Argentine Documentary Film and the Politics of Presence: Jorge Prelorán’s Valle Fértil

National identity begins at home.

On a research trip to Córdoba, it was suggested to me that the localized, personal interactions inherent to production and distribution are the truest, most profound, or only guaranteed legacy of the filmmaking experience. This idea challenges certain accepted tenets of film theory; directors dating to Sergei Eisenstein have suggested that in film the world finally had its first truly universal language. The digital age and the rise of the Internet would seem to support Eisenstein’s claim; in this, the era of Google and YouTube, an aspiring director in Tucumán can capture a scene on a cell phone and screen it in Tokyo moments later. Still, even if we accept the medium’s potential for reaching worldwide audiences, we might also recognize that most filmmaking today still unfolds much as it did in the late nineteenth century: a human being makes pictures of something (often another human being) and then shows those pictures to other human beings.

Filmmaking, thus, has retained its foundation in human engagement. All Argentine documentaries begin as local exercises, whether or not they ultimately attain international acclaim. And before they become Argentine, films begin as footage conceived and captured in one or another locale. Even Fernando Solanas’s La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces) depended on an assemblage of local scenes to construct its argument. Solanas and Octavio Getino “cited” material shot by Gerardo Vallejo in his native Tucumán and by Fernando Birri in his native Santa Fe. When Solanas and Getino visited the interior provinces to capture original material, Vallejo served as a local guide, providing material and contacts that only someone from the area could (Vallejo, 1984; Mestman, 2010). Birri (1996: 200) seemed to recognize the local specificity at the core of even essayistic work when he wrote, “National identity begins at home.”

Some scholars have begun to appraise the theoretical import of cinema’s locales, borrowing insights from the humanities as much as from film studies. In The Corporeal Image, the filmmaker and scholar David MacDougall (2006: 2) demonstrates that “the human subject—as material presence”—lies at the core of both cinema and ethnography. MacDougall and also Catherine Russell (1999) and Scott MacDonald (2013) have reexamined the significance of ethnographic film, seeing it as more than “just social science” (Russell, 1999: xii). Others have located ethnographic methodologies in work that has traditionally been labeled political documentary (Colombres, 1985; Mestman, 2011). Both exercises have valorized anew not just the political ramifications of ethnography but also, necessarily, the political ramifications of any filmmaking that borrows from ethnographic methods. Taken together, these innovative perspectives urge a two-pronged approach in historicizing cinema’s locales: understanding first the local specificity of any given image and second the always politicized process required to capture that local image.

How, exactly, do cinema’s locales affect a filmmaker’s ability to make film and make change? Directors, as both insiders and outsiders, depend on local populations to help them produce the raw material that is only later compiled. To the extent that documentary filmmaking remains predicated on sustained contact with particular local populations, these filmmakers are bound by their hosts’ regard for the project and for the director’s conduct. This conditions the way that filmmakers carry out their filmmaking, causing them to advocate for local populations in arenas that extend beyond the film shoot and in ways that extend the politics of film beyond the final cut.

In what follows, I examine the film director Jorge Prelorán’s experiences in making and promoting Valle Fértil, a feature-length documentary that he filmed in San Juan province intermittently between 1965 and 1972. Prelorán was an Argentine-born filmmaker who made over 50 documentaries in Argentina during a career that spanned nearly four decades. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he pioneered an approach to ethnographic documentary that focused on individual biographies, a methodology that he ultimately labeled “ethnobiography” and that garnered him acclaim in Argentina and around the world (Prelorán, 2006; Rossi, 1987; Taquini, 1994).

Prelorán is a useful example because he was openly antagonistic to the partisan filmmaking so predominant in this era. He often insisted that he was not an “ista” of any sort and criticized his contemporaries for so compromising their cinema (Prelorán, 2006: 16). However, his filmmaking depended, just as did that of others, on sustained contact with populations, and this engagement lent his work a political hue that he never intended. Recognizing this forces us to reconsider not only the legacy of his films but also that of other documentaries. Far too often the historiography of Argentine and Latin American cinema rests either on director biographies, wherein auteurs’ party allegiances define their work, or on textual analysis of the final cut, wherein we isolate finished products from the history of their making. The case of Valle Fértil suggests instead that the localized, personal interactions inherent to production and distribution are often an equally relevant legacy of the filmmaking experience. In this sense, Prelorán offers us a counterexample that, when viewed as another instance of local filmmaking, becomes instead exemplary.

An 88-minute film, Valle Fértil is divided into two parts, with an extended montage at the midpoint that accentuates a break. During the first half of the film, it introduces the town of Valle Fértil and 14 of its principal artisans. Tight shots detail the craftwork of saddlers, carpenters, knife-makers, silversmiths, and weavers. Wide panoramas of the valley suggest that this work has long unfolded in neglected corners of the Argentine countryside, a profession—better, a lifestyle—as yet untouched by modern machinery. Prelorán, in his images, and the characters, in their dialogues, suggest that the vallistas (valley inhabitants) have been content to remain isolated from urban development. Protagonists smile at the camera as they labor and, later, take their breaks, suggesting both a comfort with their routines and a comfort with Prelorán the cameraman, who further emphasizes this intimacy with close, handheld takes and many a returned gaze.

The second half of Valle Fértil presents the brutal realities threatening the vallista way of life. The valley, residents explain, has suffered an extended drought. Many have left for larger cities; others, without small-scale agriculture to supplement their incomes, have accepted work as laborers on farms owned by outsiders, where they bag onions and other vegetables bound for Buenos Aires and points abroad. Prelorán uses the radio, with its broadcasts from Tucumán, Mendoza, and Buenos Aires, to suggest an imposing modernization under way. The artisans, as they work on their crafts, listen intently to melodramas like Ha muerto un peón del campo (A Farmworker Has Died), and in their daily struggles play out, allegorically, the supposed conflict between modernity and tradition to which the program alludes. Despite Prelorán’s demonstrable predilection for such juicy metaphors, the film closes with a more ambiguous take on the introduction of “modern” things when residents point out that the radio provides them with valuable entertainment and useful newscasts.

Valle Fértil as a film text, with its innovative editing and nuanced analysis of changes afoot, certainly deserves further analysis. However, here I use the film as an example because the unusually large amount of personal correspondence related to his filmmaking that Prelorán preserved allows me to write not just about his films but also about the experience of their production and distribution. In many ways, Prelorán’s own personal history in town parallels the historical arrival of radio and other media in locations such as Valle Fértil. The story of his efforts to make a film about modernization is also itself a story about the connections and disjunctures occasioned by the expansion of mass media. At certain points the stories even overlap; after all, radio and television stations expanded into the provinces via capital cities such as Tucumán and Córdoba, often with the cooperation of local university film programs. Many independent filmmakers, including Prelorán, worked from these campuses and broadcast their work on the provinces’ inaugural stations (Romano, 2002).

Jorge Prelorán first visited Valle Fértil in July of 1965. He was at this time in the third year of a contract jointly supported by the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán and the Buenos Aires–based Fondo Nacional de las Artes (National Foundation of the Arts—FNA), charged with creating a series of short films that would “reflect aspects of popular, ‘folkloric’ life in typical regions of the country.” ¹ As the FNA was at pains to demonstrate, this film work complemented other efforts to improve both the artisan’s way of life and Argentine society’s understanding of the artisan. ² While under this contract, Prelorán reported most often and most directly to the FNA and especially to its coordinator of folklore programs, Augusto Raúl Cortazar. Cortazar, an esteemed folklorist, managed Prelorán’s program and ensured that the young director developed his documentaries alongside accredited academic advisers. ³ It was at Cortazar’s suggestion that Prelorán visited Valle Fértil. There he met with Luis Olivares, a sanjuanino scholar who had written a series of short essays on local craftwork. ⁴ Olivares had also spent years working as a doctor in the area, and so, especially in his role as an “unforgettable benefactor” to the town (as one newspaper put it), ⁵ he was able to offer the filmmaker and his crew personal contacts with the local population.

Once Prelorán had arrived in Valle Fértil, every stage of his production was marked by local contact; consultations fueled collaboration, and even perceived slights aggravated stumbles. Shooting never began without a series of gestures that, Olivares and Cortazar insisted, demonstrated to the locals that Prelorán and the crew arrived with good intentions. In addition to introductory conversations, Prelorán and his staff photographer offered to provide still portraits of their hosts, a “method,” as Prelorán described it, that they utilized in many cases wherein “the help of locals is of utmost importance.” ⁶ Cortazar invited locals for drinks to explain the goals of their filming. Later, when someone in town asked Prelorán to send textbooks from Buenos Aires for the local primary school, Prelorán was able to gather the materials and ship them off. ⁷ Each of these acts, Prelorán noted in a FNA report, was received “with sympathy by those assistants, who, without a doubt, will be of much help on future trips to the area.” ⁸

By the end of 1966 Prelorán and his team had completed three shorts based on footage shot in Valle Fértil: Máximo Rojas, monturero criollo, about a local saddler; Rondas y rodeos, on livestock herding; and Yacimiento paleontológico, which profiled archeological digs in the province. Because they were part of the FNA folklore series, they were shelved until the national premiere of Prelorán’s entire oeuvre in October 1969 at the capital’s Teatro San Martín: nearly 20 films, shot mostly in the country’s Northwest provinces, that he and the FNA had packaged as the “Primera Muestra Cinematográfica de Expresiones Folklóricas Argentinas” (the First Film Showing of Argentine Folklore Traditions). As Cortazar suggested in interviews, the Buenos Aires presentation emphasized the serial, the national, the “complete,” and the comprehensive, neglecting difference among the communities featured. ⁹ The film series, much like the FNA, seemed to be oriented around what the FNA’s bulletins recognized as “a national vision” (Cortazar, 1959).

San Juan’s papers covered the premieres, just as they had covered each of Prelorán’s visits to Valle Fértil. ¹⁰ In those earlier stories, what most captured attention was the arrival of the porteño Prelorán with camera and crew. Still, while the articles dutifully related the outsiders’ visit, each article also ultimately relayed difficult realties troubling the locals. When the Diario de Cuyo reported on Prelorán’s visit to Valle Fértil, it included other news from the town in its story. Though presumably the correspondent had visited town to comment on the filmmaking, it ultimately published his work with the headline “Lack of Gasoline Causes Problems in Valle Fértil.” Prelorán’s local exercises called attention to local issues. Similarly, a second article began by pointing out how, with their “regional films,” Prelorán and his assistant Lorenzo Kelley had undertaken a “worthwhile effort to capture . . . everything as regards natural beauties and general local activity.” ¹¹ The journalist accompanied them in town, noting how the two had engaged the locals, sharing photographs and “collaborating,” as the article termed it, with a local guide, Santos Villafañe, who was named. Still, as he also recounted, vallistas had presented them with a formal complaint, otherwise unrelated to the filmmaking exercise, that they hoped the paper might publish. For some time then, they said, the town’s main streets had been without electricity, leaving vallistas to travel by lantern once darkness fell. The journalist made note of this in his article on Prelorán, adding that the problem had led to “serious inconveniences” for the valley’s residents. The news of filmmaking in the area had to share a headline with news of the streetlight issues: it read “Valle Fértil: Calles sin Luz/Filman Películas de la Zona” (Valle Fértil: Streets without Light/Film Being Shot in the Area).

Thus, Prelorán’s visit to Valle Fértil called attention not only to his own productions or “the area’s natural beauties” but also to other local realities, some more negative than positive. The media’s expansion into the provinces provided populations with an opportunity not only to see themselves on camera and in print but also to use that coverage as a means of condemning ineffective governance in their midst. On the one hand, the making of a film in town had the potential to boost tourism and other commercial efforts in the region. As mentioned earlier, this had always been the goal of the FNA and of the Prelorán series. On the other hand, to the extent that problems persisted in the valley, once Valle Fértil was placed under a microscope local problems revealed themselves. For a majority of the valley’s inhabitants this was advantageous; no one wanted local inadequacies redressed more than they did. But for others, especially local politicians, this placing of Valle Fértil under a microscope had the potential to create more problems than solutions. Recognition of this fact likely shaped the attitudes that certain locals adopted toward Prelorán. As the filmmaker prepared to return to Valle Fértil some years after his initial visit, this mélange of memories lingered and complicated his return.

Nearly five years passed between Prelorán’s last visit to San Juan in 1966 and his return to town in 1971. In the interim, he had become a director of international renown for his work in ethnographic documentary. He was the only Latin American invited to the University of California, Los Angeles’s inaugural Colloquium on Ethnographic Film, a seminal gathering for the genre. He had developed working relationships with filmmakers and scholars such as Margaret Mead, Tim Asch, and Jean Rouch. He had spent a semester with Robert Gardner at Harvard’s nascent Film Study Center. He had begun teaching in the ethnographic film program at UCLA and directed a feature-length documentary on Venezuela’s Warao. In 1971 he received the first of two Guggenheim fellowships, and with this he returned to Argentina (Prelorán, 2006; Taquini, 1994).

Whether because of the breadth and variety of his oeuvre or because of his burgeoning public profile, the press in Argentina and abroad increasingly directed its attention toward the individual auteur and away from the local collaborations that had made his documentaries possible. Gradually, películas de la zona became películas de Prelorán. In the mid-1960s, when Prelorán first visited towns like Valle Fértil, newspaper coverage had singled out his many collaborators (Santos Villafañe, Lorenzo Kelly, and the student assistants). In fact, when the Diario de Cuyo reported on the 1965 visits it even credited Olivares with having “filmed” the three documentaries himself. ¹² However, by 1969, when San Juan’s Tribuna covered the provincial premiere of Prelorán’s folklore films, accounts emphasized that what most distinguished him was that he had made such sophisticated films with just one assistant. ¹³ In a dramatic twist, coverage had shifted from mistaking Olivares as the director of the films to profiling Prelorán to the exclusion of all others.

Away in Buenos Aires and Los Angeles, few recognized the many persons and engagements that had helped make Prelorán’s films what they were. Nonetheless, the myth of the auteur, like neglect of the collective, could survive only as long as Prelorán stayed away from town. By 1971 he was eager to return to Valle Fértil and begin work on a feature-length documentary. While, as he garnered acclaim, the names of local collaborators increasingly disappeared from newspaper coverage, as he prepared to return these names began reappearing through his correspondence with friends and colleagues in Valle Fértil. Starting with his 1971 letters to the valley, Prelorán began to mention Olivares in greater measure, despite the fact that Olivares had since passed away. ¹⁴ He referenced conversations with Ercilia Moreno Cha, a young anthropologist doing work in the area, and Sergio Barbieri, who had presided over the FNA screenings in San Juan. Armed with high regard for his associates, a sustained friendship with Santos Villafañe, and local goodwill for his having provided vallistas with material goods from Buenos Aires, he was able to return and resume shooting with relative ease. These efforts guaranteed him success as much as international renown might have.

Throughout 1971, as he returned various times to film in Valle Fértil, Prelorán continued to help out in what he could, maintaining that goodwill. When in town, he stayed at Santos’s home. Back in Buenos Aires, he remained in close contact with Santos and other collaborators, reiterating his appreciation. He continued to send along photographs, reading glasses, and other goods to vallistas, and he persuaded porteño presses to send additional textbooks to the schoolchildren free of charge. Later he began pressuring the Ministry of Social Welfare and the town’s intendente (mayor), Luis Martínez, to provide two of his collaborators with pensions. ¹⁵ Thus, when Prelorán reminded friends back in the valley that “we have followed through,” ¹⁶ the sentiment was at least relatively well-founded.

This is not to say that Prelorán was without conflicts in the village. It was around this time—in April of 1971—that he heard from a porteño friend who had recently visited Valle Fértil. The friend had chanced to meet Máximo Rojas, the title character of Prelorán’s 1966 film on saddlery. As Prelorán recounted in a letter to Santos, “Don Máximo, without realizing who this man was, complained to him that two men from a government entity had come to make a documentary some years ago, that they had surely made lots of money, and that they hadn’t given him anything.” ¹⁷ Prelorán was distraught at this news. He wrote to friends and colleagues in town, hoping that they would help explain his situation to Máximo and others. “Santos,” Prelorán pleaded to his host and guide,

if this is generally the attitude of those with whom we have filmed, then I am begging that you tell them all this, because I am mortified that they think we are “using” them.” It hurts a lot that when I return to a place where, truly, I had a very beautiful experience, there are people there who are upset with me.

In assuming this position, Prelorán was demonstrating that, for all his efforts to help the vallistas, he remained unaware of certain facts of his relationship with the town. After all, he was in many respects a privileged outsider: he was a filmmaker, and he was in a technical sense a government employee, as documentarians so often are. He had become famous on the basis of the earlier films (among them, the film to which Máximo had contributed). He had taken the films to Buenos Aires and from there around the world.

Contradictions aside, Prelorán argued that the film on Rojas, like the other films by then in the series, was intended to be screened free nationwide as a means of boosting tourism in areas like the valley. Increasingly, he put success in these terms. As he wrote in an appeal to Máximo, “If, when they watch the film that I made about you . . . the people come to Valle Fértil and they come to have you make them a saddle, then at least the film will have done its job.” ¹⁸ In a second letter, penned a year later, Prelorán alluded to the difficulty of balancing positive and negative coverage while reiterating his hope that the film would spur tourism: ¹⁹

I don’t know if the film is going to help you, but I hope that if government figures see it, maybe they will understand some things . . . and that [then] they will help. On the other hand, I think that tourism is going to come, and that surely [tourists] will want to meet you in your house. . . . At the least, you’ll have more visits, if not more work.

To communicate the goals of the film in this way placed persistent pressure on Prelorán. If the documentaries were intended to help those that he filmed, then he would need to provide some proof that they did so. It was one thing to state goals in a proposal for the FNA. It was another thing to wait around and see if the film actually changed things. To the extent that Prelorán’s filmmaking was increasingly founded on sustained contact with locals, any future collaboration would be mitigated by the degree to which promises of success—however defined—were fulfilled.

After an October 1972 premiere in Buenos Aires, plans were finally set in motion for Prelorán to bring the completed version of Valle Fértil to San Juan in April of 1973. However, the event was canceled just days beforehand—“I think,” Prelorán telegraphed Santos, “for political reasons.” ²⁰ The filmmaker was later told that the screenings scheduled for San Juan and Valle Fértil were boycotted at the last minute by Intendente Martínez, then in the last days of his term (as he had lost the election of March 1973), who had declared Prelorán persona non grata. As the filmmaker understood it, word had spread locally that a Buenos Aires daily had reviewed the documentary under the headline “Valle Fértil: Un Pueblo Que Sucumbe” (A Village That Is Succumbing). As Martínez’s replacement, Angela Carrizo, explained, locals had been upset by this, and so Prelorán was going to have clarify the title “or change it.” ²¹ The article’s headline had actually read “Un Pueblo Que Se Extingue” (A Village That Is Being Extinguished). ²² The story ran in a November issue of Clarín; in it an unnamed correspondent described the valley population as “layered in an interminable poverty” and pointed out that many, especially the young, had begun to emigrate, looking for better places to live. Those who stayed, it continued, suffered doubly from feelings of “abandonment and orphanhood.” Locals had been “invaded” by the radio, with its “English-language music” and its “unrealistic melodramas,” all of which created “appetites and false expectations that will never be satisfied.”

Despite his attempts to explain away the article as biased porteño coverage about the region and not necessarily about the town, ²³ there was little that Prelorán could do but apologize for the way the article had made vallistas feel. What the episode suggests is that much as Prelorán and the FNA were maintaining a delicate balance between the good and the bad in their coverage of San Juan, highlighting talents and underscoring the challenges faced, this could easily come tumbling down if press coverage focused on the bad at the expense of the good. To the extent that the outside journalists portrayed Valle Fértil as just another rural Argentine town, as one paper put it, ²⁴ the village could easily become just another pueblo que se extingue. And if vallistas believed that Prelorán was not balancing the bad with the good, not adequately respecting their way of life, local cooperation evaporated.

Whatever the reason(s) behind the canceled screening, Prelorán hoped that with Martínez on his way out of office the film would finally get its local premiere. Prelorán was hardly a Peronist; in fact, just a year earlier he had been working with Ernesto Lanusse, minister of agriculture during the minister’s cousin Alejandro Lanusse’s tenure as head of the ruling military junta. ²⁵ (In another twist to this story, Lanusse had approached Prelorán because he had been impressed by, of all films, Valle Fértil.) Still, if the overwhelming Peronist gains of 1973 (see Healey, 2011: 287) had the potential to facilitate screenings, then Prelorán was okay with a change in power. In one letter to Santos, Prelorán suggested partisan differences between the two, writing, “I imagine that you are thrilled with the election results.” At the same time, a few lines later, he added, “Perhaps it will be convenient for the Peronist government to show the film, and so, soon, we’ll show it all over the place.” ²⁶

Ultimately, in May of 1973, some seven months after the premiere in Buenos Aires, Prelorán was able to persuade the news magazine Panorama to contract a feature article on the film and the village. One of Panorama’s staff would take the film back to Valle Fértil, screen it for the townspeople, and then write a story on local reactions. In preparation for the screening, Prelorán wrote ahead, alerted his many friends and colleagues in the village, and asked them to write back with their impressions the very minute they saw the film. He desperately wanted to know if they had liked it or not. ²⁷

Panorama published its article on the experience in September of that year. ²⁸ In it it suggested that the film advanced a “thesis” that would prove “conflictive” for those in the film and for local politicians: “In Valle Fértil a rich artisan culture is slowly dying away.” Commenting on the screening experience, it added that, despite the film’s gloomy prognosis, locals at the event seemed not to care much about how they had been portrayed. After the screening, Panorama wrote, “no one offered any commentary other than some adjective along the lines of beautiful, nice, good.” “They laughed,” the article continued, “when recognizing a neighbor, when hearing the identifying voice . . . of a friend.” The reporter suggested that the vallistas had enjoyed the brief, momentary experience of appearing on screen but that the experience probably promised little for the valley over the long run.

It could be that Panorama was at least partly correct in portraying the vallistas as an uninterested audience. After all, generally speaking, the film’s protagonists did not attend the screening in large numbers. Though Santos dutifully replied, “The film was marvelous,” he added that many “were left without having seen it.” ²⁹ Others responded with niceties such as “Based on what they tell me, the film was really good,” ³⁰ but the majority did not even mention the film. This caused the filmmaker no small amount of grief. His personal archive includes no fewer than 10 letters written between September 14 and September 16 of 1973. He wrote to each of the main protagonists and collaborators in town, insisting that it was “odd” that they hadn’t written with their impressions. He emphasized that foreign audiences had loved the film and suggested that vallistas should be “proud” that they were chosen for a feature-length documentary. ³¹ He often wrote, “I made the film for you.” ³² By September 16 his anxiety had boiled over into frustration. The filmmaker began to suggest that vallistas simply weren’t used to seeing films and that, as he wrote in one letter, “maybe one [screening] wasn’t enough, because between recognizing themselves, chatting, and commenting, they really didn’t ‘see’ the film.” ³³

From this point forward, Prelorán’s enthusiasm for showing the film seems to have waned. He did, however, remain in touch with Santos and others from town. He continued to write the new intendente, Angela Carrizo, and pester her about colleagues’ pensions as he had Martínez. Locals invited Prelorán and his wife, Mabel, to return and join them in village celebrations. Vallistas addressed them in letters as “My unforgettable friend,” “Jorgito,” “Mi recordada Mabelita,” and, often, “Barbudo” (bearded one). ³⁴ He continued to prod them for their opinions on the documentary, though generally his appeals went unacknowledged. Replies from the valley offered only news from town. In response to one of Prelorán’s letters, Hilda Guerrero wrote that she had been unable to attend one of the screenings, as she was ill. “They said,” she added, “that it was beautiful.” “I can see,” she closed, “that you haven’t forgotten about these parts and in particular about me and my children.” ³⁵ This was what she seemed to appreciate most.

Jorge Prelorán first entered Valle Fértil in 1965 with the idea of making a documentary film there. He established contacts in the village, made the proper gestures, and maintained his commitments to locals even long after he had left town. Despite the fact that the films were produced as part of a series on “Argentine tradition” and ultimately screened in Buenos Aires, the initial act of shooting had called attention to local problems. As for Prelorán, his films made him famous, and his fame made the films his; as he garnered more acclaim, attention shifted away from the many collaborators and collaborations central to production. Still, to the extent that Prelorán hoped to return and shoot additional material and to the extent that his ethnographies required that he shoot in select locales for a sustained period of time, the filmmaker remained dependent on local support.

In his effort to maintain that support, Prelorán faced competing pressures. More than merely conducting himself respectfully, he needed to faithfully capture local reality on film while, as Máximo Rojas and others demanded, dutifully representing that reality to outside audiences in a form of advocacy-cum-advertising. In this, Prelorán constantly straddled the line between insider and outsider. By highlighting the challenges facing vallistas as an Argentine rural problem, Prelorán guaranteed that his films would reach larger audiences, but this meant that reparations were rarely funneled back directly to Valle Fértil. As the valley’s story was abstracted for audiences in Buenos Aires and abroad, Prelorán increasingly forfeited his ability to control the message of the film. In this vulnerable state, Valle Fértil became just another pueblo que se extingue. Whether or not popular frustration over the press coverage was responsible for Prelorán’s film’s having been boycotted in the village, it is clear that he was taking a risk in blending the specifically local with the allegorically national.

Ultimately, I believe, Prelorán lost himself amid these contradictions. When he wrote to friends in the valley and insisted that he had made the film “for them,” he was mistaking the making of something for people with the making of something by people and on people’s behalf. Santos Villafañe, Máximo Rojas, and other villagers offered little reaction to the finished documentary because their relationship to the film consisted of something else. The making of Valle Fértil had allowed for committed individuals to engage one another—Prelorán from one sphere and interested vallista collaborators from another. Once they finished shooting, it was up to Prelorán, the insider/outsider, to distribute the film, advocate on the vallistas’ behalf, and direct attention back to the local contexts from which the film had been born. In that sense, the film was for Valle Fértil and it wasn’t. Prelorán was not required to advocate on their behalf, of course, but his future engagements with the townspeople would depend on the extent to which he was successful in this. At the very least, as 1973 came to a close and Prelorán entered his ninth year of work alongside those in Valle Fértil, locals such as Hilda Guerrero still believed that he had not forgotten about them, and that mattered.

Should it matter for the history of Argentine film? For the history of Argentine culture? Prelorán’s biography and the case of Valle Fértil certainly have their particularities. Often both Prelorán’s champions and his critics have characterized him as “unique” among his peers and in the history of Argentine film (Gutierrez, 1987: 43; Taquini, 1994: 42). Nonetheless, I believe that his story ought to inform the way we research Argentine film and the history of documentary more generally. After all, filmmakers ranging from Fernando Birri and Gerardo Vallejo to Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino premised their filmmaking on local collaborations. Although these directors used their filmmaking to speak about more universal themes, they also recognized that they were sourcing images from very particular local contexts (Getino, 1979: 9). As the case of Valle Fértil suggests, those local interactions mattered: collaborators affected production, and the experience of filmmaking enjoyed a legacy that extended beyond the film text. We might ask: Did collaborators in other documentaries, ones more readily acknowledged as political films, enjoy a similar experience? How did locals shape the politics of more explicitly partisan documentaries such as La hora de los hornos?

Research of this sort will help us to enumerate the reasons documentary film matters; after all, local specificity is a hallmark of documentary. In recent years film scholars have produced an array of important works that have reimagined the genre. They have highlighted representational strategies and modes of address that challenge a traditional notion of the documentary as a “discourse of sobriety” (Nichols, 1991), pointing to new strategies in representing the real (Beattie, 2008; Renov and Gaines, 1999; Smaill, 2010). Scholars of Latin American film have not only contributed considerably to these advances (Chanan, 2007; Fradinger, 2013; Malitsky, 2013; Podalsky, 2011) but in many ways have long been pioneers in the field (Burton, 1990; Chanan, 1983; Stam, 1997).

That being said, in most of this work scholars have focused on the film text and on questions of representation. Those who have reimagined the legacy of ethnographic film have done so as a means of reconsidering documentary as content. What if we also understood documentary as an experience—a series of interactions and engagements between filmmaker and film-subject shaped by its locales as much as shaping them? What if we understood the politics of documentary as a politics of presence? In even the farthest reaches of rural Argentina, populations greeted filmmakers like Prelorán with well-developed attitudes regarding modern media. Locals critically incorporated film, radio, and, later, television into their lives at midcentury; they showed that they could use the media much as the media used them. Villages such as Valle Fértil and provinces such as San Juan enjoyed a rich political history all their own (see Healey, 2011), and, as Getino (1979: 10) recognized, visiting filmmakers, there to capture some reality and transport it elsewhere, often could do little more than “couple themselves,” as he wrote, with movements already under way.

While Getino recognized the way that local politics and culture shaped his filmmaking, he also cautioned that the local, collective character of filmmaking did not guarantee that any film would be inherently revolutionary in its politics. “Many films made by collectives . . . simply express an ideology of ambiguity” (1979: 16). While his point is valid and we should be wary of giving too much weight to a politics of presence, the well-documented case of Valle Fértil suggests that we should at least broaden our notion of the legacy of film. After all, as a text, Valle Fértil is decidedly equivocal in its conclusions. Prelorán retained final control over the editing, and his hand lends the film a political ambiguity. However, while the film might strike (especially a nonlocal) audience as ambiguous in tone, the changes wrought by Prelorán’s having made the film were anything but.

In May of 2014 I had the opportunity to take a recently restored version of Valle Fértil back to the town where it had been filmed over 40 years earlier. Few in the valley had ever heard of the film, and even fewer had known that a copy of the documentary still existed. Many claimed that only a handful of vallistas had ever seen the film, during the 1973 screening that Panorama hosted in Santos Villafañe’s home. Others insisted that they had watched it as schoolchildren in the late 1970s. Whatever the reality, our screenings were deeply emotional experiences; at events in San Juan and in Valle Fértil, sons, daughters, and grandchildren of the 14 protagonists gazed in amazement as their forebears graced the screen. Many approached me after the show to share in laughter and tears. Some carried letters that Prelorán had written to their family members. Others brought photographs. All offered stories of the filmmaker who, for a period of time, had become part of their families’ lives.

Many journalists covering the events suggested that with our screenings we had realized Prelorán’s greatest dream—“to present the documentary in town.” ³⁶ They all emphasized that the film had been censored—a fact that some locals told me was being overplayed and, in the process, decontextualized. In both cases, the local media suggested that the greatest injustice was never showing the film in town. They were inferring, as we historians so often do, as Prelorán himself believed, and as the Getino quote above suggests, that the finished film was the most important remnant of the filmmaking experience. The film is what counts; the film is what makes change. It is telling, though, that although the valley had been without a copy of the film for over 40 years and only a handful of vallistas had ever seen it, many retained letters, photographs, and especially stories from Prelorán’s time in town. Throughout my stay in Valle Fértil I was reminded of what my friend in Córdoba—a filmmaker who developed his craft in the early 1970s and now teaches a very different generation in a very different Argentina—had told me: that the local interactions inherent to filmmaking matter, first and perhaps foremost. As the case of Valle Fértil demonstrates, the legacy of film often lies somewhere off-screen.