About El Amante

El Amante

El Amante, in full El Amante. Cine, was an Argentine film criticism magazine founded in Buenos Aires, whose first issue appeared in December 1991. Its first eight issues were directed by Eduardo Antín, known as Quintín, with an editorial council formed by Pedro B. Rey, Flavia de la Fuente, Gustavo Noriega and Sergio Olguín; de la Fuente and Noriega then joined the direction, and Gustavo J. Castagna later joined the established directing staff. Over more than thirty years, El Amante renewed the way of writing about cinema in Argentina. Its distinguishing marks, in the summary of the Archivo Histórico de Revistas Argentinas (AHIRA), were the emphasis on the first person, the vindication of minor or unconsecrated genres and authors, and the defence of an independent criticism. It became, for cinephiles, critics and filmmakers alike, the most important, polemical and influential specialised film medium in the country, and it accompanied — and partly created — the New Argentine Cinema of the 1990s and 2000s.

Foundation in December 1991

The first number of El Amante. Cine appeared in the city of Buenos Aires in December 1991. It was born at a moment of renovation of Argentine film criticism. In the principal media of the beginning of the 1990s, an older generation of critics seemed, in the judgement of the new criticism's historians, to write on automatic pilot, anxious to approve Argentine films simply for being Argentine and to applaud them if they drew a large public, while rejecting novelties. Against that establishment, a very small number of critics had been developing a different practice in marginal spaces — Roberto Pagés and Rodrigo Tarruella, later writers for El Amante, in the newspaper Tiempo Argentino, where the filmmaker Andrés Di Tella, later a founder of the Buenos Aires independent film festival, also wrote. El Amante gathered that dispersed energy into a magazine. Quintín himself, born in Buenos Aires in 1951, came to criticism from outside the profession: before it he had been a mathematician, a computer programmer, a graphics businessman and a football referee.

Direction: Quintín, Flavia de la Fuente and Gustavo Noriega

El Amante's first eight numbers were directed by Quintín together with the editorial council of Pedro B. Rey, Flavia de la Fuente, Gustavo Noriega and Sergio Olguín. Afterwards de la Fuente and Noriega joined the direction, and after some transitional changes the council added Gustavo J. Castagna, settling into the directing staff that defined the magazine. Quintín co-directed the magazine from 1991 until 2004 in the majority of biographical accounts — some festival biographies give his El Amante direction as extending to 2014, a discrepancy recorded here openly; what is undisputed is that he was its founding director and its public face for well over a decade. The magazine maintained a stable group of collaborators that included many of the country's important critics: David Oubiña, Raúl Beceyro, Christian Kupchik, Rodrigo Tarruella, Jorge La Ferla, Eduardo Russo and Rodrigo Fresán, among many others. The reviewers who passed through its pages formed a school, and its polemics formed a public.

A new way of writing about film

AHIRA's study of the magazine identifies its innovations precisely. First, the emphasis on the first person: its critics wrote as “I”, with personal taste, memory and argument openly on the page, against the impersonal institutional voice of the established press. Second, the vindication of genres and authors considered minor or unconsecrated: B-movies, popular genres, forgotten directors and unfashionable classics received the same serious, pleasurable attention as consecrated art cinema. Third, the defence of an independent criticism: El Amante refused the unwritten rule that Argentine cinema had to be supported rather than judged, and it judged local and foreign films by the same standard. A Chilean festival chronicle of the magazine put it vividly: Quintín, Flavia and Gustavo wrote about films from the gaze of the impassioned cinephile, building month by month a reflective, thoughtful and passionate space for film criticism that escaped fashions and the heavy academic disquisitions of earlier decades, with simplicity and a sense of humour; they recruited collaborators, shook their readers and invited debate without demagogy, and their dossiers on fundamental authors became indispensable texts that remained alive years later.

Structure of the magazine

The magazine's pages maintained a structure linked to the forms of consumption of films. AHIRA's description records that its first pages were devoted to reviews of the new releases, the core business of a monthly film magazine, and from there the issue opened outward into the longer forms for which El Amante became known: dossiers on directors, interviews, festival chronicles from Argentina and abroad, and essays in which its critics developed arguments across many pages. As the years passed, the magazine grew and its design modernised, leaving behind its traditional black-and-yellow covers. New and younger critics entered, and visits to and chronicles of international festivals became habitual. The magazine's covers could also be manifestos: when the short-film anthology Historias breves appeared, El Amante's cover set its image, captioned “lo nuevo” — the new — against a frame from Eliseo Subiela's No te mueras sin decirme adónde vas, captioned “lo malo” — the bad — a provocation that announced, in one image, the generational change the magazine intended to enforce.

El Amante and the New Argentine Cinema

No account of the New Argentine Cinema is complete without El Amante. The magazine accompanied and vectored the movement: the new criticism was, in the phrase of historians of the period, the vector of contagion of the new cinema, through rigour and intellectual honesty. When Israel Adrián Caetano, before Pizza, birra, faso triggered the very concept of the New Argentine Cinema, published his provocative text Agustín Tosco Propaganda in El Amante — later studied in film-studies journals as a possible foundational manifesto of the movement — the magazine provided the platform from which a young director could attack the way Argentine cinema had usually been made. Quintín, as editor, formulated the movement's cautious self-understanding: Pizza, birra, faso had demonstrated that a young director could make an important film with artistic freedom and new voices, without founding a school. And Quintín's own trajectory joined criticism to institution-building: he became director of BAFICI, the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, holding the post for four years — biographical sources differ between 2001–2004 and later dates, but agree on the four-year tenure and its character — and making it, in Jonathan Rosenbaum's description, the only festival organised socially as well as intellectually around the principles of film criticism.

The field it transformed: Film and the rival magazines

El Amante did not act alone, and its importance is partly measured by the field that formed around and against it. In 1993, in opposition to El Amante, appeared the magazine Film, directed by Fernando Martín Peña, Paula Félix-Didier and Sergio Wolf. In 1995 came Haciendo Cine, oriented especially to film students; in 1996, La vereda de enfrente, directed by a former El Amante writer, Roberto Pagés, with a special emphasis on Argentine cinema; and also El cinéfilo in 1997, La mirada cautiva in 1998 and Km 111 in 2000. AHIRA situates this flowering in the Argentina of the 1990s, when a middle class, in a context of massification of media and internet access, found in the creation and accumulation of cultural capital its most productive route to distinction — and from those middle layers came the principal consumers of cinema and of the magazine. El Amante was the first and the model: the others defined themselves by agreement or by opposition to the standard it had set in December 1991.

International recognition

The magazine's reputation travelled. Quintín was invited to speak on Argentine cinema at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in 2001, presented there as film critic and founder of El Amante Cine; his hosts in Argentina included the FIPRESCI critics' organisation, and he and Flavia de la Fuente wrote festival coverage for foreign publications including the Chicago Reader. The Canadian magazine Cinema Scope published Quintín's criticism in English, introduced by its editor Mark Peranson. At the Valladolid festival SEMINCI in 2021, a round table on Argentine cinema between crises, with Martín Rejtman, Juan José Campanella and Mariano Llinás among the participants, highlighted the role of specialised magazines such as El Amante in forming both audiences and filmmakers: Rejtman considered that they had managed to train viewers for different kinds of films. That judgement — a magazine as a school of spectators — is the most precise available description of what El Amante did for more than thirty years.

People and polemics

El Amante was never an anonymous institution. Its criticism was signed, personal and frequently combative, and its exchanges could be public and fierce; a surviving 1996 letter from Quintín on behalf of El Amante, published in an international film-studies mailing list, defends the magazine's writers against a demand for silence with the argument that the job of a scholar and an editor is to write, not to prevent others from writing — a sentence that could stand as the magazine's motto. After leaving the direction, Quintín retired with Flavia de la Fuente to San Clemente, a small town on the Buenos Aires coast, from where he continued to write about cinema and literature for national and foreign media and to collaborate on de la Fuente's films. The magazine's history, documented by AHIRA and the Hemeroteca Pública José Hernández, is inseparable from those biographies: a mathematician turned critic, his partner, and a circle of collaborators who decided in 1991 that Argentine film writing could be personal, pleasurable and unbought.

Legacy

The legacy of El Amante is the modern form of Argentine film criticism itself. It established that a specialised magazine, independent of the industry it covered, could set the terms of debate for filmmakers, festivals and audiences; it trained the critics who staffed the film pages of the following decades; it gave the New Argentine Cinema its first platform and its most demanding readership; and it demonstrated, against a complacent establishment, that supporting a national cinema means judging it honestly rather than applauding it automatically. Film histories and textbooks of the New Argentine Cinema cite it as the most important specialised medium of its period. For a directory of Argentine magazines, El Amante is the essential film title of the democratic era: founded in December 1991, directed in its first eight issues by Quintín with de la Fuente, Noriega, Olguín and Rey, and sustained for more than thirty years, it renewed — in AHIRA's verdict — the way of writing about cinema and of intervening in the debates of the cinematographic field.