Concentric and representative narratives in Latin American auteur cinema: Buenos Aires viceversa, the film and its symbolic resources

Abstract

As a contribution to the research on auteur cinema in Latin-American’s countries, reinforcing the value of critical film analysis and exploring the mixtures that took place in the transition from documentary to fiction in the New Latin American Cinema. The film Buenos Aires Viceversa (Agresti, 1996) manages to construct a represented past that offers unequivocal symbolic resources about Argentina. The methodology employed is structured in three stages: a contextual review of the literature, followed by a documentation work that studies how the analysis of specialised critics has dealt with the representation. Finally, Buenos Aires Viceversa is analysed using a model that situates the work between the creative corpus and the audience. As a result, the film is reaffirmed as a precursor text of Latin American audio-visual trends, with a concentric narrative structure: fragmentations in representing the city (place); the children of the dictatorship missing people (characters), who, without having a factual memory (history), they are in an age of questioning and participate in the process of offering the audience concrete forms of the abstract ideas that the author chooses to project.