Footsteps: Risks and Challenges of Contemporary Argentine Cinema

OUBIÑA, DAVID

Río de Janeiro

Simposio; Recoveries of the Real. New Argentine and Brazilian Cinema in the Global Image-World; 2009

University of London / Princeton University / New York University in Bs. As. / Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

The documentary register has been both a blessing and a curse for film. It gave it its specificity, but it has often obliged it to pay the price of illegitimacy. The idea of an independent cinema in the sense of craftsmanship (as opposed to being free from the impositions of the industry) marked the first films of the new Argentine cinema. Digital cameras and smaller technical crews made it possible to have more flexible shoots in which experimentation, the unforeseen, or chance could become a productive element of the film without the director losing aesthetic control over his or her material. However, the new cinema is not exempt from generating its own clich é s. In fact?as happens invariably?once a new approach has been incorporated and has become the norm, it will stagnate if it is not propelled in new directions. In Argentine cinema of the last years there are various examples of films that try to go against the grain of the possibilities offered by documentation: Historias extraordinarias (Extraordinary Stories, Mariano Llin á s, 2008), La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman, Lucrecia Martel, 2007), Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, 2008), Castro (Alejo Moguillansky, 2009), Todos mienten (They All Lie, Mat í as Piñeiro, 2009). Beyond the expected democratization of the medium, beyond the possibilities offered by digital technology, for these filmmakers the problem remains how to make critical use of the medium, how to use the camera to restore ambiguity to what is being filmed. Or to take up Manovich?s image once more: how can we make art from footprints? If some recent films manage to construct a political dimension, it is not because they uphold a particular ideology, but because they establish a new critical relation between the image and reality. Taking as a starting point various recent films, this essay reflects on the risks and challenges of a cinema that, not long ago, was hailed as an alternative model.