The last heist revisited: reimagining Hollywood genre in contemporary Argentine crime film
2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 53; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/screen/hjs033
ISSN1460-2474
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American Literature Studies
ResumoIn the past decade, the ‘New Argentine Cinema’ has garnered international acclaim for its oblique, minimal narratives and unconventional cinematography. Yet this independent movement has been commercially overshadowed by recent Argentine films that stylishly rework the Hollywood genres of the heist picture and the whodunnit, including 2010 Oscar winner El secreto de sus ojos/The Secret in their Eyes (Juan José Campanella). The national and international success of films like Fabián Bielinsky's Nueve reinas/Nine Queens (2000) and Marcelo Piñeyro's Plata quemada/Burnt Money (2000) suggests that the strategic use of crime genre elements lends broad cultural legibility to Argentine thrillers of widely varying budgets and styles. This group of films, which I call the ‘new policiales’ (crime films), draws on the New Argentine Cinema's measured narrative pacing and innovative visual strategies to re-cast global genre codes established in Hollywood, simultaneously appealing to the ‘commercial’ tastes of domestic audiences and the sensibilities of the international art house market. Evoking a panorama of recent Argentine thrillers, this analysis focuses on Bielinsky's El aura/The Aura (2005), Caetano's Un oso rojo/A Red Bear (2002), and Piñeyro's Plata quemada, which appropriate and critique Hollywood models by incorporating them selectively into each film's visual codes. While the new policiales to some extent share the urgency of social critique and the search for new cinematic models manifest in the New Argentine Cinema, their heterogeneous narrative strategies more accurately give expression to the exigencies of a cinematic market that requires them to function as simultaneously local and global products.
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