Review
"Given the widespread recognition for the achievements of contemporary Argentine cinema, it is startling that there have been so few scholarly works about it published in English. Taking a major step toward filling this void, Joanna Page offers a fascinating study of recent Argentine films through beautifully situated readings that reveal the cinema's participation in larger sociocultural debates and historical processes. This is a top-notch work."--Laura Podalsky, author of Specular City: Transforming Culture, Consumption, and Space in Buenos Aires, 1955-1973 "Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema is an excellent book. Joanna Page gives us a fresh, up-to-date treatment of one of the most significant and exciting Latin American cinemas of recent years." --Michael Chanan, author of Cuban Cinema
Product Description
There has been a significant boom in recent Argentine cinema, with an explosion in the number of films made in the country since the mid-1990s. Many of these productions have been highly acclaimed by critics in Argentina and internationally. What makes this boom all the more extraordinary is that it has coincided with a period of severe economic crisis and civil unrest in the nation. Offering the first in-depth English-language study of Argentine fiction films released since the mid-1990s, Joanna Page explains how these productions have registered Argentina's experience of capitalism, neo-liberalism, and economic crisis. In different ways, the films selected for discussion testify to the social consequences of growing unemployment, rising crime, marginalization, and the expansion of the informal economy. Page focuses particularly on films associated with New Argentine Cinema, but she also discusses highly experimental films and genre movies borrowing from the conventions of crime thrillers, Westerns, and film noir. She analyzes films that have received wide international recognition alongside others that have rarely been shown outside Argentina. What unites all the films she examines is their attention to shifts in subjectivity provoked by political or economic conditions and events. Page emphasizes the paradoxes arising from the circulation of Argentine films within the same global economy they so often critique, and she argues that while Argentine cinema has been intent on narrating the collapse of the nation-state, it has also contributed to the nation's reconstruction. She brings the films into dialogue with a broader range of issues in contemporary film criticism, including the role of national and transnational film studies, theories of subjectivity and spectatorship, and the relationship between private and public spheres.
