Department of Spanish and Portuguese

 

Post Dictatorship Argentine Cinema /
The Cinematic City

 

Class Three: Memory Machines and Cybercities

(Hombre mirando al sudeste, dir. Eliseo Subiela, 1986)

Moebius (Möbius Strip), dir. Gustavo Mosquera R. and students of the Universidad de Cine, 1996

La sonámbula (The Sleepwalker), dir. Fernando Spiner, script by Ricardo Piglia, 1998

 

Some quotations to consider:

 

‘Nosotros pensamos en la idea de una película de ciencia ficción en el sentido de que hay una idea, una especulación sobre el presente que se traslada al futuro. Tomamos la problemática de la memoria, las cosas que se recuerdan o no en la Argentina, y lo convertimos en un universo en el futuro, donde ese es el problema que define la vida. Quiero decir que en última instancia la ciencia ficción no es otra cosa que usar el futuro para hablar del presente. Entonces la película es una película de ciencia ficción porque funciona de esa manera, porque está puesta en el futuro, y por lo tanto, como pasa con la ciencia ficción, es muy política (la ciencia ficción es un género muy político casi de manera natural, porque se trata siempre de sociedades donde se está produciendo siempre algún tipo de conflicto).’

            Ricardo Piglia, Entrevista - http://www.mabuse.com.ar/mabuse/piglia.htm

 

‘Metz argues that 'cinema is a technique of the imaginary' [...]. However, the scope of today's (counter)revolution [...] emerges from a reversal of these very terms: the imaginary is a technique of cinema, or rather, of mediation generally. Such a reversal de-ontologizes the unconscious and further suggests that the unconscious is cinema's product [...]’ p.64

            Jonathan L. Beller, "Kino-I, Kino-world" in Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed., The Visual Culture Reader

 

‘por supuesto nosotros pensamos que la mujer era un mito, por eso le pusimos Eva Rey, que es una especie de Edipo Rey, peronista, que remitiera de una manera tangencial a Eva Perón’

            Ricardo Piglia http://www.mabuse.com.ar/mabuse/piglia.htm

 

‘[T]he most terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narratives with a different logic of repression, which we need to understand for our survival. […] Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden […].’

       Haraway "Cyborg Manifesto" (150-51)

 

‘Without the reorganization of the visual, the massive, global immiseration that currently exists could not be effected. The postmodern distortions, which are actually spatial, temporal and corporeal transformations, and hence new forms of social relations, are created and sustained through a generalized extension of the capacity to mediate vision and to prolong the interface between human beings and social machines.’

         Bellner, p. 78

 

 

Bibliography:

 

Avelar, Idelber. 1999. The Untimely Present (Durham and London: Duke University Press).

Beller, Jonathan L. 2002. ‘Kino-I, Kino-World: Notes on the Cinematic Mode of Production’, in Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed. The Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge),  pp. 60-85.

Bioy Casares, Adolfo. 1940. La invención de Morel (Buenos Aires: Alianza Emecé).

Blade Runner. 1982. Directed by Ridley Scott (USA), 35mm/Colour, 117mins.

Borges, Jorge Luis. 1946. Historia universal de la infamia (Buenos Aires: Emecé).

Castells, Manuel. 1996. ‘The Space of Flows’, The Rise of the Network Society (The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture), Vol. 1 (Malden MA and Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 376-428.

Clarke, David B., ed. 1997. The Cinematic City (London: Routledge).

García Canclini, Néstor. 1995. Consumidores y ciudadanos: conflictos multiculturales de la globalización (México: Grijalbo).

Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press).

Haraway. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books).

—. 1991. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, pp. 149-81.

—. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York and London: Routledge).

Hoffmann, E.T.A. 1816 [1988]. Der Sandmann (Berlin: De Gruyter).

Hombre mirando al sudeste. 1986. Directed by Eliseo Subiela (Argentina: Cinequannon), 35mm/Colour, 100mins.

Kantaris, Geoffrey. 2005. ‘Holograms and Simulacra: Bioy Casares, Subiela, Piglia’, in Evelyn Fishburn and Eduardo L. Ortiz, eds., Science and the Creative Imagination in Latin America (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas), pp. 175-89.

—. 2009. ‘Buenos Aires 2010: Memory Machines and Cybercities in Two Argentine Science Fiction Films’, in Andrew Webber et al, eds, Memory Culture and the Contemporary City: Building Sites (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 191-207.

Lefebvre, Henri. 1974. La Production de l’espace (Paris: Anthropos).

Luppi, Nacho, ed. 1998. ‘Ricardo Piglia habla de La sonámbula’, Mabuse. http://www.mabuse.com.ar/mabuse/piglia.htm. Accessed 16 February 2006.

Metropolis. 1927. Directed by Fritz Lang (Germany: Universum Film A.G.), 35mm/BW, 153mins.

Page, Joanna. 2004. ‘Writing as Resistance in Ricardo Piglia's La ciudad ausente’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 81:3 (May 2004), 343-60.

Person, Lawrence. 1998. ‘Notes Towards a Postcyberpunk Manifesto’, Nova Express 16. http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/notes_toward_a_postcyberpunk_manifesto.html. Accessed 22 October 2006.

Piglia, Ricardo. 1992. La ciudad ausente (Buenos Aires: Seix Barral).

Shiel, Mark and Tony Fitzmaurice, eds. 2001. Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (Oxford: Blackwell).

La sonámbula. 1998. Directed by Fernando Spiner, script by Fabián Bielinsky and Ricardo Piglia (Argentina), 35mm/BW/Colour, 107mins.

Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Auguste. 1886. L’Ève future (Lausanne: Éditions de l’Age d’homme).

Wells, H.G. 1896. The Island of Dr. Moreau (New York: Garden City Publishing).