An Ephemeral Composition of Disjointed Memories: Cristina Nigro’s Production Design in The Last Matinee

by: Tori Potenza , February 6, 2024

Director Max Contenti credits Al morir la matinée/The Last Matinee (2020) as Uruguay’s first slasher, which seems likely. He says that ‘in Uruguay, there is no horror tradition or industry, with very, very few exceptions, and this was one of them’ (Sellers 2021). As one of the few horror movies made in the country, The Last Matinee is important to understanding genre representation in Uruguayan cinema history, and Latin American cinema more generally (see Shaw and Dennison 2005). Uruguay is a small country whose film industry has only grown in recent years. After establishing funds to help subsidise local projects in the 1990s, the country saw an emergence in auteur filmmaking. They made contracts with countries like Argentina to co-produce films, including The Last Matinee.

The Last Matinee is a love letter to the giallo, slashers, and the movie-going experience. It has little plot, dialogue, or character development and is almost entirely an exercise in visual storytelling and the emulation of a setting and time in the past. Much of the success of this film is to do with the production designer Cristina Nigro. Jane Barnwell explains that ‘the production designer assists in bringing the script to life through a range of technical and creative choices’ (2004: 3). As Head of the Art Department, the production designer works collaboratively with art directors, prop masters, set dressers, and anyone else building the world of the movie (2004: 125). Designers like Nigro have to take the vision of the filmmaker and find a way to practically put it into action. This includes everything from design, style and graphics, to lighting, locations, and angles. It is a hefty responsibility, considering how little recognition production designers get.

Nigro has worked as a set decorator, art director, and production designer since the early ‘90s. Her first role was as a set decorator for María Luisa Bemberg’s film Yo, la peor de todas/I, the Worst of All in 1990. Nigro has a history of working with women filmmakers in Argentina: María Teresa Costantini on Felicitas (2009), Laura González on Milonga (2023), and Lita Stantic on Un muro de silencio (1993), amongst others. Her work has mainly been on dramas with little horror before The Last Matinee. There is little information about her apart from her website and a few YouTube clips. However, she has won major awards including the Silver Condor Award for cinematography in 2010, an award akin to the Oscars in Argentina.

As such, Nigro had an extensive career in visual storytelling when she embarked on The Last Matinee, this time working with a newer director whose vision relied heavily on aesthetics that emulated 1990s nostalgia. In a YouTube interview she said that art direction is not meant to be the focus of attention; on the contrary, it has to flow with the story. Everything from the color of the objects to the shooting locations must produce an alchemy that accompanies the story the director wants to tell as well as the cinematography. It has to have a homogenous effect to work (Marchisio 2021). This aligns with Barnwell’s point that the ‘possible reasons for the anonymity of the designer lie in the invisible nature of much of the work. The design is there to support the overall production, not necessarily upstage it’ (2004: 15).

My video essay pays tribute to Nigro by making visual storytelling front-and-centre It opens with clips from various horror movies from the 1970s to the 1990s showing people at the movie theater. From there the buzz of a projector starts to queue us in that the ‘feature’ is about to begin. There follows a romanticised quote on nostalgia from Gabriel Garcia Marquez followed by a split screen to show The Last Matinee with various films it emulates. Over fifteen movies are referenced to highlight the sheer amount of reference material that went into Nigro’s design. There is no dialogue, only music: one from Dario Argento’s Opera and the other from The Last Matinee. Underneath, the hum of a projector continuously plays.

The title of my video essay comes from a portion of a quote by critic Florence King: ‘true nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories’ (1990: 112). I was drawn to this definition, on the one hand, as I used various disjointed film clips used in the project. At the same time, however, it is important to remember the issues from that past that permeate our present, such as the lack of women represented in the film industry. Production designers are rarely discussed in the scope of film history with little scholarship and recognition.This is not necessarily that surprising. San Diego University publishes an annual report called ‘The Celluloid Ceiling’ which details women’s roles in the top 100, 250, and 500 films each year. They typically focus on the number of women directors, producers, writers, editors, and cinematographers. Occasionally they expand their scope to include roles like production designers. In their 2019 report, women accounted for 23% of production designers working on the top 250 films (Lauzen 2020). This is a slight bump from 2008 which accounted for 20% of women production designers (Lauzen 2009). That said, these statistics often focus on the United States film industry so it is unclear what this means for Latin American women in the industry, let alone Uruguay and Argentina specifically. While Nigro’s work is inspiring, it is clear that not enough women are given these opportunities, and those that do are not always recognised.