Voice, Music and the Experience of the Neutral in Martín Rejtman’s Fictions

DEPETRIS CHAUVIN, IRENE

Hispanic Issues On Line

University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

Lugar: Minneapolis; Año: 2012 vol. 9 p. 214 - 236

1931-8006

Almost all of Martín Rejtman’s films and short stories follow the lives of apathetic middle-class youths pauperized as a result of the Argentine economic crisis. From the silent teenagers of Rapado (1991) and the twenty-something late adolescents of Silvia Prieto (1998) and Velcro y yo (1996), to the thirty-something adults in Los guantes mágicos (2003) who neither want to stop being young nor know what to do with their lives, the protagonists of Rejtman’s fictions live in a somewhat childish state of uncertainty and indolence. In this essay I reconsider the critical potential of Rejtman’s cinematic language by analyzing not images but soundtracks. I argue that while, on the one hand, Rejtman’s ambiguous plots and visual aesthetic expose the arbitrary logic of both language and the commodity form in the market economy, on the other hand, his exploration of the dimension of sound suggests the possibility of a new form of experience. In particular, a closer look at the characters’s voices and the function of music in his films and short stories leads me to conclude that, far from being merely expressions of a lack of affect, Rejtman’s detached aesthetics and the apathetic behavior of the youths portrayed in his fictions are in fact an alternative form of expression that proposes “neutrality” as a non-paradigmatic intensity.