Joanna Page - Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema

Since the mid-1990s, Argentine filmmaking has experienced a boom in production that at the time of writing shows no signs of abating. Critics and film festivals worldwide have not been slow to herald a renaissance in Argentine cinema, and accolades, prizes and other sources of funding have secured access for a number of these films to screens around the world. That national production should show such a dramatic increasefrom fourteen feature films in 1994 to sixty-six in 2004is remarkable; that it should do so at a time of severe economic crisis is quite extraordinary.

In December 2001 Argentinas economic recession had reached the point at which the states policy of convertibility, under which the peso had been pegged to the dollar throughout the 1990s, became impossible to sustain. Financial investors withdrew, and there was a run on banks (el corralito), which reacted by freezing deposits, preventing individuals from accessing their savings. A measure of the depth of the Crisis is given by a comparison of GDP levels, which show a drop of almost 20 percent between 1998 and 2002, the sharpest fall experienced by any capitalist country of some significance at least since World War II and the gravest economic event ever in a country known for the recurrence of crises.

Devaluation also had a significant impact on the financial costs of filmmaking: because film stock and equipment are largely imported, and therefore payable in dollars, many of the costs associated with production virtually tripled overnight. Funds allocated to the Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales (INCAA), which had been relatively high between 1995 and 1998, were to suffer cuts of up to 50 percent as the crisis deepened.

This book does not set out to explain the boom in filmmaking that, having begun in the mid-1990s, only gathers pace during the Crisis and its aftermath: this task has already been undertaken by others. Critics coincide in referring to the Ley de Cine (Cinema Law), which came into force in 1995, as a crucial factor in the growth of Argentine cinema. The new law granted a degree of protection to the national film industry in terms of exhibition and provided significant funds for filmmaking, administered through the INCAA.

I see no reason not to concur with the majority of critics in their view that Argentinas boom in filmmaking also marks a radical shift from previous filmmaking aesthetics. The role played by film criticism itself in the creation of the phenomenon of New Argentine Cinema should not, however, be overlooked. The influential El amante enthusiastically proclaimed the advent of a new generation and a wholesale rupture with the old. The predisposition of critics toward the new has resulted in a number of self-fulfilled prophecies: for example, a number of critics went beyond supporting the new directors in written reviews, actively intervening to secure the inclusion of their films in festivals. That the films selected for this study date from the mid-1990s does, however, recognize clear shifts in aesthetics at this time; more importantly for my purposes, from this point onward films began to testify in earnest to the impact of growing unemployment, rising crime, and the expansion of the informal economy. The Crisis of 2001 was the culmination of a longer period of economic troubles and civil unrest, and for this reason I do not create artificial distinctions between pre-Crisis and post-Crisis films, most often reading them together as part of a corpus of texts charting the economic decline of the nation, and its social consequences, over several years.

My central purpose is to explore how cinema has registered, and indeed helped to construct, certain modes of subjectivity relating to Argentinas experience of capitalism, neoliberalism, and economic crisis. Thematic introductions precede the analyses of films presented in this book; to repeat this material here would be redundant, but some words about the range of texts selected, and approaches taken, may be of use. Significant space is dedicated to the films that have become widely associated with the label of New Argentine Cinema. Chapters , is their attention to shifts in subjectivity and representation provoked by specific political or economic structures and events. For reasons of space and focus, I have chosen to limit the scope of this book to fiction film, leaving aside the important contribution of documentary film in recent years. I have, however, included a number of films that operate on the border between fiction and documentary, and I return in my conclusion to suggest some important differences between the roles of fiction and documentary film (and video) in representing the Crisis.