Lucrecia Martel

This book provides an overview of the films of the Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, who counts as one of the most accomplished filmmakers from Latin America and as a leading female global auteur. It situates Martel’s cinema in the context of a post-dictatorship, neoliberal democracy, as well as within the emergence of a new wave realism (New Argentine Cinema), which profits from and is critical of the privileged role cinema assumes in this new economy. The book argues that Martel’s films challenge the primacy of the visual by emphasizing modes of perception such as hearing, feeling, and smelling to question not only the veracity of what we see but, more fundamentally, the epistemological foundations on which the visual is built. Focusing on her native region of northwestern Argentina, Martel’s Salta trilogy employs a heightened realism, combined with aspects of genre cinema, to articulate a powerful critique of dominant power relations and forms of entitlement. Her radical aesthetics force viewers to rethink privileges of race and class associated with Argentine bourgeois society. Martel’s more recent literary adaptation, Zama, traces the origins of the exploitation of indigenous populations to colonial times and unearths its long-lasting legacies.

Interviews with Lucrecia Martel

DAVID OUBIÑA: La Ciénaga appeared a bit on the sides of the New Argentine Cinema.1 It is included in the term, because the film is part of the same generation and because of its conflictive relation to several dominant films of the preceding cinema, but at the same time its production circumstances differ from films like ...

Argentina: Introduction

This introductory section and its account of the significant changes in Argentine filmmaking in the last twenty five years acts as a platform to the director-centred analyses of Juan José Campanella’s films in Chapter 6. It situates Campanella and his filmmaking practice as typical of one vector of Argentina’s changed filmmaking landscape (the ‘industry auteurs’ produced through the neoliberal reforms to the industry in the 1990s and fostered by transnational media conglomerates) but also addresses the vibrant independent filmmaking movement (the New Argentine Cinema) also a by- product of the 1990s reforms and fostered by the government and transnational funding bodies.

Juan José Campanella: Historical Memory And Accountability in El Secreto De Sus Ojos (The Secret In Their Eyes 2009)

This chapter explores Juan José Campanella and his Oscar winning El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes 2009). Unlike the other transnational auteurs focused upon in the book, he has not followed an initial critical and commercial domestic success (El hijo de la novia) with deterritorialized feature films outside of Argentina (although he has worked in US television). However, like the transnational auteurs he has been the object of analyses that criticize the mainstream ‘commercial’ forms and venues (transnational conglomerates) he works in and question the national credentials of his filmmaking. Arguing against a critical hierarchy that rates the features of art cinema (the New Argentine Cinema) above those of a commercial cinema, the chapter explores how in El secreto de sus ojos Campanella uses genre film to engage with the legacy of Argentina’s ‘Dirty War,’ with the period directly before it and also with the contemporary moment. This chapter argues that Campanella’s manipulation of melodrama and film noir are an effective means to self-consciously stage the past and also pose key issues of historical memory and accountability of the crimes committed during Argentina’s Dirty War.

The Foundational Manifesto of New Argentine Cinema? Israel Adrián Caetanos ‘Agustín Tosco Propaganda‘ (1995)

Agustín Tosco Propaganda was published in the Argentine film journal El Amante Cine. It was written by Israel Adrián Caetano before his film Pizza, Beer and Cigarettes (Caetano and Stagnaro, 1998) triggered the concept of New Argentine Cinema. In this provocative text, Caetano criticised the way Argentine cinema had usually been made and, in a form of manifesto, he presented the principles that his own films – and those of many other young directors – have followed since then. Although New Argentine Cinema has been thoroughly studied in the English-speaking academia, only a few authors have made reference to this seminal text. Being aware of the principles set in this manifesto more than twenty years ago will help researchers and students understand some important features that tend to be overlooked when exploring not only Argentinean cinema, but also many other cinemas of the region.