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Last Snapshots/Take 2: Personal and Collective Shipwrecks in Buenos Aires
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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31 lastsnapshots/take2 PersonalandCollectiveShipwrecksinBuenosAires geoffrey Kantaris I n 1989, seven years after the collapse of the military dictatorship, a film with an evocative title was made in Argentina: Últimas imágenes del naufragio (Last Images of the Shipwreck), directed by Eliseo Subiela. Set in 1982 or 1983, but also reflecting the uncertainties and crises of Raúl Alfonsín’s mandate, it is a stylized film that links the sense of social dissolution of the years of hyperinflation and political uncertainty to the collapsing narratives of a failed author cum insurance salesman who finds himself unable to make sense of the entangled threads of poverty, crime, and dissolution of family relationships in the midst of a dark city whose boundaries are as uncertain as the lives of its shipwrecked inhabitants. The shipwreck metaphor proved prophetic , although the idea that these would be the “last” images of this social wreck was premature—which is why the title of this chapter is “Last Snapshots / Take 2.” Through this title, I want to suggest a temporal paradox of belatedness and repetition, a paradox that will send us fast-forwarding to the end of the millennium , to films made with a radically different aesthetic to Subiela’s but that repeat the sense of a personal and collective shipwreck that Argentina was still experiencing even through its most recent social and economic crises. I have argued elsewhere that Últimas imágenes and its more famous contemporary, Sur by Fernando Solanas (1988), were emblematic of the loss of the dreams of Argentine national modernity—put on hold since the fall of Perón’s government in 1955 and condensed in the intensely nostalgic images of I young and holmes text-5.indd 31 11/1/10 10:08 AM 32 — geoffReY KantaRis the “table of dreams” and the Proyecto Nacional Sur in Solanas’s film (Kantaris 1996). More recently, Idelber Avelar’s book The Untimely Present (1999) argued compellingly, via an interpretation of the work of Ricardo Piglia and others, that the dictatorship from 1976 to 1982 forcefully shifted Argentina from a social and economic paradigm of statism and national modernization to the neoliberal paradigm of postmodern, globalized market economics. Thus, in the spirit of Beatriz Sarlo’s studies of end-of-millennium postmodernity in Argentina, Escenas de la vida posmoderna (1994) and Instantáneas (1996), the three urban films I shall focus on here might be collectively called snapshots (“instantáneas”) of postmodernity. These films are: Buenos Aires vice versa (Agresti 1996), Pizza, birra, faso (Caetano and Stagnaro 1997), and Mundo grúa (Trapero 1999). It is true that none of these films have what one might call a pro-postmodern aesthetic: their relationship to the loss of temporal depth, to the erasure of memory, to the failure of grand social narratives in the globalized megalopolis is more resistive than reflective. However, one obvious difference from the films of the 1980s is that these films are no longer steeped in the mode of nostalgia for the contained narratives of the modernizing nation. Although they do not celebrate the rise of mass-mediatization and the dissolution of temporal paradigms into spatial ones, they illustrate dramatically the social effects of such processes, of the interpenetration of place with global flows of power and money, of the personal and collective shipwrecks that these seismic flows and currents engender. In many ways, the space of the city becomes the privileged canvas for the filmic exploration of these geological shifts in personal and collective identity at the end of the 1990s. The urban paradigm that emerges in a cluster of films from this period suggests a spatialization of identities, a loss of historical depth and of personal histories which nevertheless are rendered spatially, often through a series of paradoxical visual metaphors. Discussion of globalization and its social effects is inseparable from understanding the global city at the end of the second Christian millennium. In fact, the Marxist critic of postmodernism and globalization Fredric Jameson claims that the new modalities of time and space emerging in the global interlinking of economies “ha[ve] everything to do with the urban, . . . its postnaturality to technologies of communication as well as of production and . . . the decentered, well-nigh global, scale on which what used to be the city is deployed” (1994, 11). David Harvey puts this point in a more pessimistic vein when he talks, in a single breath, about the urbanization of capital and the urbanization of consciousness: “The urbanization of capital on...