Contemporary Argentine Cinema

Argentina’s return to constitutional democracy in 1983 initiated a cultural renaissance as the new government instituted a widespread collective effort to recover from a decade of military dictatorship. For a five-year period, until severe financial emergencies forced the cancellation of subsidies, film-making flourished. Cinematographers took the opportunity to articulate their pent-up frustrations regarding the suppression of political dissent as well as to address social attitudes towards violence, Nazism, homosexuality and incest. In this book, David Foster discusses 10 major films of this time and examines the transformation of social topics into motion pictures and the relationship between commercial film-making strategies and Argentine redemocratisation. Foster analyses internationally recognised films such as
Kiss of the Spider Woman ,
The Offical Story
and
Man Facing Southeast
as structural features - how action is framed, the transition between scenes, the relationships among characters, the use of highlighting and foregrounding - as a key to ech film’s interpretation of Argentine social topics. General readers, students of film theory and Latin American scholars should welcome Foster’s analysis of the most important films made during Argentina’s period of cultural renewal.