Default cinema: Queering economic crisis in Argentina and beyond

TY - JOUR

T1 - Default cinema

T2 - Queering economic crisis in Argentina and beyond

AU - Galt, Rosalind

PY - 2013/3

Y1 - 2013/3

N2 - The last two Cannes Palme d'Or winners suggest a battle in contemporary world cinema between a heteronormative aesthetic (Terence Malick) and a queer sensibility (Apichatpong Weerasethakul). I argue that directors like Apichatpong and Lucretia Martel exemplify a significant mode of queer worldliness. Whereas world cinema as a concept is often considered in terms of geopolitics, this focus can obscure the ways that recent queer cinema troubles categories of transnational meaning, staging refusals of the neoliberal world order. To propose a queer world cinema does not simply replace categories of geopolitics with those of sexuality but demands that we read these categories as mutually imbricated. This essay locates queer critique in the context of New Argentine Cinema, a movement legible within discourses of world cinema and the global economic crisis. Scholars have analyzed the links between the NAC and the Argentine crisis of 2001, but Diego Lerman's Tan de repente/Suddenly (2002) is barely mentioned in this work: its queer narrative is invisible in the context of ‘crisis cinema’. Here, I argue that queer textuality provides a radical mode of articulating economic refusal. The film refuses the common NAC strategies of neo-neorealist representation and of allegory (in Edelman's terms, a queer refusal of meaning). Instead, I analyze it in terms of slowness, non-productivity and queer affect. Finally, I argue that Tan de repente presents a default cinema: a cinema of queer refusal that emerges as a gesture of non-productive dissent in an age of sovereign default.

AB - The last two Cannes Palme d'Or winners suggest a battle in contemporary world cinema between a heteronormative aesthetic (Terence Malick) and a queer sensibility (Apichatpong Weerasethakul). I argue that directors like Apichatpong and Lucretia Martel exemplify a significant mode of queer worldliness. Whereas world cinema as a concept is often considered in terms of geopolitics, this focus can obscure the ways that recent queer cinema troubles categories of transnational meaning, staging refusals of the neoliberal world order. To propose a queer world cinema does not simply replace categories of geopolitics with those of sexuality but demands that we read these categories as mutually imbricated. This essay locates queer critique in the context of New Argentine Cinema, a movement legible within discourses of world cinema and the global economic crisis. Scholars have analyzed the links between the NAC and the Argentine crisis of 2001, but Diego Lerman's Tan de repente/Suddenly (2002) is barely mentioned in this work: its queer narrative is invisible in the context of ‘crisis cinema’. Here, I argue that queer textuality provides a radical mode of articulating economic refusal. The film refuses the common NAC strategies of neo-neorealist representation and of allegory (in Edelman's terms, a queer refusal of meaning). Instead, I analyze it in terms of slowness, non-productivity and queer affect. Finally, I argue that Tan de repente presents a default cinema: a cinema of queer refusal that emerges as a gesture of non-productive dissent in an age of sovereign default.

KW - Argentina

KW - film

KW - economic crisis

KW - queer

U2 - 10.1093/screen/hjs068

DO - 10.1093/screen/hjs068

M3 - Article

SN - 0036-9543

VL - 54

SP - 62

EP - 81

JO - Screen

JF - Screen

IS - 1

ER -