Celebrated Argentine author and filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky made his North American cinematic debut with Dot Dot Dot (1971) in the very first New Directors/New Films festival, in 1972. Cozarinsky returns to MoMA with a Carte Blanche selection that juxtaposes classic and contemporary Argentine cinema in fresh and provocative ways. A 1930s musical drama, for example, is paired with a subversive theater improvisation from the late 1960s, while a 1950s noir about a child murderer appears alongside a recent coming-of-age drama about a different form of child abuse.
In doing so, he sheds new light on Argentine cinema’s unique concerns and urgencies—whether political, sexual, or artistic—observing that “history is rewritten all the time, and film history is even more liable to reassessments, fallen idols, and heroes retrieved from obscurity. This series of Argentine films proposes an alternative to accepted film history, bringing into dialogue vintage and present- day titles that escape, hopefully, from the accepted pattern of Argentine history and not just of film history.” Cozarinsky will introduce many of the programs.
Organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, Department of Film.
