Watching the city: the politics of space in Pizza, birra, faso

Abstract

In this article, I discuss the representation of Buenos Aires in Pizza, birra, faso. Paying attention to some of the film’s salient aspects vis-a-vis its portrayal of urban space, my analysis has as its ultimate goal to reveal the ways in which the film engages in a political critique that might seem absent if studied solely from a narrative point of view. In this sense, Pizza, birra, faso is a paradigmatic example of the ways in which many of the films of New Argentine Cinema engaged with their political context differently to films of the post-dictatorship generation. To unearth this political content, I will argue, it is necessary to study these films as films, and not merely as texts.

Keywords:

• New Argentine Cinema
• Argentina
• Buenos Aires
• urban space
• neoliberalism
• crisis

Notes

1. A working-class nightclub.

2. See Essever 1998 and Pauls 1998 among others.

3. New Argentine Cinema is a label that is deeply contested, equally embraced and rejected. Although in its common-sense use these words point to the emergence of a new form of filmmaking in the early to mid 1990s, on closer scrutiny it is hard to ascertain with accuracy what these words really encompass. When did New Argentine Cinema begin? Is the current Argentine cinema, for example, part of the same phenomenon? Should ‘industrial cinema’ also be considered part of New Argentine Cinema? It is not the purpose of this article to resolve the meaning of this taxonomy. The label is in this article used for the possibilities it opens up of joining ongoing discussions. See Aguilar 2006, Andermann 2011, and Page 2009 et al. for extended debates on these topics.

4. These first eleven seconds serve as a sort of ‘foreword’ to the film, establishing more an atmosphere than the film’s action. They could refer to the police operation that ends most of the film’s main characters lives or it could be another police operation – this is not clear and I would argue below is intentionally left open.

5. Page also pays attention to speed and time in this scene, particularly to the intervals between the film and its credits, arguing that ‘[i]n the same way that the speed of the city is literally paused to give way to the credits, so the film as a whole attempts to carve a hole in the frenzied time of the city, through which we may glimpse the lives of those who are not integrated into the space-time of global capitalism’ (2009: 37).

6. There are differences in accents between the main characters (and secondary characters too) that serve to establish not only class differences between them, with Pablo and Córdoba belonging to the middle and working classes respectively, but also geographical provenance: Córdoba is from the city that gives him his nickname. His accent betrays this, not only for the viewer but also for other characters who recognise him as such.

7. ‘I don’t get that thing of placing a giant dick in the middle of the city .… You have to be porteño to do that ….’ All translations are my own.

8. ‘The process of middle-class flight to the periphery can take it [Buenos Aires] to the typical situation of European and North American cities in the 70s, when their central districts were under-financed and ghettoized.’

9. For example Vagón fumador (Verónica Chen 2003), Ronda nocturna (Edgardo Cozarinsky 2005) and Vladimir en Buenos Aires (Diego Gassachin 2002) among others.

10. Niebla del riachuelo, La Boca está de fiesta, Riachuelo, among other tangos, reference this locale.

11. There are many films that engage with this locale in different ways. To name two of the most renowned films: El hombre señalado, (Francisco Lauric 1957), and Happy Together, (Wong 1997).

12. BEATRIZ: Why did you come back? / ALFREDO: To Buenos Aires? / BEATRIZ: No. Here tonight. / ALFREDO: I wanted to see you. And when Chino told me that Marta was living in our house, the temptation was too much. (Long silence). And I really wanted to see you. / BEATRIZ: Of course, all the tourists are like that. In a couple of days they want to see everything. All the museums, all the shanties, everything typical [in English in the original]. Isn’t it? You know what? I don’t understand why you don’t go around carrying a camera. / ALFREDO: What kind of journalism do you do now? / BEATRIZ: Zoological. All kinds of animals. And you? / ALFREDO: I’m something like a deluxe errand boy. / BEATRIZ: I see that we are two winners. (Nods to a shipyard worker). / ALFREDO: (Nods as if to say hello to a worker). If you had gone to New York, wouldn’t you have wanted to see me? / BEATRIZ: You didn’t want to see me: you found me. / ALFREDO: I would have searched for you. / BEATRIZ: What for? / ALFREDO: I never fell in love again. I never even thought about it. Until now. (Bandoneon music gets louder).

13. SANDRA: So, what job will you do? / CÓRDOBA: I’ll drive a taxi .… / SANDRA: But you can't drive, Córdoba .… / CÓRDOBA: So what? I’ll learn then and there. I get on the car and learn. / SANDRA: (Puffs in irritation). / CÓRDOBA: What? You don’t like my job?/ SANDRA: No, I like any job. But I want you to promise me one thing. / CÓRDOBA: Sure. I’ll promise you whatever you want. / SANDRA: No. Just one thing. I want you to promise that if this job doesn’t work you’ll search for something else but you won’t rob again. / CÓRDOBA: (Silence). / SANDRA: So? / CÓRDOBA: So what? / SANDRA: So… Don’t be an idiot. Do you promise? Yes or not? / CÓRDOBA: Yes, but you don’t get how things are… Do you? / SANDRA: No, what I don’t get is why you don't take care of me. If you end up in jail, what will I do? Can you tell me? / CÓRDOBA: OK, stop. That won’t happen Don’t worry because it won’t happen. Get it? All cool? Do you know what I was thinking about? / SANDRA: What? / CÓRDOBA: That the two of us can go to Uruguay. / SANDRA: The three of us. / CÓRDOBA: OK, the three of us. / SANDRA: Do you want to touch my belly? / CÓRDOBA: Touch it? / SANDRA: Yes, come. / CÓRDOBA: (Crouches to put his ear on her belly). / SANDRA: Can you feel it? / CÓRDOBA: Hmmm (kisses her belly).

14. The film’s title is the name of a tango song made famous by Carlos Gardel.

15. Volver was shot in the last year of the Junta dictatorship, just before the Malvinas war, a conflict that signalled the collapse of the dictatorship. This date is marked in the film, after the last images fade to black, just before the titles: ‘Marzo de 1982’. Considering that the collapse of the dictatorship had been anticipated for some years, it was becoming obvious by 1982 that the military was clinging to power. There is clearly a testimonial intention in this dating of the film.

16. See Ministerio de Economía y Producción 2005, for a detailed analysis of these phenomena during the 1990s.

17. The role of the spectator in decoding these uses of the mise en scène if of course of utmost importance – Mulvey’s ideas of ‘delayed cinema’ and ‘attentive spectactor’ are for that reason relevant here. In Death 24× a Second Mulvey writes of ‘delayed cinema’ which ‘works on two levels: first of all it refers to the actual act of slowing down the flow of film [with the use of contemporary technology such as the remote control]. Secondly it refers to the delay in time during which some detail has lain dormant, as it were, waiting to be noticed’ (2006: 8). An ‘attentive viewer’ is a viewer that by ‘halting the image or repeating sequences … can dissolve the fiction so that the time of registration can come to the fore’ (2006: 184).

18. There are certainly other uses of the index in Pizza, birra, faso. It would be unnecessarily laborious to attempt to reproduce every time the Buenos Aires of the late 1990s appears in the film, hence my focus on one particular type of indexical image.

19. Garbarino is a famous Argentine home appliances store, the biggest in the country, operating since the early 1950s.

20. For an extended analysis of Convertibility and its impact, see Galiani, Heymann, Tommasi, Servén and Terra 2003.

21. Knowing of their lack of future is of course only possible once we know the ending of the film.

22. The term intendente was changed to jefe de gobierno in 1996, coinciding with Buenos Aires being granted autonomous status. After losing the elections to De la Rúa, who would become the next Argentine president, Dominguez became Minister of Defence until the end of the Menemist government in 1999.

23. The Argentine daily La Nación declared in 1996 that the eviction had been pacific, although this version was subsequently denied. See ‘Villa 31: Pacífico fin del desalojo’ 1996.

24. See ‘En el pasado con la dictadura’ 2006.

25. The area of Palermo where these streets cross is now one of the most attractive touristic and real estate locations in Buenos Aires.

26. It would be hard to believe La Nación’s journalist Willy Bouillon’s dictum that the ‘eradication’ was carried out almost in a ‘festive environment’ (Bouillon 1996). This said, the fact that this settlement was only six years old, while Villa 31 had existed since the early 1930s, in addition to it being a relocation not a mere eviction, might have played a decisive role in decompressing the situation.

27. See Alcaraz 2010.

28. See Guano 2002, for more information of neoliberal urbanism in Buenos Aires during the 1990s.

29. ‘[a] film without ideology is impossible, that is why a politics of the shot can be read in the mise en scène and in the point of view chosen by a director .… The eye gazes from a system and from some symbolic coordinates, and the mise en scène exteriorizes this gaze.’

30. ‘… a historical and political conscience is evident in his opera prima: Pizza, birra, faso is not spontaneous, nor narratively inconsistent, and let alone does it portray its marginals as if they were subjects at the margin of the margins; its precise historicity reveals the ravages of the politics of president Menem and their structural effects on the social order.’

31. Sandra went onto the ferry but not necessarily to the bridge of the ship, from where this shot seems to be taken.

32. In Cinema 2 Deleuze writes of the existence of a ‘direct image of time’ that originates in the postwar period (2011: xi). He sees this image as an evolution of a movement-image, typical of ‘the so-called classical cinema’ (idem).

33. The idea of suture originates in the Lacanian concept of the same name and has been developed by, among others, Laura Mulvey and Stephen Heath. See Mulvey 1989 and Heath 1981, particularly the chapter ‘On Suture’. Heath describes it as ‘a stitching or tying as in the surgical joining of the lips of wound. In its processes, its framings, its cuts, its intermittences, the film ceaselessly poses an absence, a lack, which is ceaselessly bound up in and into the relation of the subject, is, as it were, ceaselessly recaptured for the film’ (1981: 13). Therefore, by suture I understand the inscription of the spectator into the film in a way that the spectator no longer perceives that they are watching a film, an artifice produced by the cinematic apparatus.

34. Page rightly signals the role the viewer is given in this scene, arguing that ‘the spectator is effectively imprisoned here, in the longest shot of the film [….] This final scene metaphorically confirms the replacement of action with observation: confronted by the bathos and the tragedy of these lives, we become aware of our inability to act and of our conditions as spectators’ (2009: 43).

35. For example with films such as Los rubios (Albertina Carri 2003) or Historias cotidianas (Andrés Habbeger, 2001), Crónica de una fuga (Caetano 2006). These are explicitly political works that foreground the individuals’ struggle to recover a space in history, one removed from the necessity of questioning a totality, or delivering a clear political message that speaks for a collective. These films are clear examples of what Clara Kriger defines as a ‘superposición entre la esfera de lo privado y lo público’ (in María José Moore and Paula Wolkowicz 2007: 47).

36. In a similar vein, Roger Koza argues that ‘[l]o político es un a priori (histórico) de la mirada’ (in Duarte and Lara 2013: 250).

37. ‘In contrast with the films of the 80s and part of the 90s, in these films produced in the past three years, politics acts as a backdrop, with the representation of globalisation and the effects of neoliberalism – particularly on the porteño population – taking central stage.’

38. ‘The fact that the political ends up being negated each time it is mentioned in the new Argentine cinema … leads us to question whether it might not be a case of of redefining its status – not any more as something displaced … or suppressed … but as a category that acquires new powers and qualities in a medium whose function changed radically in the 1990s. In other words, before launching into a condemnation, wouldn’t it be worthwhile to question whether the political in cinema requires a redefinition? In the end it is an aesthetic debate: not what film does with a politics that awaits in its exterior but how the political is offered to us in the form of these movies.’