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  • Dancing Affect in the Aftermath of Loss: El loro y el cisne and Argentina’s Generation “In Between”
  • Cecilia Sosa

Alejo Moguillansky’s third film, El loro y el cisne (2013), mischievously articulates the dancing landscapes of an outlandish Argentina through an unusual love story with autobiographical components. The film seems to elude a conventional analysis. It could be read as an improbable southern remake of Swan Lake, drawing upon the rehearsals of Grupo Krapp, an Argentine experimental, independent dance company. Alternately, El loro can be viewed as a quirky rom-com in which the director surreptitiously forms part of the romance while the characters flirt constantly at both sides of the camera. The film could also pass as a contorted musical or as a memoir of first-time fatherhood. El loro is most likely all of the above, and more.

Rather than consider El loro’s enfolded puzzle of screens, stages, and lives as a threat to the idea of generic purity, I propose that it sheds light on a new body of work, an upcoming hybrid genre within Argentina’s contemporary filmic and theatrical production. In particular, I examine how this southern version of a classic ballet fable provides a playful overlap between documentary and fiction, while calling into question traditional boundaries across the arts. In dialogue with Homi Bhabha’s theories on postcolonial literature and recent affect studies, I show how Moguillansky’s crossover of genres provides a powerful transnational critique of what it means to be a Latin American artist. Ultimately, I contend that El loro features a language breakdown for the aftermath of Argentina’s last dictatorship (1976–1983). In doing so, it serves to envision the current dramas of a young generation for whom the resonances of the traumatic past are starting to fade away. [End Page 49]

Act 1: Meeting the Director

Alejo Moguillansky was born in 1978 in Buenos Aires, two years after a coup d’ etat led to a cruel bio-political regime responsible for kidnapping, torturing, and destroying politically engaged subjectivities. The experience of terror and loss vanished 30,000 lives, infamously known as los desaparecidos. When democracy returned in 1983, civil society was left with no bodies to be mourned. Against that contested background, which led to a decade of poverty and rough neo-liberal policies in the 1990s, Moguillansky’s work has defended its right to be political in a non-traditional sense. His filmography includes the short films Lola/Gonzalo (2001) and Un modo romántico de vivir su vida (1999), as well as La prisionera (2006), which premiered at Berlinale, and Castro (2009), his second feature film, which was awarded the prizes for Best Film and Best Cinematography at the Independent Film Festival of Buenos Aires (BAFICI) in 2009, premiered internationally at Locarno’s Festival, and was shown at more than 25 festivals in 30 countries. More recently, he directed El escarabajo de oro (2014), awarded the prize for Best Argentine Feature Film at BAFICI (2015).1 Alongside Mariano Llinás, Agustín Mendilaharzu, and Laura Citarella, Moguillansky also founded El Pampero Cine, a renowned independent production house that promotes the talented work of his generation. Furthermore, he has been the scriptwriter for many films directed by friends and colleagues and has served as the editor and montage expert for more than 15 films.2

In the area of theatre, Moguillansky co-directed El amor es un francotirador with Lola Arias and regularly collaborates with the Grupo Krapp, in which his partner, Luciana Acuña, directs and performs. As a couple, Moguillansky and Acuña also staged the theatrical piece Por el dinero (2013), which focuses on the domestic struggle of a family of artists who depend on international funding and which could be read as El loro’s counterpart and a live bio-drama emerging out of the backstage of the film.3 Currently, while he prepares the musical Film por dinero, Moguillansky has just released La vendedora de fósforos (2017) at BAFICI. This fictional film also has a documentary component that draws on the attempts of the German avant-garde composer Helmut Lachenmann to put together an opera piece at the Teatro Col...

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