National history, allegory and the force of habit in the films of Matías Piñeiro

Abstract

This article examines how Matías Piñeiro’s films El hombre robado/The Stolen Man (2007) and Todos mienten/They all Lie (2009) critically redeploy foundational figures and rhetorical devices that structure the dominant narratives of Argentine national history. Both films take lesser-known writings of the nineteenthcentury intellectual and statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, best known for Facundo: Civilización y barbarie/Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (1845) (1845), as the point of departure for intricate plots involving the romantic intrigues of young people in twenty-first century Buenos Aires. Contrary to the teleology integral to official versions of national history, which have been conspicuously on display during the Bicentennial celebrations of Latin American independence in recent years, Piñeiro’s films posit a more porous and more unstable relationship between the present and history, in which the ruins of the latter persistently, if intermittently, and fragmentarily inform everyday life, and vice versa. Thus, through the insistent repetition of the basic components of foundational myths of Argentine identity, El hombre robado and Todos mienten redirect a force of habit to restore the polysemy of the commonplace tropes of national history.