Politics and Performance in Post-Dictatorship Argentine Film and Theatre by Philippa Page (review)

The dialogue between performance and politics in Argentina has provided fertile ground for artistic and ideological debate, especially in the years following the 1976-1983 dictatorship. Osvaldo Pellettieri, Jorge Dubatti, and Diana Taylor, among other scholars, have shown how theatre aesthetically and ideologically straddles the boundary between art and reality to make its mark on global and national consciousness. By adding film to this conversation, Philippa Page challenges existing theories on performance and genre and revises established notions of convivio and convivencia. Positing genre as a “contingent construct shaped by prevailing circumstances” (11), Page questions whether theatrical presence (convivio) is limited to theatre by showing how cinema can also manipulate convivio and how both genres interrogate convivencia in the post-dictatorship period. She argues that cinema and theatre borrow from and “tacitly collaborate” with each other to “carve out a space for themselves, in between more dominant forms of literature and television, as legitimate narrators of the nation and vehicles for societal convivencia” (3).

Framed by the opposition between aesthetic and social performance, chapter one highlights cinema and theatre as “neighboring, yet substantially different, types of aesthetic performance” (25). In examining Eduardo Pavlovsky’s Paso de dos, Page confronts but oversimplifies Diana Taylor’s more well-rounded reading of Pavlovsky’s play. Page’s conclusion is that Paso de dos, like other plays of the period, “revise(s) the binary between good and evil, which had thereunto dominated representations of the dictatorship” (37). By contrast, Page’s strong analysis of El exilio de Gardel discusses the tanguedia (tango, comedia, tragedia) in Solanas’s film, alongside Artaud’s, Brecht’s, Brooks’s and Schechner’s theories to dissect the performance of exile and to examine how Solanas’s films use convivio as “a tool of resistance” (39). She concludes that, here, “performance is used to fill the void left by the sense of cultural desarraigo” (44). Unfortunately, Page’s study of Solanas’s film La nube, “una continuación amplificada” of Pavlovsky’s play Rojos globos rojos, falls short in two ways; she does not theoretically ground her discussion of intertextuality nor does she acknowledge Pavlovsky’s “original” intertext, El Cardenal. Nonetheless, her chapter shows how theatre can “revitalize cinema” through the “presentness of performance” (61).

Chapter two scrutinizes the complex relationship of theatre and cinema to television in films by Malowicki, Sorín, and Agresti and in Cossa’s play Años difíciles. If consumption is “the systematic manipulation of signs,” Page, like Baudrillard, argues that advertising exploits “an ‘underlying leitmotiv of protection and gratification’ which promotes a societal picture of prosperity and safety” and which “serves to justify and legitimize our daily routine” (67). Malowicki’s PyMe (Sitiada) and Sorín’s Historias mínimas highlight a “national fascination with foreign goods” and show performance as fundamental to understanding how “society is conditioned to follow certain patterns of consumption” (73). The strongest section is her probing analysis of Cossa’s play alongside the film Buenos Aires viceversa. Although it is sometimes difficult to determine whether she is talking about theatre or film, she demonstrates how Agresti’s film juxtaposes reality on the street with the país imaginario in theatre, film, and television, to emphasize how “television, as a medium, is reconceptualizing the spatial/temporal boundaries of the nation” (90). She further affirms that “Buenos Aires viceversa and Años difíciles exemplify theatre and cinema’s attempts at carving out a space for themselves as bona fide narrators of the nation” (91).

Chapter three investigates the “family romance” in Spiner’s film La sonámbula and Bartis’ Postales argentinas to reveal how the “discourse of failure” that has marked Argentina is performed. Ironically, although both the film and the play “proffer seemingly clear-cut visions of failure, they ultimately narrate their success, as art forms and as a genre […]” (101). Adeptly maneuvering Jameson’s alongside Graciela Scheines’ theories, Page demonstrates how “a work of art that builds itself on...