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Tribute to Contemporary Argentine Ethnographic Cinema

Does the work of Gorriarena explain his life? No. But does it justify it? Yes.
Carmen Guarini on the movie “Gorri” (2010)

Argentina is going through a different time; this is expressed in its documentary films. Within the framework of the Athens Ethnographic Film Festival, the first tribute to the Argentine ethnographic cinema portrays the geographic and thematic diversity of this vast country, through the eyes of four anthropologists and filmmakers who are the leading exponents in the field of visual anthropology. Social and historical memory, time and endangered languages are the main subjects on which their documentaries focus.

The return to democracy in Argentina in 1983 was a key moment for the beginnings of visual anthropology in the country. During the post-dictatorship period, the trend in local production was driven by the need to adapt visual anthropology to the urgencies of the socio-historical situation. In this context, what was said became more important than how it was said. Content outweighing form would be the ethnographic approach to topics anchored in the country’s contemporary history and oriented toward political and social issues.

In the midst of the greatest crisis modern Argentina had ever suffered – the 2001 crisis – the interest of joining the past with the present strongly emerged. In this context, and following the momentum of new audiovisual and post-production technologies, the number of works of anthropologists experimenting with new methods, working both inside and outside the academic field addressing new topics or adopting a more political approach would increase.

Soledad Torres Agüero and Felippe Rugeles work with indigenous people in the north of Argentina experimenting with participatory video methodologies. “Luis” shows the dimensions of time and silence in the lonely landscape of a man in the Argentine Chaco. “Looking for a Treasure in the Backyard” is set in the Paraguayan Chaco, in a city marked by the traces of the War of the Triple Alliance (1865-1870). Walter Mereles searches for lost treasures in hidden places during the war, an act of memory that reconstructs the past by trespassing the limits between reality and fantasy.

The work of Carmen Guarini, who was a central figure in introducing the French movement near the end of the ‘80s, goes into depth in the issue of memory through two movies that take place in the urban context of Buenos Aires. “Tiles of Buenos Aires” focuses on reworking the recent political past, using as an example the placement of artisan tiles in the city sidewalks which recall the existence of political activists that disappeared during the last military dictatorship. “Gorri” explores the material and ideological decisions that coexist in the work of Carlos Gorriarena, a passionate painter and a mentor for many generations of Argentine artists. His strong resistance to being “accused” of being a social and political painter allows us to understand the way in which politics meets art.

Carlos Masotta and Paulo Campano dig into the lives of Argentine indigenous peoples. “The memory of the Rain”, by Paulo Campano, uses a trip through landscapes to show the testimonies of the Mapuche people regarding the need for indigenous organization in Patagonia.

The three short documentaries by Carlos Masotta are part of the project “Endangered Languages, Endangered People in Argentina”, a co-production by the University of Buenos Aires and the Linguistics Department of the Max Planck Institute. Through the narration and cultural practices of Mocovies and Tapietes, we will look into issues concerning historical reconstruction and the endangered languages in the area of the Argentine Chaco. Masotta’s films contribute to the preservation and appreciation of the least known languages in the country.

We would like to thank the anthropologists who accepted our invitation to participate in this tribute and kindly lent us their works. Although we present the works of anthropologists dedicated to academic activities at universities in Buenos Aires, we must mention that unfortunately, we were not able to address the vast filmography of Argentine filmmakers working in the rest of the country.

We want to give our special thanks to the filmmaker Soledad Torres Agüero, whose support and dedication accompanied us during the two years we spent preparing this tribute, as well as to Marian Moya for her theoretical contributions to the study of films by anthropologists in Argentina.

The program of the Athens Ethnographic Film Festival presents some of the movies that are the most representative of contemporary trends of Argentine ethnographic cinema. In the current socio-economic context of Greece, the images of Argentina that we receive through the media are mainly related to the country’s economic and political history, framed in terms of crisis. This tribute leaves proof of how human creativity can help overcome any crisis. By bringing distant geographies closer, ethnographic cinema broadens our viewpoint and our questions about the world and makes intercultural dialogue about the production of anthropological knowledge possible.

Konstantina Bousmpoura and Julia M. Heimann