Self-managed production cinema in Tucumán: Three narratives of violence

Abstract

In the last ten years, it developed in Tucumán an incipient audiovisual field. In this period, a low-budget cinema emerged, associated with a conception of self-managed cinema. This article explores the modalities of self-managed production in the context of contemporary Tucumán cinema. According to our hypothesis, in contemporary Tucuman cinema there are two sub-modalities: on one hand we have certain filmmakers that have the desire to establish some distance from established forms by the audiovisual market. In this case, an self- managed cinema was developed as an aesthetic reaction to state funding guidelines (INCAA). On the other hand, young directors carried out their projects despite economic difficulties and technical and production limitations. We call the first self-managed sub-modality "self-managed production as an aesthetic decision". We call the second possibility "self-managed production due to lack of financing". As examples of these submodalities, we will focus on the productions of directors Verónica Quiroga, José Villafañe and Franco Mirra Giollitto. The three short films work with different ways of narrating violence. We will also focus the narrative modalities of short films, following the analysis made by David Bordwell in his opus Narration in Fiction Cinema. The study of the three cases, in consideration of the modes of production and the narrative modalities, will allow us to show that the mode of production does not coercively condition the type of narrative chosen by the filmmakers.