12/17/2023 0 Comments La revancha peliculaIt is this process of discrediting that forms the film’s narrative arc. La historia oficial ends with resolute uncertainty: while Alicia and Roberto’s marriage appears to be over and Gaby seems to have been reconnected with her disappeared family, the lies that held the family together have been just as discredited as the official (hi)story. Only sons of bitches, thieves, accomplices, and the oldest of my boys went up!” What comes up must come down, however, as the connections Roberto used to procure anything from business deals to his adoptive daughter are disintegrating in his clutched hands. In fact, his father José bitterly argues that “the entire country is going down. ![]() Having benefited greatly from social, political, and economic cronyism, as well as access to American capital and so-called neoliberal reforms, Roberto and his family are depicted in La historia oficial as being (willing or willfully ignorant) accomplices to a government that systematically oppresses its own people. in Economics, her husband”-frantically attempts to avoid being crushed by the fall of the military apparatus. The pater familias Roberto (Héctor Alterio)- described in the film’s script as “45 years old, Dr. ![]() A history teacher in a local boys’ school, Alicia (Aleandro) begins to question the origin story of her five-year-old adopted daughter Gaby (Analia Castro). The tremors of social and political change are felt in the film by its emblematic family, the Ibáñez. La historia oficial takes place in March 1983 during a period of transition in which the military government prepared for democratic elections that would be eventually won on October 30 by Raúl Alfonsín. And even though teaching cinema within the distinct contexts of a language classroom (or, more specifically, that of a conversation course) and a content one is quite different, I have found that teaching La historia oficial has posed two very specific problems stemming from the film’s narrative: how to confront history and how to approach melodrama. Perhaps it is that sense of obligation, or perhaps it is a desire to want to do justice to a film representing horrible injustice, but each time I have assigned La historia oficial, something does not quite fit. Peter Bogdanovich, 1985)-and its influence-numerous films of the New Argentine Cinema, for example, represent different aspects of the Guerra Sucia and its sociohistorical legacy- La historia oficial is a film you feel obliged to teach. Eliseo Subiela, 1985), La historia oficial formed part of the first wave of Argentine films to confront the state terrorism (strongly supported by the United States) of the mid-1970s and early-1980s. Depicting a woman’s growing realization of her complicity in the horrors suffered by her compatriots, La historia oficial was the first Latin American film to win an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (1986). Because of its numerous awards-Norma Aleandro, who played its protagonist, shared the Best Actress Award at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival with Cher for her work on Mask (dir. Héctor Olivera, 1983), and Hombre mirando al sudeste ( Man Looking Southeast. Adolfo Aristarain, 1981), No habr á má s penas ni olvido ( Funny Dirty Little War. Along others like Tiempo de revancha ( Time for Revenge. Luis Puenzo, 1985) has been the most problematic for me. Of the films I have taught several times, perhaps Luis Puenzo’s La historia oficial ( The Official Story. Teaching cinema, unsurprisingly, poses its own unique challenges (and rewards) within such a fragmented discipline whose undergraduate majors and minors are typically interested first in language acquisition, second in culture, broadly defined, and third, I hope, in a subfield like Latin American cinema. We may still teach Spanish (as well as several other languages, depending on the department), but our upper-division courses look little like those of the past, even those of my own increasingly less recent undergraduate experience in the late-1990s and early-2000s. ![]() Like so many other disciplines, mine-which once was referred to as Spanish but now takes on so many permutations sometimes I find it difficult to think of it as anything more than an afterimage-is no longer as defined as it once was. On any given day, I may teach graffiti and a radio drama, a novel and a video game, or a few poems and a film in my language and content courses. Drawing on my own interdisciplinary intellectual formation, I teach a wide range of texts of cultural production in my courses.
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