The Short Arm of the Law: The Post-Dictatorship Crime Film as a Barometer for Justice in Argentina

Jennifer Alpert (Lecturer, Committee on Degrees in History & Literature at Harvard University)  is a film scholar interested in portrayals of marginalized groups in the popular cinemas of the Americas as it pertains to race, gender identity, sexuality, class, and political ideology among others, and with a focus on human rights in Latin America.

Through close visual readings, this talk explores how policiales become symptoms of a society deeply concerned with its role in the failures of the legal system. While the theme of justice has remained consistent in the cinema of redemocratization, narrative and aesthetic codes surrounding it have not remained fixed. These films do not simply repeat the trauma of dictatorship mimetically and stagnantly, but rather accompany a changing context and present new ways of addressing it.

The Argentinean crime film/policial has historically been concerned with showing crimes or assigning guilt. Since the end of the brutal 1976–1983 military dictatorship, policiales have operated as indicators of shifting popular demands and anxieties regarding the justice that democratic governments have failed to deliver. In the 1990s-2000s, films such as Caballos salvajes (Marcelo Piñeyro, 1995), Nueve reinas (Fabián Bielinsky, 2000), and Al final del túnel (Rodrigo Grande, 2016) shift from representing the dictatorship directly to create veiled fantasies that consistently propose retribution outside the law as a moral form of justice within a context in which legal institutions have failed. More recently, under renewed calls to sentence human rights abusers, films like Nieve negra (Martín Hodara, 2017) investigate the role of complicity in helping perpetrators get away with murder. This signals another turning point in cinema’s representation of crime and justice.

Co-sponsored by the Hirschfield Film Endowment.