The camera is focused on bellies. The imperfect bodies of old men and mature women. Flaccid arms listlessly pulling dilapidated sun-beds. All we can hear is the screech of metal zigzagging across a tiled floor. We are watching the opening scene of The Swamp (La ciénaga), the film that launched its young director, the Argentine Lucrecia Martel, to international fame in 2000. It takes a few minutes before we can work out what is going on: we can see a group of older people, some of them well into their declining years, sprawled on the ground, completely drunk. They are lying by a fetid, unattended swimming pool. The pool appears to be what justifies the title of the film, although it may also refer to the actual swamp where a group of youngsters practice their shooting over the putrid remains of a cow. Whichever it is, the title is undoubtedly symbolic of the existentialist feeling of stillness and tragic expectations that imbues the entire film.

As in other examples of what is now known as nuevo cine argentino (new Argentine cinema), there are none of the heroes or political martyrs common in films made in Argentina in the aftermath of the reestablishment of democracy in 1983. The preference for the explicit has been turned into an exploration of the everyday life; something also found in films such as Valentín (2003) by Alejandro Agresti, Historias mínimas (2002) by Carlos Sorín, or the early Pizza, Beer and Smokes (Pizza, birra y faso, 1998) by Adrián Caetano. What is special about Martel is her illustration of the inherent conflict between the generations manifest in daily life. Here, as in her second film, The Holy Girl (La niña santa, 2004), the worlds of adults and young people appear alienated. There is no contact between the two but for the usual formalities and painful suspicion, turning the young adults into little monsters and poor imitations of their already exhausted parents. No hope of change or improvement, no new wave – a nouvelle vague – to stir the static surface of the ever-muddy swimming pools. And yet…

There are more than 12,000 cinema students in Argentina today (more than in the whole of the European Union), and, as Sorín pointed out in a recent newspaper interview, 50 or 60 films are produced in Argentina every year for a total cost equivalent to that of a low-budget Hollywood movie. Many of these films achieve recognition in respected international film festivals. A similar level of output and international recognition is also characteristic of the cinema productions of other Latin-American countries, in particular Brazil and Mexico. In the Brazilian case we could cite for example the success (commercial as well as critical) of Central Station (Central do Brasil, 1998) by Walter Salles, together with films like City of God (Cidade de Deus, 2002) by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, and Mango Yellow (Amarelo manga, 2002) by Cláudio Assis, which revisit the socially excluded with a previously unheard of technical skill and narrative ability. Are we witnessing the effect of a new wave of directors and experimentalism until now unknown in Latin America?

It may be useful to remember that in 1959, when the term ‘nouvelle vague’ was widely used in France, the by-then famous Chabrol said that he himself was nothing but an invention of the weekly L’Express used to refer to a new generation of directors, and that there was no such thing as a new wave, but if indeed there was a new wave it was important to know how to swim. Perhaps the same can be said of this new generation of Latin-American directors, considering the repeated attempts to class them together and give them a unifying theme. A link has occasionally been found in the changed socio-political environment of Latin America. For example, Alfonso Cuarón – the Mexican director of films as diverse as Y tu mamá también and the global Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – has argued that the creative boom in Latin America is a result of the abolition of military dictatorships in the region. According to Cuarón, major cinematic movements emerge 15 years after major social changes have taken place. In the same way that Iranian cinema established itself 15 years after the fall of the Shah, Latin-American cinema would establish itself 15 years after the end of the cruel dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s.

Whether or not we agree with Cuaron’s thesis, the salient fact is that he favours the term ‘explosión’ to refer to recent cinematographic developments in the region. The use of the word explosión is neither new nor ingenuous. It is the Spanish equivalent of the English word ‘boom’, which has already been used to describe – or, perhaps better, to underline and endorse – the rapidly improving quality of Latin-American cultural output. Back in the 1960s, Latin-American literature underwent a boom that promoted to international acclaim writers who remain key figures in the field today, whether as role models or as examples to avoid.

Is Cuarón right? Is the current explosión a direct consequence of the rebirth of democracy in Latin America? It is revealing to compare the present political situation with that of the 1960s, when the boom in literature took place. The 1960s were synonymous with hope. Respected critics, such as Angel Rama, described that period in terms of characteristics enviable today: a large increase in the number of people pursuing university studies, and as a result a number of highly educated readers; creation or expansion of high-quality publishing institutions in Buenos Aires and Mexico City; and an expectation of social change in the wake of the Cuban revolution in 1959. It is clear that the current boom in Latin-American cinema is taking place in a very different environment. Times have changed. There have been frustrations (such as the famous Padilla affair in 1971), terror governments (Pinochet, Videla, Stroessner) and even a war (the Malvinas). Furthermore, new democracies with neo-liberal principles have led either to economic collapse (Argentina) or to a development process that takes advantage of social inequalities rather than correcting them (with the obvious examples of Mexico and Brazil, the latter the twelfth-largest economy of the world but at the same time fifth in the global ranking of social inequality).

Faced with this reality, the content of the new Latin American cinema is hardly surprising. In The Swamp as in others – in particular the remarkable Whisky (2004) by the Uruguayans Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll – we find not only both direct and indirect references to the Latin-American debacle, but also a thick, viscous atmosphere devoid of glamour. As the Uruguayan Onetti and the North American Faulkner have shown us in their novels, breakdown and deprivation are aesthetically richer than harmony and security, and Latin-American cinema lifts the veil of our apparently calm daily lives to expose the rotten and conflict-ridden social drama which lies hidden beneath.

Hence, in The Swamp the question is not simply that of the reciprocal hostility between parents and their children, but also the tensions present in other relationships, such as between men and women, or between those descended from Europeans and those descended from the native population. Martel disentangles these relationships with a wonderful choice of images and dialogue; a knowledge of the discourse between sexes and social classes so clear and sharp that it makes one wonder if the new Argentine cinema might be inspired by Manuel Puig and his (never finished) cinematographic project. Assis’s Mango Yellow,

on the other hand, moves beyond the powerful City of God (for which Meirelles has sometimes been accused of cosmetically enhancing the reality of Brazilian life), showing us a sordid Recife and mercilessly displaying a wide range of marginalised characters. The common rule for both Assis and Martel, despite formal differences, is the strict avoidance of clichés and any comforting redemption.

Do these common elements suggest the existence of a boom in the Latin-American cinema? Daniel Burman, director and winner of the Jury Grand Prix at the Berlin festival for The Lost Embrace (El abrazo partido, 2003), has distanced himself from this idea, at least as far as Argentina is concerned. Rather than a boom, a term that simply recognises the phenomenon and explains nothing, one should, according to Burman, speak of areas of resistance.

In fact, the boom has not arrived out of nowhere. Rather, it is the outcome both of an established tradition of cinema that has had several peaks over the last few decades and either public financial support (Brazil) or promotional funds deriving from cinema takings (Argentina).

 

Nevertheless, and contrary to Burman’s views, understanding this phenomenon as a boom appears to go along with the rapid internationalisation of Latin-American cinema.

For the French, Japanese or Australian viewer, the choice of an Argentine film is most likely to be based on a preference for diversity – a rejection of the lowest-common-denominator productions of Hollywood – rather than a thorough understanding of the history and the cinema history of a particular nation. They might equally well have chosen a Korean, Mexican or Iranian film.

In any case, if there is some kind of meshing that enables Latin-American cinema to become international, it must pay the same price that Pascale Casanova (La République mondiale des Lettres, 1999) suggests has been paid by periferical literature to achieve the Parisian recognition, namely that transcending national frontiers comes at the expense of a certain a-historicism and involves openly discounting the local factors that led to a particular work. This would also explain the use of broad and vague but easily understood terms such as boom and new generation.

In the meantime, to paraphrase Chabrol, the fundamental thing is swimming (and sailing), either in the cinema or, better yet, in ever-robust Latin America.