New Argentine Cinema

Argentine filmmaking over the past two decades has enjoyed worldwide success. New Argentine Cinema explores this cinema from the mid-1990s to the present, from a film-analytical as well as a cultural studies perspective. it reveals the elements that have made for this success, in relation to the country’s profound political, social and cultural crisis during the same period. Jens Andermann argues that cinema, more than any other art form, has proved a particularly effective medium for engaging with the way crisis has been lived and experienced, due to its own exposure to economic and technological change. Thus, the most recent wave of films also differs markedly from the Argentine cinema of the preceding decade, following the end of the dictatorship in 1983. Studying films including Lucrecia Martel’s La ciénaga (The Swamp), Lisandro Alonso’s La libertad (Freedom), Albertina Carri’s Los rubios (The Blondes), Martín Rejtman’s Sílvia Prieto and Pablo Trapero’s Nacido y criado (Born and Bred), among others, he identifies a shift in aesthetic sensibilities between these directors and those of the previous generation, as well as a profound change in the way films are being made, and their relation to the audio-visual field at large. In combining close comparative analyses with a review of the changing models of production, editing, actorship and location, this book uncovers the ways in which Argentine films have managed to construct a complex, multilayered account of their own present, still troubled by the unresolved legacast.