The Conventillo, the Department Store, and the Cabaret: Navigating Urban Space and Social Class in Argentine Silent Cinema, 1916–1929

Abstract

This article examines an understudied film genre that some Argentine early film periodicals labeled cinedrama porteño. Porteño cinedramas portrayed a bleak Buenos Aires, a dark metropolis of massive immigration and accelerated urbanization in which opulence was reserved for the few and misery was all around, particularly in immigrant neighborhoods. Centering on ‘fallen women’ and well-dressed wastrels, the genre foregrounded social instability by confronting emerging and established social actors in several locations, including tenement housing, department stores, and cabarets and garçonnières. Based on surviving film fragments, this article argues that porteño cinedramas rendered visible varying degrees of sociocultural proximity and separation in urban space. In doing so, the genre traced sociocultural cartographies and identitary strategies to confer narrative and visual saliency to mobile subjects, most noticeably urban outcasts. Porteño cinedramas warned against the dangers of upward mobility while at the same time denouncing gender and class inequality in Buenos Aires. Films discussed include Hasta después de muerta (Eduardo Martínez de la Pera and Ernesto Gunche, 1916), La chica de la Calle Florida (José A. Ferreyra, 1922), and La borrachera del tango (Edmo Cominetti, 1928).

Keywords:

• Argentina
• Silent Cinema
• Buenos Aires
• Latin America
• Urban Space

Notes

1. I refer to films such as Tango! and Los tres berretines, both released in 1933, not the films revolving around the figure of Carlos Gardel and produced by Paramount Pictures. The latter focused on different, yet equally important, forms of cultural identification on local and transnational scales (D’Lugo 2008; Navitski 2011). For relevant studies on urban silent films, see Couselo 1969; Cuarterolo 2013; Tucker 2015.

2. See, for instance, the ‘Novelas de Humildades’ (1922), which appeared in the crime section of the first Buenos Aires tabloid newspaper, Crítica (1913–1962).

3. Based on surviving footage, this film seems to be one of the first attempts in Argentine cinema to explore non-linear narrative structures and ellipses. The whole film is framed by a flashback of an aged Luis, standing with his son in front of Elvira’s tomb. The novelty required guidance through intertitles. At the end of the film, an expository title reads, ‘THE EVOCATION ENDS,’ cutting to the initial shot of the father and son at the graveyard.

4. See my “Films on paper: Early Colombian cinema periodicals, 1916–1920.” Forthcoming. In Cosmopolitan visions: Transnational horizons of latin American film culture, 1896–1960. edited by Navitski, Rielle and Nicolas Poppe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

5. In his study, Poppe (2006) suggests that in Argentina ‘films focusing on the lives of women became increasingly important’ during the sound period (58). However, archival accounts such as Muzilli’s and this study show how porteño cinedramas already catered to such a demand.

6. Initially published in the Frankfurter Zeitung in March 1927.

7. Film synopses suggest that in many films ‘fallen’ women can only find solace after returning to the barrio and marrying blue-collar workers, who see beyond women’s dubious pasts and relocate them in traditional gender roles. ‘El martes se estrenó ‘El organito de la tarde,’ obra que distribuye Argentina Program’ (La Película (1919), October 15, 1925: 29) ‘Se pasó en privado ‘Perdón, viejita’’ (La Película, August 18, 1927: 21).

8. A review of Ferreyra’s El organito de la tarde (1925) condenses the narrative formulae of these films: ‘yearning of intense life, delirium of grandeur, burn the wings of [barrio women].’ The review continues, ‘in the cabaret honor is exchanged for a suit and a tango.’ ‘El martes se estrenó ‘El organito de la tarde’, obra que distribuye Argentina Program’ (La Película, October 15, 1925: 29).

9. Given the director’s proclivity for borrowing from tango lyrics (Vieytes 2009, 56), the eponymous tango quoted above may have inspired Ferreyra’s film.