Lo poético cinematográfico. La imagen luciérnaga de Gustavo Fontán

Laura Martins. Lo poético cinematográfico. La imagen luciérnaga de Gustavo Fontán. Raleigh, NC: A Contracorriente | University of North Carolina Press, 2022.  

This book has been awarded the Premio Humanidades—Honorable Mention by the Southern Cone Studies section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), 2023. 

The cinematographic poetics: Gustavo S. Fontán's firefly image is part of the growing interest in the forms that "the poetic" adopts in cinema. Within the current panorama of Argentine cinema, Fontán distinguishes himself by building a consistent trajectory in his eagerness to scrutinize the materiality of the world and move away from the serialized models of the standardized rhetoric of the late-capitalist market (his films constitute "works without place"). It reveals to us the possibility of the enjoyment of the concrete (perhaps a way of learning to live in a different way) and forges a warp that is poetic--and pictorial--with a tempo of its own that allows us to contemplate and notice the "enigmatic proliferation of matter that we call the world." It invites us to appreciate iridescence, blurred contours, opacities, fleeting presences and instants, which enables us to value the modesty with which each visual and sound image gives us. Fontán tries to reconfigure the space of the sensible, to arouse emotions with cognitive capacity, to expand the limits of what can be experienced and to open up new auditory worlds from that sort of foreign language that is his cinema.