Documenting Urban Fictions in Contemporary Argentine Film: Notes on Pablo Trapero’s El bonaerense
James R. Cisneros
2009
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Semantic Scholar
Key Takeaway Key Takeaway: Contemporary Argentine films like El bonaerense, Buenos Aires viceversa, and Bar "El Chino" explore urban spaces, attempting to understand and make sense of the city's transformations under neo-liberal capitalism.
Abstract
Buenos Aires holds a privileged place in contemporary Argentine film. Its protagonists roam the city streets under the sign of discovery or survival, evoking the capital’s monumental past and the smooth spaces of a new global presence. These cityscapes are constitutive of narrative meaning, chronotopes that open sites where fortunes change and paths intersect, making accessible a city whose recent transformations have been sudden and remain indecipherable. The characters decode the city as they move across it, interpreting its signs as they search or wander, translating the urban landscape that conditions their possible movements and encounters. Films as different as Pablo Trapero’s El bonaerense (2002), Alejandro Agresti’s Buenos Aires viceversa (1996) and Daniel Burak’s Bar “El Chino” (2003) open historic and affective trajectories through urban space, attempting to figure out the city, to figure the city, to find a figure that will make Buenos Aires legible after the multiple physical and civic changes arising with neo-liberalism.