The Cinematic Tango: Contemporary Argentine Film (review)

This new work offers a good introduction to the topic of film industries, expanding upon and providing a different dimension to Octavio Getino’s, Cine argentino: Entre lo posible y lo deseable (1998; 2005), and complimenting Randal Johnson’s study about neighboring Brazil, The Film Industry in Brazil: Culture and the State (1987). Little has been done in this area of Latin American film studies and this is one reason why The Cinematic Tango is a must read. It traces the trajectory of the industry from a commercial enterprise during the 1930s with the establishment of national studios emulating the Hollywood system.

According to Tamara Falicov, “Argentine cinema might be described as dancing a complicated tango with the Hollywood film industry on one arm and European cinema on the other” (p. 5). This quote explains both the title and premise of the book, framed along this basic tension between art and commerce that faces the Argentine film industry. While the first chapter, “From the Studio System Era to the Dirty War,” encompasses half a century of filmmaking, which cannot possibly delve deeply into the long history of cinema in Argentina, it provides an important overview of the politics influencing the early industry, in particular the role of the United States in depriving the non-allied Argentina of film stock. Furthermore this chapter sets a course for the rest of the book, which will look at the contemporary post-1983 period, and contextualizes the ensuing tension between art and commerce, which will shift according to the present political moment.

Beginning with the Alfonsín government the Instituto Nacional de Cine (INC) would promote a cinema meant to “clean up” Argentina’s image abroad from a country dominated by a recent violent dictatorship violating basic human rights to an Argentina integral to the industrialized Western world. Falicov engages in a provocative close reading of the paradigmatic film of the period, La historia oficial (1985), to show precisely how it fits into this worldview stressed by the Alfonsín government and implemented by the INC. She argues that the film circumvents the voice of the abuelas and madres of the disappeared, and obscures the complicities of the Argentine middleclass and U.S. government during the Dirty War to ease the conscience of a middle-class foreign audience watching this and other films from Argentina circulating at international film festivals.

During the neoliberal years under President Menem there is a clear shift in the INC’s policies from a European auteur-based model to a commercial Hollywood protocol. This is a change evident in the institute’s 1994 name change to INCAA (Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales), which incorporates the more commercial and popular television into its structure. According to Falicov, films made during this period, “blockbusters,” had a glossy aesthetic and were funded by multimedia global conglomerates and U.S. entertainment companies, while social and political issues were “sidelined in favour of pure entertainment” (p. 106).

The book ends with a close look at the new and younger generation of filmmakers whose success abroad forced the INCAA to take note of the new talent and thereby create an alternative space for filmmaking. This new group, not cohesive in aesthetic or philosophy, sought a new standpoint that would not necessarily be polemical or ideological. Simultaneously they moved away from the commercial and genre-based cinema of the 1990s, and the stagnant auteur cinema produced by the “dinosaur” filmmakers of the 1980s. These three chapters provide an engaging story about the recent phenomena of filmmaking in Argentina and account for the difference in production throughout the years. The Cinematic Tango traces the recent development of the Argentine film industry back to the beginning of the sound era and interweaves into the discussion a variety of issues not often taken into account, such as the rise of film schools and the creation of new film journals. Falicov’s contextualized overview of the...