There has been a significant surge 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 elsewhere. What makes this boom all the more extraordinary is its coinciding 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 of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first, Joanna Page explains how these productions have registered Argentina’s experience of capitalism, neoliberalism, 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 that borrow 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.

This book considers how architectural landmarks, imagined buildings and urban landscapes take part in the production of meaning in contemporary Argentine cinema. From the iconic Buenos Aires Obelisk to the Hilton International Hotel, the shopping center to the café and the Le Corbusier-designed Curutchet House to the gated community, architecture in these films evokes the political. Tracing architecture’s expression through six films produced since the 1990s—Pizza birra faso, Mundo grúa, Nueve reinas, La niña santa, La antena and El hombre de al lado—Amanda Holmes studies how architecture in cinema elicits political memory, underscores marginalization and class discrepancies, creates nostalgia for neighborhoods and re-evaluates existing communities. Generously illustrated and carefully researched, the book offers an in-depth reading of key contemporary Argentine films and a fresh architectural approach to film analysis.

Examines contemporary cinematic representations of Argentine masculinities, the social construction of gender, and the financing of domestic film production following Argentina's 1990 change to a neo-liberal economic model.

"Foster discusses ten Argentine films, including Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Official Story, and Man Facing Southeast to examine the transformation of social topics into motion pictures and the relationship between commercial filmmaking strategies and Argentine redemocratization."--Publishers website.

This innovative study finds that, through his unique representation of violence, Argentine director Pablo Trapero has established himself as one of the 21st century's distinctly political filmmakers. By examining the broad concept of violence and how it is represented on-screen, Douglas Mulliken identifies and analyzes the ways in which Trapero utilizes violence, particularly Žižek's concept of objective violence, as a means through which to mediate the political Through a focus on several previously under-studied elements of Trapero's films, Mulliken highlights the ways in which the director's work represents present-day concerns about social inequalities and injustice in neoliberal Argentina on-screen. Finally, he examines how Trapero combines aspects of Argentina's long tradition of political film with elements of Nuevo Cine Argentino to create a unique political voice.

Argentine filmmaking from the mid-1990s to the present has enjoyed worldwide success. New Argentine Cinema explores this cinema in order to discover the elements that have made for this success, in relation to the country's profound political, social and cultural crisis during the same period. Jens Andermann shows how the most recent wave of films differs markedly from the Argentine cinema of the preceding decade, following the end of the dictatorship in 1983. Studying films by Lisandro Alonso, Albertina Carri, Lucrecia Martel, Raul Perrone, Martin Rejtman, and Pablo Trapero, among others, he identifies a shift in aesthetic sensibilities between these directors and those of the previous generation as well as a profound change in the way films are being made, and their relation to the audiovisual field at large. In combining close comparative analyses with a review of the changing models of production, editing, actorship and location, Andermann uncovers the ways in which Argentine films have managed to construct a complex, multilayered account of their own present, as shot through - or 'perforated' - by the still unresolved legacies of the past.

This book explores the role of emotion and affect in recent Latin American cinema (1990s-2000s) in the context of larger public debates about past traumas and current anxieties. To address this topic, it examines some of the most significant trends in contemporary Latin American filmmaking.