Chronicles of light and sound: the film-poems of Alfonsina Storni

Abstract

One of South America’s most popular poets, Alfonsina Storni is primarily known for verses of love and passion. During her lifetime, Storni also wrote as a newspaper columnist under the pseudonym Tao Lao. Storni’s association with film has primarily been discussed as part of her friendship with author and cinephile Horacio Quiroga but translations and analyses of Storni’s film-poems, mainly composed in the last decade of her life, show that she was experimenting in a fusion of verse and cinema. Drawing on the proliferation of consumer products bringing film and photography into everyday life in Argentina in the 1920s and 1930s, Storni’s film-poems blend word and image through the photochemical properties of the film medium and the spatial and temporal techniques of motion pictures. While Storni’s biographers have classified some film-poems as falling within the reportage genre of the chronicle (crónica), these multimedia experiments work problems of subjectivity and objectivity intrinsic to the time-based approach of the chronicle through filmic technologies, while also interrogating constructs of gender and colonial power that were deeply embedded in the visual culture of South America in the 1920s and 1930s.