State University of New York Press The Projected Nation: Argentine Cinema and the Social Margins (SUNY series in Latin American Cinema)

The Projected Nation examines the representation of rural spaces and urban margins in Argentine cinema from the 1910s to the present. The literary and visual culture of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries formulated a spatial imaginary--often articulated as an opposition between civilization and barbarism, or its inversion--into which the cinema intervened. As the twentieth century progressed, the new medium integrated these ideas with its own images in various ways. At times cinema limited itself to reproducing inherited representations that reassure the viewer that all is well in the nation, while at others it powerfully reformulated them by filming spaces and peoples previously excluded from the national culture and left behind in the nation's modernizing process. Matt Losada accounts for historical events, technological factors, and the politics of film form and viewing in assessing a selection of works ranging from mass-marketed cinema to the political avant-garde, and from the canonical to the nearly unknown. Review Matt Losada's The Projected Nation offers an original, complex, and historiographically comprehensive reading of one of Latin America's most prolifically studied film cultures. Throughout the entire volume, arguments are tightly constructed and systematically supported with the most pertinent, fitting, and, at times, erudite references. -- Revista de Estudios Hispánicos Matt Losada's survey study of the social geographies of Argentine cinema is a truly impressive achievement. Combining anthological knowledge of Argentina's cinematic canon with a solid command of film-analytical method as well and a deft capacity to put close-readings of individual works within wider contexts, including the shifts in production and distribution these respond to, The Projected Nation will become a major reference on the history of Argentine cinema. -- Hispanofila This is an ambitious work that views the spatial imaginary in a full century of film development as informed by national culture and politics. -- Marvin D'Lugo, coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema About the Author Matt Losada is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Kentucky.