"Swamp" stills
"Swamp" stills
" Zama " stills
2022 Beijing International Film Festival 's guest of honor is Argentina . If tango and football are the world-famous Argentine symbols, then Argentine films are also eligible to share this honor. Argentine cinema has been one of the shapers of Latin American culture for decades. At the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, a new generation of outstanding filmmakers emerged in Argentina, whose works either interweave cultural and social concerns in genre spectacle, or explore identity and identity in contemporary contexts in avant-garde art. minority expression.
1. Campanella
If an intuitive analogy is used, the history of Argentine filmmaking can be described as "dancing a complex tango" - both in the face of competition from the Hollywood film industry as well as from Europe The influence of film; there is both a constant friction between art and commerce, and a tension between local culture and the global market. As an international symbol, the drama and passion of tango, as well as its intricate choreography, still applies to the many changes that have taken place in Argentine cinema from the late 20th to the 21st century.
In the 1990s, the advent of the commercialization of the visual arts led to the explosion of Argentine blockbusters financed by multinational groups, and policies of "pure entertainment" concealed social and political problems. As Argentina has undergone major political, cultural and social changes, a new generation of filmmakers has sought to seek new production models and new ways of understanding film, outside of the co-production system of the 80s and the genre film system of the 90s,” "New Argentine Cinema" marks a clear revival of Argentine cinema, breaking with the country's cinematic traditions both in form and theme. This new trend,
, captures the impact of cultural globalization. Directed by Juan J. Campanella and won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, Mysterious Eyes (2009) created a paradigm of "indie commercial film ", which is the most important film in Argentine history. A successful commercial film and the most successful Argentine film on the international market. Weaving between different styles and timeframes, it mixes genre elements from romance, detective and political thriller, building a dual-themed narrative using the structure of Beethoven 's sonatas: retired prosecutor Benjamin is taken together 25 years ago Haunted by the mysteries of unsolved cases, retracing history on the grounds of writing a novel. The film perfectly balances the memory of the past and the hope for the future: we see the final fate of the murderer who was protected by power and escaped the law, and we also see Benjamin's double redemption of career and love. The
double-line structure is echoed in two photos: the first is a photo of the beautiful victim, the young man staring at her, letting Benjamin know who the murderer is; the second is the engagement photo of the female boss, Erin, Benjamin stared at her and understood why he was able to explain the first picture. Writer-director Campanella has added a symbol of Argentina's passion to Eduardo Sacheri's original novel: football culture. This stunning five-minute-long sequence marks an innovation in Argentine cinematic technology - swooping over the stadium to the pitch and the crowd, then to the audience stage, and then into an underground tunnel to hunt down the killer in a fast, thrilling chase. Argentine mainstream commercial films have a tendency to avoid local identities in order to appeal to international audiences, and Mysterious Eyes is a good mix of "global aesthetics" with local roots. Campanella started his career in the United States shooting series, and then returned to Argentina to make an international breakthrough, building his reputation largely on films that embody the spirit of Argentina. His work establishes a local-global dialogue that shapes Argentina's unique character and specific history through a broad international language of genre and aesthetics; uses genre conventions and star images to engage international audiences, and through plot structure and historical events Brings cinema closer to Argentina's cultural and social concerns.
Campanella's films spread to Argentine directors the concept of new social imaginations that perpetuate perceptions of current society through melodrama. For example, "Wild Tales" (2014), which was recently nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, director Damien Szfron used the framework of car chases, explosions, farce and other genres to make this six independent stories. Black comedy becomes highest-grossing film in Argentine history. Whether it's a wealthy father struggling to cover up his son's hit-and-run, or a demolition specialist caught in a Kafkaesque nightmare after his car is towed away, whether it's a flamboyant slapstick-style road fight, or the The wedding slapstick, a combination of Rini style and Czech tragicomedy, all juxtaposes the funny, the sad and the absurd, expressing anger at certain aspects of Argentine society, such as issues of bureaucracy, inequality and social privilege.
2. Martel
The "New Wave" movement of the 1960s sowed the seeds of art cinema in Argentina, which in the 1980s wanted to show the world a new face of the country through cinema. Today, at a time when economic and cultural globalization has brought about a shift in the discourse of identity, the Argentine film industry is emerging with vibrant female voices. If male filmmakers established the role of "new Latin American cinema" and ideological position through political expression, then female filmmakers focused on identity and social minorities through subverting traditional film techniques and subtle and profound themes The relationship between ethnic groups expresses changes in all areas of Argentine life and changes the face of Argentine cinema.
Argentine director Lucezia Martel and Peruvian director Claudia Llosa have brought Latin American women's cinema to an unprecedented international level. As the jury member of the Beijing International Film Festival in 2022 and the jury chairman of the Venice International Film Festival in 2019, Lucecia Martel has gained widespread respect in the film industry. Although she has only shot 4 works in 17 years, she Her vision seemed limitless. Unique in style and subject matter, exhilaratingly exploratory and mysterious, her films are most notable in that they do not produce a specific effect through traditional genre films, but offer an opportunity for Argentine art cinema and a feminist perspective. field.
Martel's film language can be seen as "displaced, alienated and anxious", subverting the classic film paradigm and its dominant patriarchal perspective, reshaping film traditions in the midst of global and local cultural influences, and creating unique female expression. Martel's "Salta trilogy" ("The Swamp", "The Holy Maiden", " The Headless Woman") all focus on the lives of Argentine women. She constantly breaks the linear narrative structure, using distance mechanics to prevent the audience from identifying with the characters and immersing themselves in the story. Whereas classic narrative cinema strives to create the illusion that anything that threatens narrative coherence is excluded from the frame, Martel's film does not create the illusion of reality. "The Swamp" (2001) is a day-to-day trivia about a middle-aged matriarch and her extended family in a country house. The title of the film is a metaphor for the inexplicable narrative direction and the existence of the characters - like falling into a swamp, the story seems to Unfolding randomly, hearing is often separated from sight, which directly challenges mainstream conventions. By employing "excessive" techniques that transcend visual and auditory expression, Martel breaks down the clear linear narrative structure and shakes the audience's safety closer to the reality that the audience experiences. Much of the film’s scenes take place in domestic spaces, closed and gendered, and the wider patriarchal society is shrunk to near-invisibility. Close-ups add to the claustrophobic, often off-centre angles of the shots, and in these unstructured spaces, the male perspective can be deconstructed to open up the possibility of female expression. Like an internalized sociological drama, the film subtly shows the gulf between class and race.
Argentina is a mixed society, made up of many cultures and ethnicities. A stable, homogeneous identity is difficult to establish under current conditions of transnationalism. Martel disrupts easily identifiable identities and labels with narrative fractures, as in "The Holy Maiden" (2004), which tells of a medical conference being held in a hotel run by a middle-aged mother, a doctor with a mother and daughter A strange story happened between them. Its fragmented narrative offers multiple perspectives, both disrupting and requiring audience participation to decode. This is a story about good and evil—not about good versus evil, but about the difficulty of distinguishing between good and evil, and the film tries to rediscover a sense of well-being that is sufficiently diverse.
Martel also uses history and memory to reconstruct the past and propose new models to challenge the present. "Headless Woman" (2008) successfully counter-narrates the society's traumatic past, which affects the wholeSociety, where every viewer becomes a witness and a survivor. After the accident, the heroine falls into a state of shock, her husband, friends and relatives seem determined to "protect" her by sweeping away the truth, and she "acquiesces" to this cover-up. Through this existentialist drama, Martel poignantly hinted that perfidy would have serious consequences for Argentine society.
Intrigued by the language of Antonio di Benedetto's novels, Martel's fourth work, Zama (2017), finds contemporary resonance in telling a story about the colonial period of the 18th century, with a theme of Latin American identity. In the film, Zama, a Spanish magistrate stationed in a remote outpost, tries to request a transfer to a more civilized town, but his appeal is always delayed. Zama is gradually drawn into a void he cannot understand, and an attempt to escape his fate pushes him on a misguided adventure that ends up in a beautiful natural world. The film critiques colonialism in a subtle way in a setting of magical realism. The
identity has also become a common direction for Argentine female filmmakers, such as Paula Hernandez's films revolving around the search for a vague and changing identity, the short film "22 km" (1996) adapted from Garcia Marquez's short story, about a woman who is ultimately mistaken for a lunatic, defines "normal" by giving viewers an exploration of the woman's character; the feature film Inheritance (2001) uses immigration issues and Argentina's close relationship with Europe, especially Italy and Spain, delves into the search for identity, what it means to be an Argentine, and examines the various waves of immigration that have shaped Argentine society.
To some extent, the social and economic context of contemporary Argentina provides the soil for filmmakers, represented by Martel, to establish a unique female expression. The economic crisis of the early 2000s prompted filmmakers to look for new ways of working, creating a break with old methods and styles. Martel's fusion of experimental avant-garde, Argentine political film , and subversive uses of Hollywood classics has shaped social justice and racial integration through the female figure.
Whether expressing cultural and social concerns in genre spectacles or exploring contemporary discourses of identity in avant-garde art, these new Argentine films provide audiences with reflections on social realities and enrich the Argentine cultural scene.
(Author: Wang Tian, associate researcher at the School of Drama, Film and Television, Communication University of China)
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