Argentine women filmmakers have made significant contributions to the film industry since the mid-1990s.1 Despite the fortified and professionalized bond between women and cinema in Argentina, academic research still continues to be patchy.2 This book fills in parts of such lacunae, as it draws more nuanced attention to the place of affect in the films of Argentina’s most prominent, prolific, and internationally reputable women directors. In a recent and illuminating piece, film scholar B. Ruby Rich reaffirms the need for deepening scholarly “conversations” about Latin American women directors’ prolific work. Women directors and producers, explains Rich, have engendered “a new expanded Latin American cinema shaped by female experiences—and reconfigured to give as much importance to the home as to the street and as much attention to the subtle signifiers of lives lived under the surface as to the headline-making gestures in the public sphere.”3 Affective Moments in the Films of Martel, Carri, and Puenzo adds to this conversation—without sealing off categorically these cinematographic works under “women’s cinema”4 in an outmodedly essentialist spirit—by examining these filmmakers’ appeals to affect . While each of these filmmakers has individually received scholarly attention to different degrees, Albertina Carri, Lucrecia Martel, and Lucía Puenzo have not been juxtaposed in relation to each other regarding the manifestation of affect, especially as it serves as their shared aesthetic denominator for capturing the social.
Critics such as B. Ruby Rich, Deborah Martin, Deborah Shaw, Paulina Bettendorff, Agustina Pérez Rial, Parvati Nair, Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla, and Constanza Burucúa have demonstrated the ways in which Argentine women filmmakers —and those from other Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American contexts—have faced and resisted cultural neglect.5 Rich testifies to the overt dismissals of directors such as María Luisa Bemberg, Suzana Amaral, María Novaro, and Lúcia Murat—all of whom either had already won their first awards or had just produced debuts that quickly proved to have lasting impact on Latin American cinema.6 Bettendorff and Pérez Rial explain in Tránsitos de la mirada: mujeres que hacen cine (2014) that in more contemporary contexts of Argentina “las mujeres … en este período, que va desde el regreso de la democracia hasta mediados de la década del noventa, enfrentaron las dificultades de un momento en que filmar una película en Argentina no aseguraba su estreno” (“women … in this period, which goes from the democratic return until the mid-1990s, faced difficulties for awhile whereby making a film in Argentina did not guarantee its debut”) (30).7 It is not surprising that such lacunae in scholarly inquiry have recently given rise to collaborative volumes on Latin American and Spanish women’s filmmaking, such as Hispanic and Lusophone Women Filmmakers: Theory, Practice and Difference (2013) and Latin American Women Filmmakers: Productions, Politics, Poetics (2017).
While underscoring the heterogeneous productions from the Hispanic and Lusophone world in Hispanic and Lusophone Women Filmmakers, Nair and Gutiérrez-Albilla exemplify the ways in which the “Portuguese, Spanish, and Latin American women filmmakers are still culturally undervalued on the basis of their gender identity” (5). Yet such cultural mistreatments have failed to hinder the steady proliferation of women filmmakers and their influence over the last two decades. Beginning in the 1980s, there was a literary boom of women writers, poets, and essayists across Latin America in general and Argentina in particular. In the first decades of the twenty-first century there was another remarkable boom in women’s contributions to the filmmaking industry. This persistent and heterogeneous proliferation continues to burgeon through feature, short, documentary, and documentary-fiction films by other women filmmakers such as María Victoria Menis, Verónica Chen, Gabriela David, Sandra Gugliotta, Paula Hernández, Ana Katz, Lorena Muñoz, María Teresa Costantini, Celina Murga, Ana Poliak, Vanessa Ragone, Julia Solomonoff, Natalia Meta, Carmen Guarini, Anahí Berneri, and others. According to Bettendorff and Pérez Rial, from 2000 to 2005 alone “se pasó de una película estrenada y dirigida por una mujer, Acrobacias del corazón, de Teresa Costantini, en 2000, a ocho films dirigidos por mujeres y tres codirigidos en 2005” (“a shift has been made in 2000 from seeing one film, Acrobatics of the Heart, [which was] directed by a woman, Teresa Costantini, to eight films directed and three co-directed by women in 2005”) (34). Building on Hispanic and Lusophone Women Filmmakers, Martin and Shaw , in Latin American Women Filmmakers, also emphasize the increased “prominence” of Latin American women directors since the early 2000s, particularly underscoring the shared “shift from a public and overt politics to a politics of the personal and the private often found in their work” (1).
Argentine women’s filmmaking continues to broaden its presence beyond the cultural milieu in Argentina, thus simultaneously creating an unquestionable need for further qualitative critical engagement with their filmic narratives. This book builds on these insightful treatises by privileging the filmographies of Martel , Carri, and Puenzo, particularly in light of their aesthetic treatment of affect . More specifically, I analyze the ways in which the tensions between affects and emotions, albeit differently manifested in each film, spotlight not solely what Rich calls “interiority [as] an altered formal engagement,” or what Joanna Page calls “retreat into the private sphere,” but also these filmmakers’ subtle and politically charged reimaginations of interpersonal realms, thus “alter[ing] the imaginary”8 from within their contemporary contexts.
The analysis of these women directors’ feature-length films takes place in relation to a number of pivotal sociopolitical moments in Argentina: Carlos Menem’s neoliberal reforms since the mid-1990s, the crude aftermath of the 2001 economic crisis, the rise and fall of kirchnerismo (2003–2015), and Mauricio Macri’s neoconservative victory in 2015. These historical moments inform the present analysis spasmodically, especially if we aesthetically align some of these filmmakers with those who initially viewed the NAC as the “cine de captura, que funciona a partir de lo que encuentra y de lo que le sale al paso” (“cinema of allure, which functions on the basis of what it encounters and stumbles upon”).9 The juxtaposition of these three award-winning Argentine women directors and their most prominent feature-length films focuses on a close examination of Martel’s La mujer sin cabeza/ The Headless Woman (2008), La niña santa/ The Holy Girl (2004), and La ciénaga/ The Swamp (2001); Puenzo’s Wakolda: El médico alemán /Wakolda: The German Doctor (2013), El niño pez/The Fish Child (2009), and XXY (2007); and Carri’...