Appendix 1 the World of Cinema in Argentina
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Appendix 1 The World of Cinema in Argentina A revelation on January 17, 2002. I am headed to the Citibank on Cabildo Street, where I have a savings account. I try to enter the bank but cannot because of the number of people waiting. So I give up on my errand. I cross the street to return home, and from the sidewalk facing the bank I see, for the first time, the building in which it is housed. The familiar is made strange; shortly after, it becomes familiar again, but in a slightly disturbing way. I recognize the building’s arches and moldings, its fanciful rococo façade. I recognize the Cabildo movie theater, in which I saw so many movies as an adolescent. Although I have been coming to this bank for years, I have never before made this connection. I know movie theaters that have been transformed into video arcades, into evangelical churches,1 into parking garages, even into bookstores. Yet I knew of none that had become a bank. All my savings were housed in a space that had been shadows, lights, images, sounds, seats, a screen, film. I remember that around the age of sixteen, I saw Robert Redford’s Ordinary People (1980) on the same day as Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961) in the Hebraica theater. Two or three movies a day (video didn’t exist then) in which almost everything was film, film, and only film. These are the adolescent years in which cinephilia is born: a messy love, passionate, without much judgment. I remember once I dragged some friends to see a piece of Italian garbage at the Hebraica, just “because it was Italian” and I loved movies from Italy. Film, and we should remember this, was still something linked to the forbidden: Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) had been rated inappropriate for people under the age of fourteen and to see it, one had to perform a juggling act. (In such cases, is bribery an act of corruption?) Luckily, there were some theaters (such as the Boedo on 184 New Argentine Film San Juan Avenue) in which the forbidden could be touched with the eyes, even if only in the mediocre movies of erotic stars Isabel Sarli or María José Cantudo. Film was something as immense, enormous, and dark as the theaters themselves. Then video came and the theaters grew empty. The process of reviving them was slow, but video also allowed for a reconnection with earlier film that had been unthinkable. We no longer had to wait for an Orson Welles or Billy Wilder retrospective to see their movies; professors could use fragments of films in their classes; a cinephile could set up a film library. Yet because the industry of the spectacle continued to be one of the most lucrative, it was not long before the exhibition of new movies reorganized—in recent years, on a global scale. During the 1990s movie theaters also suffered the effects of the magic word of that period: conversion. The great theaters began to disappear, the pedestrian walkway on Lavalle Street became a ghost town (at least for those of us who loved film), and we saw the arrival of the large chains that constructed their Buenos Aires theaters according to the same designs as theaters in Cincinnati or Bangkok. A shot from Rejtman’s Silvia Prieto that out- lines the neon lights of the theaters on Lavalle, as though they were an organism living on beyond people, is particularly moving for those of us who lived the absurd spell that this street cast.2 There was (there still is) the Atlas, which Alberto Prebisch designed in 1966, and which was the theater to see premieres. All of those theaters that had been ours (so to speak) began to disappear or to be split up into smaller theaters. Even the Los Ángeles theater, “the first theater in the world dedicated exclusively to Disney,” as its sign proclaims, was divided up, subjected to strange alterations. The first movie theaters were pockets of fantasy in the city, buildings whose façades resembled exotic palaces, or whose interiors, as in the case of the Ópera theater, simulated a starry sky. The Los Ángeles looked like a castle, and it did not matter that it was painted cardboard. There were also neighborhood theaters where you could see classic films, pseudo-pornography, or unusual movies (in the Moreno theater, in the Caballito neighborhood, Beatles films; in the Boedo, the premiere of Leonardo Favio’s Juan Moreira [1973] and Fernando Ayala and Héctor Olivera’s Argentinísima [1972, “Extremely Argentine”]). The appearance of video led many to believe that film as a spectacle was on its way out, but in the 1990s the North American chains arrived. Although these chains were devoted to commercial films and housed in malls, they were also protagonists of the Festival The World of Cinema in Argentina 185 de Cine Independiente (Independent Film Festival). Cinema’s forms were changing, and the public (who had grown up with television, MTV, and video) had other habits. The closing of the great theaters began around 1987, and the rate of closure increased sharply with the economic crisis of the late 1980s. Of the 900 theaters in Argentina in 1984, by the end of the decade less than one half remained (427 in 1990). The lowest point came in 1992, with only 280 working theaters, and the recovery came in the late 1990s, with the multiplex and theaters in the malls. In 1997, there were 589 working theaters, 830 in 1998, 920 in 1999, and in recent years more than 1000 in the entire country—that is, more than at the beginning of the 1980s (Seivach and Perelman 2004, 139). All of this indicates that film’s social function has changed, along with its role in the production of images. In this appendix I am interested in referencing five specific phenomena of the 1990s that have had an impact on film as an institution and on its aesthetics: first, the huge increase in the amount of money needed to finance a film and the infinite production possibilities, from homemade movies to mega productions (which often end up competing in the same space); second, the profound transformations in the cultural function of the administrators of the image3 and in the institutions where they are trained; third, the appearance of a new exhibition network for films, which found in the festival scene a specific public, critics, and reception; fourth, the foundation of a number of cinema schools, which changed the trade by opening up a new way to enter the world of making movies; finally, the growth of film criticism as an event that is not external to the phenomenon of the new Argentine cinema but forms a part of it, actively fostering it. Strange Forms of Independence: Film and Production The category “independent” is exceedingly loose and relates more to production than to aesthetics, as it refers to the financial means with which a movie is made. However, it is difficult to make a clear- cut distinction between production and aesthetics in a medium such as film, in which decisions must constantly negotiate artistic and economic components. The issue becomes even more complex if we keep in mind that the term “independent” has an international 186 New Argentine Film sweep but that “production” varies according to the national context. In a globalized cinema, U.S. “indie” productions share space in a festival such as Sundance with independent movies that, in their country of origin, might not strictly be independent (and, if they are, might have little in common with respect to production with their North American counterparts). BAFICI, which carries the label “independent” in its title, in reality showcases productions that can be considered independent only in comparison to costly Hollywood movies. The category “independent,” then, has a global character, but its features vary according to the national origin of products, and it ends up being more strategic than objective. In the United States, the label “independent,” or “indie,” has been very successful since the late 1980s and has undeniable aesthetic consequences, given that its economic difference from industry films is astronomical (and this difference influences scriptwriting, cast- ing, filming, and postproduction).4 The label, at any rate, references only one phase of production, as movies are filmed independently but their makers aspire to have them distributed by an important company, as this is the only way to survive in a broad, competi- tive network. (In the network of global cinema, distributors have an increasingly important role in the film industry.) On the other hand, some major studios have discovered the profitability of creating a special subcategory for indie movies. Major studios see independent film not as an aesthetic antagonist but as a form of production from which they also can benefit. Thus, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset (2003) opens with a title for “Warner Independent.” Thus, the two types of production (independent and studio) aspire to be part of the same circuit. The case of Miramax is exemplary, as it began by distributing movies made outside of the major studios. It could even be said that Miramax created the independent label in the late 1980s when it bought and distributed Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989). From that moment, the Weinstein brothers’ company (named after their parents, Miriam and Max) has not stopped growing, and with Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), it became one of the major companies of the 1990s, until it was absorbed by Disney in an association that ended abruptly when Mickey’s company refused to distribute Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004).5 There is, of course, a genuinely independent tradition in the United States, comprising filmmakers as diverse as John Casavettes, The World of Cinema in Argentina 187 John Waters, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, and Robert Frank—although here it perhaps more correct to use the term “underground film” (more precise and less confusing) for all but the case of Casavettes.6 Another novelty U.S.