Ricardo Darin and the Animal Gaze: Celebrity and Anonymity in El aura Jeffrey Z¿mtovtny University of West Georgia In the brief making-of video included on the IFC Films release of Argentine director Fabián Bielinsky’s 2005 film El aura, Bielinsky claims that Ricardo Darin portrays a character “muy, muy, muy diferente de cualquier cosa que haya hecho [antes]T he film, a «oz'r-inflected psychological thriller for which Darin won a Silver Condor for best actor in 2006, throws his novel performance into relief against a backdrop of allusions to his most prominent previous roles.1 From the outset, El aura draws connections between Darin’s character and his high-profile appearances in earlier Argentine blockbusters. Rather than providing viewers with the pleasure of recognition and familiarity, however, these fleeting continuities frustrate viewer expectations as it becomes clear that Darin’s character is not a new incarnation of his established screen personae. El aura breaks with earlier films featuring Darin by imbuing his performance with qualities often associated with the acting in New Argentine Cinema, which I define here as the low-budget, experimental films that emerged in Argentina in the late 1990s and that registered the impact of neoliberalism on contemporary Argentine society and filmmaking.2 In particular, Darin is anonymous, intensely observant, and physically vulnerable in his role as an unnamed taxidermist. In what follows, I examine each of these attributes in turn to show how they relate to the film’s single most successful strategy for defamiliarizing Darin: bringing him into sustained contact, often via the gaze, with animals and human animality. In addition to previous criticism regarding El aura, my discussion draws on three related areas of research: (1) analyses of acting in New Argentine Cinema, (2) Walter Benjamin’s use of the term aura, and (3) theoretical contributions to Animal Studies emphasizing the auratic animal gaze. Viewing the film through these lenses, I contend that the title of El aura refers not only to the moment before the epileptic attacks suffered by the taxidermist, as described in the story, but also to the film’s central challenges: to divest Darin of his celebrity “personality,” to endow him with “the unique aura of the person,” and to render him strange in the penetrating gazes of anonymous, enigmatic animals (Benjamin 1177). 154