Imagofagia

Un lugar en común: estética y política en la trasposición al cine de "Las tierras blancas" (1959)

2025-09-15T21:55:03-03:00

El artículo reconstruye las condiciones de posibilidad de una afinidad estética entre Hugo del Carril –una figura “estrella” del mundo del espectáculo que fue politizándose en vínculo con el peronismo– y Juan José Manauta, escritor regionalista ligado al Partido Comunista argentino. En 1959 se estrenó la película Las tierras blancas dirigida, producida y protagonizada por Hugo del Carril, en base al guión adaptado de la novela homónima publicada por Juan José Manauta en 1956. La historia narra la vida de un pueblo rural, signada por la pobreza y las injusticias sociales, con un final movilizador en el que muere el niño, protagonista de la novela, llamado Odiseo. La película desarrolló una narrativa con elecciones estéticas en las que podían coincidir ambas ideologías; en un diálogo que ya se había iniciado con Las aguas bajan turbias (1952) basada en el libro de Alfredo Varela El río oscuro y continuó en el film Una cita con la vida (1958) basada en el libro de Bernardo Verbitsky Calles de tango, transposiciones mediadas por el guionista barcelonés Eduardo Borrás. Una hipótesis del artículo es que la afinidad que posibilitó el trabajo conjunto se sostuvo en una serie de presupuestos compartidos en torno a la mirada sobre la ruralidad argentina, sobre la explotación de los trabajadores y la denuncia de las violencias y miserias padecidas por los pueblos del interior del país.

El El octavo infierno: Discovery of a Copy and Approaches to a Lost Film by René Mugica

2025-08-12T07:53:39-03:00

This article reconstructs the history of El octavo infierno (René Mugica, 1964), an Argentinean film whose circulation was practically forgotten and whose copies were considered lost in its country of origin, until the recent detection of a 35 mm positive copy preserved in a foreign film archive. Based on archival materials, including the film itself, its production and reception are contextualized, highlighting its singularities from shooting to international distribution. The loss of the film and the location of the copy are also addressed, opening up new lines of research.

La usurpación ideológica: representación y propaganda en "Dicen que soy comunista" (1951)

2025-10-21T05:29:58-03:00

Dicen que soy comunista (Alejandro Galindo, 1951), co-produced by RKO and Estudios Churubusco, stands as the most significant example of the anti-communist film policy promoted by the United States and integrated into the modernizing and pro-capitalist project of Miguel Alemán’s government. Starring Adalberto Martínez Resortes, the film blends political comedy and film noir to represent a false communist party functioning as a criminal organization. This qualitative study analyzes the ideological representation of the communist group and the ideological discourse articulated by its author. Through a formal-discursive analysis of the scenes featuring the leaders, following Van Dijk’s framework, it examines mise-en scène and dialogues in constructing a corrupt elite that manipulates ideology as a façade. The labyrinthine set design and the reformist figure of Gildardo Molina embody the ideological roles: the State restores order, while communism appears as a moral and political usurpation.

"Cézanne y yo": cine y pintura en una biográfica fílmica de artista

2024-10-09T10:04:35-03:00

This article explores the sets of intermedial images that appear in the film Cézanne and I (Cézanne et moi, 2015) directed by Danièle Thompson. In particular, it examines how Cézanne's work and that of his contemporaries is filmed. It also pays special attention to the strategies developed by the director to dissociate herself from the conventions of films dedicated to explore the lives and works of artists active during the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe. Along these lines, the article also pays attention to the links between 19th century French literature and painting and their relationship with cinema.

El cine en los pliegues de la historia, de M. Laura Lattanzi Vizzolini

2026-03-11T13:14:04-03:00

Sobre M. Laura Lattanzi Vizzolini, El cine en los pliegues de la historia. Santiago de Chile: laFuga & Metales Pesados, 2025, 77 pp., ISBN: 978-956-6426-04-2.

De pícaros y chantas: una historia del estereotipo en el cine argentino, de Lucía Rodríguez Riva

2026-03-30T15:58:21-03:00

Sobre Lucía Rodríguez Riva. De pícaros y chantas: una historia del estereotipo en el cine argentino. Buenos Aires: AsAECA, 2025, 156 pp., ISBN: 978-987-48297-3-3.

El cine de Lucrecia Martel, de Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha, Julia Kratje y Paul R. Marchant (comps.)

2026-03-15T11:06:27-03:00

Sobre Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha, Julia Kratje, Paul R. Marchant (comps.). El cine de Lucrecia Martel. Ciudad de Buenos Aires: Futurock, 2025, 283pp., ISBN: 978-631-91170-5-9

The Poetics of Lucía Seles' Cinema

2025-03-04T12:35:17-03:00

This article aims to critically approach the audiovisual phenomenon of Lucía Seles. Drawing on Shklovski’s (1916) concept of defamiliarization, we will examine how tetralogía del odio desencadenada—as Seles refers to her four Tennis Complex films—frees objects, situations, and cinema itself from the automatism of daily life, revealing the world in a different way. This is achieved through a cinema of poetry (Pasolini, 1970), employing repetition and improvisation—evident in performances and the printed texts on the screen—that shape the filmmaker’s authorial imprint.

The Documentary 35 and Single:

2025-06-16T21:25:15-03:00

This article analyzes the short film 35 and Single (2013), by Paula Schargorodsky, focusing on the relationships between memory, intericonicity, and female subjectivity. It proposes a reading of the documentary as an autobiographical essay that reinscribes personal experiences within a network of culturally shared images related to gender, affection, and individual fulfillment. Using a qualitative methodology based on film analysis and the review of media sources, the study examines how the narrator occupies an enunciative position that challenges hegemonic representations of marriage. The article argues that the short film mobilizes collective visual memory as a critical strategy, reconfiguring established meanings through montage and the circulation of images.

O arquivo audiovisual de Lula e as imagens da resistência

2025-12-05T23:24:55-03:00

O artigo problematiza como as imagens de arquivo presentes nos documentários sobre o golpe institucional constroem um arquivo audiovisual de Lula e da resistência democrática. Os filmes Excelentíssimos, Democracia em Vertigem e Amigo Secreto são representativos do recorte temático e analisados a partir de duas categorias relacionais: “O retorno das imagens: resistência e nostalgia” e “Reconfigurações de imagens midiáticas da Operação Lava Jato”. Dialogando com a noção benjaminiana de constelação, o movimento teórico-metodológico proposto neste artigo implica desmontar os documentários para, em seguida, remontá-los através dos sentidos que advêm das conexões entre suas diversas imagens arquivísticas. A constelação de imagens audiovisuais revela um arquivo que evoca sentidos de resistência política e social, marcada pela nostalgia de um passado em que as aspirações democráticas despontavam no horizonte com o final da ditadura militar e as sucessivas eleições de Lula.

Labor Conditions of "Below the Line" Workers in the Uruguayan Audiovisual Industry

2025-04-29T21:44:49-03:00

This article provides a qualitative approach to the labor conditions of "below the line" workers in the film and audiovisual industry in Uruguay. Based on in-depth interviews with workers, observations on set, and sectoral sources, it analyzes both the objective dimensions of work—contractual modalities, working hours, income—as well as the meanings, connections, and inequalities that shape it. The text shows how the structure of project-based work and organizational fragmentation generate regimes of immersion, uncertainty, and constant demand for availability. At the same time, it highlights that the sector is not homogeneous: subsectors such as advertising, national cinema, and international series exhibit specific organizational, recognition, and sustainability logics. Inequalities based on gender, generation, and available social capital are also evident. This text is part of an ongoing research project and aims to contribute to the construction of more just agendas in the sector.

Lo intenso: montaje, artificio y animalidad en "Hombre con H"

2026-03-14T15:56:54-03:00

This article proposes an analytical approach to the film Homem com H directed by Esmir Filho, which is based on highlighting the editing technique defined in the film as a narrative structure to delineate the nature of the representation of reality in times of pure visibility and to establish the conditions for representing the life of the popular Brazilian artist Ney Matogrosso based on what is defined as the intense as a synthesis of three forms: becoming animal, multiplicity, and abnormality. Based on this argument, the new effects of the gaze in contemporary cinema and the aesthetic quests to represent lives "based on real events" are problematized.

Fracturar el espectáculo: potencia política del cine de apropiación en el capitalismo digital

2025-10-23T02:31:45-03:00

This essay examines the potentialities of cinematographic art in contemporary digital capitalism through the discussion between the postulates of Jean-Louis Comolli and Jacques Rancière. Analyzing two Latin American films as a reference—(Cuerpos frágiles Óscar Campo, 2010) and (Homenaje a la obra de Phillip H. Gosse, Pablo Weber, 2020)—it explores the status of the image in an environment of media saturation. It is argued that, far from a death of the image, digital appropriation cinema reveals a productive tension: the image, even when it becomes a spectacle, retains an irreducible otherness. The analysis of these works allows the proposal of a hybrid spectator figure, who exercises a practice that is both critical and emancipatory, capable of subverting the signs of domination to reconfigure the distribution of the sensitive and produce new knowledge.

Editorial IMAGOFAGIA No 33

2026-04-28T23:57:29-03:00

Editorial N° 33.

Norma es resistencia. Crítica de "Norma también" (Alejandra Guzzo y Natalia Vinelli, 2025)

2026-03-09T20:42:28-03:00

Review "Norma, too"

I won't kill you. I'm going to sacrifice you: On Bienvenidos al infierno (2021) by Jimena Monteoliva"

2026-04-16T20:27:42-03:00

This article reads Bienvenidos al infierno (Jimena Monteoliva, 2021) as an audiovisual counter-archive against the contemporary pedagogy of cruelty. Starting from the analytical fissure proposed by the film’s liminal sequence—a proleptic symptom of mafioso sacrificial matrices—the text traces the spectral dimension of patriarchy. Far from privatizing violence under the worn-out trope of demonic possession, the film exposes a bloody liturgy executed by a complicit fraternity; namely, a hypermasculine plurality led by a master of ceremonies. Facing the potency of this critical insubordination, the analysis examines the dismantling of the anthropophallogocentric order. At the core of this unresolved dialectic, the protagonist manages to survive by weaving interspecies kinships. Ultimately, the essay posits horror cinema as an aesthetic chimera capable of tangibly mapping the gears of the capitalist-patriarchal uroboros.

Cuando el mito se vuelve carne: "El escuerzo" (2023), de Lugones a Sinay

2026-04-09T14:03:16-03:00

Critica de El escuerzo (Augusto Sinay, 2023).

Cuatro canciones, tres escenas y dos familias en "Tengo sueños eléctricos" (Valentina Maurel, Costa Rica, 2022)

2026-04-15T11:39:58-03:00

Crítica de Tengo sueños eléctricos (Valentina Maurel, 2022).

Memorias de agua y gramática del duelo: Imágenes conjuro y materialidades afectivas en "Viento del Este" (2023), de Maia Gattás Vargas

2026-04-18T15:08:30-03:00

Crítica de Viento del Este (Maia Gattás Vargas, 2023).