The Cinematic Tango: Contemporary Argentine Film.

The Cinematic Tango: Contemporary Argentine Film by Tamara L. Falicov. London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2007. 188 pp., illus. Hardcover: $80.00 and Paperback: $25.00.

Argentina has long been recognized as an exceptional Latin American country because of the two dominant typologies routinely used since the nineteenth century to conceptualize its national identity and to analyze its national culture. For some observers, Argentina represents an essentially European-created nation whose culture is based on Western, urbane, industrialized models. For others, the Argentine case is simply part and parcel of Latin America--i.e., the culture of a developing nation in an unequal relation of dependency with the Colossus to the North, the United States. Argentine culture wars have raged for decades around the appropriateness of these two typologies; and even the nation's greatest twentieth-century cultural figures, such as the writer Jorge Luis Borges, have been swept into the debate. While Borges is widely perceived abroad as a Europeanized writer, in Argentina he is also known for his interest in home-grown sociological and cultural manifestations, such as the figure of the gaucho.

This quintessentially Argentine debate on the principal paradigms used to analyze the nation's culture provides author Tamara L. Falicov with an appropriate starting point to examine the cultural politics of the cinema industry in The Cinematic Tango: Contemporary Argentine Film. And, indeed, throughout the book this debate and its implications generate much of the author's overarching analytical framework. For across the decades, proponents of the Europeanized paradigm have tended to advocate state support for culture following the models of the social-democratic European nations. On the other hand, adherents to the Latin American paradigm have typically advocated protectionist measures aimed at nurturing the film industry of a subordinate, developing nation.

Falicov's project focuses on "the political and economic dynamics of film funding over time, but it is also concerned with understanding how cultural policy shapes national film culture." The author rightly conceptualizes the nation's cinema as a state-supported articulation of Argentine culture; and her efforts are dedicated to examining exactly how--both politically and economically--different governments from the 1930s to the present have supported, or not, this industry. The approach is holistic; and Falicov--following the theoretical lead of Tom O'Regan's Australian National Cinema--analyzes the industry in terms of the sociopolitical contexts; the production and industrial contexts; and its discursive dimensions as manifested in, for instance, genre and language.

This historical overview begins with the advent of sound technology in the upbeat 1930s and the early 1940s, when Argentina was rapidly industrializing and its tango music was all the rage throughout Latin America. At this time, Argentina seems to have boasted more movie houses than all the other Latin American countries combined. A studio system had arisen; and companies such as Lumiton and Argentina Sono Film were thriving by turning out popular commercial genre films, such as costume dramas and gaucho stories. These pictures frequently incorporated national motifs, such as the tango, or the pampas setting, in order to attract working-class audiences; and, indeed, the movies played well in the poor urban barrios. In addition, the films proved popular throughout Latin America. This, in fact, was Argentine cinema's Golden Age, which, sadly, was all over by the mid-1940s.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Falicov excels at charting the sudden decline of the industry. The causes were many, such as the first Peron government's (1946-1955) strict censorship measures, and the debilitating disputes between producers and distributors regarding quota systems designed to protect national product threatened by a flood of Hollywood and other foreign movies. But the greatest factor in this decline was the U.S. government's ban in 1941 on the sale of raw film stock to Argentina--in large part because of that nation's neutrality in World War II. The author provides a clear account of the devastating economic impact of this ban on the nation's film industry. The impact in Latin American terms was definitive, since at this point Mexico--an ally during World War II and the recipient of much U. S. aid to its own film industry--assumed the dominant position in the production of Spanish-language movies.

The many somewhat successful and failed attempts to rebuild the Argentine industry after its mid-1940s near collapse are well documented in The Cinematic Tango. Falicov displays a thorough knowledge of Argentine politics and society as she examines and contextualizes these attempts, for instance, during the period of apertura or redemocratization (1983-89) following the collapse of the brutal military dictatorship: President Raul Alfonsin's and his Radical Party's promotion of a censorship-free and open cultural landscape; the quest for European coproduction agreements to make fiction features (e. g., Fernando Solanas's Tangos: The Exile of Gardel) aimed at international audiences; legislation which allowed the National Film Institute to award loans and subsidies to projects that attained the preferential "special interest" status; and the fostering of cultural nationalism via promotion of a "quality" cinema that targeted the international film festival circuit, and that, not incidentally, favorably showcased Argentina as a functioning modern democracy.

Generally, Falicov does not offer close readings of individual films. The exception is her extended treatment of Luis Puenzo's Academy Award winning drama The Official Story (1985). In her reading, Puenzo employs an "international middle class esthetic" to create a tool in the Radical Party's effort to boost internationally Argentina's image as a middle-class democracy capable of functioning politically and economically in George H. W. Bush's globalizing New World Order. The author's argument is provocative and well articulated, though I would counter that The Official Story--in part because of its very use of that middle-class esthetic--paints a more profound and damning condemnation of that class and its complicity during the military dictatorship than Falicov seems to recognize.

Though Falicov focuses on productions that were somehow supported or promoted by the state (the vast majority), she also occasionally journeys to the margins to offer glimpses of the sociopolitical contexts in which independent works were produced. There she examines, for instance, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), the militantly left-Peronist documentary tour de force now considered a classic of guerrilla filmmaking. She also offers much useful information on recent independent efforts, such as the thriving New Independent Argentine Cinema Movement (Raul Perrone, et al.), or the "neighborhood cinema" dramas and serials currently being churned out on a shoestring in the pampas town of Saladillo by the ever enterprising Julio Midu and Fabio Junco.

The Cinematic Tango is a scholarly book built on the backs of previously published essays, and a sharper editorial eye might have helped smooth the stylistic transition from stand-alone articles to unified volume. In general, however, Wallflower has supported its author well; and this attractively laid-out volume has been for the most part well produced. An evident commitment to fact checking has led to fewer factual errors than in most scholarly works of this sort. However, two significant shortcomings do crop up: some illustrations are simply too dark and murky to illustrate much of anything. And, unfortunately, no separate index of film titles was included.

This chronological case study is well organized and clearly written; and Falicov proves herself a perceptive scholar capable of strongly supporting her contentions via cogent argumentation and relevant documentation. This concise historical overview of Argentine cultural politics as they relate to the film industry is certainly not all inclusive. Nevertheless, The Cinematic Tango will instantly become the standard work in English on which future scholarship builds.--Dennis West