Martín Rejtman and the Illusion of the Present: Cinema, Literature, and the Paradox of the Contemporary

Abstract

This paper explores the work of Argentine filmmaker and writer Martín Rejtman, highlighting his impact on narrative and cinema since the 1990s. His style challenges the distinction between the literary and the cinematic, situating itself in a present that is both immediate and eternal. The analysis focuses on Silvia Prieto (1998) and the short story “Ornella” (Literatura y otros cuentos, 2005), examining how they depict the present through narrative strategies that evoke historiography. Through minimalist dialogues, repetition, and the omission of dramatic causality, Rejtman dismantles the conventions of post-dictatorship Argentine cinema, avoiding political allegory and solemn interpretations. His work reveals how Argentine culture tends to historicize the present rather than simply experience it. Repetition plays a central role in his aesthetic. In Silvia Prieto, the protagonist discovers other women who share her name, a metaphor for identity and repetition in history and art. “Ornella” deconstructs the idea that the past inexorably determines the present. Rejtman redefines the boundaries between cinema and literature and challenges traditional ways of representing history, offering a vision of the present in which the weight of the past is felt but does not impose itself.