Argentine cinema – between the crisis and memory

Two relatively recent events have inspired and continue to inspire questions and answers in the
arts produced in Argentina. The first, from political nature: a bloody dictatorship that settled
between 1976 and 1983, leaving an official balance of 30,000 political disappeared and leading
the country to a war. The second, economic: the greatest economic crisis in the country in
December 2001 left deep scars in the most distinct social spheres - from the public sphere,
through the world of work to the family and intimate - to which society is still committed to
healing.

Cinema was perhaps the art most affected by these two events. A victim of censorship during
the dictatorial period, it played a central role in democratic government and, in the early 1980s,
was the visible face of a forged pact between the society portrayed and the stories told to find
possible interpretations for the disturbing recent past. "La historia oficial" (The Official Story,
1985) by Luis Puenzo, winner of the Best Foreign Film Award from the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Science is the best-known result of this project. In the allegorical narrative of
this film, the nation projects itself into the body of a woman, Alicia, the mother of a child she
adopted during the dictatorship and who gradually begins to suspect that the daughter she
raised up to then may actually be the daughter of political disappeared illegally appropriated at
that time.

Soon, the characteristic melodramatic realism of the 80’s productions would give way to a new
aesthetic as a response to the new challenges sketched out at the turn of the decade. In the
mid-1990s, Adrián Caetano and Bruno Stagnaro's "Pizza, Birra y Faso" (Pizza, Beer and
Cigarettes, 1995) foreshadowed a crisis of dimensions never experienced by society, through
the tragic journey of a group of outcasts in the streets of Buenos Aires, between robberies and
long lines of jobs. The film foreshadowed in particularly the ways of an aesthetic that would
make the cinema in the country one of the most prestigious cinemas in the world, by refusing a
moral teaching, which brings it closer to the principles of modern cinema.

Introducing a text about cinema from the historical period in which the films were made poses
a risk of incurring a trap. On the one hand, this kind of relations has become a commonplace in
the tumultuous period in which we live, which art works are considered to some extent a
reflection, and help us to understand it. On the other hand, this relation produces consequences
that are not always positive because in establishing it, the analysis about the films can end up,
more than bringing us closer, moving us away from the films themselves, their images and what
they give us to see.

Success of audiences and critics, revisiting, updating and combining consecrated movie genres,
the films exhibited in this cycle, Nueve Reinas (Nine Queens, 2000), by Fabián Bielinski and El
secreto de sus ojos (The secret in their eyes, 2008), by Juan José Campanella found their basis
in history while at the same time bring us closer to its human dimension. For these qualities and
others that appear at the precise moment of the experience that take place at the movie theater
that these films impose themselves to the political commentary. Besides the combination of
genres in a good storytelling, the complex arc of their characters allow us to cross that double
path that is the penetration of the reality in the films and the reorganization of the reality by the
images and affections that they propose to us.
“Nine Queens”, premiered shortly before the social chaos provoked by the Corralito (the
confiscation of the Argentines savings by the State) and the escape of former president
Fernando De la Rúa, takes a look on the disintegration of institutions in which both identities
and the social pact established between individuals can only exist as a simulacrum.

Small and big robberies, frauds and lies are constant expedients in the narrative that act as
avatars of cheating, the only survival strategy in a dissolving world. After the Soviet Union
collapse, Argentina in 2001 was the only country that went through such an economic setback
without being in a war context. Cheating constantly reorganizes these individuals in the space
of the city, metonymy of a country, constantly reorganized by the flows of globalization, here
allegorized in the products of different origins that are consumed by the characters, but mainly
in the figure of the Spanish millionaire who seeks to do business in the country. The allegory of
the foreign element appears as a constant not only in Argentinean cinema, but also in the
regional cinema of the period, either as a criticism of the neoliberal economic model of free
market, either as a confirmation of the possibilities of displacement of people, but especially of
images and stories that have intensified since the 1990s.

In addition to acting internally, the flows acts externally to the narrative: winner of 22 awards,
the film was a part of what has been called “Buena Onda” (Good Wave) Cinema by the
specialized critique. A kind of new wave of Latin American cinema, Buena Onda was “brand”
responsible to insert into diversity negotiation networks conformed by international festivals
and specialized publications, other stories and images of Latin American cities and of those who
inhabit them.

While Nueve Reinas turns itself to the city and to the state of social fragmentation fomented by
the crisis, El secreto de sus ojos turns itself to another basic aspect of the Argentine society
constantly revised by cinema of the beginning of the century: memory. Here Benjamin Esposito
a retired official of the judiciary decides to write a book about one of the cases that most marked
his career: the rape followed by the murder of a young woman during the troubled period prior
to the installation of the last military dictatorship that ruled the country between the years 1976
and 1983.

On the one hand, the successful combination of movie genres, from romance to the thriller and
the drama, is crucial to understand the success of the film in several countries. The secret in
their eyes won an Academy Awards for Best Foreign Movie and 51 prizes in national and
international festivals including César and Goya Awards. On the other hand, another
combination also seems to favor the excellent reception inside and outside the country: the
combination of the principles of the entertainment cinema and the narrative of human rights,
quite present in the public agenda of the country in the last 15 years. In the remake produced
in the United States, the political dimension in which the crime is inserted is diluted,
considerably reducing the strength of the story.

In a world where decisions about the lives of millions of citizens seem to be taken by people
difficult to identify and in places equally difficult to locate, suggesting a defeat of politics to the
market, Bielinski and Campanella films bring us an important remembrance: fiction as an ability
to narrate stories is a powerful tool for appropriating spaces.

Luanda Fernandes
Curator