of Latin America, seeking to explore and expose social conflict and inequality, and culminating in the "Third Cinema" defined by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino in their article "Towards a Third Cinema" (now available in Blackboard!!), and addressed by the clip of the documentary by Michael Chanan we watched the first day of class. In the same category is another film style inspired by the French new wave, that developed aesthetic and psychological aspects. We mentioned how a film like The Hour of the Furnaces contrasted with a film like Leopoldo Torres Nilson´s Martín Fierro, the latter an example of that aesthetic current, which was known in 1960s Argentine film as "La nueva ola" (The New Wave).

Over the last two days we have seen the different approaches to Argentine film taken after the military dictatorship. It is important that you study Falicov's discussion of the film industry in the period that follows the “Dirty War,” the dictatorship that had begun in 1976. The election of Raúl Alfonsín, of the moderately conservative Radical Party (Unión Cívica Radical) in 1983 initiates a democratic transition that saw the end of film censorship and sought to establish an economic as well as an aesthetic agenda for Argentine film, creating a new set of challenges for the industry.

In our screening of La historia oficial/The Official Story (1984), we discussed the way the industry was used to promote a specific image of Argentina abroad. In today´s discussion, we have to consider that Alfonsín appointed Manuel Antín, a director who was representative of the "aesthetic", not the "political" line of Argentine filmmaking, as head of the Instituto Nacional de Cine (National Film Institute). This suggests that the Alfonsín government favored that tendency. Falicov suggests that this was done in hopes of promoting a cinematic style that could help establish an intellectualized image of Argentina in the international market (and a more educated national audience) over an industry that would satisfy the demands of a working-class national audience eager to consume the type of action films and comedies produced in the United States. Falicov confirms this through her analysis of how government funds were allocated to the production of “art house” movies (65% of the films produced during the period), which appealed to a middle-class Argentine audience as well as European moviegoers, versus those targeting a popular audience (family films, comedies, which accounted for 35% of the budget of the Institute).

On the one hand, the appointment of Antín might be a reflection of the conflicts and contradictions at play in the Argentine Zeitgeist: Middle-class Argentines partake of an identity defined by the nations “founding fathers” as based on the “civilized” principles of European tradition (in general, Solanas deplored, Argentine aesthetics tended to follow the trends and academic dictates developed in Europe), in contrast with a “barbarism” that over the years had been associated with different sectors of the lower classes (racially represented by indigenous peoples, uneducated immigrants, rural peasants, or the urban working class), a social and cultural stage considered below that achieved by the middle class. In our discussion of The Official Story we mentioned how becoming a member of the bourgeoisie (that middle class) meant having overcome that barbaric state and IMPLIED becoming a standard bearer (aesthetic, ideological) for the culture. This could apply to Fernando Solanas’ films, on the one hand explaining The Hour of the Furnaces’ attempt at creating a novel aesthetics for the revolution, on the other another one of his films, discussed by Falicov, El Exilio de Gardel, which Falicov clasifies as an attempt at negotiating the barrier between what an Argentine film made for Argentinians (Hour of the Furnaces) in contrast to “an Argentine film made for the French”.

There are also political considerations associated with this privileging of the art-house style over popular film. The most blatant is that Alfonsin’s Radical Party appealed mostly to the urban, educated middle-class, and by financing and promoting this type of cinematography the government was appealing to its political base. On the other hand, and we discussed this briefly yesterday in the post about La Historia Oficial, there was a need for Argentina to rebuild its image at the international level, and the art-house film was a vehicle that could contribute to that reacceptance of Argentina as an international creative force. Films like Luis Puenzo’s not only would have presented to international audiences an Argentina ready to face its past and atone for its trespasses, but also to regain the place it had always claimed in Western culture. Falicov mentions how film in the Alfonsín era was used as a tool to promote Argentina as a tourist and investment destination. An Argentina ready to come to terms with its past, presented as a nation with an educated middle class, versus one preoccupied with the social, political and economic conflicts of the working class --and all the social turmoil that implies-- reflected in neorealist and social-realist films, which would not have helped the cause of the government, since that social reality conveys a sense of social instability that repels the type of international investment Argentina desperately needed.

For filmmakers, this political use of film generates a complex conflict. Theorists like Solanas saw film as a tool of liberation, both political, because of the messages film could transmit, and artistic, since part of his project called for the development of a filmic language divorced from the alienating, neocolonial model perpetuated by Hollywood, as well as from the elitist European model based on bourgeois aesthetic principles. The favoring of the European aesthetics because of political and economic reasons did not allow for an evolution of the neorealist and Third Cinema concepts, limiting the possibilities of expanding Argentina’s search for an independent filmic language.

Carlos Sorín’s La película del rey (A king and His movie, 1985) is more than just an allegorization of the conditions faced by the Argentine film industry in the mid-1980s. The film parodies the difficulties encountered by a filmmaker attempting to bring a project to the screen, and the level to which an artist is forced to compromise his vision to be able to bring it to fruition. The interpretation of the film is made more complex by the multiple readings allowed by its layering of conflicts: Historical (Is the story of the French king of Patagonia a political allegory of Argentina and the difficulties of bringing civilization to barbarism, of founding a nation on foreign (alien(ating)) political principles, and therefore a critique of the way Argentina has imagined itself for 200 years?); Artistic (is the story an allegory of the difficulties faced by a Quixotic idealist who tries to bring his artistic vision to fruition, thus paralleling the obstacles encountered by the filmmaker in realizing his dream?); Social (is the film a reflection on the need to compromise a vision (political, artistic, economic) in order to accommodate the needs and demands of other actors –in the sense of social actors, not movie personnel-- involved in the project?), etc.

In any case, in its aesthetics and narrative structure the film seems to fit the traditional bourgeois concept of filmmaking in Argentina than the revolutionary model espoused by Solanas. At the same time, it could be argued that Arturo, the director of the film within the film, is originally trying to create a socially-relevant film, one that explores historical and philosophical implications of the adventure of the King, and yet is forced by the economic circumstances to adopt a more “abstract” approach to the film –giving up his extras and substituting them for mannequins, among many other compromises-- one that forces the movie closer to the European model than the historical one the director had envisioned when developing the project. In any case, the conclusion suggests that the dreamer will continue to dream and to attempt to bring that dream to life. In your blog entry for today, analyze an element of today´s film in the context of this discussion: What is the story Carlos Sorín is trying to tell about filmmaking? How do you think he BEST presents this idea in the movie? (through a character, a specific scene of the film, an idea presented in the movie). Do you think there are aspects where he is NOT successful? Pick one, where, why?

Tuesday, January 5

The Official Story

Yesterday we watched a clip from Michel Chanan’s New Cinema in Latin America that explored the development of the “New Latin American Cinema”, an approach to film making that seeks strategies to “lift the veil of neocolonialism” that, also according to the film by Fernando Solanas, blinds Latin American audiences in particular and its society in general. Chanan’s documentary places the origins of this vision in Italian neorealism, the style of film making that developed in that country after World War II to portray the social reality of that nation by focusing on the difficulties faced by the working class. Chanan shows how that style was appropriated for documentary purposes in 1950s Argentina by Fernando Birri and the members of the Santa Fe Documentary School (we saw a fragment of his documentary Tire Dié, about the children who lived by the train tracks.  La hora de los hornos, which we also watched yesterday, fits the style of what some critics call the “survey documentary” initiated by Birri, as do other attempts to use neorealist strategies to represent the social reality of the Continent --in Chanan's film we meet Cuban filmmaker Julio García Espinosa, who muses about his attempts at explaining Italian neorealism to a policeman who arrests him and his crew when they were trying to film a neorealist documentary, El Megano, in  1950s Cuba.) Interviewed by Chanan, Octavio Getino states that neorealism is a popular strategy for Latin American filmmakers because its goals are to represent “the oppressed and the humiliated”, and “ours is the history of the oppressed and the humiliated”.

The neorealist approach, both theoretically and stylistically, is also a direct response –as Solanas and Getino mention in their text-- to the aesthetics that dominated mainstream Argentine cinema at the time, an auteur style that received great international acclaim and, in its aesthetic austerity and bleak beauty shows the influence of the French and Italian new wave. Films like Crónica de un niño solo (Chronicle of a Lonely Child), directed in 1965 by Leonardo Favio and dedicated to Leopoldo Torres Nilsson, who was considered the leading representative of a style in Argentine film that reproduced the visual and technical innovations developed in European film. Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s Torres Nilssonn was considered by international critics as the most important filmmaker in Argentina.

Norma Aleandro won the Best Actress Award 
at the Cannes Film Festival for
her role as Alicia. Analia Castro
played little Gaby.

Falicov explores towards the end of her first chapter how, upon Peron´s return to power in 1973 there was a brief period when Peronist filmmakers such as Solanas, Getino, and Raymundo Glayzer, among others, produced some political films that reflected their revolutionary ideology, and how, after Peróns death in 1974, the political situation in Argentina deteriorated, leading to the “Dirty War” and the military coup that, in 1976, would plunge the country into its most bloody political period in ages. The political repression of the dictatorship resulted in tens of thousands of disappeared (people –union leaders, students, artists, intellectuals,many innocent of any crime—arrested, tortured, and executed by the military), and hundreds of thousands of exiled.

We can approach La historia oficial (The Official Story) (Luis Puenzo, 1985) as a film that tries to explore the social and human costs of that dictatorship through the experiences of an upper-middle class family (Alicia, Roberto, and their adopted daughter, Gaby) forced to confront and come to terms with the consequences of their actions during that dark time in Argentine history. We talked about the film as a form of catharsis that could appease Argentine audiences who had gone on with their lives during the dictatorship despite widespread information about the atrocities committed by the military junta, but also as a means to show international audiences that the country acknowledged and was reacting to these crimes.

With the help of her rebellious, nonconforming students, Alicia –played by Norma Aleandro, who won the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival for her role—is a history teacher who seems to be emerging from Wonderland into her own country as she is confronted with increasingly heartbreaking aspects of a reality that she seems to have chosen to ignore, from the true reasons of the move of her friend Ana –who was exiled after her partner was disappeared and she was tortured and raped by the military—to the particulars of her husband´s mysterious job, and the true origins of her adoptive daughter. “The country went down the drain. Things only went well for sons of bitches, thieves, accomplices, and my older son”, says Roberto´s father, an old Spanish anarchist whose business has failed during the financial difficulties of the time.

Puenzo takes full advantage of many of the oldest dramatic tools of the filmic trade to warm his audience to the transformation of Alicia, and uses her as an allegory of the horrible choices Argentineans face in order to overcome their immediate past. From the discourses on history Alicia offers her class to the song about memory and forgetting that Gaby sings throughout the film, from the mock “home invasion” staged by the children during Gaby´s birthday party to the ominous images of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo marching to demand the return of their disappeared children, from the nonchalant dismissal of the associate of Roberto´s early in the film, to Roberto´s increasingly violent desperation and loss of control as he becomes aware that the “boat is sinking”, Puenzo tries to transmit to his audience the magnitude of the price Argentines will have to pay for their redemption.