Sistematizar el caos: reglas cardinales comunes al teatro y al cine argentino contemporáneos

Abstract

This article aims to propose a set of rules to systematize the irregular aesthetic that characterizes the Argentine theater of the nineties -specifically the one called “theater of desintegration”-. We propose that this aesthetic reaches in the new century a certain filmic corpus that we call situation cinema. We organize this set of rules in four areas: 1) particular conception of communication (disintegration of language and loss of referential function, auto-referential), 2) fragmentation and episodic stories, absence of logic causality, image and experience privilege over the story, unlikely plots, 3) splitting and dissolution of the characters, opaque motivations, 4) multiplication of meanings. The development of each of these rules allows us to observe that beneath them underlies a structure which characterizes the neo-baroque era in terms of Omar Calabrese (1989) and that this structure expresses itself through its formal quality, as in the exploration of the fractal dimensions and improbable connections, in the construction of complex and chaotic structures, or in the attention to detail and repetitive techniques.