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  • The Projected Nation: Argentine Cinema and the Social Margins by Matt Losada
  • Constanza Burucúa
Losada, Matt. The Projected Nation: Argentine Cinema and the Social Margins. U of New York P, 2018. 197 pp.

Up until now, Matt Losada's acute observations and sharp writings on Argentine cinema had recurrently appeared in different journals and academic publications. The Projected Nation gathers many of his previously advanced ideas and further develops them into a systematic reading of the history and historiography of this national cinema. The result is a sophisticated monographic study in which the scrutiny of the social margins as a complex motive, both perennial and in perpetual reconfiguration, allows for a novel reading of the traditional periodization, as well as its associated film canon.

Throughout the different chapters, the shifts in filmic representations of the national space are anchored to a meticulously informed and thoroughly summarized sociopolitical context. And while the social margins are treated as signifiers of discourses on inclusion and exclusion within the "national culture's field of representability" (70), this is closely related to a spectatorial gaze that is also evolving. As an interpretive vector, the social margins are not limited to the spatial coordinates along which subsequent representations of the national have been articulated. Instead, although the focus on the rural-urban divide remains central to Losada's arguments, his understanding of the social margins as the result of uneven processes of modernization and development allows for an analysis that, beyond spatial dichotomies, includes different and successive forms of Otherization on the basis of class, race, ethnicity, and gender. [End Page 304]

Following an introduction that establishes the enduring influence of literary tropes initially formulated in nation-building writings of the nineteenth century, the first chapter is titled "National Modernization and the Production of Marginal Spaces in Early Feature Films." In it, Losada looks at how an incipient and emerging film sector (not even an industry yet), unharnessed by regulating institutions and still lacking cultural legitimation among the intellectual elites, allowed filmmakers enough autonomy (economic, political, and ideological), "to counter hegemonic discourses on identity and national space to a degree that would not be seen in Argentine cinema for several decades" (24). To sustain his points, the author turns to pioneering texts such as Amalia (Enrique García Velloso, 1914), Nobleza Gaucha (E. Gunche and E. Martínez de la Pera, 1915), Juan sin ropa (Georges Benoit, 1919) and El último malón (Alcides Greca, 1918), and, while revisiting the arguments put forward by leading voices in the study of the cinema of this early period, he offers his own thorough textual analysis to expose the narrative and formal strategies through which these films sidelined, challenged, or even defied costumbrista conventions and Lugones's criollista legacy.

In "The Classical Cinema and the Perpetuation of a National Fantasy," attention is paid to what is eventually characterized as the most occlusive period (among the ones studied in this book), in terms of discursive and representational deviations from the official versions of national identity. As Losada explains, between the 1930s and the mid-1950s, a financially dependent and regulated industry "developed a unique film language that, as it conformed to the economic demands of classical film production, minimized the chance of contradicting comfortable conceptions of the national territory" (35). By looking at films such as La rubia del camino (Luis Romero, 1938), Kilómetro 111 (Mario Soffici, 1938), and Petróleo (Arturo Mom, 1940), Losada exposes the ideological alignment between these texts (with their more or less nuanced nationalistic overtones) and specific State-driven projects concerned with the nationalization of the oil sector and the creation of a roadway network across the national territory. And, whereas in the reading of La rubia del camino such questions are entwined with others concerning discourses on class, in that of Con el diablo en el cuerpo (Carlos Hugo Christensen, 1947) the author's attention is centered on the scrutiny of (normative and non-normative) masculinities mapped along the rural-urban divide. The chapter concludes with the analysis of Suburbio (León Klimovsky, 1951), Barrio Gris (Mario Soffici, 1954), and Detrás de un largo muro (Lucas De Mare, 1958...

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