New Argentine Cinema of the '90s: Between Breakup and Tradition

OUBIÑA, DAVID

New York

Conferencia; Conferencia para los departmentos Spanish & Portuguese y Cinema Studies; 2002

New York University

During the last decade, Argentine cinema seems to have experienced a sudden innovation: new directors, new modes of production, new themes. Pizza, birra, faso (Bruno Stagnaro and Adrián Caetano, 1997) Mundo grúa (Craneworld, Pablo Trapero, 1999) or La libertad (Freedom, Lisandro Alonso, 2000) were celebrated by the audience, were praised by the critics and were successfully shown at international festivals. It is an alternative cinema consisting of low budget productions, made by young directors, and usually dealing with the subject of marginality within a disfunctional society. In this New Argentine cinema, social testimony is combined with narrative rigour and modern style. At the same time, the entusiasm provoked by these films has frequently postponed an in-depth analysis of their stylistic patterns: they have been quickly characterized as part of an organized movement sharing a same project, and they have been irresponsibly assigned the task of a great innovation. This urgency allowed some critics to put together many imperfect movies with a few notably mature works (such as Martín Rejtman´s Silvia Prieto, 1998, or Lucrecia Martel´s La ciénaga / The Swamp, 2001), whose merits don´t depend on the youth of the filmmakers, on the novelty of the themes or on a certain production system. The lecture intends to map this generation and to analyze its originality: What are the similarities and the differences between this New Wave and that Other Cinema from the ´70s? How do these new filmmakers negotiate the concept of "independent cinema"? And up to what extent the innovation that they represent is really a rupture that brings a new aesthetic proposal to Argentine cinema?