The Conventillo, the Department Store, and the Cabaret
Navigating Urban Space and Social Class in Argentine Silent Cinema, 1916-1929
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2170287 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Juan Sebastian Ospina Leon (0000-0002-5226-8194, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 377-391 |
| Publication date | 2017-07-03 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1356-9325 • E-ISSN: 1469-9575 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13569325.2017.1343185 |
| OpenAlex | W2744543579 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 9 |
This article examines an understudied film genre that some Argentine early film periodicals labeled cinedrama porteño. Porteño cinedramas portrayed a bleak Buenos Aires, a dark metropolis of massive immigration and accelerated urbanization in which opulence was reserved for the few and misery was all around, particularly in immigrant neighborhoods. Centering on 'fallen women' and well-dressed wastrels, the genre foregrounded social instability by confronting emerging and established social actors in several locations, including tenement housing, department stores, and cabarets and garçonnières. Based on surviving film fragments, this article argues that porteño cinedramas rendered visible varying degrees of sociocultural proximity and separation in urban space. In doing so, the genre traced sociocultural cartographies and identitary strategies to confer narrative and visual saliency to mobile subjects, most noticeably urban outcasts. Porteño cinedramas warned against the dangers of upward mobility while at the same time denouncing gender and class inequality in Buenos Aires. Films discussed include Hasta después de muerta (Eduardo Martínez de la Pera and Ernesto Gunche, 1916), La chica de la Calle Florida (José A. Ferreyra, 1922), and La borrachera del tango (Edmo Cominetti, 1928
Archaeology · Art · Art history · Hollywood · Humanities · Immigration · Literature · Movie theater · Narrative · Sociocultural evolution · Sociology · Studio · Visual arts · Anthropology · Cinema and Media Studies · Gender Studies · History · Media, Gender, and Advertising · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
| Highly cited | No |
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