The Projected Nation: Argentine Cinema and the Social Margins by Matt Losada (review)

Matt Losada's survey study of the social geographies of Argentine cinema is a truly impressive achievement. Combining anthological knowledge of Argentina's cinematic canon with a solid command of film-analytical method as well and a deft capacity to put close-readings of individual works within wider contexts, including the shifts in production and distribution these respond to, The Projected Nation will become a major reference on the history of Argentine cinema. The book's selection and organization of the primary corpus is guided –admirably–by an interest in the role of (both urban and rural) scenarios that cinema inherited from literature's foundational fiction of the nation-state.

Chapter 1, on representations of marginal urban and rural spaces in feature films of the first decades after 1900, offers fascinating insights into the way in which the new medium's adaptations of gauchesca characters and storylines also rearranges these in terms of emergent new national-popular alliances, different from those of turn-of-the-century literary criollismo. Perhaps the role of circus and theater as intermediaries between literary and filmic version of the gaucho repertoire could have been explored in more depth here. Yet, altogether, the chapter offers a comprehensive and erudite overview of Argentine silent cinema, often also including very knowledgeable readings of individual films' allegorical dimensions aimed at the mass audiences of Buenos Aires' 'peripheral modernity'. The chapter's final section on Alcides Greca's El último malón (1916) offers particularly compelling and nuanced reading of the way the latter calls on (and frequently also anticipates) a heterogeneous array of genres, thus also countering prevalent discourses of national modernity and progress and their casting of indigenous and mestizo subjects as barbaric remnants from another time.

Chapter 2, on films of the 1930s and 1940s, rightly sides with Matthew Karush's characterization of classic studio cinema as targeted at popular audiences and thus as invested with less symbolic capital than foreign imports, which were being watched by urban literate publics (M. B. Karush, Culture of Class. Radio and Cinema in the Making of a Divided Argentina, 1920-1946. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). This focus on the sociology of film audiences might have benefited from more extensive references to the literary field's more complex responses to the new medium: after all, writers such as Horacio Quiroga, Roberto Arlt and Jorge Luis Borges voraciously watched and reviewed both foreign and vernacular productions. Paying close attention to the spatial rhetorics of classic studio cinema, Losada analyzes here the emergence of a new form of cultural cartographics: his brilliant discussion of the deployment of synecdoche and asyndeton in Sebastián Naón's Nobleza gaucha (1937)—a loose adaptation of nationalist poet Leopoldo Lugones's homonymous epic—is exemplary in this respect. This subsection of the chapter is important also for the attention it pays to seldom-discussed early 'independent' works, including poet-dramatist Leonidas Barletta's Los afincaos (1941).

A particularly compelling section discusses a series of 1930s studio productions in the context of State-driven 'national development' projects: Manuel Romero's La rubia del camino (1938), Arturo S. Mom's Petróleo (1940) and Mario Soffici's comedy classic Kilómetro 111 (1938), are being read here benefiting from the insights of cultural geography and literary topoanalysis alike. Moving on to Carlos Hugo Christensen's Con el diablo en el cuerpo (1947), Losada shows how, from very early on, the rules of metropolitan genres such as the screwball comedy were also being subverted in Argentine cinema by proto-auteurist gestures. The final section, section "From Arrabal to Villa", discusses the emergence in the 1950s of new scenarios of urban marginality, combining a nuanced understanding of the first villero films' spatial politics with contextual background on the apogee and overthrow of Peronism as well as the shift in production models from the project of an industrial, studio-based cinema of the 1930s and 1940s to more...