Decentered Men

Abstract

In this chapter, I discuss Adolfo Aristarain as one of the key filmmakers of the democratic transition of the early 1980s as an introduction to my analysis of his film Un lugar en el mundo. In my examination of this film, I first look at the genres that inform its plot as well as the types of masculinities that are represented. I also explore Héctor Olivera’s Una sombra ya pronto serás. I argue that in both films male characters appear disoriented, one in the margins of the nation and the other one literally on the road for most of the film. I read the dislocation of the main male characters as a symptom of the father’s loss of authority within the family that is concomitant with a reformulation of the Argentine State in the early 1990s.