Picturing Argentina Myths Movies And The Peronist Vision

Although Juan Domingo Perón's central role in Argentine history and the need for an unbiased assessment of his impact on his nation's cinema are beyond dispute, the existing scholarship on the subject is limited. In recent decades Argentina has witnessed a revival of serious film study, some of which has focused on the nation's classical movies and, in one case, on Peronism. None of this work has been translated into English, however.This is the first English-language book that offers an extensive assessment of Argentine cinema during first Peronism. It is also the first study in any language that concentrates systematically on the evolution of social attitudes reflected in Argentine movies throughout those years and that assesses the period's impact on subsequent filmmaking activity. By analyzing popular Argentine movies from this time through the prism of myth-second-order communication systems that present historically developed customs and attitudes as natural-the book traces the filmic construction of gender, criminality, race, the family, sports, and the military. It identifies in movies the development and evolution of mindsets and attitudes that may be construed as "Peronist." By framing its consideration of films from the Perón years in the context of earlier and later ones, it demonstrates that this period accelerates-and sometimes registers backward-looking responses to-earlier progressive mythic shifts, and it traces the development in the 1950s of a critical mindset that comes to fruition in the "new cinema" of the 1960s. Picturing Argentina: Myths, Movies, and the Peronist Vision is an important book for Latin American studies, film studies, and history collections.

This book presents a history of the development of film noir and neo-noir in Argentina, as well as a technical, aesthetic, and socio-historical analysis of recent Argentine neo-noir films. It also considers the question of neo-noir inscription of classic Hollywood noirs.

Fertile Visions conceptualises the uterus as a narrative space so that the female reproductive body can be understood beyond the constraints of a gendered analysis. Unravelling pregnancy from notions of maternity and mothering demands that we think differently about narratives of reproduction. This is crucial in the current global political climate wherein the gender-specificity of pregnancy contributes to how bodies that reproduce are marginalised, controlled, and criminalised. Anne Carruthers demonstrates fascinating and insightful close analyses of films such as Juno, Birth, Ixcanul and Arrival as examples of the uterus as a narrative space. Fertile Visions engages with research on the foetal ultrasound scan as well as phenomenologies, affect and spectatorship in film studies to offer a new way to look, think and analyse pregnancy and the pregnant body in cinema from the Americas.

Argentine Cinema and National Identity covers the development of Argentine cinema since the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, concentrating on the historical film genre and the gauchesque. This cultural history investigates the way Argentine cinema positioned itself when facing the competition of American films.

Comprehensive examination of how Indigenous peoples have been represented in Argentine film. Affectual Erasure examines how Argentine cinema has represented Indigenous peoples throughout a period spanning roughly a century. Cynthia Margarita Tompkins interrelates her discussion of films with the ethnographic context of the Indigenous peoples represented and an analysis of the affective dimensions at play. These emotions underscore the inherent violence of generic conventions, as well as the continued political violence preventing Indigenous peoples from access to their ancestral lands and cultural mores. Tompkins explores a broad range of movies beginning in the silent period and includes both feature films and documentaries, underscored by archival and contemporary film stills. She traces the initial erotic projection, moving through melodrama to the conventions of the Western, into the 1960s focus on decolonization, superseded by allegorical renditions and the promise of self-expression in late twentieth-century documentaries. Each section includes an introduction to the sociohistorical events of the period and their impact on film production. Analyzed chronologically, the films evidence different stages in the projection of the hegemonic Argentine imaginary, which fails to envision the daily life of Indigenous peoples prior to conquest or in colonial times—and remains in denial of their existence in the present. “Cynthia Margarita Tompkins’s book is the most comprehensive analysis of the cinematic representations of Argentinean Indigenous peoples ever written. Her writing is lucid, insightful, grounded in a thorough familiarity with the films, and aware of the most current theoretical debates in film/theory and cultural studies. The book will surely become a breakthrough in its field.” — Santiago Juan-Navarro, author of Archival Reflections: Postmodern Fiction of the Americas (Self-Reflexivity, Historical Revisionism, Utopia)

Investigates how Argentine cinema has represented rural spaces and urban margins from the 1910s to the present. The Projected Nation examines the representation of rural spaces and urban margins in Argentine cinema from the 1910s to the present. The literary and visual culture of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries formulated a spatial imaginary—often articulated as an opposition between civilization and barbarism, or its inversion—into which the cinema intervened. As the twentieth century progressed, the new medium integrated these ideas with its own images in various ways. At times cinema limited itself to reproducing inherited representations that reassure the viewer that all is well in the nation, while at others it powerfully reformulated them by filming spaces and peoples previously excluded from the national culture and left behind in the nation’s modernizing process. Matt Losada accounts for historical events, technological factors, and the politics of film form and viewing in assessing a selection of works ranging from mass-marketed cinema to the political avant-garde, and from the canonical to the nearly unknown. “This is an ambitious work that views the spatial imaginary in a full century of film development as informed by national culture and politics.” — Marvin D’Lugo, coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema

No Latin American woman has ever elicited such extreme feelings of love and hate as Eva Perón. She was an actress of humble origins who fell in love with and married the soon-to-be president of Argentina, Juan Domingo Perón. Evita, as she was fondly known, became the most powerful woman in Argentine history. Adored by the masses and loathed by the bourgeoisie, Evita polarized Argentine society. Not even her death could put an end to the mixed feelings she aroused during her lifetime, and Evita remains till this day a controversial figure. Eva Perón: A Reference Guide to Her Life and Works captures Evita’s eventful life, her works, and her legacy. The volume features a chronology that includes her childhood, her acting career, her trip to Europe, her political activity, her illness, and her death, as well as more recent events that have memorialized her. While an introduction offers a brief account of her life, a dictionary section lists entries on people, places, and events related to her. A comprehensive bibliography offers a list of works by and about Evita. Finally, a filmography includes the movies in which Evita appeared and the TV series and films that have been made about her.

Following the mass arrival of European immigrants to Argentina in the early years of the twentieth century new forms of entertainment emerged including tango, films, radio and theater. While these forms of culture promoted ethnic integration they also produced a new kind of polarization that helped Juan Peron to build the mass movement that propelled him to power.