Imaginaries from Buenos Aires. From tango poetics of the 20s toward sound films in the 30s

PIEDRAS, PABLO

The Routledge Companion to Global Film Music in the Early Sound Era

Routledge

Lugar: Nueva York; Año: 2024; p. 603 - 611

The first Argentine sound films using tango as a topic -as spectacle, musical form and, above all, commercial hook to attract mass and popular audiences - reveal in their central theme a full awareness of the discursive procedures to be exploited by the cinema of the 30s in varied great variety of formats and genres. Tango is not incorporated into the first Argentinean sound films as a way of providing the story with greater realism, but rather as a mythifying narrative that appeals to different crystallized imaginaries disseminated by the suburban lyric poetry over the last 15 years: a universe of milonguitas (women leading immoral lives), of neighbourhoods with narrow, cobbled streets, an eternally lit city of Buenos Aires, a group of friends and a girlfriend who will always wait for her man who went away.