The Melodramatic Nation: Integration and Polarization in the Argentine Cinema of the 1930s

Abstract

The 1930s represent a paradoxical decade within Argentine cultural history. Historians in search of the origins of Peronism have uncovered rising class antagonisms in these years. The dislocations of import substitution industrialization and massive internal migration, along with the restricted political system ushered in by the military coup of 1930, deepened class resentment among workers, creating a receptive audience for Juan Perón’s populist message.1 But whereas this narrative emphasizes class-based polarization, a different historiography has stressed the integrative forces at work in these years. Beginning with several pioneering articles by Leandro Gutiérrez and Luis Alberto Romero on Buenos Aires in the interwar period, this scholarship has charted the emergence of a new identity rooted in the city’s rapidly expanding barrios, where home-ownership was becoming a more accessible goal and where skilled and unskilled workers often lived alongside white-collar employees, small-business owners, and professionals. According to this interpretation, Argentina’s dynamic economy created real opportunities for social mobility in the 1920s and 1930s; in this context, the militant working-class consciousness of earlier years gave way to an identity that was less grounded in class. In fact, these historians downplay the relevance of social class in this period, preferring to explore the culture, values, and identity of the heterogeneous, undifferentiated “popular sectors.” Mostly Argentine-born children of immigrants, these popular sectors were intent on self-improvement and upward mobility; unlike their parents, they embraced integration into Argentine society as the means to a more comfortable life.2Although the emphasis on mobility as both socioeconomic reality and widespread aspiration has illuminated the period, it is of only limited use in explaining the origins of Peronism. While Perón undoubtedly tapped into the desire for a higher standard of living, he also addressed his supporters in explicitly classist terms. In fact, while Perón initially sought to build a broad, multiclass movement, class polarization made it impossible to hold this coalition together. In light of these events, the notion that the pursuit of individual mobility had simply replaced working-class consciousness in the 1930s is unconvincing. The concept of the “popular sectors” obscures a complex process of identity formation marked by fluidity and ambiguity. The aspiration to a middle-class lifestyle must have coexisted with the persistence of working-class loyalties.3In part, the shortcomings of the “popular sectors” historiography reflect the rather narrow range of sources on which it relies. Historians have exhaustively analyzed the myriad new barrio associations, newspapers, and popular libraries that preached the gospel of upward mobility. But they have yet to show much interest in one of the other major developments of the period: the explosion of mass culture. Apart from some creative analyses of tango lyrics, historians have generally been content to cite the omnipresence of radios and movie theaters in the barrios as factors that encouraged the pursuit of upward mobility and weakened class consciousness.4 Yet the conservative impact of mass culture cannot simply be assumed. By overlooking the content of the films, music, and radio theater consumed in the barrios, historians have missed a crucial window onto the paradoxical cultural universe of the 1930s. This article will begin to rectify this oversight by exploring the domestic cinema produced in the years following the introduction of sound film in 1933. In this period, Argentine movies became a major attraction in the barrios of Buenos Aires and beyond, generating powerful images and discourses about class and nation. An examination of these films can help clarify how a mass culture that reflected an increasingly integrated society also contained the raw materials for the deep polarization of the Perón years.While historians have paid scant attention to the Argentine cinema of the 1930s, film scholars have produced many excellent studies of its forms and conditions of production, genre development, models of representation, as well as the styles of individual filmmakers.5 Although film-studies scholarship has not directly engaged the questions that cultural historians have raised, it tends to corroborate their assumptions about the cinema’s ideological effects. Film melodrama, extremely important in this period, has typically been considered a conservative genre, both in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America.6 Moreover, while scholars have recognized several progressive moments in early Argentine film history — notably, the urban realism of José Agustín Ferreyra and the social criticism of Mario Soffici’s rural dramas — they have stressed the industry’s conformist tendencies. According to the dominant narrative, the growth of the domestic studios in the late 1930s and early 1940s pushed filmmakers away from populist realism and toward either more aesthetically daring, intellectual material or bland, middle-class entertainments and consumerist fantasies.7 This article, by contrast, seeks to demonstrate that the Argentine cinema was ideologically ambivalent from its inception. Under pressure to compete with Hollywood, local filmmakers tried to imitate the technological and ideological achievements of their North American counterparts. Yet they also needed to differentiate their products in order to attract a domestic audience. Toward that end, they relied heavily on existing popular culture — in particular, the rich melodramatic tradition embodied in the tango songs, popular theater, and pulp fiction of the preceding decades. Attempting to modernize and improve the domestic cinema, as well as to lure wealthier customers away from Holly-wood movies, they worked to eliminate (or at least clean up) plebeian cultural elements. But lowbrow and potentially subversive traditions remained crucial to the industry’s commercial strategy. Drawing on the insights of feminist film studies, I will expose the persistent ideological instability of the films shaped by these contradictory forces. Through direct comparisons with North American films, I will demonstrate how the tension between subversive and conformist messages prevented the Argentine cinema from elaborating the sort of unifying national myths produced by Hollywood in this era.It is by now commonly accepted that mass-cultural commodities like films do not directly reflect the consciousness of the audiences who consume them. Although designed to appeal to a mass audience, films are shaped by a host of factors, including cultural traditions, individual artistic visions, commercial pressures, critical responses, and the structure of the film industry. Moreover, reception is not passive; viewing a film is an act of meaning-making, inseparable from its historical context. Nevertheless, mass culture does provide consumers with crucial material from which to forge their own consciousness, and while films are open to multiple readings, they are not infinitely malleable.8 In order to uncover the particular meanings that movie audiences make in a specific historical moment, historians need to attend to both the conditions of reception and the filmic discourse itself. Here I draw on popular film magazines and the mainstream press to establish the composition of Argentine film audiences in the 1930s, as well as the cultural and ideological context within which the films were produced and consumed. I then examine a group of films featuring several of the acknowledged box-office champions of the day: movie stars Libertad Lamarque and Luis Sandrini and director Manuel Romero. I have chosen to focus on two genres — melodrama and comedy (which was itself deeply structured by melodrama’s guiding principles) — precisely because they have often been dismissed as conservative or conformist. Although source limitations prevent me from determining precisely how individuals interpreted these films, my analysis does reveal their essential ambivalence. As a whole, the Argentine cinema pushed simultaneously toward national integration and class polarization.Although Argentine filmmakers achieved a few commercial successes during the silent era — most notably Nobleza gaucha (Cairo, 1915) — they were generally overwhelmed by competition from Hollywood and Europe. Local film production increased during the late 1910s, when World War I interrupted the flow of foreign films into Argentina, but by 1920, the U.S. film industry had recovered its position of dominance. For the rest of the silent period, Argentine filmgoers followed the exploits of Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino, and Greta Garbo and were only very rarely able to see an Argentine production. As late as 1931, only four Argentine films were released; in 1932, that number had dropped to two. But the introduction of sound would transform the Argentine film industry. In 1933, the country’s first two modern studios — Argentina Sono Film and Lumiton — were created in order to produce sound films for the domestic market. The industry took off almost immediately, growing steadily over the next decade. Local filmmakers released 13 films in 1935, 28 in 1937, 41 in 1938, and an average of 50 films each year between 1939 and 1942. By 1937, Buenos Aires hosted nine film studios and 30 production companies.9Argentine films gained a significant share of the domestic market, despite the enormous competitive advantage enjoyed by the big U.S. firms. Since Hollywood studios enjoyed direct access to the world’s largest domestic market, they entered foreign markets needing only to recover distribution costs. Argentine competitors, in contrast, had to recover the entire cost of production from the local market. Moreover, the large U.S. companies made a concerted effort to capture the Argentine market; by 1935, Paramount, Metro, Warner, Fox, Columbia, Universal, and United Artists all had branch offices not only in Buenos Aires but in the important provincial cities as well. In contrast to these powerful companies, Argentine film studios were tiny operations. Lacking the bargaining power of their foreign rivals, Argentine producers were unable to secure a distribution system that guaranteed them a percentage of the gross receipts. Forced to sell films to distributors on a flat-fee basis and lacking any protectionist assistance from the government, they remained severely under-capitalized.10 But if the domestic film industry faced adverse economic conditions, other factors favored its growth. Local film producers benefited from the long tradition of popular theater in Argentina, particularly the short musical comedy known as the sainete; by providing comparable entertainment at a lower admission price, they could capture this existing audience. At the same time, an important segment of this audience was reluctant or unable to read the subtitles that accompanied films in English.11 But perhaps most important, the Argentine films of the 1930s must have spoken to local audiences in a way that Hollywood films could not. Argentine movies were set in familiar locales. They starred actors who spoke Spanish in the local dialect and who were often recognizable to filmgoers from their previous careers in theater and radio. And as products of the local milieu, these films addressed themes of particular relevance to Argentine audiences.From the beginning of the sound era, the movies were a popular source of entertainment in Argentine cities. As early as 1929, 972 theaters showed movies in the country as a whole, 152 of them in the city of Buenos Aires.12 Seven years later, Argentina ranked first in Latin America, with 1,425 movie theaters.13 On the basis of film receipts for 1942, the U.S. Commerce Department calculated that the average Argentine went to the movies seven or eight times per year.14 Many of these moviegoers belonged to the ranks of the working poor. Of the 147 theaters listed on one porteño newspaper’s movie page in 1939, 101 were located in the barrios outside the city center, and as early as 1930, even predominately working-class areas like Pompeya and La Boca had their own movie theaters.15 Admission prices were high at the downtown, first-run theaters: 1.50 pesos for the balcony and 2.50 for orchestra seats. But barrio movie houses were much more accessible to popular audiences. There, tickets went for as little as 20 centavos, at a time when unskilled workers earned between four and eight pesos a day, on average. For that relatively low price, patrons at barrio theaters were entitled to a program of at least three, and as many as five, feature films.16 In the barrios, the movies were a cheap night out, affordable even for manual laborers. The weekly magazine of Argentina’s principal union confederation (the CGT) probably only exaggerated slightly when it declared that “90% of the audience for film production is found among our readership.”17Not coincidentally, the CGT magazine’s claim was part of an appeal directed at Argentine filmmakers. While Argentines of all social classes enjoyed Hollywood films, the audience for domestic movies was composed primarily of the heterogeneous lower and middle classes. As a U.S. Commerce Department publication reported, “The so-called better class Argentine . . . has a predilection for American films.”18 In fact, for much of the 1930s, many first-run the-aters downtown refused to show Argentine films at all, and the film industry trade paper, El Heraldo del Cinematografista, labeled most domestic productions “suitable, preferably, for popular cinemas.”19 In the 1939 movie listings cited above, only 30 percent of downtown theaters were showing any Argentine films. But among the barrio theaters, the figure rose to 53 percent, with most barrio theaters offering several domestic productions.20 The movies constituted a cultural field marked by a hierarchy of taste. At the top of this hierarchy were the major new Hollywood films, shown for a high price at fancy downtown theaters. At the other end of the spectrum were Argentine films, shown at barrio theaters at prices accessible to nearly all.Despite the success of the domestic film industry, the ongoing competition with Hollywood made the cinema a site of national anxiety. The foreign cinema was often figured as a dangerous seducer who threatened to woo local girls away from Argentine men. In a 1931 newspaper column, novelist Roberto Arlt worried that women who watched movies would become disillusioned with their own lives. He reports the words of a female informant, referring to an American film star popular in the Spanish-speaking world: “I have known many very happily married women who, after a year of going to the movies, looked at their husbands as if to say to them, ‘Ramón Novarro smokes more elegantly than you.’ “21 Once Argentina began producing its own sound films, the competition with Hollywood was depicted as a matter of national pride. The fan magazine Sintonía regularly ran ads calling on readers to attend Argentine films: “Watch Argentine movies in your neighborhood theater: It’s patriotic.”22 Likewise, movie critics used each review of an Argentine film as an occasion to measure the technological and artistic progress of the nation’s film industry against the Hollywood standard. Eventually, the success of the local cinema gave Argentine men the chance to undo their emasculation. In 1939, the film and radio magazine Radiolandia actually celebrated the suicide of a girl from the province of Misiones, whose desperation was caused by the recent death of local film star José Gola. The fact that Argentine girls were killing themselves for national idols as they had once done for Rudolph Valentino represented a major victory: “[T]he criollo competition has grown sizeable and strong.”23The domestic film industry’s subordinate relationship to its North American rival decisively shaped the movies it produced, encouraging Argentine filmmakers both to emulate the high technological and artistic standards set by Hollywood and to distinguish their products from the competition. These filmmakers sought to elaborate what Miriam Hansen, in a different context, has called an “alternative vernacular modernism,” a reconfiguration of North American models of genre, cinematography, and style that could articulate the fantasies and anxieties of the Argentine mass public.24 While they could not hope to replicate the lavish budgets of American films, Argentine filmmakers realized that they could attract audiences by producing movies steeped in local popular culture. The model for this approach was provided by the enormously successful movies of Argentine tango singer Carlos Gardel. These films, produced by Paramount between 1931 and Gardel’s death in 1935, demonstrated the commercial potential of movies that were not only spoken in Spanish but were also showcases for the tango.25 Aiming to replicate this success, local film companies drew heavily on actors, directors, and thematic material from the porteño theater and radio. The first two Argentine sound films established the strategy: Tango, released in 1933 by Argentina Sono Film, featured many of the most popular tango singers of the day and a plot that recycled the conventions and stereotypes of tango songs, while Los tres berretines, released that same year by Lumiton, was an adaptation of a sainete that had been a hit on the Buenos Aires stage the year before. Throughout the 1930s, Argentine movies continued to feature music and thematic material drawn from the tango and the sainete.26By repackaging Argentine popular culture, the local film industry could differentiate its products from Hollywood movies while appealing to an established audience. Moreover, by disseminating these local cultural practices on a massive scale, Argentine movies promoted the integration of recent migrants from the countryside and working-class children of immigrants into a common national culture.27 But the strategy had other effects as well. The tango and the sainete were useful to the film industry because they were widely seen as quintessentially Argentine. At the same time, though, both the tango and the sainete had obvious class connotations. Disdained by elites and intellectuals as lowbrow or worse, both cultural forms explicitly addressed a lower-class audience. The tendency to represent the nation with plebeian symbols like the gaucho and the tango singer had long been a source of concern for Argentine elites and intellectuals.28 The prominence of popular cultural referents in the cinema provoked similar anxieties. Although official censorship remained limited in the 1930s, criticism of the supposed bad taste displayed in national films was ubiquitous in the print media.29 In Crítica, Ulyses Petit de Murat denounced “[c]ertain dishes seasoned with heavy sauces, certain situations that offend good taste, the crudeness of the photodramatic style of many films.”30 Likewise, in El Mundo, film reviewer Calki (Raimundo Calcagno) insisted that “Our cinema needs style!”31 while his colleague, Néstor (Miguel Paulino Tato), irritated movie fans by fulminating against the “vulgarity and poor taste” displayed in local films.32For these critics, what threatened the cultural level of Argentine cinema was precisely its tendency to borrow from lowbrow cultural forms such as the tango and the sainete. In its review of Los tres berretines, the conservative film magazine Cinegraf put it succinctly: “We have been denouncing a cinema based on specimens from working-class suburbs, on carnival parade peasants. It seems to us equally absurd that films should be distorted with immigrants from the sainete in order to degenerate into situations that can never fully reflect the life of the nation, and that they should appeal to the comic effect of low-class street language [lenguaje arrabalero], whose inherent bad taste is undoubtedly damaging.”33 “Bad taste,” according to this reviewer, was epitomized by the tango and the sainete, cultural forms that sprung from the “suburbios” and “arrabales” that were home to Buenos Aires’ plebeian masses.While Cinegraf ’s conservative politics and glossy covers stood out among Argentine film magazines, its elitist hostility toward popular culture did not.34 Most film reviewers were ambivalent about the local cinema’s appropriation of lowbrow cultural forms. They wanted Argentine films to emphasize the national without catering to the uncultured tastes of the popular sectors. In its positive review of La vida de Carlos Gardel, a biopic made five years after Gardel’s death, La Razón lauded the film for having avoided “the sin of reproducing the trite and not very uplifting atmosphere of the tango. In effect, Carlos Gardel started out in the working-class suburbs, singing in grocery stores, as the film says. But the film did not go on to wallow in that torpid world of the bar counter and the suburban street tough [ese espeso ambiente del mostrador y del compadrito suburbano].”35 Even though this reviewer acknowledged the rags-to-riches story that helped make Gardel a national icon, he complimented the film for avoiding any depiction of the gritty, urban milieu from which Gardel emerged. What the reviewer appreciated was the movie’s sanitized version of a popular-national legend. Critics like this one hoped that film, if it could avoid pandering to popular tastes, might serve as a vehicle for educating and improving the masses. They saw the cinema as an opportunity to align the nation with progress and modernity while preserving its distinctive essence.Argentine film companies largely agreed with the critics. Not content to cede middle-and upper-class moviegoers to Hollywood, the local studios aimed to improve the quality of their films in order to attract an audience who could afford higher admission prices. Frequently, this “improvement” involved an attempt to distance the cinema from lowbrow popular culture. As early as 1936, Argentina Sono Film hoped to enhance its image with Amalia (Moglia Barth), based not on a sainete but on the canonical novel by José Mármol.36 The attempt to attract wealthier patrons also shaped the company’s marketing strategy; Amalia debuted in the “important” Cine Monumental, and was then extended to 15 “first-class” movie houses before eventually being released simultaneously to 62 theaters throughout the barrios of Buenos Aires.37 Argentina Sono Film, in fact, sought to distinguish itself as a purveyor of healthy entertainment uncontaminated by the dubious morality of the tango.38 But the attempt to sanitize and elevate the content of films in order to attract a higher-class audience was commonplace across the industry. Pampa Film boasted of its own effort to improve the quality of Argentine cinema in its advertisements for La fuga (Saslavsky, 1937), “a film that is honest and pure, that dignifies the Argentine screen in a clear attempt to improve itself artistically.”39 Even Lumiton, the studio most closely associated with lowbrow entertainment, employed the strategy. The company’s Así es la vida (Múgica, 1939) told the story of an upwardly mobile middle-class family. Although the film was based on a successful sainete, director Francisco Múgica purged the work of lowbrow elements, in particular the caricatured immigrants who were the sainete’s most characteristic comic ploy.40 Múgica’s efforts to lift Argentine cinema above its popular cultural roots were widely praised. In the pages of El Mundo, Calki lauded Así es la vida for having transformed a sainete into a more respectable work of art: “[I]ts sainete-like roughness has been refined, it has been cinematographically transformed, it has been given a higher level of comedy.”41 For both commercial and aesthetic reasons, filmmakers shared the critics’ dream of a national cinema purged of the traces of disreputable popular culture.Despite this dream, films featuring the tango remained common throughout the 1930s. But even these movies were influenced by the industry’s efforts at cultural improvement. During the silent era and for the first few years after the introduction of sound, director José Agustín Ferreyra produced sympathetic portraits of working-class urban life. A mulatto who grew up in a working-class family in Buenos Aires, Ferreyra drew heavily on the melodramatic conventions of the tango and the sainete. But it was their gritty realism that made his films stand out.42 However, Ferreyra soon found himself under increasing pressure to make more broadly commercial pictures. Between 1936 and 1938, he filmed three movies for the SIDE company starring theater actress and tango singer Libertad Lamarque. In these so-called tango operas, Ferreyra took advantage of Lamarque’s well-known voice by repeatedly interrupting the action so that she could sing tangos.43 While the director’s commitment to the tango remained intact, he had abandoned the realist style of his early work. As Ferreyra’s biographer, Jorge Miguel Couselo, describes it, “[T]he reality of a cinema with aspirations of industrialization was closing in on him.”44This attempt to sanitize the Argentine cinema repeated a process that had already occurred in the United States, where the birth of the cinema had inspired significant efforts at moral uplift. From the 1920s on, Hollywood achieved enormous profits by manufacturing films that appealed to a multi-class audience. These films avoided threatening topics like class conflict and moved away from lowbrow genres such as the spectacular melodrama of early cinema.45 More fundamentally, “classical” Hollywood cinema elaborated strategies of narration that standardized reception, creating a new mode of spectatorship that blurred the class and ethnic divisions of movie audiences. But as Miriam Hansen has demonstrated, the new narrative strategies also produced the conditions for the emergence of “alternative public spheres.” Hollywood cinema appropriated earlier cultural traditions and popular entertainments as its raw material, depoliticizing them in the process. But this depoliticization was never total. Subordinate groups like women and working-class immigrants could, at times, find in the cinema a space from which to elaborate their own, autonomous points of view.46Like the Hollywood studios, the Argentine film industry hoped to sanitize and elevate the popular culture that provided its primary source material. But in Argentina, the effort to render popular culture politically unthreatening was far less successful. Competition with Hollywood deepened the domestic cinema’s reliance on popular culture. Filmmakers who sought to construct safe, morally uplifting representations of the nation needed to draw on the tango and the sainete in order to give these representations legitimacy. And even as they aimed to rise above their lowbrow cultural roots, they needed to hold onto their working-class audience. Argentine filmmakers walked a fine line, attempting to capitalize on the mass appeal of popular culture even as they pursued a more prosperous audience drawn to the technical and artistic elegance of Hollywood. As a result, the potential for alternative public spheres was much greater in the Argentine films of the period, in which subversive messages persisted alongside more conservative, moralizing, and sanitized ones.Caught between these two poles, the cinema failed to construct a coherent discourse about class or nation. Many of these films explored conservative themes such as upward mobility, the virtue of hard work, and the possibility of interclass marriage, yet they continually reproduced populist versions of Argentine national identity that reinscribed class divisions and suggested the futility of trying to overcome them. Argentine audiences of all classes continued to watch Hollywood movies in the 1930s, but domestic films offered a very different viewing experience; watching a local production, moviegoers were watching a representation of themselves.47 And despite the efforts of filmmakers and critics, these images of national identity retained the populist resonances inherent in earlier popular cultural practices.Melodrama, more than any other cultural form, shaped the formal language, plot lines and character types of early Argentine sound films. The centrality of melodrama was, in fact, overdetermined. Hollywood cinema itself was born with “melodramatic predispositions,” and given Hollywood’s status as a model for imitation and competition, this orientation inevitably influenced Argentine filmmakers.48 But perhaps more important, melodramatic styles and stories dominated the local popular culture that contributed so much thematic content to Argentine films. Not only were melodramatic plots central to the tango and sainete; they were also disseminated in pulp fiction and the increasingly popular radio dramas of the day. These melodramatic narratives involved romantic conflicts that played out in a society characterized by a Manichean division between the noble poor and the evil rich. Although these narratives came in various forms, the archetype involved a poor, innocent girl who falls in love with a wealthy man. The popular “weekly novels” of the day featured prominently the “bella pobre,” the poor girl whose beauty might allow her to overcome society’s prejudices and marry the man of her dreams — typically someone of far higher economic and social status. Similarly, tango songs constantly revisited the trope of the milonguita, the poor, innocent girl from the barrio who is seduced by a wealthy man and by the wild porteño nightlife. While some weekly novels had happy endings and others ended in tragedy, tango songs typically ended with the milonguita cruelly tossed aside and left to grow old alon