• Bible Films Blog

    Looking at film interpretations of the stories in the Bible - past, present and future, as well as preparation for a future work on Straub/Huillet's Moses und Aron and a few bits and pieces on biblical studies.


    Name:
    Matt Page

    Location:
    U.K.












    Friday, July 17, 2009

    Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema

    Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema
    Author: Joanna Page

    Paperback: 272 pages

    Publisher: Duke University Press
    Language: English

    ISBN-10: 0822344726
    ISBN-13: 978-0822344728

    My sister-in-law Joanna Page is a lecturer in Argentine literature and cinema at Cambridge University, and I just found out that her new book has just been published. "Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema" looks at New Argentine Cinema, highly experimental films and Argentinian genre movies. Here's the synopsis from Amazon:
    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.

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