Pablo Trapero and the Great Secret of Argentina

El Clan  is a  flawed movie in many respects: some incomprehensible music choices, poor political contextualization for non-Argentine viewers, confusing flashbacks (or forwards, who knows?? ) and much more besides.

However, it’s saved by the fact that it throws light  on the Great Secret of Argentina: the persistence of the deep state regardless of what government is in power (an amalgam of security forces, spies, elements of peronism, elements of the legal system; all working in collaboration with ordinary criminals) and it also hints at the pervasiveness of surveillance. 

Its other virtue is its treatment of the issue of class both in the way it satirizes the credulity and stupidity of the San Isidro  cheto, rugbier class and signals the tensions in its relations with those a couple of of rungs below them who feel entitled to the same privileges but know they will never enjoy them.

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Escuela Normal

Extraordinarily good, Wiseman type, fly on the waller. School as a place for everything except teaching and learning.  La sombra de Sarmiento  saluda la película, pero llora lo que ha pasado con su visión.

Tous au Larzac

It’s a really good documentary: attractive, intelligent, small farmers talking about their decade long and ultimately successful struggle to hold on to their land and stop it being acquired by the French state to expand a military base.

One gripe: there’s lots of talk about justice and as the years went by the farmers gradually came to see their struggle as part of a broader anti-globalization movement. The only problem with this is that it’s hard to think of a sustainable vision of  global economic  justice that includes subsidies for French small farmers raising sheep and growing a bit of tillage  on a rock strewn plateau.

Django sin cadenas ESPAGUETIS A LA TARANTINO, por Ricardo Pineda

Ideas de Babel

“No conocerás los hechos hasta que hayas visto la ficción”. Dicho eslogan es atribuido al afiche promocional de la película Pulp Fiction (1994) y el mensaje se ajusta al tipo de filmografía que viene elaborando su mismo realizador, Quentin Jerome Tarantino, desde que alteró los capítulos de la Europa nazi con Bastardos sin gloria (2009) y ahora el tema de la esclavitud del siglo XIX en Django sin cadenas (2012), que ya se exhibe en los cines de Venezuela.

Mientras Steven Spielberg se apega con exactitud a los eventos políticos que condujeron a la emancipación, en Lincoln; Kathryn Bigelow expone al detalle todo el engorroso trabajo de inteligencia para dar con el paradero de Osama bin Laden, en La noche más oscura y Ben Affleck recrea un verídico y desclasificado rescate en Irán con la ayuda de productores hollywoodenses, en Argo; Tarantino va en dirección opuesta.

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Tierra de los Padres: Fatherland

1.

An ensayo nacional.

2.

A horror film. The living dead don’t have to return as they have never gone away.

3.

A gothic slasher.  Jets of blood.

4.

The central, clearly  expressed ideas of Argentine history are the desires to kill and to die.

5.

The maudlin worship of the eternal leader.

6.

Instead of trying to awake from the nightmare of history, we want to  stay asleep and repeat the nightmare with ourselves in the role of the just and progressive killers.

7.

La Argentina no cambió ni tiene posibilidades de cambiarse. This is it.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2044064/