The scars left by Juan Manuel de Rosas are still felt across all of Argentina. Despite the historical reputation of the 19th-century army leader, a nationalist who ruled the country during its unification before being exiled to England, politicians have continued to evoke his name and, in the process, the panic of the past. In 1989, after a long period of conservative reexamination of Rosas in the face of economic turmoil and a long period of state terror, former Argentinean President Carlos Saúl Menem demanded Rosas’s remains be returned from England, where he died in 1877, and later had a statue erected of the controversial leader. As recently as 2003, the City Council in Buenos Aires attempted to rechristen a three-block stretch named for rival Domingo Sarmiento as another monument to Rosas, which was met with protests. As Larry Rohter wrote in the New York Times, “it is as if a street in the United States honoring George Washington were suddenly to be renamed for Benedict Arnold.”This complicated history is examined in the films of Argentinian filmmaker Benjamín Naishtat. “History of Fear” (2014), his first feature, presented a contemporary neighborhood outside Buenos Aires that is, sometimes literally, crippled with terror. People break down in fast-food restaurants, a guard patrols the quiet suburban streets, and its residents are adamantly cautious against the people “outside” entering their world, often driving them to extreme behavior. The threat is perceived, lingering in the air, an accumulation of history that has left people anxious. At the end, the neighborhood is draped in darkness because of a power outage, leaving its inhabitants unable to even see what they’re afraid of.In Naishat’s latest, “El Movimiento” (2015), fear is immediately present. The film, which opens a new series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center titled “Neighboring Scenes” (January 7-10) and celebrating Latin American cinema, is at first glance very different from “History of Fear.” Shot in black-and-white, “El Movimiento” opens on a soldier framed against the horizon of the desert, alone. The camera moves along with him, tense and frantic. Soon he is berating a man who is attempting to sell pastries, knocking him over and, along with another solider, humiliating him by stuffing food in his face and then blowing him apart with a cannon, laughing the whole time.This scene is an introduction of a mood. The rest of the film plays out in relative darkness, where a nameless leader (Pablo Cedrón) makes his way across the Pampas, killing in the name of a mysterious group called The Movement, which seeks to unify the fractured country. Characters move in and out of the night, illuminated sometimes only by the firelight, which gives their every action a menacing quality. Who they actually are, whom they represent, and what their goals are beyond destruction and ultimate power is unclear.The allegorical force of Naishat’s work is clear yet obscured. That we are at a specific point in the past is only marked by a title at the beginning of the film, which notes: “1835. Argentina. Anarchy. Plague.” With that bold bit of text, the complexity of the film is unlocked, and the deeper you dig, the more you notice resonances between the actions of and reactions to The Movement and many different points in Argentina’s brutal history, up until the present day. But like any good allegory, it’s also broader and more all encompassing. “El Movimiento,” as well as Naishat’s “History of Fear,” point at the way power is accumulated and how that accumulation leaves its mark, even after power has changed hands.
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