A crisis doesn’t always give way to new scenarios: About Otro país. Muerte y transfiguración del Nuevo Cine Argentino by Nicolás Prividera.

Abstract

In Otro país, Prividera makes a genealogy that shows how the Nuevo Cine Argentino (the one from the 90s), is not an ex-nihilo creation, as it pretends to be, but understandable as a historical product, the result of political historical traces and the disputes that are given inside the cinematographic and cultural fields. Taking into account these historical traces, Prividera reports the ahistorical presentism that the Nuevo Cine Argentino portrays, and that is a common way to experience time during neoliberalism; a “today” without a “yesterday” or a “tomorrow”.
The way that Prividera understands history allows him to think about contingency and, thereby, find a bent that borders on with the manifiesto: the author doesn’t only explain which type of cinema and criticism takes place today, but also, which type could -and should- take place. The book is a call to transform the current cinema that claims to be separated from its own political and social context and that, therefore, becomes conservative. His proposal is in line with his diagnosis: given the depletion of the Nuevo Cine Argentino, and the absence of something new that takes its place, Prividera points out the path to be followed.