Murmurs of globalized culture: thoughts on the film Historias Mínimas

Abstract

Carlos Sorín’s film Historias Mínimas is set in Argentina’s Patagonia region and tells three somewhat interlocking stories about inhabitants of the mall village of Fitz Roy travelling to the city of San Julián. In this article, the author examines the film genre known as the road movie on the one hand, and on the other the phenomenon of interculturality that it seems to promote. Despite the fact that Historias Mínimas does not stand up to both analyses – from the point of view of the scale of characters’ travels, it cannot be seen as a “classic” road movie, and from the point of view of its intercultural situations, it can not be entirely classified as an intercultural road movie either – the film is compatible with the genre to the extent that it presents the same compositional matrix and makes possible an analysis of interculturality in this modern form, brought about by globalizing forces and their worldwide flow of images, ideas and technologies, in addition to the classic flows of money, merchandise and people. Key-words : road movie, interculturality, globalization