Post-crisis Argentine films: De-localizing daily life through the lens of Jorge Gaggero

The Argentine economic and social crisis of 2001 generated a temporary rearticulation of certain ways of interaction among individuals, as exemplified by the emergence of public assemblies, the seizure of factories by workers and the creation of alternative solidarity networks. This proliferation of encounters among individuals from different class and cultural backgrounds produced a collapse of certain class roles and aspirations that can be seen at play in the films of the post-crisis period. Jorge Gaggero's Cama adentro/Live-in Maid (2004) and Vida en Falcon/Life in a Falcon (2004) are two prime examples of that subversion of class identification and its spatial representation. The activities of daily life, generally place-and-class-bound, are represented in these films as unstable categories that shift considerably after the events of December 2001. Private and public spaces are crossed and intertwined, mirroring the social rearticulation of the time. This article analyses Gaggero's construction of these social class displacements in Argentina and the spatial changes of everyday lives produced by the neoliberal crisis.