Transition Cinema: Political Filmmaking and the Argentine Left since 1968

279 Pages·2012·0.899 MB·English

by  Jessica Stites Mor

TRANSITION
CINEMA
ILLUMINATIONS: CULTURAL FORMATIONS OF THE AMERICAS
John Beverley and Sara Castro-Klarén, Editors
TRANSITION
CINEM A
Political Filmmaking and
the Argentine Left since 1968
JESSICA STITES MOR
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS
Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260
Copyright © 2012, University of Pittsburgh Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stites Mor, Jessica.
Transition cinema : political filmmaking and the Argentine left since 1968 / Jessica
Stites Mor.
p. cm. — (Illuminations: cultural formations of the Americas)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8229-6191-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Motion pictures—Political aspects—Argentina. 2. Motion picture industry—
Political aspects—Argentina—History—20th century. 3. Politics in motion pictures.
I. Title.
PN1995.9.P6S75 2012
791.430982—dc23 2012001784
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
PART ONE: THE SPECTACLE OF THE PAST
1 Cameras in the Hands of “Angry Young Men”: Filmmaking and
the Cordobazo 17
2 Filmmakers into Film Workers: Peronism, Dictatorship, and
the Film Industry 42
PART TWO: REIMAGINING THE LEFT
3 The Scene and the City: Coded Landscapes and Collective Memory
in Transition 75
4 Experience, Representation, and Reproduction: Displacement and
el sur de Solanas 104
PART THREE: THE MEDIATED SUBJECT
5 Documentalismo: Political Filmmaking and Social Movements 131
6 Postmodern Exigencies: New Media, Memory, and Critical Spaces 159
Conclusion 186
Notes 195
Glossary 227
Filmography 229
Selected Bibliography 235
Index 251

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Putting together this book has been a much more collective process
than I would have hitherto imagined. Nothing that I’ve accomplished in these
past few years would have been possible without the strong and consistent
support of a community of people committed to my scholarship as friends,
mentors, and critics. As a graduate student working on the dissertation that
led to this book, I received a remarkable amount of support at Yale University
from dedicated and accessible faculty, vigorous intellectual exchanges in a
variety of settings, singularly capable peers, and generous funding opportuni-
ties. Listed in order of appearance, those most responsible for assisting me in
the early, conceptual stages of this research include Anton Rosenthal, Gilbert
Joseph, James Scott, Arun Agrawal, María Victoria Murillo, Stuart Schwartz,
David K. Jackson, Benjamin Kiernan, Seth Fein, and last but by no means
least, Dudley Andrew. Once in the field, I benefited tremendously from corre-
spondence and visits with several of my colleagues who generously allowed
me to talk shop, especially Jana Lipman, Martin Nesvig, Raphael Folsom,
Saeed Ahmed, Daniel Gutiérrez, Alison Bruey, Amy Chazkel, Tori Langland,
and April Cohen. I owe special thanks to Jana Lipman for hearing me out
through various major evolutions of the dissertation project, a close reading
of earlier incarnations of several chapters, and constant compañerismo de-
spite great continental and technological divides.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to the handful of scholars who read vari-
ous drafts of chapters and commented on presentations of portions of the
material. Mark Healey, Sandra McGee-Deutsch, Alberto Spektorowski, and
Rosalie Sitman all trudged through and helped clarify my early ideas and
drafts, some of which didn’t make it into the final manuscript. Many of my
thoughts were developed further through incisive conversations with partici-
pants in a graduate seminar on twentieth-century Argentine intellectual his-
tory that I led at the Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social in Buenos
Aires. These include Mireille Abelin, Louise Belfrage, Kerry Bystrom, Karen
Faulk, Katherine French-Fuller, Daniel Grech, Sarah Muir, Alison Post, Dan-
iel Richter, Noa Vaisman, and David Woken. Of these, Noa Vaisman and
Kerry Bystrom each made important contributions to the fifth chapter of this
work. I also owe special thanks to Ismail Xavier, Raanan Rein, Mario Sznadjer,
and Luis Roniger for their candid comments on various ideas and directions.
Portions of chapter 4 were published by Editorial Paidós in Buenos Aires in
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
a book I coedited with Claudia Feld entitled El pasado que miramos: memo-
ria e imagen ante la historia reciente (2009). This chapter benefited tremen-
dously from Claudia’s insights and suggestions, in addition to the careful
readings of Valeria Manzano and Laura Wittner.
Organizations that supplied financial support enabling me to embark on
what eventually became a five-year period of fieldwork in Argentina and,
later, to travel to conferences and archives include the Social Science Research
Council–International Dissertation Research Fund program, the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation, and the University of British Columbia Faculty Re-
search Grant program. I am extremely grateful for the many opportunities
these funds provided. In addition, I would like to thank the Instituto de His-
toria Argentina y Americana “Dr. Emilio Ravignani,” of the University of
Buenos Aires, for providing me with an institutional home during my stay in
Argentina and also the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, which gave me access
to its library collection and graciously allowed me to attend valuable lectures
and seminars on a regular basis. Many Argentine academicians were critical in
helping me to formulate thoughts and locate sources for this book. I offer my
sincere thanks to Noemi Goldman, Graciela Silvestri, Adrián Gorelik, José
Burucua, Sebastián Elionzado, Victor Heredia, Marco Novarro, Jorge Oubiña,
Elizabeth Jelin, Mariano Plotkin, Carmen Guarini, Ricardo Salvatore, Tor-
cuato Di Tella, David Oubiña, Tomás Abraham, Sylvia Saitta, Sylvia Sigal,
Manuel Antín, Claudio España, and Andrés Di Tella. I also owe an enormous
debt of thanks to Marcella Cassellini and Guillermo Fernández Jurado, of
the Fundación Cinemateca Argentina; Adrián Muoyo and Silvia Barales, of
the Escuela Nacional de Realización y Experimentación Cinematográfica;
and Fabián Sanchez, Daniel Paraná Sendros, Andrés Insaurralde, and Silvia
Presedo, at the archives of the Museo de Cine Pablo C. Durcós Hicken.
As the book was finally coming together, I also benefited from the sup-
port of an intellectual community at large and within my institutional home
at UBC Okanagan that cheered me on in the final stages. I am extremely
grateful to Luke Rogers, Francisco Peña, Alwyn Spies, Peter Urmetzer, Ann
McKinnon, Christopher Schneider, Daniel Keyes, Hugo De Burgos, David
Jefferess, Patricia Tomic, Ricardo Trumper, James Rochlin, Ariane Hane-
maayer, Margo Tamez, Jan Gatrell, and my colleagues in the history and
LAIS program for their moral support and good company. I am also thankful
to my UBCO students and in particular to Stephanie Tissot and the indefati-
gable Ashley Black for their help and many wonderful questions. It would
not be the same work had it not also been for the comments of audiences
that heard various chapters presented at LASA and the AHA, specifically
those of Jeffrey Gould, Steve Stern, Florencia Mallon, James Green, and Eric
Zolov. Brenda Elsey also provided key emotional support throughout the
process of finishing up the manuscript for publication. I am grateful for the
comments of the anonymous reviewers of the work and to Joshua Shanholtzer
at University of Pittsburgh Press, whose wonderful suggestions and correc-
tions have added much to the final draft.
I also want to thank Ian Bricke and Leandro Burrafato for their friendship
and the many ways they helped me see film production from the inside out. I
owe a very heartfelt thanks to my dearest friend, Rodrigo Cañete, without
whom I unquestionably would not have come to appreciate Argentine film
and culture in the same way. I must also thank my parents for their support and
patience with my extended time far from home. However, of all the people
who helped me throughout this project, the hardiest thanks are reserved for
my advisor, Gil Joseph, whose encouragement and insightful critiques guided
my way, and to my husband, Uri, whose constant support and patience made
this adventure possible.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix