Afterword: The Transmedial and the Communitarian

In a seminal text on embodied meaning, Mark Johnson writes, “To discover how meaning works, we should turn first to gesture, social interaction, ritual, and art, and only later to linguistic communication” (208). His work makes a philosophical and scientific contribution to the flourishing field of embodiment studies, which engage with the material, the sensory, and the corporeal to explore human (and nonhuman) experience. Such approaches provide a corrective to the “linguistic turn” that put philosophies of language in ascendancy for much of the 20th century and presided over the influence of semiotics in film studies and the dominance of the text in theatre. They have also shaped a move from studying media’s role in mediation—how images and discourses are considered to interpose themselves between us and reality—to a focus on mediatization, which describes how media technologies are transforming modes of subjectivity and sociability.

The cinematic and theatrical productions discussed in this special issue are often rooted in Argentine traditions, events, and debates, but they also clearly participate in these broader, transnational shifts in artistic practice and theory. The strongly transmedial quality of these texts and performances brings theatre and cinema together with music, poetry, and other arts to produce heterogeneous spaces of performance, reflection, and critique. In many cases, the use of theatrical tropes and devices in cinema (especially the rehearsal) and, conversely, the intrusion of media technologies in theatre (including the large screens used by Lola Arias, Mariano Pensotti, and Rafael Spregelburd) act to bring mediality into a close and seemingly paradoxical relationship with materiality. In cinema, an emphasis on embodied presence, the aleatory, the ritualistic, the immediate, and the contingent reasserts that which seems entirely negated by film as a technique of mechanical reproduction. In theatre, the use of digital video technologies expands embodied experience into the virtual and the mediatic, connecting the here-and-now of theatre to a wider community and to other forms of experience, as it does in Pensotti’s Los 8 de julio (2002).

The recent emergence in Argentina of such transmedial, reflexive performance practices is not without national precedent. Two cinematic examples from a previous generation in the 1990s may put in relief a couple of key continuities and differences with the present moment. The use of theatrical devices and performances-within-performances in Fernando Solanas’s La nube (1998) fractures the mise-en-scène into a heterogeneous space of performance and critique, drawing on Brechtian techniques to distance the spectator from any easy emotional identification with the characters. The film presents an homage to the community-based practices of independent theatre, neglected by the state and under threat of extinction in the context of the neoliberal 1990s, with the rise of multiplexes owned by multinational conglomerates. While the more recent productions discussed in this issue often articulate a similar critique of the commercialization of art, they share nothing of La nube’s nostalgia. Despite continued barriers to funding and constraints on exhibition and distribution, these transmedial performances manifest a new confidence in the power of art to create communities in the face of the increasingly privatized spaces of the culture industry.

Lita Stantic’s Un muro de silencio (1993) offers another instructive comparison from an earlier era, in which actors play actors playing political activists who were disappeared by the military regime. Rehearsals of the film-within-the-film do not yield great insight for the director or her actors into the lives of the disappeared militants they represent, however, reducing them simply to repeated statements whose motives or actions they cannot understand. The film as a whole bears witness to a fractured community in which “todos sabían” what was happening during the dictatorship and in which relationships are now riven beyond repair. By contrast, works such as La forma exacta de las islas and Minefield affirm the therapeutic and restorative functions of art as a practice of integration, and its potential to stage real encounters between past and present, individual and community, private and public. Importantly, this is not a gesture towards the subsumption of difference in some kind of watered-down politics...