Marco Bechis’ Garage Olimpo: the Argentine military dictatorship revisited.
A statement of intent for Argentine cinema: Pablo Trapero’s Mundo Grua.
To know more
World production rank
1999: 19th
Local films’ share of
domestic box-office 1998: 13%
Number of films produced
Total population (millions)
1988: 31.6
1998: 36.1
Number of screens
1988: 647
1998: 810
Cinema admissions (millions)
1988: 28.4
1998: 32.4
Total film production
investment (US$m) 1999: 133.3
Source: Screen Digest
(contact: David.Hancock@
screendigest.com). |
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A constellation of young directors
is touching the “rawness of things in the street” with a bare narrative and a poetic
eye
 The present is an absurd legacy of the past,” says young Argentine
filmmaker Pablo Trapero. “It’s crazy that a guy of 50 has to start from scratch like
a kid. That kind of absurdity creates a tension I used to tell the story of Rulo.”
Rulo, the hero of Mundo Grúa (Crane World, 1999), Trapero’s first feature
film, is a worker fighting to survive. Once, long ago, he had his 15 minutes of fame
as a member of a rock band, but he is not too nostalgic and meekly accepts his daily
lot. He qualifies as a crane operator, but is rejected for the job he wants after
failing a medical. Then a job in the provinces comes up, involving driving an excavator
at a site hundreds of kilometres from Buenos Aires, far from friends and family.
Rulo puts up with this until he gets bored, then returns to Buenos Aires to face
an uncertain future. There is something noble about this man who manages to keep
going by clinging to what little he has—loyal and unshakeable friendships.
The 28-year-old Trapero studied film at university, and had only made short films
before directing Crane World. Shooting stretched out over a year since it could only
be done when there was enough money for equipment and crew, though the gaps allowed
him to put together sequences and rewrite the script as he went along.
“I wanted a film that was like a hidden camera filming snatches of reality,” he says.
The film, made in semi-documentary style, gives a dramatized view of daily life stripped
of all pretence. “The crane is for all of us a symbol of building the future,” says
Trapero. “Rulo wants to have a future but he can’t get one.” Everyday life, familiar
characters, a bare narrative and independent production—all are hallmarks of other
recent Argentine films that have borrowed from the John Cassavetes tradition of neo-realism
and the “new waves” of the 1960s.
The nearest thing Argentina has previously had to this kind of cinema came from the
so-called 60s Generation group of filmmakers, who trained in art cinema and short
movies. They called for a break with tradition, with the big-studio star system and
even with “entertainment,” just as their young descendants in the 1990s have been
fighting against the hackneyed style of television and other media. The critical
and public acclaim received by Crane World along with its festival successes have
shown how potent this new genre of films can be.
Glossing over a troubled past
The enthusiastic revival of Argentine cinema
in the 1960s was fleeting, but it gave birth to two major filmmakers: Leonardo Favio
and Hugo Santiago. Several years had to pass, however, before this legacy could be
built upon. First, the 1976 military coup put an end to any chance of making films.
Then, after democracy was restored in 1983, most new films chose to flatter people’s
good consciences. This soothing, opportunistic genre was epitomized by Luis Puenzo’s
The Official Version (1984), which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film and tells how
a woman begins to suspect that her adopted daughter is one of the children of people
killed by the military. The story is not about the girl or her tortured and murdered
parents or about her grandmother who searches for her, but about a woman filled with
doubts about herself. Some films, nevertheless confronted the grisly events of the
military regime. They included Alejandro Agresti’s Secret Wedding (1988) and Hugo
Santiago’s The Pavements of Saturn (1985).
The latest batch of films has received scant encouragement. A new film industry law
(1994) was immediately applied in the wrong way. Two new taxes—on videocassettes
and films broadcast on television—on top of the existing ones (a percentage on every
cinema seat sold) were meant to help subsidize Argentine films, but an economic recession
cut proceeds to a third of the envisaged amount. Financial aid to films on general
release, meanwhile, was disbursed according to box-office receipts. As a result,
the animated film Manuelita (1999) about a female turtle, seen by two million cinema-goers,
received a much larger subsidy than either Crane World or Silvia Prieto, with 68,000
and 14,000 box-office sales respectively.
But Trapero is not alone in leading a cinematic charge. Martín Rejtman, Esteban
Sapir and Adrián Caetano/Bruno Stagnaro are also part of a movement going
by the name of “New Argentine Cinema,” which has produced the country’s most exciting
films in recent years. “Films should be about everyday things,” says Sapir. “You
should shoot in a different way and touch the rawness of life in the street. We have
to change cinema by making real life into a poem.”
It all began in 1995 with the commercial screening of Historias Breves, a collection
of short films that had won prizes from the National Institute of Film and Audiovisual
Arts. The formula was repeated, and gave impetus to several young directors—Raúl
de la Torre, Eliseo Subiela, Juan José Jusid, Daniel Barone and Beda Docampo
Feijoo—whose enthusiasm had managed to break through a suffocating academic milieu.
Argentina is now turning out between 20 and 30 films a year. But local showings are
not enough to recuperate the one to two million dollars each film costs to make,
a budget that directors are unwilling to trim. Rejtman attacks this way of thinking,
saying it is “important for filmmakers to stop thinking about sales strategies and
start thinking about film strategies. I’m not saying there’s no commercial cinema
but we have to stop thinking just about that.”
New films like Pizza, Beer and Cigarettes, Crane World and Mala Epoca (Bad Times),
which cost four or five times less to make than other movies, had well-balanced investment/return
ratios. “We should make films over the next five years that don’t cost more than
$400,000 each,” says Caetano. “That’s still a huge amount of money for a country
without any.” Young filmmakers have learnt to save money by forming co-operatives,
not shooting at weekends, using natural backdrops and employing non-professional
actors and technicians who are film students.
Stagnaro and Caetano, two of the participants in the Historias Breves, co-directed
Pizza, Beer and Cigarettes in 1997 by respecting these conditions. Its enthusiastic
reception highlighted a slowly-developing trend that had evolved from films such
as Fine Powder (1996) by Esteban Sapir, which combined the experimental style of
Godard with novelties from video-art; Garage Olimpo (1999) by Marco Bechis, a lucid
and painful look at detention centres during the military dictatorship; and Mala
Epoca (1998) by Mariano de Rosa, Nicolás Saad, Rodrigo Moreno and Salvador
Roseli, which linked a number of stories set in a hostile urban context, where everyone
appears misplaced and unsettled.
“We film things we’d like to see ourselves as film-goers,” says new director Andrés
Tambornino. Lucrecia Martel, also shooting her first film, says that what annoys
her about the “dinosaurs” (the previous generation of filmmakers) is that they became
“indifferent and timid, and so ended up using false metaphors instead of getting
out into the street and depicting things as they are.”
The new wave of films cannot be called a movement. They do not fit a defined set
of values and are not aesthetically uniform. Their vitality comes from their diversity
and their different approaches; they share what a country suffered, they share the
spirit of a generation, the methods of production, the personal imprint of the author,
the shunning of rhetoric and the concern for identity. They give a blunt but impassioned
account of Argentina following the military dictatorship, in the era of Presidents
Raúl Alfonsín and Carlos Menem.
A film like Crane World was a hit because it is a sombre portrait of people who refuse
to abandon their hopes. It is this combination of melancholy and resistance that
connects Rulo with his audience.
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