The River as God of the Plains. On the Fluvial Poetics of Historias extraordinarias by Mariano Llinás

Abstract

This article aims at analyzing how the film Historias extraordinarias by Mariano Llinás (2008) deconstructs foundational fictions of the Argentine pampa as a desert both in geopolitical and geopoetical terms. Such a view is developed, instead of being based on the figuration of the pampa as a desert, from a liminal fluvial landscape, a transitional space between the aquatic and the terrestrial. Llinás questions not only the project of the construction of fluvial canals as a "straight line to progress", inspired by a vision of the civilizing process as expressed by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Starting from the literary model of the European novel of adventures, whose classic features can be found, for example, in the representation of the Argentine pampas as a flooded space in novels by Daniel Defoe and Jules Verne, Llinás also subverts the traditional narrative model of the adventure plot that grants agency exclusively to human actors. In the episode that has as its central event the flooding of the Salado River in the story of H and César, Historias extraordinarias develops an alternative poetics that sees in the river and its uncontrollable dynamics the true central actor, the "god of our plain," as Llinás himself describes it in a note to the film’s script.