Transition Cinema

Although certain periods of sociopolitical and economic turbulence — notably the neo-fascist coup of 1976 — have depressed the production of Argentine films, Argentine film-making has always been a vigorous proposition. While there remains a certain measure of potboiler production in both Mexico and Brazil (the latter country is particularly notable for films that provide vehicles for soap opera stars), current Argentine films probably include the most professional, artistic, and socioculturally meaningful titles in Latin America.Concomitantly, Argentine filmmaking, especially since the last quarter of the twentieth century, is the most critically analyzed production on the continent. Jessica Stites Mor’s monograph joins a list that includes books by Gonzalo Aguilar, Ana María Amado, Claudio España, Tamara Falicov, Jorge Finkielman, David William Foster, César Magrini, and Joanna Page. Without enumerating the specific approaches of each of these works, which range from industry issues to the ideological analysis of major filmic texts, most content themselves with assuming, and citing only strategically, the specific sociopolitical contexts in Argentina of filmmaking.Stites Mor’s study deals directly with sociopolitical contexts. Argentine social history offers many points for dating cultural production: the beginning of Peronismo (1946), the fall of Perón (1955), the beginning of a series of authoritarian/neofascist military dictatorships (1966), or the return to constitutional democracy (1983). Stites Mor, however, opts to begin with 1968.1968 is the beginning of the resistance to authoritarian governments now classically associated with May 1968 in Paris and its ramifications throughout the West. In Argentina, the civil uprising in Córdoba at the end of May 1969, the so-called Cordo-bazo, which constituted a direct confrontation of military dictatorship, is considered the beginning of a coherent armed guerrilla response to dictatorship that would mark the social history of Argentina until its brutal suppression by the mortally efficient military dictatorship that came to power in 1976. By the late 1960s, however, Argentine filmmaking had seen the emergence of a group of directors and production entourages that had come to understand the value of film as a form of social resistance and political messaging. Individuals like Raymundo Gleyzer are a major point of reference for the period. The 1959 Cuban Revolution and subsequent filmmaking played an important role here. Gleyzer was the first Argentine to report directly from revolutionary Cuba, and his subsequent disappearance in 1976, two months after the military coup of that year, not only deprived the industry of one of its most singular voices but also indicated how culture, and particularly filmmaking, was going to be unrelentingly oppressed by the neofascist regime. What is particularly significant to stress here is that the sort of documentary and testimonial filmmaking of Gleyzer and several significant other figures (Fernando Birri, Octavio Getino, Fernando Solanas) was successful precisely to the degree that the Cuban Revolution had struck a responsive note in Argentine society, and there were audience sectors to whom Argentine (and Cuban and other foreign) titles could productively address themselves. The Argentine filmgoing public remains one of the most sociopolitically committed in Latin America.Stites Mor speaks of going “beyond film as text,” by which she means to establish her privileging of the examination of films not as closed realms of artistic creation (as the much vaunted auteur theory of filmmaking has encouraged scholars to do) but as works that function within a sociopolitical and historic network of determinants that are part of the mapping of their meaning. Stites Mor also speaks of the how “cultural studies and film scholars have made tremendous progress in identifying subjectivities crafted on-screen” (p. 11). This gives the impression that cultural studies and film scholars are impervious to the political dimensions she argues for, or that the analysis of on-screen subjectivities means the psychoanalyzing of bourgeois heroes and heroines, as though feminist work, queer studies, and racial and ethnic perspectives were not all grounded in the principle that the “personal is political.” Indeed, I find it notable that so little of Latin American and Argentine film scholarship resembles the American-English-French emphasis on auteur theory and on psychoanalytical approaches to film. And, of course, from a semiotic point of view, everything is text, including the specific film and the sociohistorical discourses in which it is encrusted.One definitely agrees with Stites Mor that a significant sociohistorical discourse is what is most desirable in film (and all cultural) scholarship. In any event, she delivers an authoritative analysis of some 50 years of Argentine filmmaking in its determinant political contexts. Her work may not “correct” the balance of previous scholarship, but it does provide far greater documentary detail

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