Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (review)

Joanna Page starts her excellent overview of contemporary Argentine cinema with the following quote from Gilles Deleuze: "Money is the obverse of all the images that the cinema shows and sets in place, so that films about money are already, if implicitly, films within the film or about the film." These words set the stage for a careful and intelligent analysis of Page's book main subject: films "about money" (and its dematerialization), produced in Argentina after the economical crisis that saw its climax in December 2001.

In her introduction Page adjudicates the presence of big numbers of films in the years surrendering the crisis not only as a marker of a new cultural and political material and the imperative to find new techniques to reflect it, but also as a result of the implementation of the Cinema Law (1995), "the revival of international film festivals," "the explosion of new film schools" and "the rise in film criticism." Page concentrates on what each film analyzed in her study says about this historical moment while contrasting it with films from previous periods and with what the international markets expect of Third World Cinema. Particularly "... in an era in which culture and politics are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish" (7) this book offers a dual vision of Argentine films of the '80s, '90s and early twenty-first century from an international perspective at the same time that does not lose sight of the continued importance of the national framework in which these films are positioned. The films, Page would argue, produce a reaction to the crisis and, at the same time, offer an introspective gaze on their own means of construction that is essentially political.

Crisis and Capitalism achieves its goal based on a solid blend of film analysis and criticism, references to Karl Marx, as well contemporary cultural theory (Frederic Jameson, Beatriz Sarlo, among others), and examples of the Argentine literary corpus. In particular, this latter inclusion becomes an important contribution of Joanna Page's study. She works with well-known literary texts and authors as important tools to complement her analysis. Texts by Roberto Arlt, Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo, Eduardo Pavlovky add depth to her readings and provide a larger picture of Argentina's contextualized cultural efforts to explain and define itself.

Page states her intention is "... to explore how cinema has registered, and indeed helped to construct, certain modes of subjectivity relating to Argentina's experience of capitalism, neoliberalism and economic crisis" (3). She is interested in the relationship between the "intrinsic" and "extrinsic" construction of this subjectivity and its meaning. At the same time, the book pays attention to the Argentine film effort "to chart the decline of the state and to question its legitimacy while reasserting national identity and rebuilding a community mobilized around the idea of the nation" (17).

Page questions what "realism" can and cannot say about a specific historical circumstance. She clearly marks the connection between the minimalist techniques presented by these films and the minimal economic resources available to their producers and directors.

On one hand her study arranges together films from different directors by genre or themes while in other cases analyzes films by the same director: Fabián Bielinsky's Nueve reinas and El aura are contrasted while Lucrecia Martel's La ciénaga and La niña santa are seen as complementary.

In chapter 1: "Nation State and Filmmaking in Contemporary Argentina" Page offers the analysis of two films from the previous era, in order to contrast them with films in which "neo-realism" takes central stage. In La nube (Solanas, 1998) Page sees an intent to present resistance through art while in No te mueras sin decirme dónde vas (Subiela, 1995) appears a "New Age optimism" that understand films as a form of mass entertainment.

In chapter 2: "New Argentine Cinema and the Production of Social Knowledge," while focusing on the " . . . universally canonized as the founding text of New Argentine Cinema" (37): Pizza, Birra, Faso (Caetano, Stagnaro, 1997) and...