Film Practices of Testimony and Commitment: Piquetero Cinema during Argentina’s 2001 Crisis

• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211029567
• Published date: 01 November 2021
• Date: 01 November 2021
• Author: Fernando Redondo Neira
• Subject Matter: Films

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X211029567

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 241, Vol. 48 No. 6, November 2021, 243–253

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211029567

© 2021 Latin American Perspectives

243

Films

Film Practices of Testimony and Commitment

Piquetero Cinema during Argentina’s 2001 Crisis

by

Fernando Redondo Neira

Translated by

Mariana Ortega-Breña

During the early years of the twenty-first century, documentary filmmaking achieved

significant notoriety for its audiovisual performance, its renewal of aesthetic proposals

and reaffirmation of social denunciation, its expression of commitment, and its power

of intervening in reality. Fundamental in this regard were the medium’s full entry into

the digital universe and new technologies for production and dissemination. This par-

adigm shift was further shaped by the fact that it avoided conventional marketing cir-

cuits and was the product of a horizontal conception of communication outside of

organizational hierarchies and stable business structures. A significant number of early-

twenty-first-century Argentine documentaries corresponded to these parameters. This

article focuses on what I will call piquetero cinema or videocrache, generally short films

seeking to document the events of December 19 and 20, 2001, in Argentina and give

voice and visibility to the actors involved, especially the movements and collectives

confronting dominant political and financial power.

The early-twenty-first-century Argentine documentary movement is an important

reference for the study of how images of real contexts make up proposals, discourses,

or forms of intervention that, over time, take on a very fruitful historical dimension.

Thus, the events of December 2001 were, to an extent, the starting point of a media

phenomenon that would be repeated in other places with other crises and events. As

the century has progressed, conflicts have been accompanied by audiovisual creations

characterized by immediacy, rawness, and a subjective gaze that is very close and par-

tial to the unfolding events.

With regard to the pioneering nature of this audiovisual phenomenon, it should be

noted that Argentina’s economic and financial crisis preceded the 2007–2008 global

crisis by several years; we can thus hypothesize that piquetero cinema served as a test-

ing ground for the audiovisual treatment later received by the global crisis. The materi-

als I am referring to, which are available online, including Compañero cineasta piquetero

(2002), Piquete Puente Pueyrredón (2002), and Zanón es del pueblo (2003), are just a sample

of a large documentary corpus that contributes to a historical discourse for addressing

the early twenty-first century in Argentina. My analysis therefore adopts a historio-

graphic approach, reading those images in their contexts and allowing for “a compre-

hensive treatment of the facts of the past” (Hernández Sandoica, 2004: 382)— facts

portrayed with striking immediacy and attention to the plurality of opinion flows that

converge in the public space.

Fernando Redondo Neira is a professor of communication at the University of Santiago de

Compostela and the author of Carlos Velo: Itinerarios do documental nos anos trinta (2004). Mariana

Ortega-Breña is a translator based in Mexico City.

1029567LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X211029567LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVESRedondo / FILMS

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