Foreign Intimacies and Political Pasts in Paula Markovitch’s El actor principal (2019)

Abstract

This article studies the intersection of the protagonists’ basic emotions, bold gestures, and defiantly occupied places in Paula Markovitch’s El actor principal (2019), which, in turn, reveals the tensions between their precarious livelihoods and subtle forms of agency. Markovitch’s fourth film focuses on a chance encounter in Berlin between a Mexican non-professional actor and former petty criminal, Luis, and a laundry room worker and Kosovo war survivor, Azra. Unable to communicate in the languages they speak (Spanish for Luis and Albanian for Azra), they begin to generate a unique intersubjectivity where contradictions make sense. Such communicative efforts, failures, and breakthroughs between the main characters paradoxically succeed in illuminating the deepest quandaries of their broken selves, emotional states, and political struggles of the past. As the protagonists’ exchange about personal past and present encumbrances grows increasingly dependent upon their gestures, their emotional bonding intensifies as well. Such a bonding ultimately sheds light on Markovitch’s complex aesthetic explorations of social marginality and resistance.

Keywords:

• Paula Markovitch
• Latin American cinema
• Argentine Cinema
• chance encounters
• emotion
• gesture
• marginality

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere thanks to the anonymous reviewers as well as the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies Editorial Board. Special thanks to Isis Sadek. I am thankful to Barbara Zecchi for her constructive questions about an earlier version of this article presented at the 2021 International Conference of Hispanic Women Filmmakers (CIMCiH). For their considerate and detail-oriented support, I am grateful to Amy Zhang, Bethany Pasko, and Cheri B. Peters. My research for this article was supported by the 2021-2022 Associate Professor Research Grant from Wellesley College.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Paula Markovitch’s thematic interests and stylistic tendencies defy easy aesthetic categorisations. Markovitch’s debut film, El premio (2011), was nominated for over 30 awards and is frequently studied in the context of Argentina’s post-dictatorship cinema. Armando y Genoveva (2013) and Cuadros en la oscuridad (2017) are equally politically nuanced films and stem from the deeper layers of the filmmaker’s family life, particularly the lives of her parents. El actor principal (2019), on the other hand, cuts through and beyond Latin American contexts and engages with other cultures without losing touch with the filmmaker’s persistent thematic interests in marginality, agency, identity, and political dissent.

2 In most of the aforementioned films, for instance, Indigenous conversations, ritual practices, or voices often stand on their own – nearly always without explanation in or translation into Spanish – in order to privilege the authenticity of their identities, experiences, and traditions.

3 El actor principal also brings to mind another decolonial angle in the context of Latin America. On the one hand, the aforementioned films’ approaches to historically simplified subjectivities evoke forms of symbolic reparations as a response to the consequences of the past horrors related to, in Cynthia Tompkins’s words, “the cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples” by means of revitalising the multidimensionality of their presence in the cultural production of today in Latin America and beyond (2018, xxiii). On the other, such aesthetic choices also emphasise Diana Taylor’s recent delineation of epistemic and cultural shifts in the context of Latin America and its neighbours. Taylor focuses on the importance of the pluralistic contributions of “knowledge(s)” so that “instead of using singular knowledge for the powerful and plural knowledges for the subjugated, [we] recognize that we all produce knowledge, or knowledges” (2020, 26). By adding to contemporary decolonial debates from the Global South, Taylor highlights the significance of multiple platforms of knowledge, a notion that “includes revalorizing the autochthonous languages that allow us to know, think, communicate, and be outside the colonial framework” (2020, 27).

4 Bibliography on cinematic representations of political dissent and historical memory in South America is nearly endless. Several relatively recent and interdisciplinary works are particularly relevant, such as Antonius Robben, Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Ana Ros, The Post-Dictatorship Generation in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay: Collective Memory and Cultural Production (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Geoffrey Maguire, The Politics of Postmemory: Violence and Victimhood in Contemporary Argentine Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Jordana Blejmar, Playful Memories: The Autofictional Turn in Post-Dictatorship Argentina (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); and Ana Forcinito, Intermittences: Memory, Justice, & the Poetics of the Visible in Uruguay (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018).

5 Azra is never seen in conversation with other co-workers. Luis is verbally and physically abused by his compatriot and Mirror’s panel member, which ultimately hastens Luis’s resolve to break away from the festival.

6 See “Informal Employment in Mexico” (2014, 1-12). For more information on recent figures of disappeared individuals (over 95,000) in Mexico, please see https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/11/1106762. UN News. 29 November 2021. Accessed 19 August 2022.

7 See Julie Mertus, Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War (Oakland: University of California Press, 1999); Tim Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); and Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000). According to the Congressional Research from April 2021, during the conflict in Kosovo, “[a]bout 13,000 people were killed, and nearly half of the population was forcibly driven out of Kosovo. An estimated 20,000 people were victims of conflict-related sexual violence. The vast majority of all victims were ethnic Albanians. On a smaller scale, some KLA fighters—particularly at the local level—carried out retributive acts of violence against Serb civilians” (Congressional Research Service 2021, 10).

8 The footage that Azra shares with Luis, which is made available to the viewer only fleetingly, reaffirms both her pre-war existence and her agentic present. Given that Azra, before anything else, speaks of her broken and eviscerated motherhood, El actor principal gives voice to different aspects of motherhood in contexts of heightened political violence, including one that is related to what Di Lellio identifies as “a wall of silence among survivors of sexual violence” (2017, 630). In this context, the unsaid competes for our attention during the encounter between Azra and Luis and underscores the impact of, in Erin Manning’s words, “sounds and images [that] are collected and recombined in ways that produce new insights into the past” (2013, 18). At the same time, the impossibility of articulating the lived degree of brutality, loss, and affliction creates tension between the two characters. The intensity of their chance meeting furthermore shifts the chief purpose of Luis’s stay at the hotel, thus creating a half-wanted defiance on his behalf and letting us watch the character wander away from his responsibilities.

9 According to Howes and Classen in Ways of Sensing, “[s]ensory metaphors have played an important role in conceptualizing and justifying these different responses to social difference. (…) One common metaphor presents society as a body. This is a highly useful image for suggesting organic unity, interdependence, and hierarchy. It also offers the compelling feature of being an image with which everyone is intimately familiar: it is not, therefore, just something to think about, but something to feel through. In the social-class version of this model, the head represents the ruling class, and the feet or, as we saw above, the hands, represent the workers” (2014, 79; original emphasis).

10 See note 4.

11 The affect that these characters’ linguistic barriers engender brings to mind the opening scene from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (Зеркало) (1975). While the communicative obstacles each film underscores differ greatly (Markovitch’s characters do not suffer from any speech impediments the way Tarkovsky’s adolescent does, for instance), both highlight an odd formation of interpersonal trust and bonding.

12 Argentina’s contemporary feminist movement, Ni Una Menos, provides regular data on the prevention of gender-based violence. In terms of the Kosovar context, a forthright link emerges by means of Isa Qosja’s Three Windows and a Hanging/Tri Dritare dhe një Varje (2014). This is particularly relevant in conjunction with the Kosovo war- and gender-based violence, especially in terms of sexual trauma. While Qosja’s film deals primarily with wartime rape in Kosovo and the ways in which women survivors revisit their wartime abuses from a politically fragile post-war era, Markovitch’s film treats Azra’s burnt body as a unique site of personal strength.

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Inela Selimović

Inela Selimović is an Associate Professor at Wellesley College. She has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Revista Hispánica Moderna, Confluencia, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Chasqui, Mistral: Journal of Latin American Women’s Intellectual & Cultural History, and Bulletin of Hispanic Studies. Selimović authored Affective Moments in the Films by Martel, Carri, and Puenzo (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and co-edited The Feeling Child: Affect and Politics in Latin American Literature and Film (Lexington Press, 2018), Inusuales: Hogar, sexualidad y política en el cine hispano (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2020), and Encuentros fortuitos. Agencialidad en conflicto y poder en movimiento (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, forthcoming).