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This book addresses some of the many and varied ways in which filmmakers in Argentina engage with poetry on screen. It asks, in the broadest terms, how film and poetry transform each another, how these two expressive media behave when placed into conversation, and what this tells us about the relationship between the two art forms. This is a dialogue that I refer to elsewhere the “poetry-film nexus.” How, to put it shortly, do directors film poetry? The introduction outlines the theoretical background and cultural context to the case studies found in the chapters, also summarized here.

The second chapter broadens our understanding of the mediascape during the golden age of Argentine cinema by examining the film and radio stardom of Marina Esther Traverso, “Niní Marshall,” as a case of aural stardom that challenges image-based star studies and provides a framework to consider the particularities of popular Argentine cinema, in which radio furnished the framework for the development of its industry and star system. Star-contract disputes from studio archives and evolving sound conventions in film texts are ventriloquial gambits that rearticulate the relationship between voice and body in a shifting organization of the senses. In Marshall’s film, the actress is the site of multiples selves that surface differentially in relation to the image. Marshall is never quite in synch, is never quite embodied, is never quite diegeticized. This failure to diegeticize mocks a Hollywood classicism that differentiated diegetic and non-diegetic sound in order to secure a narrative space distinct from the theatrical space.

This chapter considers the making of Mario Soffici’s Barrio gris (1954). It documents how some Argentine critics were concerned that importing a foreign style could dilute efforts to build a truly national Argentine cinema. While intrigued by neorealism, Soffici used the film to make a direct statement about Argentine national historical contingencies in the midst of Peronism.

This introductory section and its account of the significant changes in Argentine filmmaking in the last twenty five years acts as a platform to the director-centred analyses of Juan José Campanella’s films in Chapter 6. It situates Campanella and his filmmaking practice as typical of one vector of Argentina’s changed filmmaking landscape (the ‘industry auteurs’ produced through the neoliberal reforms to the industry in the 1990s and fostered by transnational media conglomerates) but also addresses the vibrant independent filmmaking movement (the New Argentine Cinema) also a by- product of the 1990s reforms and fostered by the government and transnational funding bodies.

Critical approaches to the work of Raúl Perrone have, to date, focussed mostly on its DIY ethos and his reworking of international genres, from Italian Neorealism to the US slacker comedy, in a local Argentine context. However, despite his reputation, and indeed the immediate impression given by many of his early films, as a creator of no-budget Argentine slacker comedies, much of his cinema features or is underpinned by poetic concerns. Chapter Four therefore aims to explore his use of and interaction with poetry – how he screens it, and how it informs the aesthetics and ethics of his cinema. I draw on the work of Theodor Adorno and Franco “Bifo” Berardi, as well as Michel Foucault’s ideas about cynicism and free speech (parrhēsia). Here I develop arguments about how the use of poetry questions contemporary understandings of cultural and financial value – in short, the political implications of intermediality.

This chapter explores Juan José Campanella and his Oscar winning El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes 2009). Unlike the other transnational auteurs focused upon in the book, he has not followed an initial critical and commercial domestic success (El hijo de la novia) with deterritorialized feature films outside of Argentina (although he has worked in US television). However, like the transnational auteurs he has been the object of analyses that criticize the mainstream ‘commercial’ forms and venues (transnational conglomerates) he works in and question the national credentials of his filmmaking. Arguing against a critical hierarchy that rates the features of art cinema (the New Argentine Cinema) above those of a commercial cinema, the chapter explores how in El secreto de sus ojos Campanella uses genre film to engage with the legacy of Argentina’s ‘Dirty War,’ with the period directly before it and also with the contemporary moment. This chapter argues that Campanella’s manipulation of melodrama and film noir are an effective means to self-consciously stage the past and also pose key issues of historical memory and accountability of the crimes committed during Argentina’s Dirty War.

Chapter Two addresses the role of poetry in Subiela’s films, in particular his two films that most clearly engage with verse and poets, the two parts of El lado oscuro del corazón (1992/2001). It addresses a series of unresolved questions: over parody in Subiela’s work; his politics; and the alleged sexism of these films. The chapter assesses the filmmaker’s inclusion of poetry in a rather vague notion of rebellion, in relation to the liberal politics of “old Argentine cinema.” I offer a critique of this nostalgic and idealistic use of poetry – yet one which at the same time paves the way for later, more radical approaches to genre and disciplinary boundaries, including but not limited to the highly political cinema of Raúl Perrone, whose work appears directly to cite Subiela.

The modernization of an increasingly urban and industrial Argentina and the effect of modernity on the experience of time provide a backdrop for my discussion of the films of Luis Sandrini. More specifically, Sandrini’s films rely on the comedian’s stutter that literally disrupts the temporal continuum that film records. This chapter uses the stutter heuristically, figuring it within film texts, material film practice, spectatorial experience, and historiography. Radio sound aesthetics and sound technologies played an important role during the transition to sound, not only determining technological developments that affected film production, but also providing the material base for the nation’s nascent studios. Additionally, by focusing on Sandrini’s physical slapstick, this chapter discusses his films as staging a confrontation with standardized time both in terms of the reification of time in modernity and the standardization of film through the registration gate. Classical Hollywood may have aspired to a hermetic diegetic world, but Sandrini mocks classicism with a stutter that makes the world salient precisely because it acknowledges that the world “slips through our fingers.”