Verbena Trágica (1939), digital preservation presented by the Latin American Cinemateca and the U.C.L.A. Film and Television Archive. May 13, 2021.

The Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles teamed with the U.C.L.A. Film and Television to screen Verbena trágica, a Spanish-language film released in 1939 – the year of Gone with the Wind and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The Archive made a digital preservation of a Library of Congress 35mm print.

Verbena trágica was the second film made by Cantabria Films, the company founded by one-time producer Jaime del Amo, a businessman descendant from an old Californio family, with one of the 18^th century Spanish land grants in the South Bay. 

 

Filmed between May and June 1938, this tight melodrama, distributed by Columbia Pictures, may look like many low-budget productions of the 1930s, but it stands out for several reasons. The Library of Congress included it in the National Film Registry for its cultural and esthetic values, and the U.C.L.A Film and Television Archive included it as one of the thirty-plus films it presented in the 2017 series “Recuerdos de un cine en español: Latin American Cinema in Los Angeles, 1930-1960”, of which I was one of the curators.  This extensive program was part of the Getty-funded Pacific Standard Time: Latin America in Los Angeles.

Unfolding during a few hours in New York (Harlem?), on Día de la Raza, or Columbus Day, an immigrant Spanish family is destroyed by the same atavistic forces that poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, Italian operas and mafia movie plots, see at play in the Mediterranean world: sullied family honor and the relentless pursuit of revenge. The traditional “verbena”, a popular form of holiday celebration in Spain, functions here merely as the background of a tragic story surprisingly devoid of picturesque touches, even linguistic ones, but with assorted peninsular, Caribbean and South American supporting characters spending leisure time in a typically Spanish café. 

 

The film has a solid cast of Spanish actors: Luana Alcañiz, Pilar Arcos and Juan Torena.  They had been steadily employed during the decade-long blossoming of Spanish-language versions made by Hollywood studios like MGM, Paramount and Fox first, and then independent companies like Cantabria Films – del Amo’s short-lived foray into moviemaking. 

 

Renowned Mexican actor Fernando Soler came briefly to Los Angeles to star in the film as Mateo Vargas, the larger-than-life neighborhood boxer who returns from a brief stay in prison, to discover that his wife Blanca (Luana Alcañiz) has betrayed him with his protegé Claudio (Juan Torena). Mediating the unravelling of the marriage is Blanca’s mother, Mamita (Pilar Arcos), who shares with Blanca the final scene, a triumph of matriarchal resilience.  

 

Spanish journalist and writer Miguel de Zárraga, who had settled in Los Angeles by the late 1920s, and was a key figure in the Spanish film colony of Los Angeles, provided the Spanish dialogue to the original English-language screenplay written by Jean Bart.  It must have struck de Zárraga odd that the characters talk about returning to Spain as if no Civil War was raging between 1936 and 1939.  As head of foreign publicity at Columbia Pictures since 1936, de Zárraga surely wore more than one hat, as he did in so many of the Spanish versions of the studios.  Prolific filmmaker Charles Lamont – known before and after Verbena trágica for his comedy shorts and features - Charley Chase and Three Three Stooges for Columbia, and later Abbott and Costello vehicles – showed his flair for comedic touches, especially in the recurring gag of Mamita slapping her teenage son Pepito (Jorge Mari) for no good reason.  Song numbers by Pilar Arcos, a renowned singer and wife of Fortunio Bonanova, of Citizen Kane opera singing fame, and Sergio de Karlo soften the tragedy but stop short of turning it into the Mexican-style melodrama it could have been expected.

 

Verbena trágica was the second and last production of Cantabria Films, the venture started by Jaime del Amo. Made in 1938, as reported by trade publications, it opened at the Teatro Hispano in Harlem, and was briefly reviewed by the New York Times. “While the film is well done, its only novelty consists in the ending, something quite different from the usual “cliché” wrote H.T.S. on March 13, 1929. It seems to have done well at the Spanish-language film market in the U.S. Distribution by Columbia Pictures assured exhibition in South America.  But neither Vida bohemia – Cantabria’s first picture, released in 1938, also somewhat of an oddity – nor Verbena trágica could compete against the super popular Mexican productions released in the U.S. nor the constraints of Columbia’s distribution contract.

 

Verbena trágica is emblematic of how original Spanish-language filmmaking in Los Angeles fared in a business that had developed the technology of dubbing and subtitling Hollywood films by the mid-1930s.  Once Mexico and Argentina developed solid film industries in the sound era, early in the 1930s, Verbena trágica was the ultimate oddity, neither an American studio film, nor a melodrama with musical numbers from Mexico or Argentina. And yet, it’s a picture that captures a moment in time … and remains a pleasure to watch.

Verbena Trágica was streamed on May 13, 2021.

https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/events/2021/05/13/verbena-tragica 

 

List of sources

 

A note on recent books on Spanish-language films made in the U.S.  Besides the U.C.L.A. Archive series of 2017, the PST LA/LA project included a couple of relevant books about this time period, spearheaded by Jan-Christopher Horak, then director of the Archive.

 

Hollywood Goes Latin. Spanish-Language Cinema in Los Angeles (2019), edited by María Elena de las Carreras and Jan-Christopher Horak. 

 

In 2017, the International Federation of Film Archives organized a symposium on the making of Spanish-language films in the U.S., which brought together scholars and film archivists from all of Latin America, Spain and the United Sates to discuss the many issues surrounding the creation of Hollywood’s “Cine Hispano”. The papers presented in this two-day symposium were collected and revised for this joint publication of the U.C.L.A. Film and Television Archive and FIAF. 

Cinema between Latin America and Los Angeles (2019), edited by Colin Gunckel, Jan-Christopher Horak and Lisa Jarvinen.

 

This collection describes Spanish-language film culture in the U.S., viewing Los Angeles as a crossroads for the distribution and exhibition of Latin American – especially Mexican - cinema.

 

The bilingual catalogue of the film series “Recuerdos de un cine en español” can be accessed through the Archive’s website: https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/events/latinamericanfilm

Specific sources for Verbena trágica can be found in:

 

Daniel Egan, America’s Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2009, 284-286.

 

Library of Congress online catalogue, https://www.loc.gov/item/mbrs00008355/, accessed May1, 2021.

 

Carl J. Mora, Verbena trágica. Excerpted from Mexican Cinema. Reflections of a Society, 1896-2004. 3^rd edition, McFarland, 2005.  https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/verbena_tragica.pdf, accessed May 1, 2021.

 

 

The question of evil: "Irradiés" and "There Is No Evil"

The last two films shown in the Competition section are in the tradition of political awareness that has shaped the Berlinale for 70 years: Irradié / Irradiated, directed by the veteran Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh; and Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s There Is No Evil.  Shown back to back yesterday, they are also in conversation with one another, beyond their historical, cultural and political specificities, since their underlying theme is the value of human life in contexts of evil.  They both have a moral urgency that elicited a warm reaction from the hardened journalists in the press screening I attended.  A few minutes after the Iranian film finished, I overheard a Spanish journalist filing his report over the telephone, saying: “I cried many times”.

In Irradiés, a documentary essay on evil in the 20^th century – name the usual suspects, they are all there – Panh revisits the horrors of history from a perspective grounded in his own family history: the destruction of parents and siblings in the Killing Fields of Cambodia, at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, and, ultimately, his escape to freedom via Thailand. He eventually settled in France, graduating from the topnotch Institut des hautes études cinématographiques.  The antecedents for his latest documentary are in plain sight, beginning with Night and Fog (1956), Chronique d’un eté, the 1961 Rouch/Morin documentary, and most of all the work of Chris Marker, with Sans Soleil (1983) coming to mind.  Panh shares here their modernist impulse to see politics from the lens of the personal, and eschewing a Griersonian approach in favor of an experimental form.

Irradiés, however, is not a derivative or redundant work. In the press conference, Panh was asked about his decision to work for most of 80-plus minutes with a three-split image on the screen: the central panel is related but not similar to the two identical lateral ones, using the music as a somber and sometimes discordant counterpoint to the visuals. Panh faced the same issue a young Alain Resnais confronted when deciding on a narrative, visual and sound structure for Night and Fog: footage from the concentration and extermination camps had been used until then as evidence for the Nuremberg trials, and though professionally edited by the Allied teams in charge of the prosecution, they were not arranged for esthetic purposes.   This is a matter that comes in my documentary class time and again: how do you/should you portray “the horror, the horror” without trivializing its nature? Do you/should you make choices that privilege film language over ethics? Peter Jackson approached it, but from another angle, in the drastic shaping of archival footage from the Imperial War Museum for They Shall Not Grow Old (2018).

Rithy Panh started by responding that Irradiés is above all a "shout", a reminder of how evil irradiates. His challenge was to keep the attention of the audience past the first minutes of  

watching images of brutality. How to make the images resonate was the director’s guiding principle. If you build the work as a catalogue of horrors, the director continued, the audience checks out.  The rhythmic repetition of the three-split image structure is a form of abstraction that helps the viewer concentrate and dive into the materials. If the images speed by, truth is lost.

An Italian critic friend of mine, noted as the credits were rolling: “Ecco un capolavoro”. Beautifully said.

Shot in Iran under difficult circumstances, Mohammad Rasoulof’s There Is No Evil is a work of great courage and beauty.  Like Jafar Panahi and other Iranian directors who have gained international recognition, Rasoulof is at odds with Iran’s mullahs, his latest trouble being a pending prison sentence for  “propaganda against the system” – namely his 2017 drama A Man of Integrity, that won the Un Certain Reard prize at the Cannes Film Festival. On the occasion of the Berlinale, which as expected he could not attend, his plight was covered by the accredited press. An empty spot with his name was set up for the press conference.

Mohammad Rasoulof 

There Is No Evil is comprised of four interlocking stories involving a very specific moral choice, to be or not to be an executioner of prisoners, as determined by the state. Like Kieslowski’s Dekalog (1988), individuals are faced with moral dilemmas, for which there are attenuating circumstances, or so it seems.  In the four stories the male protagonists are part of the prison system – a metaphor for the regime at large – but their circumstances and decisions, widely different. The narrative structure of each episode is shaped by the social, economic, intellectual and geographic specificities of each case – the society at large. The viewers find themselves observing life in Tehran and then in the countryside, sharply photographed in the city, and with great beauty in the countryside.  The minute unfolding of the first story sets the tone for the film with its unexpected and stunning twist in the final shot. It is the peg on which Rasoulof, who also wrote the screenplay,  hangs the progressively more outspoken critical tone of the ironically yet poignantly titled film.  It is all about how each character – and by extension ourselves, the viewers, through fear and pity, as Aristotle would have argued – will respond to “the horror, the horror”.  

There Is No Evil shares with Dekalog 5 a profoundly humanistic point of view, a stubborn reminder that all life has value, and that maybe, at some point, facing evil, we will have to make a choice. In the context of today’s Iranian politics, it takes courage – and European production funds – to make such a statement.

The international jury will award the prizes tonight.  I hope that these two magnificent works will be recognized and launched into a long viewing life.  

Siblings Fabio and Damiano D’Innocenzo, Bill and Turner Ross made two sensational movies.

A delight of the Berlinale every year is to find a film or two that will make students share emotional truths on the screen, as Scorsese notes in “The Persisting Vision”, an essay of 2013. Last year was what turned out to be Agnès Varda’s farewell, Varda, by Agnès, a documentary about her love of cinema.  Now available on DVD, I have used it this semester, a great gift of the director to my emerging filmmakers.

Bill and Turner Ross

Fabio and Damiano D'Innocenzo

I have seen many films these past week, interesting for a number of reasons, but the two I discuss below are excellent for the classroom: Broken Nose, Empty Pockets, the fifth feature by Bill and Turner Ross, filmmakers in their late thirties, working from New Orleans; and Favolacce, or Bad Tales, second film by Fabio and Damiano D’Innocenzo, twins in their late twenties, born in the outskirts of Rome and not the product of film school. Both works defy the pigeon-hole of genres, and categorization in general. Hence, their value to show students how to think outside the fiction/non-fiction framework, in the first film, and the subversion of narrative logic, in the Italian case.

I had read about Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, directed by Bill and Turner Ross in the Los Angeles Times when it premiered in Sundance in January.  When I saw it in the Panorama section of the festival, I understood why this “documentary” is the right one to bring up the key philosophical issue on day one of the documentary class: what makes a film a documentary.  Bloody Nose is a “creative treatment of actuality”, per Grierson, but like Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), it ultimately escapes the boundaries of the non-fiction film. This question is unavoidable after viewing Bloody Nose, one that pits the purist against the pragmatic - the critics that still object to Flaherty enlarging Nanook's igloo versus those that forgive interventions in search of a larger truth.

The Ross brothers had a lively Q&A with the public after the screening.  They described how they were interested in making a film about “a space of shared events” – in their case, a bar. A source of inspiration, they noted, had been The Iceman Cometh, the Eugene O’Neil 1940s play, where the saloon is the “container” where the hopes, illusions and despair of the characters play out.  A bar in New Orleans, the Roaring 20s, became the locale where in November 2016 they shot the interaction of people they cast during one unbroken scene for eighteen consecutive hours, with two cameras and fifteen mics.  The conceit was no script, no staging, and a point of departure: the last night before the watering hole closes its doors forever. Twenty people – bar habitués, carefully selected to represent “archetypes” - reacted to the “stimuli”, as the directors referred to this set up, and they in turn responded to their dialogue and movements. In direct cinema style, no conflicts were staged but the brothers gave their actors some cues, so that they would have a dramatic arc within which to play themselves.  The Ross siblings captured some raw emotional truths on the screen, shaped and trimmed in an editing process that unfolded over three years, while they supported themselves doing other film work.  The music is purely diagetic, coming from the bar’s juke box. 

To the brothers’ surprise, Sundance selected Broken Nose, Empty Pockets for their always very strong documentary section, a decision that opened up a frank conversation about the nature of documentary.   The brothers recounted how the Sundance programmers argued that Broken Nose “constructs situations in order to invite a level of chaos and candor that feels more fitting for the nonfiction space.”

After their Q&A, I approached the very personable Ross brothers to ask about what comes next.  Distribution is still in the works, they replied. One of them could not help but say about the Berlinale, “Being here is f … unreal”.  

In Favolacce (a made-up Italian noun, with “fabulation”, perhaps, in its root), the D’Innocenzo siblings plumb a dark quarry, one that the English-language translation of the title aptly captures: a fictional story with moral and/or esthetic connotations.  The intriguing voiceover that opens and closes the film is both self-reflexive and revelatory; it alerts the viewers that the tragic events at the heart of the story may also be embroidered by fabulation; that there is something else to the story of middle-class children and their parents, set in a cookie-cutter suburban development encroaching on nature during a torrid summer.  Realism and logical plot construction may be a façade waiting to be subverted.  Fellini’s 8 ½ and Buñuel’s logic of dreams help make sense of the unravelling of four pre-teenagers, whose fathers are totally toxic and the mothers ineffectual, while other adults are literally and morally dangerous. Since realism is not the name of the game, the audience is  challenged to sort out what is actually happening on the screen, and who doing the telling.  Like the opening monologue of Nolan’s The Prestige (2006), the clue to the story is hidden in plain sight. 

The press conference was lively; when asked about their influences, one of the D' Innocenzo brothers provided an eclectic list: Gus Van Sunt, Takeshi Kitano, John Cassavetes, John Ford, Billy Wilder and Chantal Akerman. Regarding Italian directors, they acknowledged Matteo Garrone, Ermanno Olmi, and Pietro Germi as references.

Broken Nose, Empty Pockets, and Bad Tales merit a wide audience, and their directors, the recognition that fresh talents have arrived to the film scene.

Back to the source: Carlo Collodi's "Adventures of Pinocchio" (1883), redux

Three slabs of the Berlin Wall in Potsdamer Platz

I am in Berlin again, attending the 70^th edition of its film festival.  I first landed in the city in February of 1985, its 35^th, thanks to the invitation of Argentine filmmaker Manuel Antín, then director of the Argentine Film Institute, who had appointed me to the Film Rating Commission, and included me in the Argentine delegation.  The wall still divided the city, and it seemed unbridgeable. Manuel Antín advised me to get a press credential for the following year, and I have been coming ever since, skipping only two or three times. What a treat it has been, the highlight of my professional year.  I saw the collapsed wall in February of 1990, three months after it happened – an ideology and a praxis shattered  to pieces. At the time you could pick bits of concrete from the two walls and no-man’s land had stood. Now for a few euros you can get a small piece encased in acrylic.

Every screening I attend in the Competition – a lean 18-title section this year - opens vistas on unexpected things, since I read nothing beforehand, and I get to the Berlinale Palast in Postdamer Platz as much a blank slate as I can be.

Matteo Garrone’s visually dazzling Pinocchio was great treat for me on Sunday, mainly for its Proustian reverberations; but also because the film fits Bruno Bettelheim’s observations on the moral and pedagogical role of fairy tales. Like Capra with the Why We Fight series in WWII, Disney’s handling of the Pinocchio story in the 1940s – “sanitizing” could be, but is not, the right word – shape the way we perceive it today.  It seems as if Collodi has been edged out of existence outside of Italy, or perhaps more kindly made a mute presence everywhere else. Watching this Pinocchio I thought that Pope Francis – a cinephile best explained by his Italian Argentine background – would love it, and have much to comment about fatherhood in a Sunday address to the faithful.

 I had never known who Carlo Collodi - author Carlo Lorenzini’s pen name - was, even though his was a familiar from my childhood. Courtesy of the Britannica, I absorbed the details of a life: Born in Tuscany in 1826 into a working class family, and after a stint in the seminary where he gained an education, Collodi became a journalist supporting Garibaldi and the Risorgimento against Austria, publishing political satires until the reunification of Italy as a kingdom in the 1860s. He then left political writing for children’s literature. I realize that the immediate success of the book in Italy in the 1880s quickly led to translations, and that it must have become a children’s favorite for the generation of my grandparents – born between the 1890s and the 1900s.  I wonder what they made of it.  How did they absorb the adventures of an obnoxious and disobedient puppet, that can still scare the hell out of kids (maybe not the media savvy ones of today). How did they relate to a bratty character that ditches school and wants to have fun.  The novel is fraught with unimaginable dangers, all of them at the hands of  cruel or selfish adults: robbery, kidnapping, hanging, slavery, near drowning, transforming into a donkey, before Pinocchio is reunited with his loving creator Geppetto, courtesy of a mother-figure fairy and the ghost of a talking cricket Pinocchio killed with a hammer at the beginning of the story. But all’s well that ends well. In the serialized novel, the protagonist dies in chapter 15 but the clamor of readers made Collodi resurrect him in chapter 16. 

Matteo Garrone, the director of the brutal Gomorrah (2008), about the Neapolitan camorra, and a take on fairy stories, Tale of Tales (2015), wrote and directed this version, casting the exuberant Roberto Benigni as Geppetto, and the cute child actor Federico Ielapi (who won over the journalists at the press conference) who looks awfully wooden behind the makeup and costume, sporting the proverbial pointy noise. 

What makes Garrone’s a fascinating take on Pinocchio is the issue of what a Midwestern American did with the original novel in the early 1940s when looking for a project after the success of the lovingly-gestated Snow White. This Disney layer of meaning is now such an integral part of the story, that one imagines that “When You Wish upon a Star” may have been culled from Collodi’s original.

The journey from an Italian 19^th century sensibility and landscape – how to live, work, raise children in a society that was quickly being industrialized – to an 20^th century Anglo-Saxon mindset – is the intriguing part for me. The way this creative process unfolded at the Disney studios in Los Angeles has already been written, and it is fun to read about it: the technological achievements in animation in Disney’s second feature, and Pinocchio very soon becoming an archetype recognizable everywhere.

Now I have an idea for an assignment in the adaptation class I often teach: ask the students to read the original Collodi novel, and describe the nuts and bolts of the adaptation process in the Disney and Garrone adaptations, observing the key differences in text and context.  Not unlike what I have been doing since the same 2012 with the Taviani brothers’ Caesar Must Die, the Gold Bear of that year, and the 1953 Joseph L. Manckiewicz adaptation of Julius Caesar. Classics matter and Shakespeare speaks to us today. Now its Collodi's turn.  “Para novedades, los clásicos”, as Miguel de Unamuno duly observed.

Los tallos amargos (1956) at the Million Dollar Theatre in downtown Los Angeles

Los tallos amargos (1956), directed by Fernando Ayala

Los tallos amargos was hiding in plain sight in a private collector’s home in Buenos Aires, when Fernando Martín Peña, an Argentine film historian and curator at MALBA – Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires – arranged with Eddie Muller of the Film Noir Foundation to have it restored. With the foundation providing the funds and the UCLA Film & Television Archive doing the lab work, the film got an unexpected new life in 2016, when, among other U.S. screenings, it became part of a six-film series at the Museum of Modern Art: “Death Is My Dance Partner: Film Noir in Postwar Argentina”.   It should be noted, too, that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association also contributed to its restoration. Los tallos amargos is a knockout film, and the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles is proud to show it as part of the 2019 Last Remaining Seats program of the LA Conservancy. The film screens on Saturday, June 8, at 2pm, at the Million Dollar Theatre in downtown Los Angeles.

 

In 1954, journalist Adolfo Jasca submitted his novel “Los tallos amargos” [The Bitter Stems] to the prestigious literary contest of the publishing house Emecé, which gave it the first prize and recommended its publication.  The novel captured the atmosphere of the newspaper world in the Buenos Aires of the 1950s as the background for a story involving a reporter, Alfredo Gasper; a Lithuanian refugee, Paar Liudas; and the journalism school by mail they concoct that leads to a seemingly perfect crime. The novel unfolded as a porteño update of Crime and Punishment. The essentials of the story were transferred to the film version of the same title, two years later, even though Liudas became a Hungarian exile.  The film was a box-office success and earned top prizes from the Argentine critics association, for best film and best direction, in 1957. 

Fernando Ayala

Made as an independent production, and released through Artistas Argentinos Asociados, it was the second picture directed by Fernando Ayala (1920-1997), a filmmaker whose long career began at the end of the classic studio system and became emblematic of the new Argentine auteur cinema in the 1960s.  With Héctor Olivera, Ayala founded Aries Cinematográfica, a production and distribution company relevant until the late 1990s, which combined commercial fare with titles that provided an astute critique of social and political issues, grounded in real-life situations recognizable by Argentine audiences.  Always engaging, Ayala’s filmography is a road map to understand modern Argentina’s permanent state of turmoil, with its cycles of boom and bust, and its impact on the middle class. Among his most renowned titles are: El jefe (1958), Paula cautiva (1963), La fiaca (1969), La guita (1970), Plata dulce (1982) and El arreglo (1983).

Los tallos amargos belongs to the visual style we now call noir– a term coined by French critics to describe the style and content of American crime films made in the forties and fifties.  Interestingly, U.S. and European filmmakers like John Huston, Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang, Max Ophuls, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder and Orson Welles, among others, working in the Hollywood system, did not describe their work using this term. Films like The Maltese Falcon, Phantom Lady, The Woman in the Window, Caught,Laura, Double Indemnity and The Lady from Shanghai reflected a sensibility, a mood, a visual flair, that showcased psychological narratives where the action “however violent or fast-paced was less significant than faces, gestures, words, than the truth of the characters”, as New Yorker critic Richard Brody noted when reviewing two noir retrospectives in 2014. French critics had observed this prevalence of psychological narrative over action, and borrowed the term noir– black –from the title of a collection crime fiction to describe these stylish Hollywood black and white dramas of the forties and fifties.

Ensayo de un crimen (1955) by Luis Buñuel

Even if it is problematic to think of noir as a well-defined genre – like westerns, comedies or musicals – since it is primarily a visual style, determined by particular circumstances and heavily rooted in German Expressionism and a pessimistic worldview, the term has gained purchase, albeit as a “peculiar genre”, in Brody’s words. It has become a standard shortcut to group crime titles, in a large or narrow sense, where character studies are the focus of the films. In the case of Mexican cinema, Luis Buñuel’s Él (1953) and Ensayo de un crimen(1955) fit the description.  When proposing an evaluation of Latin American crime cinema, MOMA entitled its two landmark retrospectives in 2015 and 2016,  “Mexico at Midnight: Film Noir from Mexican Cinema’s Golden Age” and  “Death is My Dance Partner: Film Noir in Postwar Argentina”. 

If Buñuel did not think of his psychological studies of perverted masculinities in terms of a homegrown form of noir, neither did a young Fernando Ayala when he transferred the postwar paranoia of the literary original to Buenos Aires locations and studio sets rendered in the noir palette.  He was an avid moviegoer well versed in genre conventions, and European and American styles; and he had finished his first film film, Ayer fue primavera(1955), a romantic drama reconstructed from flashbacks.

Carlos Cores

Los tallos amargos showcases the increasing paranoia of the protagonist Alfredo Gasper (starring Carlos Cores, 1923-2000, a major star since the 1940s), the Argentine-born son of a German WWI military, with a tormented personality, while portraying Liudas, the Hungarian refugee (Vassili Lambrinos, 1926-2017, a dancer and choreographer born in Egypt) in ambiguous terms, thanks to the clever use of interlocking flashbacks. He is seen as refracted by the protagonist, and later as remembered by his son Jarvis (Pablo Moret). 

In staging the story as an atmospheric crime film, or “policial”, Ayala was ably supported by cinematographer Ricardo Younis (1918-2011), who also had a long and distinguished career in the Argentine film industry.  The reviews of this restored version of Los tallos amargos note that in a 2000 survey the American Cinematographer lists the picture as one the Best Shot Films between 1950 and 1997.  (Beware of the substandard copies of the film found in YouTube!). 

The dream sequence at the beginning of the film is an excellent instance of cinematography and mise-en-scène rendering the protagonist’s fragile ego; it is a visual forecast of Gasper’s unraveling, which unfolds like clockwork as a result of a fateful decision. The budding romance of Gasper’s sister Esther (Gilda Lousek, an upcoming actress with a long career in film and television) and Liuda’s son Jarvis serves as a counterpoint: it restores the moral order at the end of the film, not without irony.   The seeds that have germinated – the “stems” of the original Spanish title -  bring new life, but they carry the weight (“bitter”) of the past.

Rooted in a time and place, Los tallos amargos is a gripping film shaped by the noir conventions of the time. To better grasp what it brought to Argentine cinema in the 1950s, I would like to suggest an analogy with the stunning Argentine neo-noir Relatos salvajes(2014), directed by Daniel Szifrón, sixty years after the Ayala film. Its style and subject matter embody the Argentine zeitgeist of today.

List of sources

Brody, Richard, “Film Noir: The Elusive Genre”. The New Yorker, July 23, 2014. https://www.artforum.com/film/id=58064

“Death Is My Dance Partner: Film Noir in Postwar Argentina”. Program Notes, Museum of Modern Art, February 10-16, 2016. https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/1616

Green Quintana, Roberto, “El vampire negro/Los tallos amargos”. Program Notes, “Recuerdos de un cine en español: Latin American Cinema in Los Angeles, 1930-1960”. UCLA Film and Television Archive series, Fall 2017. https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/events/2017/10/28/vampiro-negro-tallos-amargos

Krieger, Clara and Alejandra Portela, Eds, Cine Latinoamericano I: Diccionario de realizadores. Buenos Aires, Ediciones del Jilguero, 1997.

Lerman, Gabriel, “La HFPA ayuda a restaurar una obra maestra del cine latinoamericano”. Hollywood Foreign Press Association, February 10, 2016. https://www.goldenglobes.com/articles/la-hfpa-ayuda-restaurar-una-obra-maestra-del-cine-latinoamericano

Manrupe, Raúl, and María Alejandra Portela, Un diccionario de filmes argentinos. Buenos Aires, Corregidor, 1995.

Nick Pinkerton, “Dead Can Dance”.  Artforum, February 10, 2016. https://www.artforum.com/film/id=58064

CSUN Cinematheque Spring 2019 Latin Auteur series: "The Official Story" (1985), by Luis Puenzo

At the core of La Historia Oficial lies a political melodrama.  Directed by Luis Puenzo, who ran a successful production company making commercials in the 1980s, the film was a critical success in Argentina and abroad, as well as a box-office smash in the domestic market: the top-grossing picture of 1985, and the second highest of 1986.  La Historia Oficial had a theatrical release in major European countries and in the United States.  It garnered national and international prizes, including an Academy award for best foreign picture in 1986, and the Cannes award for best actress to Norma Aleandro.

The film has come to represent in the minds of Argentine and foreign scholars the way the military regime of 1976-1983 operated against leftist guerrilla groups in the 1970s. Now a part of the Argentine imaginary, La Historia Oficial is seen as a document, albeit fictionalized, on how the relatives of those kidnapped were left to cope with the disappearance of their loved ones.

The film describes the process of political awareness undergone by Alicia Marnet de Ibáñez (Norma Aleandro), a high-school history history teacher married to Roberto Ibáñez (Héctor Alterio), a businessman who has prospered through his ties to the military and foreign investors. The couple has a five-year-old adopted girl, Gaby (Analía Castro), whose birthday they are about to celebrate when the film opens. In the eyes of their family and friends, the Ibáñez are a happy couple. However, through a series of shattering personal events starting in March 1983, at the beginning of the school year (the opening sequence), nine months after the military defeat in the Malvinas/Falkland war, Alicia becomes aware of the military dictatorship’s kidnapping of alleged terrorists, and suspects that their adopted daughter might be the child of a missing couple. Her search for the truth leads her to contact an organization striving to reunite children of the desaparecidos with their grandparents. Alicia believes that Sara Reballo (Chela Ruiz), a working-class woman, is the little girl’s grandmother. The marriage collapses as a result of Alicia’s quest, since Roberto is forced to acknowledge that he has indeed obtained the girl illegally through his connections with the regime.  The last months of the military in power also halt Roberto’s business dealings. The couple part and the future of Gaby remains uncertain in the film’s open ending.

The pursuit of the protagonist is punctuated by a visual pattern of slamming doors, heavy with symbolism. In the loudest slam, marking the climax of film, Roberto brutally closes the bedroom door on his wife’s finger. At the end of her journey, Alicia is made to suffer vicariously the fate of those fellow citizen humiliated and tortured by the Robertos of the regime. She leaves the family home by firmly closing the front door.

La Historia Oficial has been analyzed as a persuasive emotional account of how an important segment of the population suffered from moral and political blindness during the military rule of 1976-1983. The protagonist’s myopia to the events of those years has been justified as a plot device to make the story unfold as an Oedipus narrative: the need to find the truth sets in motion a chain of fateful events. Even more, the protagonist’s passive role in accepting a newborn baby received under suspicious circumstances, without asking questions, has been glossed over or explained as the plausible reaction of a sterile woman anxious to become a mother. Her journey towards moral enlightenment becomes credible only if Alicia’s unrealistic unawareness of the sociopolitical context and her disconcerting ignorance about the origin of Roberto’s wealth and the child are accepted by the viewer.

As in classical tragedy, this quest for truth is punctuated by moments of critical recognition, anagnorisis, that bring about a change of course in the action, peripeteia. These scenes offer the three finest melodramatic peaks of the picture: Alicia’s friend Ana (Chunchuna Villafañe) describes her torture and rape; Gaby’s presumed grandmother recalls the circumstances of Gaby’s parents’ disappearance; Alicia confronts her husband in the climax scene, no holds barred.  

For an Argentine audience, the narrative strategy of the film is clearly perceived from the opening shot, with the singing of the Argentine national anthem. From the onset, there is a metaphoric link between a family torn asunder by the consequences of an immoral act - the fraudulent appropriation of a child - and the political scene between 1976 and 1983, when the armed forces violated constitutional rights to destroy the militant left. In the film, the personal is political, and the microhistory – the emotional breakdown of a family with links to the regime – mirrors the bigger canvas – the collapse of the military dictatorship.

The well-known Argentine children’s song “En el país de Nomeacuerdo, doy tres pasitos y me pierdo” (“In the land of I- don’t -remember I take a step and I’m lost”), by singer composer María Elena Walsh, becomes a leitmotif with unambiguous metaphorical meaning. It is heard non-diegetically, sung or hummed at several key points in the story, punctuatint the final image of the film, Gaby sitting alone on a rocking chair while the camera pulls away and the credits roll on.

Besides the portrayal of the military by allusion and metaphor, the film also takes a direct look at those members of the upper-class profiting form their links to the military.  It is the film’s weakest plot thread, since it relies on stereotypes and clichés, with these scenes staged as sleek commercials for luxury products.

Truth and memory, the two themes interwoven through La Historia Oficial, are sides of the same coin. They are embedded in the title of the film, and by the end, they have given a new meaning to the protagonist’s role as a history teacher. When the credits roll, Greek tragedy has stretched a hand to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland: Alicia’s emotional and moral journey through a land where memory is flimsy and history distorted has made her a heroine in full melodramatic mode. The heightened emotional, visual, and stylistic language of the film has been able to convey and articulate the moral dilemmas Alicia has had to navigate. In 1985, La Historia Oficial told Argentines this was their trip too.

When the film opened in the US, it received good critical notices. Roger Ebert wrote that “The Official Story is part polemic, part thriller, part tragedy. It belongs on the list with films like Z,Missing, and El Norte, which examine the human aspects of political unrest. It is a movie that asks some very hard questions. Should Alicia search for the real mother of her daughter? Is her own love no less real? What would be “best” for the little girl? (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-official-story-1985)

On its 30^thanniversary, La historia oficialwas restored in 4K based on the original negative, in a project funded by Argentine Film Institute, and shown as part of the Classics section of the Cannes film festival in 2015.

The screening tonight at the CSUN Cinematheque brings to a young college audience, the opportunity to see a landmark in the history of Argentine cinema.

For an interesting perspective on teaching La Historia Oficialto US students, see the experiences of Prof. Nicolas Poppe at Middlebury College: http://www.thecine-files.com/teaching-la-historia-oficial/, published in 2015.