Exhausted Landscapes: Reframing the Rural in Recent Argentine and Brazilian Films

This article analyzes the compositional modes and signifying functions of landscape in four recent Latin American films. Comparing their deployment of the landscape form with rural-based predecessors from Brazilian and Argentine cinematic modernity, the article traces an exhaustion of landscape as purveyor of allegorical meanings. Yet the more recent films also reveal—through their self-conscious deployment of the landscape form—the historical conditions of this crisis, thus paradoxically endowing landscape once again with epistemological valences beyond the time-image.