Respected film critic Gonzalo Aguilar offers a lucid and sophisticated analysis of Argentine films of the last decade. This is the most complete and up-to-date work in English to examine the 'new Argentine cinema' phenomenon. Aguilar looks at highly relevant films, including those by Lucrecia Martel and Sergio Rejtman.

Respected film critic Gonzalo Aguilar offers a lucid and sophisticated analysis of Argentine films of the last decade. This is the most complete and up-to-date work in English to examine the "new Argentine cinema" phenomenon. Aguilar looks at highly relevant films, including recent award-winners at all of the major festivals.

Respected film critic Gonzalo Aguilar offers a lucid and sophisticated analysis of Argentine films of the last decade. This is the most complete and up-to-date work in English to examine the 'new Argentine cinema' phenomenon. Aguilar looks at highly relevant films, including those by Lucrecia Martel and Sergio Rejtman.

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.

Examines how recent Argentine horror films engage with the legacies of dictatorship and neoliberalism. Argentina is a dominant player in Latin American film, known for its documentaries, detective films, melodramas, and auteur cinema. In the past twenty years, however, the country has also emerged as a notable producer of horror films. Blood Circuits focuses on contemporary Argentine horror cinema and the various “cinematic pleasures” it offers national and transnational audiences. Jonathan Risner begins with an overview of horror film culture in Argentina and beyond. He then examines select films grouped according to various criteria: neoliberalism and urban, rural, and suburban spaces; English-language horror films; gore and affect in punk/horror films; and the legacies of the last dictatorship (1976–1983). While keenly aware of global horror trends, Risner argues that these films provide unprecedented ways of engaging with the consequences of authoritarianism and neoliberalism in Argentina. “Blood Circuits is an important and much-needed contribution to the fields of Latin American cinema and popular culture, and genre film studies with a focus on horror cinema. It offers original and innovative directions that will pave the way for new studies in different areas of film studies: the internationalization of horror that unfolds a problematic relationship between the United States and the Global South, the use of punk horror as a form of affect, and the development of new kinds of pleasures and displeasures in the spectator.” — Victoria Ruétalo, coeditor of Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas, and Latin America

Argentina fell in love with movies as soon as they were first exhibited in 1896. Even before World War I, Argentina was one of the biggest film markets in the world and continues to be a major film market today. This history of the Argentine film industry--starting with the earliest film exhibitions in 1897--covers film music, broadcasting, the introduction of film with sound, the impact of the American film industry on the Argentine, the industrialization of Argentine film, Hollywood films in Spanish, the tango in film and local stars. Reference material includes filmographic information and reviews from numerous publications. Photographs offer a look at film stills, promotions, and the people involved in the industry, and an index provides quick access to names and titles.

In Transition Cinema, Jessica Stites Mor documents the critical role filmmakers, the film industry, and state regulators played in Argentina's volatile and unfinished transition from dictatorship to democracy. She shows how, during periods of both military repression and civilian rule, the state moved to control political film production and its content, distribution, and exhibition. She also reveals the strategies that the industry, independent filmmakers, and film activists employed to comply with or circumvent these regulations. Stites Mor traces three distinct generations of transition cinema, each defined by a seminal event that shifted the political economy of national filmmaking. The first generation of filmmakers witnessed and participated in civil uprisings, such as the Cordobazo in 1969, and faced waves of repression, violence, and censorship. This generation gave rise to vibrant underground exhibitions and film clubs and eventually became symbolically linked to the Peronist Left and radical militancy. Following the 1983 return to civilian rule, a second generation of political filmmakers emerged at the center of public debates, when Buenos Aires became the locus for state-level cultural programs to address human rights and collective memory. Building on that legacy, a third generation of filmmakers explored new modes of activist and political filmmaking aided by digital technology. They pioneered new genres such as the street phenomenon of cine piquetero and introduced resistance politics and social movements into highly visible public spaces. In this captivating work, Stites Mor examines how social movements, political actors, filmmakers, and government and industry institutions, all became deeply enmeshed in the project of Argentina's transition cinema. She demonstrates how film emerged as the chronicler of political struggles in a dialogue with the past, present, and future, whose message transcended both cultural and national borders.