2 - The Struggle over Representation: Confronting Argentineans with Their Share in the Crisis

Summary

Benedict Anderson's famous definition of the ‘nation’ characterises it as an ‘imagined community’, or a symbolic construction whose history can be traced within modernity. Anderson's view stands in sharp contrast with earlier, and some current, notions of nation (and nationalism) which have taken it to be an ‘essential’, natural given whose distinct identity is shared by a unique group of people and determined either by a single criterion such as language, ethnicity, common territory or history, or by a combination of them. During modernity, national identities tended to prevail over other forms of cultural identification. However, with the acceleration of movements of people, capital and electronic communications, globalisation has provided the setting for a new crisis where essentialist notions of nationhood have been challenged by new constructions based upon the increased juxtaposing, mixing and meeting of cultures. In a context of crisis and instability, such as the one Argentineans lived through during the period under consideration, society had two options: either hold on to outdated views of Argentine national culture, or abandon the old idea of the nation's unity. The first option meant avoiding facing the fact that Argentineans as a society were responsible for the troubled present in which they lived, a present of violence and exclusion of difference and the ‘other’, in which many chose to forget the past. The second option required embracing diversity and difference, accepting the shared responsibility and reflecting about one's own actions. Several films made at the turn of the twenty-first century focused on Argentina's high levels of conflict to tackle themes of racial difference, class conflict and social dissolution while remaining skeptical of the possibility of reconstructing national identity for the better – regardless of what that might have meant specifically.

Released between April 2001 and September 2002, in the months when the crisis was more acute, Bolivia (Adrián Caetano, 2002), La ciénaga (The Swamp, Lucrecia Martel, 2001) and El bonaerense (Pablo Trapero, 2002) capture the ambivalence surrounding Argentine class and cultural identity. One important characteristic shared by the films, and one of their merits too, is that they represent the crisis not as a short-lived experience, but as resulting from notions of identity that are too limiting. Although each film was made by young directors who were widely considered as auteurs, there are noticeable differences between the three films.