Dark Rurality and Dark Ecology in Recent Argentine Cinema

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of a melancholy or dark ecology in the cinematic aesthetics of films by Albertina Carri and Lisandro Alonso. I argue that these films are examples of a new ecological ethos that filmically imagines the indissolubility between non-human and human ecology as part of the rural, thus recasting traditional images of nature in the service of a new nationalism. The rural serves as the image bank for an inexhaustible mesh of ecological relations, tied by the darkness of infinitude. I show how these recent accounts of rural exhaustion and neoliberal control over the Argentine landscape simultaneously reimagine the rural as a source of density, vital, and ecological expression. I also argue that this reading represents a new modality for cognitive mapping that includes the filmic representation of the ecological sphere that goes beyond the mere description of neoliberalism.