User:Bleff/sandbox24

The cinema of Argentina has historically been among the most developed in Latin America and one of the most recognized and influential in the Spanish-speaking world. What is known as Argentine cinema is often equated to the cinema of Buenos Aires, as the city and its metropolitan area have historically concentrated the majority of film production, although in every era there have been more or less isolated cinematic experiences outside the capital.^[5] Both the kinetoscope and the cinematograph arrived to Buenos Aires shortly after their creation and introduced the local public to the concept of motion pictures early on. The country's first films were made in the late 1890s and early 1900s by pioneers like cameraman Eugenio Py and businessman Max Glücksmann of the Casa Lepage, while the first narrative films emerged by the end of the decade, thanks to Mario Gallo. The 1914 film Amalia is often—albeit erroneously—cited as the country's first feature film, although its lavish premiere at the Teatro Colón, its association with high society, and its substantial revenue did open up new prospects for artistic prestige and commercial success in Argentine cinema.

From 1915 onward, the repercussions of World War I fueled a boom in Argentine silent films, surpassing production in other Spanish-speaking countries, which established Argentina as a leader in Latin American film production and spurred its development as an entertainment industry. The 1915 premiere of Nobleza Gaucha was crucial to this trend, becoming an unprecedented commercial success that led to a growth in local film activity. This period saw the release of several notable titles such as Hasta después de muerta (1916), El Apóstol (1917)—the world's first animated feature film—El último malón (1918), produced in Santa Fe, and Juan Sin Ropa (1919). Concurrently, it marked the emergence of the first women directors, who would not occupy directorial roles for decades following the introduction of sound. By the 1920s, Argentine silent cinema had lost its initial momentum, eclipsed by the revival of European cinema and the unmatched rise of Hollywood's dominance, while struggling to establish itself as a sustainable industry.

Argentina holds the record for the most Academy Awards for Best International Feature Film in Latin America, with two wins: The Official Story (1985) and The Secret in Their Eyes (2009); and has had a total of 8 nominations, making it the most recognized Latin American country in this category. Additionally, Argentina has won 19 Goya Awards for Best Ibero-American Film, more than any other country.^[6] In Sight and Sound 's Greatest Films of All Time 2022, Lucrecia Martel's La Ciénaga (2001) was the only Latin American film on any list, appearing in 62nd place in the director's poll.^[7]

Argentine cinema is almost as old as cinema in the world.^[8] The first early motion pictures introduced to Buenos Aires were Thomas Edison's kinetoscopes, which were brought by Czech businessman Federico Figner and presented on 18 September 1894—a few months after its first ever exhibition in New York City—^[9] in a special press screening.^[10] Although they consisted of small, single-view tapes, the kinetoscopes familiarized the local press and the general public with the concept of moving pictures, and the device came to be used as a parameter for all technical explanations regarding cinema.^{[10] [11]}

https://books.google.com.ar/books?id=qOADz1T4H4MC&pg=PA101&dq=%22vivomatograph%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiCs4Gp0-yKAxXvppUCHVRqGFEQ6AF6BAgFEAI#v=onepage&q&f=false

but true film projections were only possible thanks to the Lumière brothers' cinematograph, with which a series of presentations were made on 28 July 1896 at the Teatro Odeón.^{[12] [13]}

In 1897, the first projectors and cameras—from the Lumière and Gaumont firms—reached the country through Enrique Lepage's photography store, Casa Lepage.^[13] Their technician, the French Eugenio Py, became the first person to systematically film in Argentina;^[13] he shot the 1897 short La bandera argentina , a register of the national flag which is generally considered the country's first film.^[12] Other authors consider that the first films belong to the German Federico Fignero, who shot different views with a vitascope in 1896, aided by the camarographer José Steimberg.^[14] In addition to Lepage and Py, the third figure who dominated film production at this time was the Austrian Max Glücksmann, who was initially an employee of Casa Lepage and later acquired the firm in 1908.^{[15] [16]} The works of these early years of Argentine cinema correspond to actuality films.^[15] As noted by historian José Agustín Mahieu, this stage of national cinema "naively discovers the magic of movement, the direct capture of the landscape, of the event. The camera is still a primary eye planted in front of the facts. Over any other concern (artistic or cultural) prevails the technical curiosity, the exploration of a tool that is just beginning to be known."^[16] Thus, a small-scale commercial exploitation began, with the Casa Lepage offering projectors and films to restaurants, cafes or other entertainment venues.^[16] The company dominated the country's film production for a decade, dedicating to filming curiositites and current events such as official state visits, festivities and tourist sights.^[12] In 1900, the first movie theater, the Salón Nacional, was inaugurated, and soon more venues dedicated to the projection of films were opened.^[16]

At the end of the 1900s, the incipient Argentine cinema made significant progress with the appearance of the first narrative films, which encouraged production and distribution.^[12] These were the work of the Italian Mario Gallo, who had arrived in Buenos Aires a few years before as part of an opera company.^[17] There is confusion as to which was the first narrative film in the country: those who date its release in 1908 consider it to be El fusilamiento de Dorrego ,^[16] while more recent researchers point out that this film is actually from 1910 and the first one was really La Revolución de Mayo , released in 1909.^[18] For this reason, May 23 is considered National Film Day in the country, in commemoration of the release date of the latter film.^[19] In the manner of the French film d'a rt trend, Gallo's films were closer to photographed theatre, almost always on historical topics.^[16]

• View of the Teatro Odeón c. 1900, where the cinematograph was presented for the first time in 1896.
  View of the Teatro Odeón c. 1900, where the cinematograph was presented for the first time in 1896.
• A frame of the Eugenio Py's La bandera Argentina (1897), long considered the first Argentine film in history.
  A frame of the Eugenio Py's La bandera Argentina (1897), long considered the first Argentine film in history.
• French immigrant Eugenio Py is generally considered to have made the first films of the country in the 1890s.
  French immigrant Eugenio Py is generally considered to have made the first films of the country in the 1890s.
• A frame from Mario Gallo's La Revolución de Mayo (1909), regarded as the first narrative film of the country.
  A frame from Mario Gallo's La Revolución de Mayo (1909), regarded as the first narrative film of the country.
• An article published in 1914 in the magazine Caras y Caretas about Max Glücksmann and the Casa Lepage.
  An article published in 1914 in the magazine Caras y Caretas about Max Glücksmann and the Casa Lepage.

The 1914 release of the film Amalia —based on the novel of the same name by José Mármol—was highly influential and marked a turning point for the history of Argentine cinema.^[20] The film's premiere on 12 December 1914 was an unprecedented event for national filmmaking, as it took place at the Teatro Colón, the most prestigious venue for the high society and aristocracy of Buenos Aires, with the presence of President Victorino de la Plaza and his ministers.^{[21] [20]} Amalia was produced by Glücksmann, directed by playwright Enrique García Velloso and photographed by Py, shot in a very similar style to Gallo's films.^[21] The film was an initiative of the charity society Asociación del Divino Rostro, and its premiere was held with the "stated purpose of raising funds for the construction of a chapel and a school for girls."^[22] The characters were played by a long list of members of Buenos Aires' high society, presented in what Peña called "one of the longest title sequences in the entire history of cinema."^[21] Described as a "self-celebration show" for Buenos Aires' high society, the premiere of Amalia featured an unusually expensive ticket for a film screening and was accompanied by the Teatro Colón's orchestra.^[20] Contrary to popular belief, Amalia was not Argentina's first feature-length film, nor did it represent a stylistic breakthrough, as Nelly o la prima pobre was released the previous year, a 60-minute production sponsored by and starring members of elite charitable societies.^[22] Nevertheless, Amalia was the longest film up to that time, with an original running time of 3,000 meters,^[22] and is also the oldest surviving feature film of the country.^[21] As in 1912 and 1913, it was the only film released that year, but as Mafud pointed out, "unlike the previous ones, the trail that Amalia would leave would be much more important, both in 'artistic' prestige and in commercial possibility."^[20] By then, national production of fiction films had been stagnant for years, following a brief boom during on the occasion of the Centennial celebrations.^[20] Amalia had a pedagogical purpose centered on the ideals and tastes of the upper classes, which gave national cinema a new "moral and artistic prestige", as it was not only featured prominently in the society sections of major newspapers but also in theater reviews, initiating film criticism in Argentina.^[20]

The influence of Amalia is evident in most of the following year's film production.^[23] On the one hand, it gave a notable boost to films linked to the elite's institutions, with at least three—El tímido, Deuda sagrada  [es], and Un romance argentino—of the seven films released in 1915 being produced by benevolent societies.^[23] Additionally, the film demonstrated the financial potential of national cinema, pulling in over 35,000 pesos from just a few high-end screenings, where the cost of admission was set high for an exclusive, affluent crowd.^[23] For example, director Julio Irigoyen, who became the "paradigm of low-budget cinema", declared that he made his first film inspired by the economic success of Amalia and the high price of its tickets, stating: "Fifteen pesos a seat when in the best cinemas downtown you paid twenty... cents to see Pearl White, Charlie Chaplin, Maciste, etcetera!".^[23] Glücksmann himself was the first to try to replicate the success of Amalia and shortly after its premiere began filming Mariano Moreno y la Revolución de Mayo  [es] (1915), and in the course of the year built his own filming studio in the barrio of Belgrano.^[23]

With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, European film production retreated, which resulted in an abundance of Argentine production in the following years.^[24] As noted by Mahieu, during this time Argentine cinema "tends to abandon its character of empirical adventure, to become an entertainment industry. New distributors appeared, and in 1914 Pampa Film was founded, which produced several films."^[25]

Before the arrival of sound films, Argentina experienced a "golden age" of silent films and led their production in Spanish, with more than 100 feature films being made between 1915 and 1924, equal to the combined total of those made in Mexico and Spain.^{[26] [27]} During the first three decades of the 20th century, more than 200 silent feature films were produced in the country, in addition to a large number of documentaries, newsreels and shorter fictional works.^[8]

The release of the 1915 film Nobleza gaucha —a project by Humberto Cairo, Eduardo Martínez de la Pera and Ernesto Gunche—was a turning point in Argentine film history,^[28] opening new artistic and economic paths.^[15] Nicknamed "the goldmine" by distributors and exhibitors, Nobleza gaucha was an unexpected massive commercial success which remained in theaters for more than two decades,^[29] and was also released in Spain and several Latin American countries.^[30] The artistic and commercial possibilities that the success of this film signaled translated into a growth of film activity in the country, with new producers and directors following its path; however, none were able to reach the initial success of Nobleza gaucha.^[30] Martínez de la Pera and Gunche followed with the release of Hasta después de muerta (1916), Brenda (1921), Fausto (1922) and La casa de los cuervos (1923).^[29]

Another notable production of the era was Juan Sin Ropa (1919), produced by a partnership between the prestigious actors Camila and Héctor Quiroga and the French filmmakers Paul Capellani and Georges Benoît.^[24]

This period is also significant for the emergence of the country's first women filmmakers,^[31] the production of numerous newsreels and documentaries,^[32] and the first animated feature films in cinema history by Quirino Cristiani.^[33] Reflecting on the Argentine silent era, Peña wrote:

If anything characterizes Argentine silent cinema, even during its most prolific period, it is its dispersion and diversity. Instead of being concentrated in large companies, production appears atomized in dozens of independent enterprises, technically assisted by a relatively small number of specialists and laboratories (or "talleres" [workshops], in the terms of the time). This phenomenon explains its wide thematic variety and its singularities: in this mode of production, opposed by definition to the mass production favored by the big studios, the exception was the rule.^[31]

During the silent era, Argentina emerged as one of the most significant producers of fiction films in Latin America, notable for both the number of films made and the recognition they received.^[34] Favored by the outbreak of World War I in Europe, the country experienced a "golden age" of silent films and led their production in Spanish, with more than 100 feature films being made between 1915 and 1924, equal to the combined total of those made in Mexico and Spain.^{[26] [27]} During the first three decades of the 20th century, more than 200 silent feature films were produced in the country, in addition to a large number of documentaries, newsreels and shorter fictional works.^[8] However, the Argentine cinema of the silent period—as in other countries in the region—did not manage to consolidate as an industry, hampered by financing problems and by the popularity of the more advanced Hollywood cinema, which flooded the national market from 1917 onwards.^[35] Despite these limitations, the silent era saw the professional formation of several filmmakers who laid many of the foundations for the industrial sound films of the 1930s, and some of them, such as José A. Ferreyra and Leopoldo Torres Ríos, were fundamental for that period as well.^[36]

In the early 1920s, Argentine silent cinema entered a crisis caused, on the one hand, by the recovery of European industry after the end of the war and, on the other hand, by the ascent of Hollywood cinema to a position of unparalleled international dominance.^[37] Leopoldo Torres Ríos, a future filmmaker and one of the country's first film critics, denounced this situation in 1922: "When they show an Argentine production, they do it as if it were alms. Those same gentlemen endure daily the cinematographic detritus sent from the East to the West and our public, on their immense, broad backs, carries it without a protest."^[38] The 1920s was marked by the activity of four main directors: José A. Ferreyra, Nelo Cosimi, Edmo Cominetti and Julio Irigoyen.^[39] In this decade, the first model of tango-based films was systematized, despite the absence of sound, with titles including Milonguita (José Bustamante y Ballivián, 1922), La cieguita de la avenida Alvear (Julio Irigoyen, 1924), La borrachera del tango (Edmo Cominetti, 1928) and La vendedora de Harrods (Francisco Defilippis Novoa, 1921).^[40] These silent films laid the groundwork for the tango melodramas that defined the Argentine cinema of the early classical period in the following decade.^[41]

The most complete form of the silent "tango melodrama" model was the work of José A. Ferreyra,^[42] who began his career in the mid-1910s and stands out as the most important Argentine filmmaker of the 1920s,^[43] and would continue to be a central figure during the transition to sound and later in the classical-industrial period.^[38] Considered a precursor of neorealism, Ferreyra's influential style was characterized by its profoundly local identity, with characters and situations linked to the world of tango lyrics and the urban working classes of Buenos Aires, in whose streets he filmed with low resources and often starring non-actors.^{[38] [44]} Many of Ferreyra's titles point to a connection with the mythology of the city and its music: La muchacha del arrabal (1922), Buenos Aires, ciudad de ensueño (1922), Mi último tango (1925), El organito de la tarde (1925), Muchachita de Chiclana (1926), La vuelta al bulín (1926) and Perdón, viejita (1927), among others.^[42] Some of these films were based on specific tangos while others inspired the composition of new tangos, and also incorporated other elements of popular culture such as sainete and serial novels.^[45] As noted by film historian Jorge Miguel Couselo: "In Ferreyra, also a sporadic lyricist, the identification with tango is total. His adherence to Buenos Aires, to the most needy and suffering face of Buenos Aires, is a porteñismo of soul, temperament and habit, synonymous with tango. The subject matter of his films is tango, an eager search to discover the dramatizable facets of the city song, its habitat, its types, its conflicts, its symbolic candor, its accessible tragedy."^[42]

The Golden Age of Argentine cinema (Spanish: Época de Oro or Edad de Oro del cine argentino),^{[46] [47]} sometimes known interchangeably as the broader classical or classical-industrial period (Spanish: período clásico-industrial),^{[48] [49]} is an era in the history of the cinema of Argentina that began in the 1930s and lasted until the 1940s or 1950s, depending on the definition, during which national film production underwent a process of industrialization and standardization that involved the emergence of mass production, the establishment of the studio, genre and star systems, and the adoption of the institutional mode of representation (MRI) that was mainly—though not exclusively—spread by Hollywood,^{[49] [50]} quickly becoming one of the most popular film industries across Latin America and the Spanish-speaking world.^[51]

As in other countries, the arrival of sound films put in check the international dominance of American cinema due to the language barrier, leaving a market available.^[52] This situation was analogous to the one that occurred during World War I, when the European film crisis benefited Argentine producers.^[52] Hollywood tried to deal with these difficulties with attempts at dubbing that ended up failing and also with various forms of subtitling, although this still required technical development and also excluded illiterate audiences.^[52] Eventually, the U.S. industry reacted by making little acepted Spanish-language versions of its most important productions, although they found the greatest success once they began to make produce original Spanish-language films made to showcase Latin American stars.^[52] Among them, the 1931–1935 films made by Paramount Pictures starring Carlos Gardel stood out, and became a major influence on the emergence of an Argentine sound film industry.^{[53] [54]} Before being hired by Paramount, Gardel—the most popular performer in the history of tango—had starred in a series of short films using optical sound between 1930 and 1931, which were directed by Eduardo Morera and produced by Federico Valle.^[52] The first of Gardel's feature films produced by Paramount was Luces de Buenos Aires , released in September 1931 to great success.^{[52] [55]} By this time optical sound had demonstrated its advantage over disc systems, so the equipment was progressively replaced in a process that lasted throughout 1932.^[52]

Argentine industrial cinema arose in 1933 with the creation of its first and most prominent film studios, Argentina Sono Film and Lumiton, which released ¡Tango! and Los tres berretines , respectively, two foundational films that ushered in the sound-on-film era.^{[56] [57]} Although they were not national productions, the 1931–1935 films made by Paramount Pictures with tango star Carlos Gardel were a decisive influence on the emergence and popularization of Argentine sound cinema.^{[53] [54]} The nascent film industry grew steadily, accompanied by the appearance of other studios such as SIDE, Estudios Río de la Plata, EFA, Pampa Film and Estudios San Miguel, among others, which developed a continuous production and distribution chain.^[50] This momentum laid the foundation for what would later become a thriving industry for commercial video production in Argentina, maintaining a strong presence in Latin America.

The number of films shot in the country grew 25-fold between 1932 and 1939, more than any other Spanish-speaking country.^[58] By 1939, Argentina established itself as the world's leading producer of films in Spanish, a position that it maintained until 1942, the year in which film production reached its peak.^[27]

In classical Argentine cinema, film genres were almost always configured as hybrids,^[59] with melodrama emerging as the reigning mode of the period.^{[60] [61]} Its early audience were the urban working classes, so its content was strongly rooted in their culture,^{[62] [63]} most notably tango music and dance, radio dramas, and popular theatrical genres like sainete ^[64] or revue.^{[59] [65]} These forms of popular culture became the main roots of the film industry, from which many of its main performers, directors and screenwriters came.^{[59] [65]} Much of the themes that defined the Argentine sound cinema in its beginnings were inherited from the silent period, including the opposition between the countryside and the city, and the interest in representing the world of tango.^[42] As the industry's prosperity increased in the late 1930s, bourgeois characters shifted from villains to protagonists, in an attempt to appeal to the middle classes and their aspirations.^[63] Starting in the mid-1940s, Argentine cinema adopted an "internationalist" style that minimized national references, including the disuse of local dialect and a greater interest in adapting works of world literature.^[66]

Beginning in 1943, as a response to Argentina's neutrality in the context of World War II, the United States imposed a boycott on sales of film stock to the country, causing Mexican cinema to displace Argentina as the market leader in Spanish.^[51] During the presidency of Juan Perón (1946–1955), protectionist measures were adopted,^[58] which managed to revitalize Argentine film production.^[67] However, financial fragility of the industry led to its paralysis once Perón was overthrown in 1955 and his stimulus measures ended.^{[68] [69]} With the studio system entering its definitive crisis, the classical era came to an end as new criteria for producing and making films emerged,^[70] including the irruption of modernism and auteur films,^[49] and a greater prominence of independent cinema.^[71] The creation of the National Film Institute in 1957 and the innovative work of figures such as Leopoldo Torre Nilsson gave rise to a new wave of filmmakers in the 1960s,^[72] who opposed "commercial" cinema and experimented with new cinematic techniques.^{[73] [74]}

https://ahira.com.ar/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/El-Amante-135.pdf

• Media related to the cinema of Argentina at Wikimedia Commons
• INCAA (in Spanish), official website of the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts.