The Projected Nation , livre ebook

The Projected Nation
A volume in the SUNY series in Latin American Cinema

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado and Leslie L. Marsh, editors
The Projected Nation
Argentine Cinema and the Social Margins
MATT LOSADA
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Losada, Matt author.
Title: The projected nation : Argentine cinema and the social margins / Matt Losada.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2018. | Series: SUNY series in Latin American cinema | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Includes filmography.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017040337 | ISBN 9781438470634 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438470658 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—Social Aspects—Argentina.
Classification: LCC PN1993.5.A7 L67 2018 | DDC 791.430982—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017040337
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A History of Erasures
Chapter 1 National Modernization and the Production of Marginal Spaces in Early Feature Films
Chapter 2 The Classical Cinema and the Perpetuation of a National Fantasy
Chapter 3 An Inquisitive Gaze on the Nation
Chapter 4 Contemporary Cinema and the Neoliberal Social Margins
Notes
Works Cited
Filmography
Index
Acknowledgments
Looking back from the end of this project, the beginning has become hard to discern. The sources of inspiration are many, including Professors David William Foster, James Gaasch, Rosamel Benavides, Lilianet Brintrup, Ellsworth Pence, David Castillo, Evlyn Gould, Massimo Lollini, Steven Botterill, Mia Fuller, Jeffrey Skoller, Ignacio Navarrete, Natalia Brizuela, and Verónica López. All provided inspiration and lots of help. I’m most grateful—especially when I consider that I completed my doctorate and found gainful employment—for the generosity and warmth of Dru Dougherty, an exemplary professor, adviser, and friend.
I owe a great debt to my excellent colleagues in the University of Kentucky’s Department of Hispanic Studies: Yanira Paz, Ana Rueda, Aníbal Biglieri, Haralambos Symeonidis, Alan Brown, Carmen Moreno-Nuño, Moisés Castillo, Irene Chico-Wyatt, Heather Campbell-Speltz, Jorge Medina, Ruth Brown, Brent Sebastian, Dierdre Reber, Susan Larson, and Mónica Díaz.
Although I have not met them, I deeply appreciate the work of the audiovisual preservationists who care for the cinematic past and generously exhibit its films—among them Fernando Martín Peña, Fabio Manes, and Paula Félix-Didier—as well as the efforts of the many other organizers of film screenings and those who attend them. They make Buenos Aires a wonderful place for a cinephile, and this project could not have been imagined were it not for their work. A special thanks to the Museo de Cine, and especially to the generous Fabián Sancho, a treasure of information on all things cinema and culture.
Thanks to those at the NEH seminar in Buenos Aires in 2014 for long walks and stimulating conversations, especially Rocío Gordon, Stephen Silverstein, Patrick Ridge, and David William Foster, to the organizers of the symposium Film and Phenomenology: Affect, Bodies, and Circulations in Latin American Cinema at Virginia Tech University, María del Carmen Caña Jiménez and Vinodh Venkatesh, to Gary Crowdus, founder and editor of Cineaste , and friends and cinephiles Pablo Baler, Andrei Dubinsky, Adam Shellhorse, and Chris Eagle.
Much love and appreciation to Gerardo, Carmita, Feña, Vale, Lola, Tato, Fede, Toni, Lucía, and el/la nuevo/a, as well as to Aunt Irene and my cousins lost on Long Island. Many others go unmentioned, though never unloved, but reserved for last is appreciation and love for my mother, Patricia, for Pops and Mike, and for Pepita (you are missed). My deepest love and gratitude to Remi and Mia, who put up with me as I wrote this book and nonetheless managed to make each day a wonderful adventure.
I am very indebted to the reviewers of the earlier versions of some of the material in this book, which were published in journals as follows: a few paragraphs of the introduction, chapter 2, and chapter 3 in a much earlier form in Chasqui 40.2 (Nov. 2011); part of chapter 1 in an earlier form in Hispanic Review 80.3 (Summer 2012); a section of chapter 3 in a slightly earlier form in Revista de Estudios Hispanicos 50.3 (Oct. 2016); and a few paragraphs of chapter 4 in an earlier form in Romance Notes 50.2 (2010).
All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
Introduction
A History of Erasures
To begin to illustrate the cultural field in which filmic representations of Argentine national space were conceived, I will open this book with a poem written as the cinematic medium had only begun to take on importance in the national culture. “El hermoso día” (The Beautiful Day), written by the conservative nationalist intellectual Leopoldo Lugones, was published in 1917, the year after the first commercially successful run of an Argentine feature-length film, Nobleza gaucha . 1 The poem is apposite for both its erasures and its origin in a far more restricted field of production. For its reader, who likely belonged to an elite, urban, highly cultured minority, the poem’s antimodern conception of national space conspicuously erases any trace of modernity and the accompanying influx of immigrants, and in doing so naturalizes the privileged position in a hierarchy of being of the terrateniente , the landowning lyric subject of the poem:
Tan jovial está el prado,
Y el azul tan sereno,
Que me he sentido bueno
Con todo lo creado.
El sol, desde su asomo,
Derramó por mi estancia
El oro y la fragancia
Del polen del aromo.
Sentimental, el asno,
Rebuzna su morriña,
Y ayer, como una niña,
Floreció ya el durazno.
So cheerful is the land,
And the blue so serene,
That I’ve felt fine with
With all of creation.
The sun, upon its rise,
On my ranch spilled
Gold and the fragrance
Of the pollen of the myrrh tree.
Sentimental, the ass,
Brays his nostalgia,
And yesterday, like a young girl,
The peach tree already flowered.
The lyric subject is in prelapsarian harmony with a landscape he owns, and which in turn envelopes him with a sense of timeless, natural serenity through the stimulation of his sensorium. The blue he sees, the warmth of the sun he feels, the flowers of myrrh he smells, the braying ass he hears, and the peach he anticipates tasting all contribute to an affective order in which he is the privileged subject of aesthetic rapture. This timeless space was “created” ( creado ) by an entity of whom the terrateniente lyric subject is the favored son, but such solitude, such an insular perspective, to what is it responding? To insecurities regarding a national landscape conquered by coercion and violence only decades before, and at present undergoing a rapid and problematic modernization, primarily in the form of massive immigration? The only trace the poem contains of this modernity is its complete erasure from the landscape. So, the questions must be asked: What is the nature of this structuring absence? What was happening in the nation’s rural spaces at the time Lugones was idealizing it for elite readers? Elina Tranchini offers an answer:
Desde 1901 se sucedieron con una mayor o menor violencia, huelgas, movilizaciones y protestas de braceros, trilladores, estibadores, carreros, y otros trabajadores rurales. En la región pampeana los conflictos comenzaron en 1912 y se extendieron durante toda la década de 1910 por las provincias de Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, Córdoba y La Pampa, incluyendo a chacareros, arrendatarios, pequeños proprietarios, que se oponían a las condiciones impuestas por terratenientes, intermediarios colonizadores, comerciantes y acopiadores. (1999, 126)
After 1901 there occurred, with varying degrees of violence, strikes, mobilizations, and protests by temporary farm workers, threshers, stevedores, cart drivers, and other rural workers. In the region of the Pampa the conflicts started in 1912 and extended throughout the 1910 decade in the provinces of Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, Córdoba and La Pampa, including farmers, tenants, small landowners, who were opposed to the conditions imposed by the large landowners, middlemen, traders, and brokers.
When contextualized by such conflict, Lugones’s poem takes on a far different meaning, as yet another salvo in a cultural struggle to justify control over the national space in the face of a modernization project that brought demands, sometimes violent, from the dispossessed. His strategy was to portray space in ways that would favor the claims of elite sectors to national authenticity and cast out the immigrants as unredeemably alien.
But as the poem was being written and first read, the national culture was also undergoing rapid modernization as new media were fast expanding, with already a far wider reach than th