Nation, Culture and Class in Argentine Cinema

Nation, Culture and Class in Argentine Cinema
Author: Santiago Oyarzabal
Publisher: Tamesis Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9781855663053

An unprecedented close textual analysis of numerous films within their contemporary cultural context. This book engages with representations of social crisis in Argentine fictional cinema between 1998 and 2005, a period when Argentina experienced a deep economic crisis that brought about significant changes in politics, culture, society and the arts. It focuses on the ways in which cinema interpreted and represented both contemporary and long-established issues within national and social discourse, while re-assessing notions of national identity, culture and class. Despite a growing body of scholarship on Argentine film published in English over the past few years, the role of more conventional films aimed at the public at large remains underexplored. By combining close textual analysis of films with the study of their cultural context, this book argues that fictional cinema at large addressed predominantly middle-class audiences, offering both reflective and divergent views on social reality that enriched the cultural arena in which Argentineans could reflect on their past, their daily life, and their relationship with the other. In this sense cinema helped Argentine people to learn to live in democracy.

Culture of Class

Culture of Class
Author: Matthew Benjamin Karush
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2012-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822352648

Following the mass arrival of European immigrants to Argentina in the early years of the twentieth century new forms of entertainment emerged including tango, films, radio and theater. While these forms of culture promoted ethnic integration they also produced a new kind of polarization that helped Juan Peron to build the mass movement that propelled him to power.

Argentine Cinema and National Identity (1966-1976)

Argentine Cinema and National Identity (1966-1976)
Author: Carolina Rocha
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2018-01-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1786948265

Argentine Cinema and National Identity covers the development of Argentine cinema since the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, concentrating on the historical film genre and the gauchesque. This cultural history investigates the way Argentine cinema positioned itself when facing the competition of American films.

Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema

Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema
Author: Joanna Page
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2009-05-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0822390752

There has been a significant surge in recent Argentine cinema, with an explosion in the number of films made in the country since the mid-1990s. Many of these productions have been highly acclaimed by critics in Argentina and elsewhere. What makes this boom all the more extraordinary is its coinciding with a period of severe economic crisis and civil unrest in the nation. Offering the first in-depth English-language study of Argentine fiction films of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first, Joanna Page explains how these productions have registered Argentina’s experience of capitalism, neoliberalism, and economic crisis. In different ways, the films selected for discussion testify to the social consequences of growing unemployment, rising crime, marginalization, and the expansion of the informal economy. Page focuses particularly on films associated with New Argentine Cinema, but she also discusses highly experimental films and genre movies that borrow from the conventions of crime thrillers, Westerns, and film noir. She analyzes films that have received wide international recognition alongside others that have rarely been shown outside Argentina. What unites all the films she examines is their attention to shifts in subjectivity provoked by political or economic conditions and events. Page emphasizes the paradoxes arising from the circulation of Argentine films within the same global economy they so often critique, and she argues that while Argentine cinema has been intent on narrating the collapse of the nation-state, it has also contributed to the nation’s reconstruction. She brings the films into dialogue with a broader range of issues in contemporary film criticism, including the role of national and transnational film studies, theories of subjectivity and spectatorship, and the relationship between private and public spheres.

Picturing Argentina: Myths, Movies, and the Peronist Vision

Picturing Argentina: Myths, Movies, and the Peronist Vision
Author: Currie K. Thompson
Publisher: Cambria Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2014-05-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1604978791

Although Juan Domingo Perón's central role in Argentine history and the need for an unbiased assessment of his impact on his nation's cinema are beyond dispute, the existing scholarship on the subject is limited. In recent decades Argentina has witnessed a revival of serious film study, some of which has focused on the nation's classical movies and, in one case, on Peronism. None of this work has been translated into English, however.This is the first English-language book that offers an extensive assessment of Argentine cinema during first Peronism. It is also the first study in any language that concentrates systematically on the evolution of social attitudes reflected in Argentine movies throughout those years and that assesses the period's impact on subsequent filmmaking activity. By analyzing popular Argentine movies from this time through the prism of myth-second-order communication systems that present historically developed customs and attitudes as natural-the book traces the filmic construction of gender, criminality, race, the family, sports, and the military. It identifies in movies the development and evolution of mindsets and attitudes that may be construed as "Peronist." By framing its consideration of films from the Perón years in the context of earlier and later ones, it demonstrates that this period accelerates-and sometimes registers backward-looking responses to-earlier progressive mythic shifts, and it traces the development in the 1950s of a critical mindset that comes to fruition in the "new cinema" of the 1960s. Picturing Argentina: Myths, Movies, and the Peronist Vision is an important book for Latin American studies, film studies, and history collections.

The Cinematic Tango

The Cinematic Tango
Author: Tamara Leah Falicov
Publisher: Wallflower Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2007
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781904764922

This text explores the cultural politics of over 60 years of filmmaking in Argentina. The author explores how national culture on film has been shaped, articulated and debated through the lens of state policy and the dynamics of the global film market.

La Joven Moderna in Interwar Argentina

La Joven Moderna in Interwar Argentina
Author: Cecilia Tossounian
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Feminism
ISBN: 9781683401162

In this book, Cecilia Tossounian reconstructs different representations of modern femininity from 1920s and 1930s Argentina, a time in which the country saw new economic prosperity, a growing cosmopolitan population, and the emergence of consumer culture. Tossounian analyzes how these popular images of la joven moderna--the modern girl--helped shape Argentina's emerging national identity.

Imagination Beyond Nation

Imagination Beyond Nation
Author: Eva P. Bueno
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 327
Release: 1999-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 082299058X

Can scholarly pursuit of soap operas and folk art actually reveal a national imagination? This innovative collection features studies of iconography in Mexico, telenovelas in Venezuela, drama in Chile, cinema in Brazil, comic strips and tango in Argentina, and ceramics in Peru. In examining these popular arts, the scholars gathered here ask the same broad questions: what precisely is a national culture at the level of the popular? The national idea in Latin America emerges from these pages as a problematic, divided one, worth sustained attention in the field of culture studies. Many different arts come forth in all their richness and vitality, compelling us to look, listen, and understand.

The Projected Nation

The Projected Nation
Author: Matt Losada
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2018-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1438470630

Investigates how Argentine cinema has represented rural spaces and urban margins from the 1910s to the present. The Projected Nation examines the representation of rural spaces and urban margins in Argentine cinema from the 1910s to the present. The literary and visual culture of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries formulated a spatial imaginary—often articulated as an opposition between civilization and barbarism, or its inversion—into which the cinema intervened. As the twentieth century progressed, the new medium integrated these ideas with its own images in various ways. At times cinema limited itself to reproducing inherited representations that reassure the viewer that all is well in the nation, while at others it powerfully reformulated them by filming spaces and peoples previously excluded from the national culture and left behind in the nation’s modernizing process. Matt Losada accounts for historical events, technological factors, and the politics of film form and viewing in assessing a selection of works ranging from mass-marketed cinema to the political avant-garde, and from the canonical to the nearly unknown. “This is an ambitious work that views the spatial imaginary in a full century of film development as informed by national culture and politics.” — Marvin D’Lugo, coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema