Di Tella Analysis

Notably, then, despite the film’s expository richness, its intelligent use of archival material, and the boldness it displays in incorporating family members (Andrés’s father and, in a short sequence, his uncle), with La televisión y yo Andrés Di Tella would not yet reach the pinnacle of the personal documentary form. Beyond expressing angst about the seven years of television he missed (angst that doesn’t totally gel into anguish, drama, or tragedy), beyond sharing with the viewer some childhood dreams (like wanting to be an astronaut), or excepting a brief sequence from his wedding (aimed at showing that it was there where he first met Rosenfeld), there is actually very little of “Andrés Di Tella” in this film.

Even though the documentary’s

His adept straddling of the public and the private realms reveals the filmmaker’s undeniable and mature control of media. In Montoneros and Prohibido, he experimented with and learned to control both the archive and the interview. With La televisión y yo, the “family novel” (la novela familiar) finds its (perhaps) necessary place in the history of postdictatorial Argentina cinema. More than mere revisionism, Di Tella brings into play a new way of manipulating media to create a more subjective and personal cinema than the social and political documentaries to which audiences had grown accustomed.

If we think about this film in Freudian terms, it offers a return to the past whose intention is to reimagine and rearticulate the “family novel.” What is particularly noteworthy in Di Tella’s case, however, is that this gesture coincides with his maturation as a director. In La televisión y yo, the subject and the world, the individual and society, achieve an astonishing degree of intercommunication. This leads us to believe that in the future Di Tella will not be able to avoid turning his gaze toward the collective (a shared “outside”), nor will he be able to avoid gazing inwardly at