Documentalismo and the Transnational: Argentine Political Filmmaking, Solidarity, and Social Movements, 1989–2004

This paper examines the period 1989-2004, when Argentina witnessed an explosion of grassroots activist documentary film production, termed documentalismo. It argues that Argentina was home to a unique and transnational technology of place during this period, described as a long transition to democracy, that favored the advance of cinema, and in particular documentary filmmakers, in the political arena. It argues that the transnational dimensions of this advance, specifically the discursive politics used to frame progress during the transition, resulted in a privileged role for political cinema in meaning-making during the long transition.

New forms of production and diffusion, coupled with advances in regulation and the contours of a new global marketplace, turned the act of filmmaking into a form of bottom-up political activism particularly suited to simultaneously emerging social movements and to the political projects of what would be called Argentina’s “new left”. Left-leaning film activists and even leftist political parties began to use film to intervene in a range of appeals for social justice and for reform to neo-liberal economic policies. They simultaneously looked to film to help establish and develop solidarity networks abroad.

Argentina’s post-dictatorship period has been portrayed in contemporary historical accounts as a narrative of the power of art to speak truth to silences and ruptures in the official historical record. The visual and literary arts are credited with crafting new collective understandings of the recent past and humanitarian subjectivities highly compatible with the imagined role of transnational political organizing. Thus, documentalismo as a social and political phenomenon must be examined, as this paper attempts to do, through the lens of the rather the multiple and complex processes of cultural production and reproduction of transnational discourses of solidarity, human rights, and citizenship which informed this new set of historical sensibilities in the aftermath of the dictatorship.