The Political Violence of the 1970s in Recent Argentine Cinema: Strategies for the Reaffectivisation of the Past in Rojo (Benjamín Naishtat, 2018)

Abstract

There is a renewed momentum in twenty-first-century Argentine film to represent the 1970s in productions that, in one way or another, exhume the alliance between auteur and commercial cinemas, developed during the restoration of democracy in 1983, in order to think “differently” about the ‘70s or to recover the ‘70s of “the common people”. This essay sets out to examine the particular way political violence is expressed in the film Rojo [Red] through mise-en-scène choices associated with the aesthetics of certain popular cinemas of the 1970s and with the central role of romantic ballads during the period depicted. Attention to the use of romantic song allows us to understand the way the work constructs specific affective and cognitive appeals between the figurative diegetic universe and the spectators’ cultural memory, and to suggest that it is precisely in the territory of the family that a type of violence is engendered that would later be replicated in other social structures.