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Argentine Cinema and National Identity (1966-1976) by Carolina Rocha

2019; Washington University in St. Louis; Volume: 53; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/rvs.2019.0049

2164-9308

Matthew Losada,

Memory, violence, and history

Reviewed by: Argentine Cinema and National Identity (1966-1976) by Carolina Rocha Matthew Losada Rocha, Carolina. Argentine Cinema and National Identity (1966-1976). Liverpool U P, 2017. 250 pp. Carolina Rocha's Argentine Cinema and National Identity (1966-1976) thoroughly examines a surprisingly under-studied corpus in Argentine cinema, that of a cycle of gauchesque and historical films made during the volatile ten years between military coups that saw a lengthy dictatorship interrupted by elections that brought the brief, combustive return of Peronism to power, a time during which, as Rocha writes, "diverse national projects competed among themselves to assert what Argentina should be and the images by which it should be represented" (6). The films studied, many of which were protected and incentivized by the state, drew a flood of media attention and spectators and "put Argentine film at the center of the country's cultural life" (220). This thematic and formal turn by several established auteur directors of the internationalizing modernity of the 1960s toward a popular cultural nationalism of gauchos and founding fathers allowed many to outcompete Hollywood for Argentine spectators. Together, the films form a unique moment in Argentine cinema, one which, viewed from a present in which the perception of cinema's power of social cohesion is largely dissipated, produced films that are today often dismissed as bloated, ideologically compromised productions, several having become the later, lesser works of major auteurs like Leopoldo Torre-Nilsson and Manuel Antín. Rocha's is a welcome reconsideration of these forgotten blockbusters produced and first viewed in an era of mass movements, surging political violence, and faith in the cinema's power to reinforce social identity, and she brings to bear a great degree of historical specificity through her own research in newspapers and journals of the period. Her study, well-informed by scholarship on national cinemas and on the heritage and historical film genres, develops especially well the role of these filmic returns to the past as contributions to debates on national identity in the context of a nation gripped by internal conflict. [End Page 805] The book has three main sections. The opening section's four chapters offer a concise account of Argentine cultural history, cinema, and political developments from Juan Domingo Perón's overthrow in 1955 until the 1976 coup, while the other two sections cover, respectively, adaptations of gauchesque literary texts and what Rocha calls "founding fathers' biopics" (11). The first of these begins with a clear and concise account of the figure of the gaucho in Argentine culture, beginning with nineteenth-century literary texts and moving through to the early 1970s, thus contextualizing the filmic gauchos in their cultural and political fields. Each of the section's following five chapters covers one adaptation of a gauchesque literary classic released between 1968 and 1975, offering an analysis of the film and an account of production and reception rich in new information gathered by Rocha. The first film discussed is Torre-Nilsson's Martín Fierro (1968), which inaugurated this short-lived quasi-genre that Rocha, borrowing from British film culture, calls the "heritage film." The formula included gauchos, big-budget production values, and appeal to a wide public. The film was enormously successful commercially, and only slightly less so in its critical reception, which Rocha documents extensively. The following chapters cover Antín's Don Segundo Sombra (1969), Carlos Borcosque Jr.'s Santos Vega (1971), and Leonardo Favio's Juan Moreira (1973), the latter a high-profile production released at a moment of euphoric optimism on the Peronist left as Héctor Cámpora prepared to assume the presidency in the name of the newly legalized Peronist party. These events provide a ready key for a political reading of Favio's film and Rocha supplies important information on its production, reception, and critical acclaim. The section closes with the 1975 adaptation of Alberto Gerchunoff's 1910 novel Los gauchos judios, directed by Juan José Jusid, and Rocha explores the anti-Semitic sabotage and censorship it suffered upon its release as the Triple A operated under Isabel Perón's presidency. These chapters on gaucho films are admirable for relating the adapters' strategies to...