This first in-depth English-language study of Argentine fiction films released since the mid-1990s explains how they have registered Argentinas recent experience of capitalism, neoliberalism, and economic crisis.

There has been a significant surge 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 elsewhere. What makes this boom all the more extraordinary is its coinciding 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 of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first, Joanna Page explains how these productions have registered Argentina’s experience of capitalism, neoliberalism, 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 that borrow 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.

This book considers how architectural landmarks, imagined buildings and urban landscapes take part in the production of meaning in contemporary Argentine cinema. From the iconic Buenos Aires Obelisk to the Hilton International Hotel, the shopping center to the café and the Le Corbusier-designed Curutchet House to the gated community, architecture in these films evokes the political. Tracing architecture’s expression through six films produced since the 1990s—Pizza birra faso, Mundo grúa, Nueve reinas, La niña santa, La antena and El hombre de al lado—Amanda Holmes studies how architecture in cinema elicits political memory, underscores marginalization and class discrepancies, creates nostalgia for neighborhoods and re-evaluates existing communities. Generously illustrated and carefully researched, the book offers an in-depth reading of key contemporary Argentine films and a fresh architectural approach to film analysis.

Through a textual analysis of six filmmakers (Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, Fernando Meirelles, Walter Salles and Juan José Campanella), this book brings a new perspective to the films of Latin America's transnational auteurs.

Argentine filmmaking from the mid-1990s to the present has enjoyed worldwide success. New Argentine Cinema explores this cinema in order to discover the elements that have made for this success, in relation to the country's profound political, social and cultural crisis during the same period. Jens Andermann shows how the most recent wave of films differs markedly from the Argentine cinema of the preceding decade, following the end of the dictatorship in 1983. Studying films by Lisandro Alonso, Albertina Carri, Lucrecia Martel, Raul Perrone, Martin Rejtman, and Pablo Trapero, among others, he identifies a shift in aesthetic sensibilities between these directors and those of the previous generation as well as a profound change in the way films are being made, and their relation to the audiovisual field at large. In combining close comparative analyses with a review of the changing models of production, editing, actorship and location, Andermann uncovers the ways in which Argentine films have managed to construct a complex, multilayered account of their own present, as shot through - or 'perforated' - by the still unresolved legacies of the past.

Contemporary Latin American Cinema investigates the ways in which neoliberal measures of privatization, de-regularization and austerity introduced in Latin America during the 1990s have impacted film production and film narratives. The collection examines the relationship between economic policies and the films that depict recent transformations in many Latin American countries, demonstrating how contemporary Latin American film has not only criticized and resisted, but also benefitted from neoliberal advancements. Based on films produced in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru since 2010, the fourteen case studies illustrate neoliberalism’s effects, from big industries to small national cinemas. It also shows the new types of producers that have emerged, and the novel patterns of distribution, exhibition and consumption that shape and influence the Latin American filmscape. Through industry studies, reception analyses and close readings, this book establishes an informative and accessible text for scholars and students alike.

This edited collection explores how contemporary Latin American cinema has dealt with and represented issues of human rights, moving beyond many of the recurring topics for Latin American films. Through diverse interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological approaches, and analyses of different audiovisual media from fictional and documentary films to digitally-distributed activist films, the contributions discuss the theme of human rights in cinema in connection to various topics and concepts. Chapters in the volume explore the prison system, state violence, the Mexican dirty war, the Chilean dictatorship, debt, transnational finance, indigenous rights, social movement, urban occupation, the right to housing, intersectionality, LGBTT and women’s rights in the context of a number of Latin American countries. By so doing, it assesses the long overdue relation between cinema and human rights in the region, thus opening new avenues to aid the understanding of cinema’s role in social transformation.

This book explores the role of emotion and affect in recent Latin American cinema (1990s-2000s) in the context of larger public debates about past traumas and current anxieties. To address this topic, it examines some of the most significant trends in contemporary Latin American filmmaking.

This book, the first of its kind, brings together leading scholars from multiple perspectives in a serious dialogue about continuity and change in global media production and content. Looking at a wide swath of the world, these authors show the emergence of transnational collaboration in global television and film production across national borders that seem to transcend national cultures and identities. At the same time, traditional class analysis of such phenomena is reframed within the rise of myriad social movements for equality, democracy, human rights, and defense of the environment. What are the effects of media, local or global? Does the West continue to dominate or is cultural imperialism waning? With original chapters written by leading scholars from a variety of disciplines, this book will appeal to students and scholars interested in global media communication, cultural studies, and international political economy.

Human rights film festivals have been steadily growing in number in recent years. They are all bound by a common thread, human rights, and yet show distinctly different films. What leads them to be so different, and how is the universalism of human rights made sense by each?