Extraordinary characters, archetypes and classical narrative structures: on the representation of poverty in two Argentinian documentaries

Abstract

The Argentinian political, social and economic crisis of 2001, which was the product of neoliberal policies of the previous decade, forced a section of the population to generate new forms of work organization to survive in a country ruled by the logic of unemployment. The occupied factories workers and cartoneros were represented insistently and instantaneous in documentary films such as El tren blanco (N. García, S. Pérez Giménez y R. García, 2003), Caballos en la ciudad (A. Gershenson, 2004) and Grissinopoli, el país de los grissines (D. Doria, 2004), among others. Most of these texts represent their subjects similarly, favoring a passive attitude on the part of the filmmakers and recording the daily actions of a group of individuals, who in some scenes express their ideas and feelings through interviews. However, in this paper we propose to analyse two documentaries that work this issue through a different approach: Bonanza (en vías de extinción) (U. Rosell, 2000) y Vida en Falcon (J. Gaggero, 2004). These two films present the story of underclass characters who adopt peculiar means of survival (one making his Ford Falcon housing and the second living with his family among scrap and junkyard), adopting classical narrative structures fictional and archetypes of characters. The aim of these films is try to reduce the distance with the audiences by appealing to recognizable characters and structures instead of favouring the explicit denunciation favouring the "creative treatment of reality" posed by the documentary discourse.