Social Science Research Council

"Screening the Transition: Cultural Politics and the Argentine Film Industry at the End of the Dirty War, 1983-1989"

My current project aims to uncover the way in which the Raul Alfonsín government, the first democratically-elected leadership to follow the 1976-1983 military regime in Argentina, capitalized on the importance of the film community, its intellectuals and its product in generating an image of a recuperated and re-democratized nation. In order to do so, this work will examine the new legal codes and policies regulating film production during the early transition, the reorientation of institutions governing and subsidizing the industry, the internal debates of film producers regarding their involvement with the state, and the public and international responses to the films made during this period. A chapter of the final work will be devoted to comparison of these processes with similar phenomena in Brazil, where a military regime during roughly the same period, alongside a film industry of roughly the same size and radicalization, gave way to very different results during its own transition to democracy. I will split my time in the next year between Argentina and Brazil.