Sounding Out Temporality in the Argentine Film Musical of the 1930s

Abstract

Sounding Out Temporality in the Argentine Film Musical of the 1930s Nicolas Poppe (bio) Among the revolutionary changes precipitated by the shift from silent to sound film in the late 1920s and early 1930s is the temporalization of the image by sound. No longer left in temporal indeterminacy as it was in the silent period, the internal duration of the image becomes rooted in time through the viewer’s experience of sound.1 The susurrus of leaves in the background—an image whose contingency so captivated Georges Méliès’ viewing of the Lumière’s Repas de bébé (1895) that he famously disregarded the rather staged movements of Auguste and Marguerite Lumière doting on their daughter Andrée, an anecdote that also underlines the ineluctable indexicality of film—is no longer left without an auditory referent, but rather becomes fixed into time through what Michel Chion calls its “added value.”2 Even though early film was often conceptualized as an imprint of time, which transforms the present by archiving it into immediate history by either explicitly or implicitly assembling recordings of real time continuously and indiscriminately, film can only become truly chronographic when the movements of its images can also be heard.3 No matter how verisimilar the perceived image of rustling leaves may be, the viewer must hear movement in order to reconcile its temporality. Somewhat more prosaically, filmic temporality also becomes fixed by the introduction of synchronous sound through the normalization and stabilization of film projection speed. As Chion agues: [End Page 211] Filmic time was no longer a flexible value, more or less transposable depending on the rhythm of projection. Time henceforth had a fixed value; sound cinema guaranteed that whatever lasted x seconds in the editing would still have this same exact duration during the screening. (Audio-Vision 16–17) Not only did this new type of filmic temporality dramatically alter the experience of time and space on the screen, but also it posed new challenges to those engaged with constructing filmic texts, especially in montage.4 Even in the very early history of film, decades before the introduction of sound film technologies, montage was used to assemble temporalities independent of what was recorded by the camera. While the viewer may have felt or perceived experiences of real duration, moments ostensibly captured by the camera “as they actually happened,” those temporalities are not only constructions made by those involved in the creation of the film, but also they are illusive, as the filmic apparatus is inherently unable to represent the totality of the real. Furthermore, as films ultimately came to be constructions of diverse components and disparate experiences, temporality is not even fixed within the film. In this sense, the arrival of brand-new sound technologies to the cinema marks a continuation, if not an extension, of the inherent incongruity or heterogeneity of temporality. Following Mary Ann Doane’s assertion that “cinema engages multiple temporalities, and it is helpful, at least temporarily, to disentangle them” (30), in this paper I examine film musicals5 produced in the mid-to-late 1930s in Argentina in an attempt to get at how audiovisual textual operations frame the experience of cinematic temporalities while keeping in mind Tom Gunning’s observation that time in filmic narratives: is never just linear progression (one damn thing after another), it is also the gathering of successive moments into a pattern, a trajectory, a sense. (6) More specifically, I aim to trace a trajectory of a sense of temporality in these films through the analysis of a specific textual operation that is a key contributor to the films’ temporal instability: the song. Focusing on the relationship between narrative and song in three waves of early Argentine film musicals, I examine the construction of diegetic temporality, as well as the ways in which the almost-extradiegetic experience of watching songs being performed on screen problematizes and at times subverts the films’ sequential, normative chronologies, sometimes disrupting the linearity of time and sometimes suspending it. Interrupting the films’ diegeses, these songs operate as kinds of punctuation that “can not only modulate the meaning and rhythm of a text but actually determine it as...