Abstract
From its beginnings, cinema has connected groups, publics, communities, multitudes, worlds. In recent years, when the very idea of society appears to be undergoing an unprecedented mutation, to a great extent due to the importance of the media, it is no coincidence that cinema has begun to explore once again, implicitly or explicitly, the possibility of inventing or consolidating associations. The absence or withdrawal of large popular groups as subjects of history led cinema to rest its gaze on a smaller group, albeit one no less revered: the family. It seems evident that not only conjugal matrimonial ties but also familial ideas as entrenched as the heterosexual union, the stability of the group linked by ties of blood, the authority of ancestors, and the sense of belonging are in crisis.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
One exception that shapes the family is the stories of Jewish families in which a reencounter appears to be possible and is filled with meaning. I refer to the films of Daniel Burman (in particular, El abrazo partido) and to Gabriel Lichtmann’s opera prima, Judíos en el espacio (¿o por qué es diferente esta noche a las demás noches)? (2005, “Jews in Space [or Why Is This Night Different From Any Other?]”).
Of the YPF service stations of the 1930s, Anahí Ballent and Adrián Gorelik write that these constructions are “frankly modernist, almost didactic commands of the avant-garde, with the explicit vocation of generating a progressive, urban imagination” in Argentina (2001, 191).
The inclusion of one filmic citation in La niña santa must have surprised several of these critics; it referred not to Torre Nilsson but to Raúl de la Torre’s Heroína (1972, “Heroine”), the movie that Mercedes Morán’s character watches on television. Is this an homage to one of the few Argentine directors besides Nilsson and others from the generation of the 1960s who placed an emphasis on the feminine gaze and experience? Or is it more a dedication to Graciela Borges, who plays a translator at a medical conference in that film?
In Rapado the character escapes on his motorcycle, but when it breaks down he must return to Buenos Aires. In contrast, in the story that is the source for the movie, Lucio goes to Mar del Plata, where the text ends. The only film in which there is an escape from the police is Pizza, birra, faso, and in that film Uruguay is the analog for Mexico in U.S. film noir or crime fiction. The story ends on the border, just before the protagonist can board the ferry. In addition, Lerman’s Tan de repente and Pablo Reyero’s La cruz del sur (2003, “The Southern Cross”) take place on the Atlantic coast.
Filippelli (2002) analyzes Todo juntos using the category of the shot.
In his review of the film, Salas speaks of “three ghosts” that hound the couple: the video of the slaughtering of the pig, his supposed infidelity, and, finally, the taxi driver (2004, 175). Diego Trerotola’s review of the film in El amante (2003) is also very good.
Estrella roja (“Red star”) refers to an LSD tab of the same name. Cf. the song “Mil horas” (“A Thousand Hours”) on the album Vasos y besos (1983, “Cups and Kisses”) by Los Abuelos de la Nada (“The Grandparents of Nothingness”): “In the circus you’re a star/A red star that imagines it all.” Rosario Bléfari and Gonzalo Córdoba are part of the rock band Suárez.
In his Tratado de semiótico (A Theory of Semiotics), Umberto Eco explains Peirce’s system of signs. According to Eco, one of the great virtues of Peirce’s conception of the sign lies in the fact that it supposes neither intentionality nor artificiality (1995, 32).
This characteristic also applies to the whole boom of commercial film produced during the 1990s under the auspices of television. In these films (Jorge Nisco and Daniel Barone’s Comodines [1997; released in the United States as Cops], Eduardo Mignogna’s La fuga [2001, “The Escape”], Juan José Jusid’s Un argentino en Nueva York [1998, “An Argentinian in New York”]), the commodity narrates without any mediation whatsoever. These are the prolongations, we could say, of the sociopolitical story of the 1990s that Beatriz Sarlo has defined as “the bourgeois novel of the marketocratic rationalization, a truly impoverished material to replace the political identity that Menemism set out to dissolve” (1990, 4; italics in original). Although these films do not hold up to a cinematographic analysis, they are interesting from a cultural point of view. Is there a more pathetic “first world” than that represented by the encounter between the protagonist played by Franchella and the doubles of Woody Allen and Whoopi Goldberg, the latter transformed into a waitress at a fast-food joint? Just as Juan José Jusid’s Made in Argentina (1986) was not a great film but served as a direct testimony of the Alfonsín years (and also began in New York), Jusid’s Un argentino en Nueva York inadvertently illustrates the social imagination during the Menem years.
Benjamin had divided experience into Erfahrung (the integration of events into collective memory) and Erlebnis (the separation of events from these meaningful contexts and the linking of them to the flux of life). For an exposition of this difference, see Jay (1988, 67).
In the same book, Benjamin avers, “Prostitution, in which the woman represents merchant and merchandise in one, acquires a particular significance” (1999, 896).
On the themes of perception, interest, and the human condition, see the developments of Bergson and Deleuze in Marrati (2003, 42–4). The “first material moment of subjectivity” consists, according to Deleuze, in a subtraction of the perception from that which interests us (1986a, 63). The action-image (“the virtual action of things on us”) and the affection-image (“living matter”) form the second and third moment of subjectivity (65).
In the short story “Quince cigarillos” (“Fifteen Cigarettes”) in Velcro y yo (1996, “Velcro and I”): “What a shame that I haven’t run into any of Mariano’s old high school friends. I’ve just gotten here and I want to get back in touch. A casual encounter around a circumstance like this one [Mariano is in jail], which brings people together, is always better than any old phone call” (Rejtman 1996, 95). The melancholy of such encounters is never entirely dark; it is nuanced by the ironic distance of the absurd: in Los guantes mágicos it is the brother of a grade-school classmate (they run into each other in the end, but they do not recognize one another); in Silvia Prieto, Garbuglia mixes up the names of his former classmates.
Madame de … tells the story of the title character, who sells a pair of earrings in the shape of a heart that her husband (Charles Boyer) had given her. The husband later discovers this fact and recovers the earrings to give them as a gift to his lover. The lover visits Constantinople and parts with the earrings, which find themselves in a jewelry store where an Italian diplomat (Vittorio de Sica) buys them. The diplomat travels to Paris and falls in love with Madame de…, to whom he ends up giving the earrings. Her husband discovers the betrayal and challenges the diplomat to a duel, eventually killing him. In his text “Postproducción,” Rejtman mentions Madame de…, La ronde, and Ophuls’ Le plasir (1999, 144, 152). He also refers several times to Guy de Maupassant, the writer on whose work the episodes in La plasir are based.
In her astute review of Silvia Prieto, Silvia Schwarzböck speaks of “residues” of the classics (1999). She begins her article by affirming that “while movies can be similar to other films or to extra-cinematographic reality,… Silvia Prieto eschews both possibilities.”
I am, of course, using these comparisons in a different way than is customary when film criticism speaks of Bresson and the rigor of the mise-en-scène- what David Bordwell, borrowing from Noel Burch, deemed “parametric narration,” a type of narration that differs from plot-based films (1996, 275). In this sense, Ophuls tends to orchestrate his mise-en-scenès around spiral forms, in a constant search for the superposition of shots through frames, glass, rails, and other objects. In this sense, Rejtman is closer to Bresson’s asceticism. See Beatriz Sarlo’s comparisons in Birgin and Trímboli (2003).
Cavell analyzes the following films: Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve (1941), Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934), Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940), and George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story (1940) and Adam’s Rib (1949).
Once again, technological advances highlight the artificiality of artistic languages, as in the case of dubbing. In recent years, improvement in theater acoustics, the generalized use of the Dolby system (“optical stereophonic sound on film,” created in 1975), and the possibility of manipulating sound with computers (to splice together different parts, to temporalize sound, to reformat it, etc.) have all made the elaboration of sound as extensive an act as work on the image. Francis Ford Coppola, for example, has spent as long developing sound as on filming (Stam 2001, 212–13). In contrast, at times technical limitations pose true challenges for filmmakers, as happened in Adrián Caetano’s Bolivia. According to Carolina Duek, in a paper presented in the seminar on “The Cunning Tricks of the Cinematographic Form,” “The role of music in editing is well known. As they did not have money to film with two sound tracks, they had to do it with a single one. This meant that the ambient sound could not be ‘superimposed’ upon the music. For this reason, the dialogues in the movie would seem to form a part not only of the plot but also of the ambient sound, which in other cases is occupied by soundtracks.”
Some films that include indigenous languages, such as Lautaro Murúa’s Shunko (1960), subtitle these parts to facilitate comprehension.
According to Adriana Cavarero, this represents “the nature of women as a specific, passionate nature, considered disordered, dangerous, and incapable of regulating itself from within. Therefore, it is seen to need discipline from without, which is generally the role of men” (1998, 303).
At night, Helena suffers the same discomfort as the character in the movie she is watching on television, Graciela Borges in Raúl de la Torre’s Heroína. Instead of invoking Torre Nilsson (the director to whom she had been compared after her first film), Martel turns to Raúl de la Torre, the first Argentine director with an exclusively feminine thematic. In addition to Heroína, see Juan Lamgalia y Sra. (1970, “Mr. and Mrs. Juan Lamgalia”), Crónica de una señora (1971, “Chronicle of a Lady”), and Sola (1976, “Alone”), all of which feature Graciela Borges.
The fundamental position of the woman in relationship to desire lies in the fact that, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu, “she is condemned to be seen through the dominant, that is, masculine, categories” (1998, 89).
the prime organ of perception (Baroque, art of the thing seen, attests to it). This change is of great religious importance. The primacy of hearing, still very prevalent in the sixteenth century, was theologically guaranteed: the Chuch bases its authority on the word, faith is hearing: auditum verbi Dei, id este fidem; the ear, the ear alone Luther said, is the Christian organ. Thus a risk of a contradiction arises between the new perception, led by sight, and the ancient faith based on hearing. Ignatius sets out, as a matter of fact, to resolve it: he attempts to situate the image (or interior ‘sight’) in orthodoxy, as a new unit of the language he is constructing” (1976, 65).
Classifications of sound in film have always been problematic and are almost always described as a function of the visual. For the sound whose origin is not perceivable in the image, two terms are used: “nondiegetic” and “diegetic.” As can be seen from previous examples, in La niña santa, sound is presented in offscreen space, later to reveal itself in the scene. On this theme, see Michel Chion’s indispensible books (1999, among others), and the succinct but exhaustive treatment of the term “Sound” in Russo (1998).
The literature on the relationship between the privileging of the visual (ocularcentrism), masculine control (phalocentrism), and the preeminence of reason (logocentrism) in the West, particularly in the realm of French post-structuralism and feminism, is extensive. A lucid analysis of these positions with respect to cinematographic criticism can be found in Martin Jay (1993). In her essay “La tecnología del género,” Teresa de Lauretis proposes, per Foucault, that the body of the woman saturated with sexuality is “perceived as an attribute or a property of the male” (1987, 14) and that “in the phallic order of patriarchal culture and in its theory, woman is unrepresentable except as representation” (20). That is, the order of representation, to which the cinematographic apparatus belongs, is constituted by the masculine gaze.
This tendency to fulfill the conventions of a genre continued in many movies of the 1990s, including Alberto Lecchi’s Perdido por perdido (1993, “Since It’s Already Failed”), Desanzo’s Al filo de la ley (1992, “At the Edge of the Law”), and Mario Levin’s Sotto voce (1996), which do not belong to the “new cinema.” There were also important contributions to a rereading of the genre in Marcelo Piñeyro’s Cenizas del paraíso (1997, released in the United States as Ashes from Paradise) and Fabián Bielinsky’s Nueve reinas, which had very solid screenplays (the first by Aída Bortnik, the second by the film’s director). Among the younger filmmakers, it was Damián Szifron—the most coherent filmmaker dedicated to well-constructed commercial movies— who revisited the genre with El fondo del mar (2003, released in the United States as The Bottom of the Sea). For an overview of detective/crime film of the 1980s, see the article by Elena Goyti and David Oubiña in España (1994).
Villegas had already made a lovely short entitled Rutas y veredas (1995, “Routes and Sidewalks”), in which a mysterious urban sadness gives the film its tone.
Various examples could be included in a fairly heterogeneous series of films of education or formation—from literary adaptations of classic examples of the Bildungsroman, such as Wim Wenders’ version of Wilhelm Meister and Peter Handke’s Falsche Bewegung (1975), to the properly cinematographic inflection typical of U.S. film, where an older (and wiser) character initiates another into a discipline: from John Avildesen’s The Karate Kid (1984) to Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money (1986). The initiation of a novice into the institution of the police constitutes a subgenre and has many examples: Dennis Hopper’s Colors (1988), with Robert Duvall and Sean Penn; John Herzfield’s 15 Minutes (2001), with Robert DeNiro and Edward Burns; and many others.
For many aspects of what I examine in this chapter, I have consulted Richard Sennett’s intelligent study on the relationships between personality and institution, especially Respect in a World of Inequality (2003).
Copyright information
© 2008 Gonzalo Aguilar
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Aguilar, G. (2008). Film, the Narration of a World. In: Other Worlds. New Concepts in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230616653_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230616653_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-37391-8
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-61665-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)