Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Argentina
Argentina in a spat with Eva Duarte. Lamarque had a
long and successful career in Mexico and elsewhere,
returning to Argentina only after Perón’s fall in 1955.
Many other Argentine actors also sought their fortune in
Hollywood, most notably Fernando Lamas (1915–1982),
who was married to the swimmer Esther Williams
(b. 1922) and who served as the all-round Latin lover in
such films as The Merry Widow (1952) and The Girl Who
Had Everything (1953).
During the neofascist period, filmmaking was
severely curtailed, as was the distribution of US films,
by the Axis-sympathizing governments prior to Perón
and then by Perón during his regime. Nevertheless,
Buenos Aires remains almost fanatical about film, and
foreign films have always played an important general
cultural role in Argentine society, as well as serving as
closely studied models for Argentine filmmakers.
It is important to note that private, semi-clandestine
film clubs allowed for some distribution of films that
could not have been shown publicly during the neofascist
period. Many films were either banned outright or
severely mutilated, and this had a dampening effect on
production initiatives, with many insignificant films filling
the resulting void. In addition to defecting actors,
such as Héctor Alterio (b. 1929), Norman Briski
(b. 1938), and Norma Aleandro (b. 1936), who figured
prominently in the resurgence of filmmaking in Spain
after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco (1892–
1975) in 1975—precisely the period of the worst phase
of military tyranny in Argentina—major directors such as
Carlos Hugo Christensen (1914–1999) and Héctor
Babenco (b. 1946), both with extensive directorial
records in Brazil, also worked elsewhere.
MAJOR FIGURES
The importance of La historia oficial, aside from its
intrinsic qualities that merited the OscarÒ, lies in the fact
that it is emblematic of the sort of Argentine film that
could not be made during the dictatorship, while at the
same time it represents the attempt to analyze the material
and emotional violence of the neofascist period.
Virtually a Who’s Who of Argentine filmmaking and
other realms of culture were involved in the making of
Puenzo’s film, including Aleandro and Alterio, for whom
this film was a comeback to Argentine cinema. Moreover,
La historia oficial represents the extensive array of films
made in Argentine under the aegis of the Program for the
Redemocratization of Argentine Culture during the latter
half of the 1980s. These films, many of which attained
international recognition (María Luisa Bemberg’s Camila
[1984], Héctor Olivera’s No habrá más penas ni olvido
[Funny Dirty Little War, 1983], Eliseo Subiela’s Hombre
mirando al sudeste [Man Facing Southeast; 1986]), had to
compete with the large inventory of American and
European films that were finally able to be exhibited
either for the first time or without cuts in Argentina after
1983.The intense competition for screen space and critical
attention afforded a new vigor to film as a cultural
product in Argentina that has lasted into the twenty-first
century.
La historia oficial, however, remains the iconic film
of the period, not only because of the OscarÒ, but also
because of the story it tells: a prosperous businessman
who has shady dealings with the military is rewarded for
his loyalty with a baby born in prison to one of the socalled
disappeared ones. His wife, a history teacher who
until that moment has had little involvement with the
recent events in her country, begins to suspect the truth
and undertakes to establish how the child came to them,
with violent consequences. The adoptive mother’s quest
symbolizes how, more than twenty years after the return
to constitutional democracy, Argentina had yet to overcome
the many social and political effects of the tyranny.
One of the most significant figures to be associated
with the post-dictatorship period is María Luisa
Bemberg. When Bemberg died of cancer in 1995, she
had been directing for little more than a decade and had
signed only a half-dozen films. It was not until she
walked away from her upper-middle class marriage in
her late fifties that she began making films on her own.
All of Bemberg’s films attracted rave reviews and significant
critical attention, along with enthusiastic public
reception, so that she was well known by the time of
her last completed film, De eso no se habla (I Don’t Want
to Talk about It, 1993), which recounts how a comfortable
merchant-class young woman who is a dwarf runs
off with the circus as an act of rebellion against her
mother’s attempt to deny the reality of her physical
condition. Bemberg used international stars such as
Marcello Mastroianni (1924–1996), Julie Christie
(b. 1941), Assumpta Serna (b. 1957), and Dominique
Sanda (b. 1948) in starring roles in her films.
Aside from the general feminist quality of Bemberg’s
films, in which she showed women rebelling against
stifling social paradigms, they are important for their
generally queer orientation. Argentina does not have a
distinguished record in gay and lesbian or queer filmmaking,
although some important work has been done.
One could almost say that Bemberg naturalized queerness
in her films, and her premature death deprived
Latin American filmmaking of one of its truly unique
voices. In Argentina there is a new generation of feminist
directors such as Lucrecia Martel (b. 1966) (La Ciénaga
[The Swamp, 2001] and La Niña santa [The Holy
Girl, 2004]), who has garnered considerable international
112 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM