Kristi M. Wilson

On the Decay of the Art of Going to the Movies

La vida útil is simultaneously a cinephile’s dream picture, in its stylized look back at the history of cinema, and a biting satire about the fact that in the digital age of reproduction even the art of filmmaking has lost its aura. Uruguayan film buffs will recognize the film enthusiast and regular film festival patron Jorge Jellinek as the film’s central protagonist, Jorge, and the legendary film critic and real-life Cinemateca director Manuel Martínez Carril as a version of himself. Veiroj’s film captures the dying urban experience of going to the neighborhood movie theater—a collective encounter with celluloid and film history that, all over the world, is slowly but surely being replaced by private, digital, on-demand, and Hollywood multiplex practices of viewing. In this dark comedy about one man’s attempt to save Montevideo’s Cinemateca, an independent theater he has managed for 25 years, we get a glimpse of the many traditions that have helped shape the New Latin American cinema, a distinct film movement of which La vida útil can be considered a recent shining example.1 Under Marx’s paradigm for alienated labor, the artisanal connection between a worker and his or her product is broken under capitalist modes of production. Where art is concerned, Walter Benjamin (1969 [1955]) suggested that the age of mechanical reproduction brought the world works of art stripped of their context, their tradition, their authenticity, their “aura.” In film he saw a revolutionary potential to liquidate the “traditional value of cultural heritage” (221):

Building Memory Museums, Trauma, and the Aesthetics of Confrontation in Argentina

The U.S.-backed Latin American military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s resulted in a lack of documentary evidence about the lives of thousands of political activists, intellectuals, union leaders, and everyday people who were tortured and disappeared by their own governments. In Argentina, people have attempted to come to terms with such horrific past events in a variety of ways that are neither static nor univocal. The dynamic process of memory building is influenced by ongoing political debates, shifting power dynamics, global markets, social movements, and a host of other factors such as justice policies. Spaces of memory and museums created in former clandestine centers of torture and disappearance bring to light a politics of truth that works against and reframes a history of silence through impunity. Parte del legado de las dictaduras militares latinoamericanas de los años 70 y 80 apo-yadas por los Estados Unidos es la carencia de pruebas documentales acerca de las vidas de miles de militantes políticos, intelectuales, líderes sindicales y gente común que fueron torturados y desaparecidos por sus propios gobiernos. En la Argentina, la gente ha tratado de lidiar con estos horribles hechos del pasado por medio de una variedad de formas que no son ni estáticas ni unívocas. El proceso dinámico de construir la memoria está influenciado por los debates políticos en curso, las cambiantes dinámicas de poder, los mercados globales, los movimientos sociales y una gama de otros factores tales como las políticas judiciales. Los espacios de la memoria y los museos creados en antiguos centros de tortura y desapariciones clandestinos como el ESMA y el Olimpo ponen de manifiesto una política de la verdad que de forma visual actúa en contra de una historia del silencio guiada por la impunidad y la redefine.

Resonance and the Echo Chamber of the Argentine State

The term “the state” makes one think of a monolithic entity—an immense, inaccessible nexus of power, a leviathan. The five books considered here address the topic of Argentine state formation from a range of disciplinary perspectives, unpacking its complexity and materiality on many levels. In them the state can be found in visual allegory, in museums and archives, in the act of waiting for social services, in mass consumption habits, and in the everyday, ongoing negotiations among businesses, labor unions, and politicians. Javier Auyero’s Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina grows out of his previous work on clientelism in Argentina, and it demonstrates the power of a seemingly banal daily activity that poor people who are dependents of the state must endure: waiting in line for social services. Drawing from an interdisciplinary corpus of work by theorists such as Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu and well-known writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Franz Kafka, and Samuel Beckett and from contemporary sociological theory about the dispossessed and the state, Auyero argues that daily nuanced lessons in political subordination are learned by the destitute in the act of waiting. These lessons eventually become productive phenomena in their own right. The dispossessed in Argentina are subjected to repeated delays over time and, as a result, have learned a “particularly submissive set of dispositions.” The book starts with the story of Silvia, a woman who spent over five years trying to get her pension. Auyero argues that the all-too-familiar runaround in public agency offices is a temporal process “in and through which political subordination is reproduced.” Accordingly, time itself becomes an important agent in the dynamics of clientelism, defined as a symbolic exchange network with its own set of formal and informal, tangible and ephemeral components. “Domination works,” he argues, “through yielding to the power of others and is experienced as a waiting time: waiting hopefully and 550286LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X14550286Latin American PerspectivesWilson / Book Review research-article2014

The Split-Person Narrative Resisting Closure, Resistant Genre in Albertina Carri’s Los rubios

The Argentine director Albertina Carri’s documentary/docudrama Los rubios confounds the binary between postmodern and neoconservative trends in recent Latin American cultural studies and popular media. It breaks the mold for ways in which the sons and daughters of the victims of political genocide can talk about their memories, inviting a pointedly feminist/postmodernist reading that plays with Baudrillard’s notion of seduction in its challenge to established order. Carri’s apparently postmodern rejection of the truth, facts, and master narratives expected from the politically involved descendants of disappeared activists opens up critical spaces for reflection about the discourse of meaning. El documental/docudrama de la directora argentina Albertina Carri, Los Rubios, confunde la binaria entre las tendencias posmodernas y neoconservadoras en los estudios recientes de la cultura y medios populares latinoamericanos. Se rompen los moldes por los cuales los hijos e hijas de las victimas del genocidio político pueden hablar de sus memorias, invitando una lectura intencionadamente feminista/posmodernista que juega con la noción baudrillardista de la seducción en su reto al orden establecido. Lo que aparenta ser un rechazo posmoderno de la verdad, los hechos y narrativas maestras esperadas de los políticamente involucrados descendientes de desaparecidos abre espacios críticos para la reflexión del discurso del significado.

Film Review: Disappearing into the Distance Two Latin American City Symphonies

In Oblivion, the award-winning Dutch-Peruvian filmmaker Heddy Honigmann (Forever, Metal and Melancholy, O Amor Natural) visits her birthplace to record the stories of everyday Peruvians under Alan García’s second presidency (2006–2011). Her camera appears to float or wander at the street level, pausing on occasion to drop in upon the lives of the people it encounters there. Andrea Prates and Cleisson Vidal’s Dino Cazzola is at once a family history, a story of migration, a story of power and national identity, and an homage to filmmaking. Both films recall the Russian director Dziga Vertov’s 1929 classic documentary Man with a Movie Camera in that they are city symphonies, films that produce complex truths about a particular urban space by weaving together images and narrative fragments from the lives of its longtime residents. At the start of Dino Cazzola: A Filmography of Brasília, close-ups of filmstrips from Cazzola’s extensive archive with dates and bits of tape on them play across the screen (Figure 1), letting us know that this documentary will address the sometimes tedious but usually surprising process of digging through archival material and that it will be self-reflexive. As in the case of Man with a Movie Camera, this film is not just about the creation of Brasília “on the boards of architects” and the life’s work of Dino Cazzola but about documenting one man’s obsession with filmmaking and fascination with the times in which he lived. The film’s opening shots oscillate between close-ups of dirty film cans from Cazzola’s archive being pried open to reveal largely decayed or moldy film stock (Figure 2) and black-and-white aerial shots of gleaming new symmetrical apartment buildings gliding past as if fresh off the conveyor belt. An interview with Cazzola’s son Julio reveals that the filmmaker kept everything he made, even footage that the television stations did not want. The problem—and this is a current problem for national cinema traditions across Latin America—is that 70–80 percent of the footage has been completely lost through chemical decay and the lack of funds and infrastructure for film preservation. That said, there was more than enough footage for Prates and Vidal to piece together a unique film that takes audiences on a dizzying journey through the landscape of Brasília from start to finish. Their film will, indirectly, function as an archive of sorts for the many clips from Cazzola’s lifetime of filmmaking that made it into the story, ensuring a legacy in the digital age. Dino Cazzola is discussed as a visionary who could “see ahead”—“beyond his nose.” He was literally a man with a movie camera, and he made the most of it. His infatuation with the creation of Brasília is connected to the total destruction of his 492958LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X13492958LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES 2013 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Disappearing into the Distance

In Oblivion, the award-winning Dutch-Peruvian filmmaker Heddy Honigmann (Forever, Metal and Melancholy, O Amor Natural) visits her birthplace to record the stories of everyday Peruvians under Alan García’s second presidency (2006–2011). Her camera appears to float or wander at the street level, pausing on occasion to drop in upon the lives of the people it encounters there. Andrea Prates and Cleisson Vidal’s Dino Cazzola is at once a family history, a story of migration, a story of power and national identity, and an homage to filmmaking. Both films recall the Russian director Dziga Vertov’s 1929 classic documentary Man with a Movie Camera in that they are city symphonies, films that produce complex truths about a particular urban space by weaving together images and narrative fragments from the lives of its longtime residents. At the start of Dino Cazzola: A Filmography of Brasília, close-ups of filmstrips from Cazzola’s extensive archive with dates and bits of tape on them play across the screen (Figure 1), letting us know that this documentary will address the sometimes tedious but usually surprising process of digging through archival material and that it will be self-reflexive. As in the case of Man with a Movie Camera, this film is not just about the creation of Brasília “on the boards of architects” and the life’s work of Dino Cazzola but about documenting one man’s obsession with filmmaking and fascination with the times in which he lived. The film’s opening shots oscillate between close-ups of dirty film cans from Cazzola’s archive being pried open to reveal largely decayed or moldy film stock (Figure 2) and black-and-white aerial shots of gleaming new symmetrical apartment buildings gliding past as if fresh off the conveyor belt. An interview with Cazzola’s son Julio reveals that the filmmaker kept everything he made, even footage that the television stations did not want. The problem—and this is a current problem for national cinema traditions across Latin America—is that 70–80 percent of the footage has been completely lost through chemical decay and the lack of funds and infrastructure for film preservation. That said, there was more than enough footage for Prates and Vidal to piece together a unique film that takes audiences on a dizzying journey through the landscape of Brasília from start to finish. Their film will, indirectly, function as an archive of sorts for the many clips from Cazzola’s lifetime of filmmaking that made it into the story, ensuring a legacy in the digital age. Dino Cazzola is discussed as a visionary who could “see ahead”—“beyond his nose.” He was literally a man with a movie camera, and he made the most of it. His infatuation with the creation of Brasília is connected to the total destruction of his 492958LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X13492958LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES 2013 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Disappearing into the Distance Two Latin American City Symphonies

In Oblivion, the award-winning Dutch-Peruvian filmmaker Heddy Honigmann (Forever, Metal and Melancholy, O Amor Natural) visits her birthplace to record the stories of everyday Peruvians under Alan García’s second presidency (2006–2011). Her camera appears to float or wander at the street level, pausing on occasion to drop in upon the lives of the people it encounters there. Andrea Prates and Cleisson Vidal’s Dino Cazzola is at once a family history, a story of migration, a story of power and national identity, and an homage to filmmaking. Both films recall the Russian director Dziga Vertov’s 1929 classic documentary Man with a Movie Camera in that they are city symphonies, films that produce complex truths about a particular urban space by weaving together images and narrative fragments from the lives of its longtime residents. At the start of Dino Cazzola: A Filmography of Brasília, close-ups of filmstrips from Cazzola’s extensive archive with dates and bits of tape on them play across the screen (Figure 1), letting us know that this documentary will address the sometimes tedious but usually surprising process of digging through archival material and that it will be self-reflexive. As in the case of Man with a Movie Camera, this film is not just about the creation of Brasília “on the boards of architects” and the life’s work of Dino Cazzola but about documenting one man’s obsession with filmmaking and fascination with the times in which he lived. The film’s opening shots oscillate between close-ups of dirty film cans from Cazzola’s archive being pried open to reveal largely decayed or moldy film stock (Figure 2) and black-and-white aerial shots of gleaming new symmetrical apartment buildings gliding past as if fresh off the conveyor belt. An interview with Cazzola’s son Julio reveals that the filmmaker kept everything he made, even footage that the television stations did not want. The problem—and this is a current problem for national cinema traditions across Latin America—is that 70–80 percent of the footage has been completely lost through chemical decay and the lack of funds and infrastructure for film preservation. That said, there was more than enough footage for Prates and Vidal to piece together a unique film that takes audiences on a dizzying journey through the landscape of Brasília from start to finish. Their film will, indirectly, function as an archive of sorts for the many clips from Cazzola’s lifetime of filmmaking that made it into the story, ensuring a legacy in the digital age. Dino Cazzola is discussed as a visionary who could “see ahead”—“beyond his nose.” He was literally a man with a movie camera, and he made the most of it. His infatuation with the creation of Brasília is connected to the total destruction of his 492958LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X13492958LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES 2013 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES