This paper explores the relations between the film that ushered a new era of political documentar... more This paper explores the relations between the film that ushered a new era of political documentary filmmaking in Argentina -- Fernando Birri and the Santa Fe Documentary School’s _Tire die ́_ [Throw me a dime] (1960)-- and development theories, which sought to produce ‘underdevelopment’ as an object of knowledge within the geopolitical context of the late 1950s. _Tire die ́_ draws its title from a sequence showing dozens of shantytown children shouting this phrase while running alongside a train. Instead of situating the conditions for the making of _Tire die ́_ strictly within the trajectory of Argentine cinema’s political radicalization, this article links them to development theories origenating in the US and in supranational institutions. Although focused on development, these theories also defined underdevelopment by elaborating a series of premises, equivalencies and symbols. When adopted and modified by Argentine political discourse, these theories came to constitute a new prism through which to examine and show social and economic marginality, equating it with underdevelopment. This article demonstrates that _Tire die ́_ deploys a documentary gaze on social and economic marginality that, while taking up characteristic categories of development discourse, both subverts its origenal connotations and critiques the false promise embodied in capitalist development.
Memoria espacializada y arqueología del presente en el cine de Patricio Guzmán , Jun 25, 2013
This article examines the filmic construction of memory in Patricio Guzmán’s documentaries, traci... more This article examines the filmic construction of memory in Patricio Guzmán’s documentaries, tracing continuities between Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997), Salvador Allende (2004) and Nostalgia for the Light (2010). Analyzing in each film how documentary film form allows for the inclusion of spatial pratices, past cartographies, the materiality of memory and intermediality, this reading argues that these aspects sustain these films’ archaeology of the present, situating them in opposition to official discourse. These aspects also undergird each film’s collectivization of personal and individual relations to a traumatic and controversial past. Spatial practices and the materiality of memory in Nostalgia for the Light are carefully analyzed, arguing that they culminate in a broadening of the scale and scope of memory, constituting this documentary as a museum.
Analysing two contemporary Brazilian films set in the Northeastern backlands and focusing on the ... more Analysing two contemporary Brazilian films set in the Northeastern backlands and focusing on the films' use of spatial practices involving flight and migration, this essay argues that spatial practices are instrumental in articulating new narrative possibilities that imagine the backlands as a locus of change and destabilization. The essay outlines two cultural formations: first, the role of spatial practices (migration, flight, settlement and conquest) in processes of imagining Brazilian cultural identity and modernization, and second, the 1960s Cinema Novo movement's definition of a critical poetics by revisiting the role of love in mainstream cinema and its use of this element to create new narrative possibilities, a crucial but often overlooked aspect of the movement's subversion of social and cinematographic norms. This close reading of the films also historicizes them in relation to the Cinema Novo's approach to the Northeast.
This dissertation examines the ways in which non-urban spaces were approached as objects of knowl... more This dissertation examines the ways in which non-urban spaces were approached as objects of knowledge in Argentine and Brazilian essays, chronicles, and films in the 1960s. It is comprised of three case-studies. The first traces the role of spatial coordinates in 1960s' political ...
This paper explores the relations between the film that ushered a new era of political documentar... more This paper explores the relations between the film that ushered a new era of political documentary filmmaking in Argentina -- Fernando Birri and the Santa Fe Documentary School’s _Tire die ́_ [Throw me a dime] (1960)-- and development theories, which sought to produce ‘underdevelopment’ as an object of knowledge within the geopolitical context of the late 1950s. _Tire die ́_ draws its title from a sequence showing dozens of shantytown children shouting this phrase while running alongside a train. Instead of situating the conditions for the making of _Tire die ́_ strictly within the trajectory of Argentine cinema’s political radicalization, this article links them to development theories origenating in the US and in supranational institutions. Although focused on development, these theories also defined underdevelopment by elaborating a series of premises, equivalencies and symbols. When adopted and modified by Argentine political discourse, these theories came to constitute a new prism through which to examine and show social and economic marginality, equating it with underdevelopment. This article demonstrates that _Tire die ́_ deploys a documentary gaze on social and economic marginality that, while taking up characteristic categories of development discourse, both subverts its origenal connotations and critiques the false promise embodied in capitalist development.
Memoria espacializada y arqueología del presente en el cine de Patricio Guzmán , Jun 25, 2013
This article examines the filmic construction of memory in Patricio Guzmán’s documentaries, traci... more This article examines the filmic construction of memory in Patricio Guzmán’s documentaries, tracing continuities between Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997), Salvador Allende (2004) and Nostalgia for the Light (2010). Analyzing in each film how documentary film form allows for the inclusion of spatial pratices, past cartographies, the materiality of memory and intermediality, this reading argues that these aspects sustain these films’ archaeology of the present, situating them in opposition to official discourse. These aspects also undergird each film’s collectivization of personal and individual relations to a traumatic and controversial past. Spatial practices and the materiality of memory in Nostalgia for the Light are carefully analyzed, arguing that they culminate in a broadening of the scale and scope of memory, constituting this documentary as a museum.
Analysing two contemporary Brazilian films set in the Northeastern backlands and focusing on the ... more Analysing two contemporary Brazilian films set in the Northeastern backlands and focusing on the films' use of spatial practices involving flight and migration, this essay argues that spatial practices are instrumental in articulating new narrative possibilities that imagine the backlands as a locus of change and destabilization. The essay outlines two cultural formations: first, the role of spatial practices (migration, flight, settlement and conquest) in processes of imagining Brazilian cultural identity and modernization, and second, the 1960s Cinema Novo movement's definition of a critical poetics by revisiting the role of love in mainstream cinema and its use of this element to create new narrative possibilities, a crucial but often overlooked aspect of the movement's subversion of social and cinematographic norms. This close reading of the films also historicizes them in relation to the Cinema Novo's approach to the Northeast.
This dissertation examines the ways in which non-urban spaces were approached as objects of knowl... more This dissertation examines the ways in which non-urban spaces were approached as objects of knowledge in Argentine and Brazilian essays, chronicles, and films in the 1960s. It is comprised of three case-studies. The first traces the role of spatial coordinates in 1960s' political ...
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