Abstract
An odd, tacit division of labor seems to have arisen in film during the 1990s: with few exceptions, the political (in the classical sense of the word) was allocated to documentaries, and fiction films tended to avoid it. Very few movies (Garage Olimpo, Los rubios, Mala época) were concerned with mixing both worlds and with asking how fiction can represent political events.1 Despite their differences, documentaries and fiction films coincide in the fact that the incitement to political action is linked to the past. This has meant that the status of the political in the new Argentine cinema has provoked a certain perplexity. Horacio Gonzalez affirms:
El bonaerense touches upon all of these themes and takes care to remain within the realm of petty crime organized in police stations, in a phase of pre-political initiation. Thus it easily fulfills what eventually has been celebrated in these films: the lack of judgment or, as it is said, “preaching to the audience [bajar la línea].” Of course, this is a more profound problem that cannot be resolved by the voluntary resignation of indictment that underlies (should underlie) any artistic or political venture.
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Notes
A very different case—and perhaps the only one that continues, though in a very different vein, the legacy of the Liberation Film Group—is that of films about piqueteros, those involved in the social movement of civil disobedience for the rights of the unemployed that began in the mid-1990s. This cinema took the baton from the political film of the 1980s, with the difference that new technologies and a lack of censorship allowed these piqueteros to participate more collectively and actively in the making of their works. In El rostro de la dignidad (1999, “The Face of Dignity”), the activists of Solano’s Movimento de Trabajadores Desocupados (MTD, Movement of Unemployed Workers) assemble to decide how to end the movie. Completely indifferent to the institution of film (which La hora de los hornos tried to combat), these movies had their own film festival in the Cosmos movie theater in Buenos Aires in December 2001. (I take this information from Christian Dodaro’s paper “Memories of light and repulsive aesthetics” from the seminar on film at the UBA. See also Dodaro and Salerno (2003) and the Alavío group’s Web site, which states: “Making technologies and skills accessible and available to exploited sectors by democratizing audiovisual production and language is a priority of Grupo Alavío’s work. For over 10 years, Alavío has been participating in working class struggles, supporting with audiovisual materials. As activists struggling for social revolution, the debate of whether the reach of the camera is enough is an inevitable discussion. ‘We are working to construct an identity and thinking that reflects the working class’ and exploited sectors’ specific interests and necessities. The camera is a tool, another weapon’”; www.revolutionvideo.org/alavio/englishhome.html.)
The text comes from the work of Juan Díaz del Moral and acts as an epigraph for Alberto Carri’s work. In a reading of the “writing of the father” in Los rubios, Hugo Salas (in a text included in his blog “elconsensoreverenciado”) debates Kohan’s (2004a) reading of this passage.
In these cases there is a key difference from Alejandro Agresti’s Buenos Aires viceversa (1996), which films a protest by children of the disappeared during the last dictatorship and has the protagonist join the protest to find out about her past. As Ana Amado pointed out to me in conversation, it is from the inclusion of the protest in the narrative diegesis that the films analyzed here are distancing themselves.
On the figure of the plebeian in Argentine culture, see Christian Ferrer’s interesting essay in Birgin and Trímboli (2003). Ferrer analyzes the plebeian imagination as an alliance between popular culture and political power.
This populist-lumpen line has been returning in recent festivals, and Jorge Gaggero, in his Cama adentro (2003, released in the United States as Live-In Maid) and Vida en Falcón, is one of the filmmakers who affirms it. The first film opened the festival and the second won the audience choice award.
I am not claiming that Ulises Rosell read Landi’s book but that both participate in a rehabilitation of Olmedo that ran throughout the 1990s. For a reading of Landi’s book when it was first published, see Beatriz Sarlo’s review (1992), in which she objects to the contemporary or “Realpolitik” stance towards the televisual image that ultimately eliminates thought from all critical operations.
This invisibility is evident in the history of Argentine film, which has virtually ignored lesbians, except when they are linked to criminal activity, as in Emilio Vieyra’s Sucedió en el internado (1985, “It Happened in the Institution”) and Correccional de mujeres (1986, distributed in the United States as Women’s Reformatory) and Aníbal de Salvo’s Atrapatadas (1984, released in the United States as Condemned to Hell), all of which take place in jails or other disciplinary institutions. (Barney Finn’s chapter, included in De la misteriosa Buenos Aires [1981, “Of the Mysterious Buenos Aires”], constitutes an exception.) The most interesting precursor of this link between lesbianism and criminality comes in Daniel Tinayre’s Deshonra (1952, “Dishonor”). Among Argentine directors, Tinayre is one of the most inclined to show sexual conflicts. Despite the film’s Peronist propaganda and melodrama, prison life in Deshonra suggests sexual relationships between some of the inmates. Male homosexuality has had better luck, although it has often been represented satirically. After efforts such as Enrique Dawi’s Adiós Roberto… (1985, “Goodbye, Roberto…”) and Américo Ortiz de Zárate’s Otra historia de amor (1986, “Another Love Story”), we have to wait until Verónica Chen’s Uagón fumador (2001, “Smokers Only”) and, in particular, Anahí Berneri’s Un año sin amor, based on the story of Pablo Pérez, to see intelligent and nonprejudicial representations.
I am aware that this reading develops a somewhat indirect aspect of the film, so I reproduce here part of Moira Soto’s review, which does justice to the movie’s central theme: “Neither lesbian chic nor paternalistic, thuggish condescension. Neither hypocritical voyeurism nor spying disguised as pedagogical or sociological dissemination. In these close encounters with the young women of the film’s title, Santiago Garcia, with a fine-tuned, empathetic attitude, deserves the trust that his brave lesbians offer to him in revealing themselves, from the personal—so linked to social rejection that denies them a visible, egalitarian place in the world—with moving sincerity” (2004).
Deleuze classifies frames as physical, geometric, or dynamic. In geometric framing, “there are many different frames in the frame … it is by this dovetailing of frames that the parts of the set or of the closed system are separated, but also converge and are reunited.” The physical conception of the frame, in contrast, “produces imprecise sets” (1986a, 14).
A similar opposition can be found in Sebastián Schindel, Fernando Molnar, and Nicolás Battle’s Rerum Novarum (2001), which juxtaposes Villa Flandria films from the 1950s and 1960s with contemporary images of a textile factory in ruins. (The town was built around the Flandria textile factory, founded by the Belgian immigrant Julio Steverlinck, the model of a modern boss and progressive Catholic, who was inspired by the encyclical Rerum Novarum.) In the film we also see how the factory brought hospitals, schools, clubs, and a movie theater to the town. The story centers on a musical group (organized among the factory workers by Steverlinck in 1937) that continued to function after the factory’s closure in 1996. The biographical sketches are more personal and affectionate and leave the sociological and political aside. Of course, the opposition between film and video can be a consequence of the era, but in both Bellande’s film and Rerum Novarum the appearance of celluloid as materiality is underlined.
Strangely enough, Bellande’s second movie is an institutional documentary for Techint on the construction of a gas pipeline 731 kilometers in length. In the words of Gustavo Noriega, “the fantastic project of the gas pipeline has such characteristics, and this is the focus that Bellande privileges: to show a unique combination of a group physical effort and engineering genius,” a “fascinating exaltation of human effort and its half-truths” (2005, 27).
The evocation of the past is exclusively oral. At the barbeque that el Rulo throws with Adriana, his friends get together to look at photographs (never shown), sing Manal songs, and recall Séptimo Regimiento. This despite the fact that Trapero could have incorporated the hit song, which appears in Fernando Ayala’s El professor patagónico (1970, “The Patagonian Professor.”) El Rulo finally returns to Patagonia (to Comodoro Rivadavia), not as a musician but as a worker.
Politics no longer pursues the goal of changing the status of labor; rather it aims to conserve or recover it. This nostalgia for the monuments of labor (the admiration that large, empty factories inspire) is a theme not only of narrative documentaries such as Rerum Novarum but also of works of political activism, such as Carlos Mamud, Patricia Digilio, and Nora Gilges’ Laburantes (Crónicas del trabajo recuperado) (2003) (“Workers [Tales of Recovered Worki”), which speaks of the cooperatives that unemployed workers form in their places of work.
According to Eduardo Russo, video and light equipment rendered the great cranes of classic film obsolete. Russo also says that “this eccentric support would become one of the most archetypical elements of studio filming”; he writes of “totemic figures” and “coveted fetishes of Hollywood’s Golden Age” (1998, 122).
Both Rafael Filipelli (1999) and Domin Choi (n.d.) point out the organic nature of Mala época and the procedures and intersections that transform it from a collection of shorts into a feature film.
Adrían Gorelik (1999; also in Birgin and Trímboli 2003) has written two excellent analyses of politics in this movie based on its representations of urban space: “It is this definitive failure of politics as an instrument of change and of society as its actor that I think should be seen as the basis of these new representations of the city” (1999, 31).
In addition to the work of Sander Gilman, Jesús Martín-Barbero’s studies and Alejandro Grimson’s various works on the Bolivian community in Buenos Aires (2000) are of great interest. In collaboration with Sergio Wolf, Grimson made a documentary on the Bolivian community in this city. On the problem of stereotypes in film, especially peripheral film, see Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s panorama: “1. Revealing oppressive patterns of prejudice in what might at first glance have seemed random and inchoate phenomena; 2. Highlighting the psychic devastation inflicted by systematically negative portrayals on those groups assaulted by them, whether through the internalization of the stereotypes themselves or through the negative effects of their dissemination; and 3. Signaling the social functionality of stereotypes, demonstrating that they are not an error of perception but rather a form of social control, intended as what Alice Walker calls ‘prisons of image’” (1994, 198).
Few films have continued the theme of immigrants in Argentina inaugurated by Caetano. One of the exceptions is Diego Gachassin’s Vladimir en Buenos Aires (2002), which tells the story of a Russian immigrant. Gachassin has continued with this theme in his second feature-length film, Habitación disponible (2005, “Room Available”), co-directed with Eva Poncet and Marcelo Burd.
On this relationship between stereotype and experience, see Jesús Martín-Barbero’s analysis (1993, 128ff), based on Richard Hoggart’s arguments in The Uses of Literacy.
This is why I think it was a good decision to include Caetano’s film in Claudia Torre and Álvaro Fernández Bravo’s introductory book on college writing (2003).
Christian Gundermann (2005), in his work on desire in recent Argentine film, says of Bolivia: “One of the last ‘postcards’ is the sign ‘Grill Cook Wanted,’ a shot that obviously explains retrospectively the dialogue between the men’s voices, but that also takes on a special significance at the end of the film when the bar’s owner again hangs up the same sign in the door after Freddy’s death (murdered by a xenophobe whom the bar owner had told him to kick out because of his drunkenness). This shot of the sign symbolizes all the structural brutality of an environment in which not only is the immigrant worker replaceable, but his death (which occurred while he was following an order) is a non-event, one that cannot be elaborated.”
As cited in Sigfried Kracauer’s Orpheus in Paris (Offenbach and the Paris of His Time) (1938).
See my article “Maravillosa melancholia (sobre Cazadores de utopías de David Blaustein)” (“Marvelous Melancholy [On David Blaustein’s Cazadores de utopias]”), in Sartora and Rival (2007).
Almost all of the testimonies in Andrés Habegger’s (h) historias cotidianas (2001, “Stories of Daily Life”) make reference to the explanations given to children about the fate of their parents. In Albertina Carri’s case, as she states in her movie, when she was told at the age of twelve what had happened, “she didn’t understand anything.”
Aumont speaks of “visual touch” and shows how the haptic returns periodically in the very optical medium of cinema (1997, 111–13). For an insightful review, see Antonia Lant’s “Haptical cinema” (1995), a critique of Alois Riegl and Noël Burch.
Almost all political documentaries fall into this trap of naturalization, but few in such a systematic and monotonous way as Blaustein’s Cazadores de utopias. For an analysis of the testimony of the mother through the lens of gender, see Amado (2004, 64–5).
They are Cristian Czainik (the son of Antonio Czainik, disappeared in August 1977), Ursula Méndez (the daughter of Silvia Gallina, disappeared in November 1976), Florencia Gemetro (the daughter of José María Gemetro, disappeared in February 1977), Claudio Novoa (the son of Gaston Gonçalvez, murdered in 1976), Martín Mórtola Oesterheld (the son of Raúl Mórtola and Estela Oesterheld, murdered in December 1977, and grandson of the cartoonist Hector Oesterheld), and Victoria Ginzberg (daughter of Mario Ginzberg and Irene Bruchstein, disappeared in March 1977).
Although they may appear to be mixing oil and water, these types of combinations have been very fruitful for directors of the new Argentine Cinema, who have tried to combine in their own way and in the audiovisual context of the 1990s what Serge Daney has called “film’s two legs”: avant-garde and mainstream film. With respect to Los guantes mágicos, for example, Martín Rejtman has spoken of a combination of Robert Bresson’s Balthazar (1966) and John Carpenter’s Christine (1983) (Pauls 2004).
In fact, Martín Kohan speaks of “total impassiveness [indolencia]” with respect to Carri (2004a, 27). Etymologically, indolencia is “the absence of pain” (dolor) and, by extension, “the lack of mourning.” Mourning and pain (duelo and dolor) have the same root. Emilio Bernini speaks, in contrast, of a “lack of interest in accessing the familial and public past” (2004, 46, my emphasis). Now, not even in film do we need to believe everything we see. Are these writers not able to perceive, beyond the visual, the waves of pain that rock the director when she opens her car window or when she witnesses the testimony of the woman who turned her father in? To evaluate its implications, Martín Kohan’s essay should be related to his novel Dos veces junio (2002, “June, Twice”), one of the most interesting written narratives on the dictatorship years.
Film, however, has dedicated itself with great intensity to the study of the relationship between childhood and politics, from the famous cases of neorrealism (Vittorio de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, Rossellini’s Alemania ano cero [“Germany Year Zero”] and The Greatest Love [1951]) to various postwar films, such as René Clément’s Forbidden Games (1952). At any rate, children are inside of politics as victims (or they testify to something that they cannot endure or understand, or they are used by those in power). In Latin American cinema, the list of films condemning the treatment of children is extensive.
Among the many books that focus on these subjects, Juan Gelman and Mara La Madrid’s Ni el flaco perdón de Dios (1997) is indispensable. With respect exclusively to activist organizations, Cristina Zuker’s El tren de la Victoria: una saga familiar (2003, “Victory Train: A Family Saga”) contains chilling cases.
Several films of the 1990s deal with the relationship between childhood and dictatorship. Some were institutional documentaries of denunciation, such as David Blaustein’s Botín de guerra (2000, “Spoils of War”), on the work of the Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo) to recover children born in captivity during the dictatorship. Others deal with the perceptions that a child could have of state terrorism after his or her family has been torn apart. Marcelo Piñeyro’s fictional film Kamchatka (2003) turns, like Los rubios, to the projection that a child makes onto his games (in this case, a game of military strategy) owing to situations that overwhelm him that he cannot explain.
The essay was originally published in the journal Sur (Number 4, 1931) and was included in the first edition of Borges’ collection of essays Discusión (1932). Borges eliminated the essay from later editions (Borges en Sur 1999, 119). An incisive reading of the text can be found in Daniel Balderston’s “La dialéctica fecal: el pánico homosexual y el origen de la escritura en Borges” (“Fecal Dialectics: Homosexual Panic and the Origin of Writing in Borges”), in his El deseo, enorme cicatriz luminosa (Ensayos sobre homosexualidades latinoamericanas) (“Desire, enormous, luminous scar [Essays on Latin American Homosexualities],” 2004).
On this characteristic, specific to the process of illness, see Susan Sontag’s Illness As Metaphor: and, AIDS and Its Metaphors (1990).
See Sacher-Masoch y Sade (1969, 107), translated into English as Sacher-Masoch: An Interpretation. I am using Deleuze’s analyses only partially, as he refers to Sacher-Masoch’s novels and to the clinical diagnosis of masochism in a situation that applies only partially to sadomasochistic practices. (In fact, one of his goals is to deconstruct Freud’s linking of Sade and Sacher-Masoch, who for him represent different, and even opposing, symptoms.)
The term is used intentionally: Pablo Peréz’s book El mendigo chupapijas (“The Beggar Who Sucks Cock”), in fact, takes place in these movie theaters. Here, oral sex is presented as the beggar’s only activity and source of income. Originally self-published, the book was edited and released by Mansalva in 2006.
For a playful and meticulous appraisal of the role that S/M practices played in Foucault’s work, see James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault, where he employ the expression “strategic relation” (1993, 263).
Foucault’s opinions were expressed in interviews that he gave to gay magazines after his stay in San Francisco as visiting professor at the University of California—Berkeley in 1975. These texts were included in Dits et ecrits (Gallimard; partially excerpted in English in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984). “Desexualization” does not mean that there is no sex but that the discourse of sex articulated around genitality is subverted. As Foucault says in an interview cited by Miller, one should aim, in the new feminist and gay social movements, not at “liberation” of “sex-desire” but “at a general economy of pleasure not based on sexual norms” (1993, 273).
In effect, this scene consists of a meeting of sadomasochists that the cameras record without intervening or being seen by the participants. On the filming of this scene, see Emilio Bernini, Silvia Schwarzböck, and Daniel Goggi’s interview with Anahí Berneri, Santiago García, and Pablo Pérez in the journal Kilómetro 111 (2007).
See Michele Marzano (2006, 235), and the bibliography therein; see also the bibliography in Linden et al. (1982).
In the interview in Kilómetro 111, Berneri says: “I came to the gay world with an exterior gaze….I happened to find a gaze that was exterior to a world that I don’t belong to, where I’m never going to belong. In a sense, sexual orientation allowed me, in clubs or in certain places, to look at a distant world, where I’m invisible.” Santiago García makes a similar remark in the same interview, with respect to his film Lesbianas de Buenos Aires: “In my case, I’m not part of the lesbian community, clearly. What’s more, I can’t be a part of that community, notwithstanding the fact that a militant Mexican activist (a woman) once characterized me as lesbiano [that is, as a male lesbian], authorizing that name for me.” See Berneri, García, and Pérez (2007).
We cannot say that the film has predecessors in Argentine cinema. If I were forced to give examples of movies that it might resemble, I would name Hugo del Carril’s La Quintrala (1955) and Leopoldo Torre Nilsson’s La casa del ángel (1976, “The House of the Angel”). In both of these films there is a relationship between pleasure and self-dissolution.
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© 2008 Gonzalo Aguilar
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Aguilar, G. (2008). A World without Narration (Political Investigation). In: Other Worlds. New Concepts in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230616653_4
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