The City at Night: The Celluloidal Sensibility of Juan Jose Saer's La pesquisa

A significant aspect of Juan Jose Saer's La pesquisa is its filmically charged ' noir' style which seems to disclose a distinct preoccupation with space. In other words, through its simulation of some of the more structural components of ` noir' cinema such as disorienting camera angles and vertiginous frame compositions, the novel is able to create a geography of unease. Indeed, one could go as far as to posit the noir aesthetic as a kind of spatial anxiety that reacts to the topographical power relations and modes of domination within a particular historical context. With the case of Saer, such an aesthetic seems to be grounded upon Argentina's own immediate history -namely, the 1976-83 dictatorship and the subsequent implementation of a neo-liberal economic model, both of which, I contend, create a free-floating tension that indelibly translates onto the written page. As such, the goal of this essay will be to elucidate Saer's specifically cinematic use of 'noir' in La pesquisa in order to show how said style or code functions to map the spatial anxieties of modern Argentine society.