Separated by half a century, two films from Córdoba province now screening at MALBA examine how cinema becomes a refuge — and a weapon — in times of political and economic upheaval. Through a movie theater and recovered film reels, The Night is Fading Away and All You Need to Make a Movie Is a Gun both explore issues of solidarity, resistance and survival across different times. One rescues the memory of a turmoiled past; the other captures a precarious present.
Shot in a beautiful and sophisticated black and white, Ramiro Sonzini and Ezequiel Salinas’ The Night is Fading Away follows Pelu, a struggling thirtysomething projectionist at a municipal film club in Córdoba’s capital city. Played by real-life projectionist Octavio Bertone, Pelu’s quiet life is troubled when budget cuts in state funds force the owner to fire one of the two existing projectionists, and Pelu draws the short stick. Offered a position as the building’s night watchman, he spends the nights roaming inside the cinema, finding refuge among its projectors, empty screening rooms and reels of film.
When his roommate loses his job and is unable to pay his half of the rent, the theater also becomes Pelu’s secret home. In the veil of night, Pelu forms an unlikely community with homeless parking attendants seeking refuge from the weather, as well as a friend who uses the projection booth to film content for her OnlyFans channel. The economic hardship binding them together also threatens to shut down the cinema, putting their fragile sanctuary at risk.
Sonzini and Salinas’ film is also a tribute to movie theaters as spaces of both magic and resistance, much as Malayan filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang bid a nostalgic, ghostly farewell to old cinemas in Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003). It also echoes Argentine writer/director Edgardo Cozarinsky’s reflections in Palacios plebeyos (Commoners’ Palaces), where he describes how grand movie theaters, built like opulent palaces, transformed cinema into a mass form of entertainment for the working classes. An ode to cinephilia and a poignant portrait of solidarity in times of crisis, The Night is Fading Away echoes a similar feeling to late 1990s landmark films such as Bruno Stagnaro and Israel Adrián Caetano’s Pizza, Beer, Cigarettes or Pablo Trapero’s Crane World.
The films, which ushered in the New Argentine Cinema depicted the social and economic malaise (unemploy…
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