Retrofuturism and Reflexivity in Argentine Science Fiction Film: The Construction of Cinematic Time

In his work on utopia and science fiction, Fredric Jameson observes the “seeming extinction” of the classical forms of utopian writing and “the emergence of newer, more reflexive forms” (Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 284). Rather than offering specific “blueprints” of future societies, imagining and defending the value of invented social institutions, these more recent texts centre on “the possibility of their own production, in the interrogation of the dilemmas involved in their own emergence as utopian texts” (Archaeologies of the Future 216, 293). Most persuasively, Jameson argues that this reflexive turn allows us to glimpse the “deepest vocation” of utopian narratives: not to bring forth convincing and coherent new worlds, but to confront us precisely with their inability to do so. This failure is not due to the inadequacy of any individual’s vision but results instead from “the systemic, cultural and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or another prisoners” (Archaeologies of the Future 289). Utopian narrative is at its most utopian, Jameson contends, when it demonstrates to us our imprisonment within the present (ideological) moment.

The two Argentine science fiction films discussed in this essay certainly pursue a highly reflexive approach to their construction of alternative worlds. At first sight, both films seem to set out the familiar science-fiction scenario of the evil dictator who maintains power through advanced technologies of surveillance and psychological control. The hapless citizens of La antena (Esteban Sapir, 2007) are kept in thrall to their silent, monochrome existence by Señor TV’s manipulation of television’s hypnotic power, while in La sonámbula (Fernando Spiner, 1998), the state uses filmed recordings of individuals’ dreams and memories to assign identities to the 30,000 of the city’s inhabitants who are suffering from amnesia after a chemical explosion triggered by the government. However, as I will suggest, these films’ primary interest is in the construction of visual technologies as the tools of utopian imagination rather than the servants of dystopian terror.

The films’ experiments with generic convention and their fabrication of extremely heterogeneous visual styles continually emphasize what Jameson refers to as “the constructed, invented, artificial nature of SF as a genre” (Archaeologies of the Future 308). The fairytale and comic-book aesthetics of La antena clearly draw attention to the artifice of its utopian narrative; in La sonámbula, as we will see, the insertion of sequences carrying a pseudo-documentary charge points to the impossibility of sustaining a vision of an ultra-modernized, futuristic Buenos Aires. One might be tempted to suggest, therefore, that both films consciously reiterate the failure of the utopian imagination, that crucial—if decidedly negative—political contribution that Jameson ascribes to science fiction since the late twentieth century. Although they are thoroughly reflexive, however, neither La antena nor La sonámbula ultimately constructs a utopian vision that fails in the way that Jameson describes. Indeed, as I will show, they locate utopian potential precisely within the power of cinema itself as a visual technology, to liberate as much as to oppress, to reshape temporalities, to bring about encounters between alternative temporalities, and to free us from the deception that our present moment can be located at a point within a homogeneous, linear course of historical inevitability. These films’ reflexive exploration of the construction and manipulation of time in cinema brings some important nuances to Jameson’s account of postmodern science fiction, and more generally to his claim of the loss of historicity in postmodern texts.

Retrofuturism in La antena: Recycling as a Critique of Capitalist Consumption

For Jameson, postmodernism’s abandonment of a properly historical perspective—which would seek to understand causality and connections, and recognize the events and processes that separate the present from the past—is everywhere evident in “the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion” (Postmodernism 18). It is this appropriation of past styles with disregard for their “content,” or their placing within broader historical narratives, that in his view erodes postmodernism’s potential for a serious...