Self-referentiality and neoliberalism in contemporary Argentine cinema

ABSTRACT

This chapter examines ways in which filmmaking becomes a self-referential theme in Argentine films in the neoliberal era. Three films will be referred to: Adolfo Aristarain’s Martín (hache) from 1997; Daniel Burak’s Bar El Chino from 2003, and Alejo Flah’s Sexo fácil, películas tristes from 2014. These films all depict the making of international film co-productions primarily between Argentina and Spain and are explicitly concerned with the figure of the Argentine filmmaker, who in the process of filmmaking experiences neoliberalism from the margins of the world economy and more often than not succumbs to its international demands. This body of films criticizes while simultaneously testifying to neoliberal filmmaking practices of the last two decades. The films thus raise meta-critical questions about both their cinematic context and the prevailing economic system in contemporary Argentina to which they belong.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• Latin American cinema
• Argentine cinema
• genre
• romantic comedy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. ‘We are neither Europeans nor North Americans. Lacking an original culture, nothing is foreign to us because everything is. The painful construction of ourselves develops within the rarefied dialectic of not being or being someone else. Brazilian film participates in this mechanism and alters it through our creative incapacity of copying.’ (Salles Gomes in Johnson and Stam, 1995: 245).