University of Iowa
Iowa Research Online
Theses and Dissertations
Summer 2013
Peripheral Humor, Critical Realism: Latin
American Film Comedy, 1930-1960
Nilo Fernando Couret
University of Iowa
Copyright 2013 Nilo Fernando Couret
This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4831
Recommended Citation
Couret, Nilo Fernando. "Peripheral Humor, Critical Realism: Latin American Film Comedy, 1930-1960." PhD (Doctor of Philosophy)
thesis, University of Iowa, 2013.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4831.
Follow this and additional works at: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd
Part of the Film and Media Studies Commons
PERIPHERAL HUMOR, CRITICAL REALISM:
LATIN AMERICAN FILM COMEDY, 1930-1960
by
Nilo Fernando Couret
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for Doctor of
Philosophy degree in Film Studies
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
August 2013
Thesis Supervisor: Associate Professor Kathleen Newman
Copyright by
NILO FERNANDO COURET
2013
All Rights Reserved
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
____________________________
PH.D. THESIS
_____________
This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of
Nilo Fernando Couret
has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the Doctor
of Philosophy degree in Film Studies at the August 2013 graduation.
Thesis Committee:
___________________________________________________
Kathleen Newman, Thesis Supervisor
___________________________________________________
Charles Altman
___________________________________________________
Paula Amad
___________________________________________________
Steve Choe
___________________________________________________
Corey Creekmur
___________________________________________________
Brian Gollnick
To my father who taught me my first joke and
to my mother who asked why it was funny.
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES .............................................................................................................v
INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1
Modernism Out of Place ...................................................................................5
The Idea of Latin America in Film History ....................................................10
Affect and the Study of Comedy ....................................................................19
Peripheral Humor, Critical Realism ...............................................................24
PART ONE: PERIPHERAL HUMOR ..............................................................................30
CHAPTER ONE: HAZME REÍR: CANTINFLISMO AS SPATIAL PRACTICE ..........31
Cantinflismo en detalle ...................................................................................36
Vulgar Speech, Vernacular Modernism .........................................................49
What’s in a Name? Revisiting Mexican Spectatorship ..................................69
Cinematic Misdirection as Spatial Practice ....................................................81
CHAPTER TWO: EDUCATING NINÍ: VENTRILOQUISM, PERIPETEIA, AND
NINÍ MARSHALL’S VOCAL STARDOM ..................................................96
A Star is Born: Radio, Cinema and Stardom ..................................................97
Authentically National, Authentically Cinematic.........................................106
See What You Hear ......................................................................................109
Women, Comically Speaking .......................................................................120
Peripatetic Travels with Catita and Cándida ................................................135
PART TWO: CRITICAL REALISM ..............................................................................153
CHAPTER THREE: LUIS SANDRINI’S STUTTER, EARLY ARGENTINE
FILM COMEDY AND THE REPRESENTABILITY OF TIME ................154
The Comedian Stutters .................................................................................157
The Soundtrack Stutters ................................................................................165
The Body Stutters .........................................................................................178
Peripheralizing Realism ................................................................................187
The Historian Stutters ...................................................................................200
Conclusion ....................................................................................................205
CHAPTER FOUR: FUNNY HOW? TOWARDS A HUMOROUS SPECTATOR
OF THE BRAZILIAN CHANCHADA .......................................................208
Non-Ironic Spectator ....................................................................................210
The National and/or Popular Spectator.........................................................219
Parody and Temporality ...............................................................................235
The Trouble with Irony .................................................................................241
Humor as Anti-Subjective Ethical Practice ..................................................247
Critical Proximity .........................................................................................254
Conclusion ....................................................................................................257
iii
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................260
APPENDIX: FIGURES ...................................................................................................260
REFERENCES ................................................................................................................284
iv
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure A1. Cayetano (Joaquín Pardavé) confronts Cantinflas about his wife's
indiscretions in Ahí está el detalle. ................................................................267
Figure A2. Cantinflas finds himself forced to marry Clotilde Regalado (Sara
Montiel) in Ahí está el detalle. .......................................................................267
Figure A3. Cantinflas leans against a fake column, nearly collapsing the set of the
film within the film in Los tres mosqueteros .................................................268
Figure A4. Manolete (Mario Moreno) dedicates his bullfight to a special supporter
in Ni sangre ni arena. ....................................................................................268
Figure A5. Cantinflas thanks his Doppelgänger in Ni sangre ni arena. ..........................269
Figure A6. The first-time pilots hoisted on the shoulders of their peers in a selfreflexive newsreel in ¡A volar joven!.............................................................269
Figure A7. Cantinflas recognizes himself on screen in ¡A volar joven! ..........................270
Figure A8. Cantinflas is tossed out of his ill-gotten seat and thrown out of the frame
in Ni sangre ni arena. ....................................................................................270
Figure A9. Niní Reboredo (Niní Marshall) is startled by a microphone shoved
down her throat in Hay que educar a Niní. ....................................................271
Figure A10. Niní Reboredo (Niní Marshall) stands in for the movie star in Hay que
educar a Niní...............................................................................................271
Figure A11. Niní Reboredo (Niní Marshall) is through being a double in Hay que
educar a Niní...............................................................................................272
Figure A12. Niní Reboredo’s (Niní Marshall) screen self betrays her in Hay que
educar a Niní...............................................................................................272
Figure A13. Niní Reboredo (Niní Marshall) as a teenaged schoolgirl writing letters
to herself in Hay que educar a Niní. ...........................................................273
Figure A14. Catita (Niní Marshall) finds Paris derivative of Buenos Aires during
her bus tour in Divorcio en Montevideo. ....................................................273
Figure A15. Montevideo depicted in establishing shots in Divorcio en Montevideo. .....274
Figure A16. Cándida's (Niní Marshall) first on-screen appearance in the eponymous
film, Cándida. .............................................................................................274
Figure A17. Cándida (Niní Marshall) dreams of Galicia in this superimposition
from Cándida. .............................................................................................275
Figure A18. Cándida (Niní Marshall) cannot make sense of the modern Buenos
Aires in Cándida .........................................................................................275
v
Figure A19. Bartolo (Luis Sandrini) writes to the light of the flashing
advertisements outside in Bartolo tenía una flauta. ...................................276
Figure A20. Berretín (Luis Sandrini) steals a gentleman's pocket watch in
Riachuelo. ...................................................................................................276
Figure A21. A woman gets harassed by potential kidnappers. She screams for help,
but goes unheard by… ................................................................................277
Figure A22. Eusebio (Luis Sandrini), whose felicitously faulty gun fails to shoot in
Don Quijote del altillo. ...............................................................................277
Figure A23. The parallel events in adjacent spaces are connected with a sound
event in Don Quijote del altillo. .................................................................278
Figure A24. Berretín (Luis Sandrini) out of sync during a fight in Riachuelo. ...............278
Figure A25. On-location footage of the structures in the port of Buenos Aires and
La Boca neighborhood in Riachuelo...........................................................279
Figure A26. The moving image becomes still photograph in this trick shot from
Riachuelo. ...................................................................................................279
Figure A27. Buenos Aires as depicted by Brazil in Aviso aos navegantes. ....................280
Figure A28. Helen of Troy as imagined by Cecílio B. De Milho (Renato Restier) in
Carnaval Atlântida......................................................................................280
Figure A29. Helen of Troy sings "Dona Cegonha" with Blecaute and Grande Otelo
in Carnaval Atlântida. ................................................................................281
Figure A30. Kid Bolha (Oscarito) turns back time in Matar ou Correr. ........................281
Figure A31. Scaramouche (José Lewgoy) hypnotizes his nemeses in Aviso aos
navegantes...................................................................................................282
Figure A32. Grande Otelo and Oscarito run backward while moving forward in a
trick shot from Aviso aos navegantes. ........................................................282
Figure A33. Grande Otelo and Eliana sing “No Tabuleiro da Baina” in front of lifesized covers of popular magazines in Carnaval Atlântida. ........................283
Figure A34. Xenofontes (Oscarito) lectures on Zeno's paradoxes in Carnaval
Atlântida......................................................................................................283
vi
1
INTRODUCTION
On September 18, 1960, the Mexican comedian Mario “Cantinflas” Moreno
appeared on the American television game show What’s My Line? as the mystery
celebrity to promote his upcoming holiday film Pepe (George Sidney, 1960). The film
would prove to be a critical and commercial failure for Columbia Pictures in the United
States and marked a turning point for critical estimations and industrial support of the
comedian in his native country (Pilcher 165). During the segment, a panel of celebrity
judges asks the mystery guest a series of yes or no questions to discover his identity.
After having the comedian sign his name on a chalkboard, the blindfolded panelists begin
with a series of broad questions in an effort to situate the guest (e.g., “Are you wellknown in motion pictures?” or “Have you ever appeared on the legitimate stage in New
York?”). The comedian answers the questions honestly but must attempt to dissimulate
his identity and obfuscate his recognizable traits in order to prolong the enigma. His
accent being difficult to mask, the comedian proceeds to answer yes and no in different
languages (Sí. Nyet. Oui.) Eventually, the panelists discern his accent and ask, “Are you
an American?” After discovering that he was not born in the United States, the panelists
ask one final question: “Are you a gentleman who is considered the greatest actor in
Mexico?” Other than his mono-syllabic answers, the comedian says nothing else during
this segment. The comedian is identified, the blindfolds come off, and the mystery is
solved.
This appearance by Cantinflas on US television highlights many of this project’s
larger concerns. The segment speaks to the material exchanges and discursive relations
between Hollywood and Latin America. These are relations of both dependency and
2
exchange that have a longstanding history in the continent: from the importation of
European and American film technologies at the turn of the twentieth century to the
market dominance of Hollywood cinema through the present day. Further, the segment
hinges on conceiving of the comedian as representative of Mexico, a logic that
underscores how the discursive legibility of non-Anglo-European culture within the
Anglo-European sphere privileges, if not necessitates, representative figures that
metonymically stand in for their origin. Finally, the resolution of the mystery turns less
on the gradual process of situating him within discursive categories than on the
comedian’s body: his accented voice provides the key to identifying the man. What he
does and even who he is seem less important than where he is from. The accessibility of
Cantinflas’s body and the unintelligibility of his speech suggests that a discussion of a
non-Anglo-European practice, particularly one as linguistically situated and contextually
specific as comedy, must contend with the linguistic and cognitive as well as the
embodied and affective registers of the cinema experience. In other words, this study will
not simply discuss where the comedy is from but also what it says and what it does. This
project examines both what is represented on screen as well as how media move viewers
(in the transitive and intransitive senses of the word “move”) into alternative spectator
positions and counterpublics off screen. Ultimately, I argue that comedies are political;
however, these popular films are not political in a didactic mode or even imagine change
in a utopian mode, but rather assemble (or conmueven; to move emotionally) viewers in
an affective mode.
The growing availability and cultural presence of popular cinemas has affected
world cinema scholarship in the past two decades. Popular cinemas complicate the
3
production of a national cinema, often conceived as part of an art cinema tradition, in that
they underscore the discursive divide between art/popular as well as national/Hollywood
categories. If regional cinemas often get constructed along political, auteurist or
movement-based axes, then popular genre cinema has forced a reconsideration of how
international film history is written. The inclusion of commercial cinemas in world
cinema contexts for metropolitan Western audiences has resulted in a newfound dilemma
for scholars of international film. As Walter Armbrust discusses in his own attempts to
program a retrospective screening series of Egyptian cinema, international film scholars
are caught between: “the desire to solve the problem of foreignness by overcoming
difference or to communicate foreignness by revealing difference” (qtd. in Armbrust
293). As the goal is neither to make everything the same nor to keep everything radically
incompatible, this project explores and preserves the tension between these two
tendencies in global media studies: more particularly, how do specific comedic practices
circumscribed to local and regional spheres complicate a shared continental Latin
American project or a global transnational cinema?
Rather than map Latin American cinema according to radical politics, film
directors or film movements as do conventional film histories, I trace the continued
popularity and cultural significance of film comedies. Why do comedies always seem lost
in translation? Why must key examples of national and regional cinemas always focus on
serious and dramatic art cinema? This project analyzes how these enormously popular
films negotiate local and global cultural influences, even though comedies are alleged not
to not travel well, and argues that these comedies function as peripheral responses to
modernization. The construction of Latin American cinema as a continental project is
4
predominantly mapped along Western frameworks that structure and inform the
production and reception of these texts, privileging certain films, by certain directors, at
certain historical moments. The films that tend to be privileged are exalted as
representative of a particular nation and/or region and, particularly after the 1960s, as art
cinema. My project traces the continued popularity and cultural significance of film
comedies in Mexico, Argentina and Brazil from the transition to sound and into the
1950s. This project, however, is not merely a history of film comedy; instead, it draws on
diverse critical traditions to demonstrate how these comedies represent ambivalent and
divergent responses to modernity that are produced, circulated, and understood in
redrawn peripheral spaces.
I argue that recognizing the transcultural, critical realism of popular comedies
helps us better theorize the nature of political cinema. Through an interdisciplinary
approach that foregrounds the affective dimensions of global media, my project addresses
the impasse in film studies regarding how to speak about local cultural practice in nonessentialist terms and avoids producing world cinema either as defensive authentic
cultural expression or as derivative of foreign (i.e., Hollywood) models. This project
brings together theoretical frameworks from different disciplinary traditions. In film
studies, I draw on Miriam Hansen’s work on vernacular modernism, as well as her rereadings of realist film theory, which focus on interwar modernity and the confluence of
mass culture, mainstream cinema and high modernism. To avoid the occlusion of
culturally specific film practices that prove less circulatory and less translatable, I also
draw on theories of narrative transculturation in Latin American literary and cultural
studies and the tradition of provincial cultural production championed by Uruguayan
5
Angel Rama. Because comedy is a culturally specific film practice that proves less
circulatory and less translatable, it reveals the unresolved tension between universalism
and difference in Latin American culture. Further, I characterize comedy as both
transcultural and critical realist because, as a cultural practice of embodiment, it
foregrounds the differential responses to modernization and reified time and the failures
of naturalistic representation. The humor is contingent on thinking within a particular
historical context and “in the language,” suggesting that these comedies represent a
response to modernity that is non-circulatory at the same time as they express a modernist
concern for everyday life. The project represents both an historical investigation and an
intervention in theoretical debates that identifies in these popular films strategies of
resistance that shifted the spectator position in the narrative and affectively moved
viewers into positions of critical opposition in the public sphere argues. Departing from a
different model of subjectivity in order to revisit debates on spectatorship and reception
in the region, I argue that these film comedies afforded a historical self-awareness and
foregrounded the geopolitical extension and uneven development of modernity by
producing a critically proximate spectator capable of perceiving and organizing space and
time differently.
Modernism Out of Place
The use of the term modernism is fraught in the Latin American context because
the term does not translate between English, Spanish and Portuguese. In Spanish
America, the vanguardia (avant-garde) designates the experimental artistic movements
associated with the European modernism of Anglo-European visual studies; in fact,
6
Spanish modernismo refers to aesthete poetry movements from the late nineteenth
century against which the vanguardia rebelled. Meanwhile, the parallel and
contemporaneous movement to the vanguardia in Brazil is called modernismo. As Esther
Gabara notes, the appearance, iterations, and circulations of these terms within and
without the continent have made the terms “errant” (14). The re-articulation of
modernismo to include the vanguardias has been due in large part to discursive
constraints, comparative analyses as well as the widespread use of the postmodernismo in
both Spanish and Portuguese. The period of modernist experimentation in Latin America
has been consigned mostly to what Daryle Williams in the Brazilian context has termed
the period of “culture wars” at the turn of the twentieth century through the mid-1930s,
the period preceding the consolidation of political power and the officialization of the
cultural sphere (98). The turn from the “culture wars” to the period of officialism during
the Second World War and post-war period is characterized by statist plans for
modernization and the articulation of modernism to nationalism, a turn Gabara
characterizes as one from critical nationalism born in the regional expressions of artistic
practice to cultural nationalism born from administrative intervention in the capital cities
(30). Hansen’s rearticulation of modernism allows us to redraw the boundaries of cultural
practice to include expressions of mass culture often aligned unproblematically with State
cultural apparatuses. This expanded modernist field allows us to study the commercial
cinema from the 1930s-1950s without relying on an essentialist popular identity and
beyond what Ana López dubs the "nationness" of the film texts ("Early Cinema" 50) —
both categories often a retroactive historico-aesthetic telos.
7
In her inflection of modernism, Hansen re-articulates the term to encompass a
broader range of practices that respond to modernization and reflect upon the experience
of modernity, discovering in modes of mass and popular culture moments of “vernacular”
modernism. Hansen’s modernism returns to mainstream cinema to distinguish the
classical Hollywood norm from the non-classical traces that endure, foregrounding how
these films mediated modernity and were received in heterogeneous ways in local and
translocal contexts. Modernist reflexivity does not necessitate a distanced and cognitive
aesthetic experience; it also consists of the production of a sensorium, a process in which
these commercial films served an integral function “asymmetrically related to modernist
practices in the traditional arts” (“Vernacular” 295). The success of classical Hollywood
had less to do with narrative organization than with the ability of its films to provide to
mass audiences with an affective-sensory dimension that allowed spectators to confront
the ambivalence of modernity. Vernacular modernism allows us to think beyond
frameworks defined by ‘high’ cosmopolitan modernism (i.e., experimental film practices
that emerged within avant-garde movements in the fine arts or modernist international art
cinema) in opposition to a local authentic popular culture. The vernacular modernist text
is a historically-situated response to modernization that mediates modernity through
affective-aesthetic tactics that exceed narrative-cognitive comprehension. For Hansen,
departing from Kracauer, slapstick comedy is a key example of the affective-aesthetic
experience provided by generic cultural practice, commercially successful particularly
during the silent period not because of critical reason “but the films’ propulsion of their
viewer’s body into laughter” (“Mass Production” 71). For Kracauer, slapstick films
highlighted the failures of Fordist mass culture and suggested the latent anarchic excess
8
potentially produced by the same rationalizing industrial impulse, what Americanist
literary scholar William Solomon refers to as slapstick modernism.
Hansen’s later work focuses on this term ‘vernacular’ as an alternative to the
overdetermined ‘popular,’ insisting on the former as articulating questions of everyday
life to questions of idiom and dialect as well as circulation and translatability. Vernacular
becomes a theoretical metaphor that offers a dynamic model of cultural circulation. More
than just a linguistic practice that rejects official language, the vernacular and the
standardized are interpenetrated and constituted through exchange. The vernacular is not
merely on the side of a particular local or an ahistoric traditional, but part of the
interactions that produce local and global. Hansen emphasizes the circulatory aspect of
the vernacular, highlighting “the fluctuating, open-ended, and relational character of
vernacular practices in different cultural contexts” (“Vernacular” 298). Despite her
acknowledgement that film objects can function differently in different film traditions
and can have different affective charges in different reception contexts, Hansen stresses
the way these common concerns gesture toward a modernist aesthetics of contingency –
material everyday objects are mobilized to make our responses to modernity sensually
graspable. Furthermore, despite the possible multivalence of filmic representation, their
circulation can provide comparative sites between diverse contexts responding to local
and global forms of modernity. Hansen privileges circulation and translation through star
systems and generic homology (e.g., in the context of 1930s Shanghai cinema she
considers Ruan Ling-Yu and the progressive melodrama of the New Woman).
Hansen’s vernacular modernism attempts to theorize the relation of global and
local modes of film practice through an examination of the sensory effects of the cinema
9
experience rather than textual representative strategies or narrative structure. Hansen’s
approach has provided a useful framework for studies of non-Western cinemas, although
uptake of her work has been mostly isolated to the recent attempts at reassesing the early
cinemas of Asia, particularly those in the Chinese (Zhang Zhen’s An Amorous History of
the Silver Screen), Japanese (Catherine Russell’s The Cinema of Naruse Mikio), and
Indian (Neepa Majumdar’s Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!) contexts. Through Hansen,
these histories figure how local debates on cinema were shaped by the encounter with
Hollywood as well as pre- and para-cinematic performance contexts. More particularly,
as Majumdar notes, vernacular modernism proves particularly helpful in shifting
discussion of early cinema from a focus on national identity toward a flexible
understanding of the experience of local film culture: “a project of radically restoring
historical and local specificity to multiple ‘vernacular’ cinemas, relativizing and thus
expanding the variable and sometimes anachronistic local meanings of the ‘early’ in
‘early cinema’” (Majumdar 4). In other words, what Hansen’s vernacular modernism
encourages is not simply the recovery of marginalized figures or cultural spaces, but a reexamination of fundamental disciplinary questions such as the relation of film history and
theory, the status of classical Hollywood as normative popular cinema and the models of
film spectatorship it presupposes, the nature of historical documentation, and the heuristic
limitations of the discursive categories often overused in regional film studies.
Despite the usefulness of getting away from the “nationness” of early cinema in
the periphery through the concept of vernacular modernism, these early cinema histories
have also found that the reformulation of local cinematic practices as vernacular has
come with a tendency to flatten distinction between and within local cinematic discourses
10
and their effects (Majumdar 9). Modernity has become the new paradigm over and above
national identity in a way that threatens to reduce and homogenize the differentiated
experiences of modernity, particularly in the periphery. If Neepa Majumdar finds the case
of Indian stardom from the 1930s-1950s as a rejoinder to vernacular modernism in the
differentiated articulation of stardom, modernity, nationhood and gender, then I argue
that the inability of comedy to travel well complicates the circulatory dynamics of the
‘vernacular’ in vernacular modernism and problematizes its transnational and
comparative frame. The transition to sound and the emergence of Latin American film
comedy make the genre a more ambivalent site. As Marxist Italian literary scholar Franco
Moretti notes, comedy relies on “short circuits between signifier and signified [that] are
weakened by translation” (94). The declining international box office returns of
Hollywood comedies, Moretti argues, are due in part to the way humor arises out of tacit
assumptions with particular cultural associations. Taking comedy seriously puts pressure
on the vernacular in Hansen’s project. Hansen’s approach may provincialize Hollywood
cinema and may historicize classical narrative and continuity editing, but when used in a
transnational and comparative spirit, it threatens to occlude culturally specific film
practices that prove less circulatory and less translatable.
The Idea of Latin America in Film History
To avoid the occlusion of culturally specific film practices that prove less
circulatory and less translatable, I draw on theories of narrative transculturation in Latin
American literary and cultural studies and the tradition of provincial cultural production
championed by Uruguayan Angel Rama. Angel Rama's Transculturación narrativa, first
11
published in 1982, focuses predominantly on the literary production from the continent
post-independence, underscoring its emancipatory streak – its rejection of foreign models
– paradoxically steeped from its inception in a foreign tradition of rupture. Perhaps most
well-known for positing an exclusionary "lettered city," Rama examines who gets to
speak as the nation and which cultural, social, political and economic conditions
legitimate this national representativity. The interwar period provides a critical moment
in Rama's historical project, a period when a growing middle class, composed mostly of
recently urbanized people, spearheaded a rise in nationalism and positioned itself as the
authentic representatives of the national. Literature confronted a declining dominant
group through the use of "local color" that actually reinforced the interests of a particular
ascendant class that had appropriated the demands of marginalized groups as a marker of
authenticity. The cosmopolitan and critical realist tendencies formed in the urban centers
in Latin America, which form the crux of Rama's literary analysis, are both informed by
this social conflict over the national imaginary.
Jean Franco expands on this imperative to critically interrogate the makers of
national culture when examining the production, circulation, and reception of Latin
American literary canons in both Latin American literary and North American and
European academic circles as well as international markets. Franco identifies the
privileging of Latin American modernism in these canons, a modernism that, in
connecting Latin American writers to European and North American counterparts,
aspires to a universal aesthetic experience that transcends nation and class. Franco
identifies a large-scale revisionism in Latin American Studies in this so-called postnational moment, one that rejects linear historical narratives, challenges the term “Latin
12
American” as an explanatory framework, and questions an evolutionary literary history
(“Globalisation” 441). Historiography during the Cold War produced an America with a
common language and shared colonial history often unable to confront contradictions and
anachronisms of the colonial period: the Boom novels were situated as representative of a
national imaginary despite functioning in a critically nationalist vein and critiquing the
nation-state as a vehicle for modernization (“Globalisation” 442). Several Latin
American literary critics, including Rama and Franco as well as Antonio Cornejo Polar
and Antônio Candido, responded to this tendency by finding conflict and heterogeneity
within tradition and understanding the production of tradition as a function of
modernization. Despite the contemporary contestation of Latin America as discursive
category, pressured from within by subregions and from without by supra-regional
categories and area studies, my project returns to these frameworks from the post-1960s.
Their critical nationalism, temporal play, spatial practice, and anti-subjectivism allows us
to re-examine and critique the nationness that characterizes contemporary studies of
early, transition, and commercial cinemas in the region.
In post-Cold War Latin American film histories, transculturation is often
deployed to allow a more expansive geopolitical frame that simultaneously
accommodates local cultural production; however, these histories often disregard the
paradigmatic transcultural objects that are not only the site of cultural exchange but also
represent a productive and discursively elided difference – an alternative to the binary
logic of defensive tradition and homogenizing modernization that characterizes postindependence canons. Latin American cinema as constructed along these lines attempts to
position Latin America either as a bastion of enduring popular culture re-appropriated by
13
a nascent culture industry or as select films and directors adopting North American
industrial models and European modernist film practice to contribute toward transcendent
aesthetic experience.
John King, writing in the early 1990s, most loosely uses the concept of
transculturation as a virtual synonym for hybrid cultural production. He argues that
despite privileging a national industrial framework in order to avoid generalized broad
categories, the constant process of transculturation within each country helps avoid
making his narrative a mere "repudiation of internationalism or a hankering after some
essentialist ideal of national identity" (4). The hybrid cultural formations produced
through transculturation mean national boundaries can be considered without
essentializing film practice. King uses transculturation as shorthand and ultimately seems
to understand the process of transculturation through the re-appropriation of the popular
as a process of product differentiation. The largely urban working-class audience
represented a growing market that was quickly mined by commercial entrepreneurs in the
early twentieth century: "the popular therefore became part of the cultural
industry...Cinema did not reproduce real, lived environments, but rather particular forms
of spectacle, based mainly on imported genres" (King 247). The development of cinema
allows King to examine the shifting definition of the popular within Latin America, as
local producers negotiated the influence of Hollywood in popular taste while attempting
to find a profitable niche in the marketplace. These local producers relied on Hollywood
industrial models and aesthetic conventions but drew on traditions of popular theater.
Transculturation here avoids transitive cultural exchange and questions of contested
representativity. The process described by John King has more in common with Nestor
14
García Canclini's treatment of hybrid popular cultures. In response to Latin American
modernization, foreign influence does not take the place of local tradition; rather, the
traditional and modern are combined with "diverse sectors tak[ing] responsibility for the
multi-temporal heterogeneity of each nation" (3).
Zuzana Pick, alternatively, uses transculturation in her continental study from
1993 as an alternative to other forms of exchanges that have characterized the cultural
history of Latin America since the conquest, i.e., mestizaje and syncretism. On the one
hand, Pick aligns mestizaje with Homi Bhabha as "the site of cultural difference,"
highlighting the ambivalence of colonial authority and the instability of categorical
distinctions; on the other hand, syncretism privileges cultural diversity, understood as the
articulation of indigenous and non-indigenous elements into a hybrid and stable plurality
(127). Pick characterizes transculturation as a synthesis to the approaches discussed
above – a solution to the dialectic of difference and diversity, "otherness and
universality" (128). The cartographic work of transculturation is crucial to Pick's
remapping of New Latin American Cinema. The attempt to configure alternative
geographic locations for cultural production, integral to both literary and cinematic
discussions of transculturation, challenges the nation as a natural category. The idea of
Latin America articulates regional autonomy and self-definition, and Pick prefers to use
the continent at large as her geographic frame and understands the transformation of
foreign film practice and the circulation of these films in foreign contexts as proof of the
region's cinematic autonomy, originality, and representativity. Rama may use these
categories to periodize the region's literature post-independence and to understand the
discursive construction of a representative canon; however, these impulses do not
15
intrinsically demonstrate transculturation. New Latin American Cinema becomes
characterized by its anti-imperialist rhetoric and its engagement with global radicalized
political movements. Drawing on Jean Franco, Pick compares 1960s revolutionary
filmmaking to 1920s vanguardismo, characterizing the New Latin American Cinema as
symptomatic of the tension between tradition and modernity that plays out in popular
cinema. The filmmaking of the 1960s becomes a reaction to hegemonic discourses on
modernity, a critical engagement with modernity expressed as avant-garde aesthetic
(192). Pick omits that Franco seeks to deconstruct the production of literary canons, and
the privileging of Latin American vanguardismo (and by extension the New Latin
American Cinema) is incompatible with a transcultural framework.
Peruvian literary critic Antonio Cornejo Polar considers the different concepts —
mestizaje, hybridity and transculturation — mobilized by literary critics and histories to
conceive of the forms of socio-cultural heterogeneity of Latin American literature
(“Doble Estatuto” 8). For Cornejo Polar, writing during a period from the late 1970s
through the early 1990s, all these concepts are problematically homogenizing, unable to
think heterogeneity because they privilege products over process and presuppose unity
within shared literary sphere. More importantly, Cornejo Polar understands these
concepts as complicit in attempting to produce a unitary identity, particularly lamenting
the transvaluation of transculturation: from Angel Rama’s original articulation to a
contemporary placeholder for mestizaje. Mestizaje preserves the appearance of unity of
the continent or nation’s literature not through exclusionary tactics but by strategically
accepting other affiliations subordinated to the basic Hispanic structure in a new type of
synthesis that occludes internal asymmetries and dissonances (“Totalidad” 39).
16
Moreover, Cornejo Polar historically situates the emergence of mestizaje within a context
of nation-state formation. Mestizo literature both expresses and contributes to a synthesis
whose figuration is inextricably linked to the production of national/regional identity.
(“Mestizaje” 368). If transculturation in its original iteration privileged process over
product and imagined a political and cultural sphere undergirded by ineluctable
difference and fundamental incompatibility, its subsequent re-articulations yield a false
harmony and a process of cultural mixing where everything remains in amenable spaces
of hegemonic culture in Latin America (“Metáforas” 7). A return to Rama’s original
conception allows for an understanding of socio-cultural situations and discourses where
the dynamic of encounter and intercommunication do not operate syncretically but
emphasize conflicts and alterity.
Finally, departing from an understanding of Latin American cinema as inherently
dependent, Paulo Antonio Paranaguá's Tradición y modernidad en el cine de America
Latina (2003) provides a more rigorous treatment of the concept of transculturation. This
dependency is determined by the material conditions of production, distribution, and
exhibition – the necessary technology for production and exhibition must be imported
and the distribution and exhibition of foreign films keep peripheral cinema operational.
Material dependency, Paranaguá argues, meant importing production and reception
models. Even the most nationalist film practice engaged in a dialogue with dominant
paradigms: "No hay en América Latina expresión autárquica, completamente
desvinculada de la evolución en los centros dominantes de la producción / In Latin
America there is no self-sufficient expression that is completely dissociated from
17
developments in the dominant centers of production" [all translations mine unless
otherwise noted] (29).
Paranaguá understands the periods privileged by King (pre-1950s mainstream
production) and Pick (post-1940s modernist cinema) as a series of responses from the
periphery to different cultural centers. The coming of sound meant sharing Hollywood
technology with multiple language versions of films concurrently produced around the
world. Directors, producers and performers traveled across national boundaries to work
in North American and European studios, legitimating and diffusing a Hollywood
filmmaking tradition, contributing to an emergent continental star system, and defining a
niche for popular local genres, i.e., melodrama and comedy. The material
Americanization of film practice along with an emergent nationalism spearheaded by
ascendant urban entrepreneurs contributed to several attempts to establish foreign
production models in these dependent contexts. For Paranaguá, transculturation becomes
synonymous with nationalization; the standardization of successful genres in this interwar
period is the process of a gradual incorporation of music, folklore, popular theater and
visual arts, now subordinated to the necessities of classical narrative and mise-en-scène
(246-247). If Paranaguá associates transculturation to process of nationalization, then my
return to Rama's original conception read through the lens of vernacular modernism shifts
the use of transculturation within Latin American film studies from a focus on national
identity toward a flexible understanding of the experience of modernity and the practices
of local film culture.
The relationship between the center and the periphery gets recast after the Second
World War with the increased cultural influence of European modernism. With dozens of
18
film technicians attending film schools in Paris, Rome and Moscow, the influence of
Italian neorealism (courtesy of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia) as well as the
nouvelle vague (and its Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographique) meant importing
new production models, politicizing film practice, and establishing new institutions and
publications for this cinephilic film culture. For Paranaguá, the periods characterized by
King and Pick are discrete moments of transculturation, exchanges between a periphery
and a historically shifting center which offers models of film practice subsequently
nationalized. Paranaguá provides a comprehensive account of the asymmetric exchanges
that characterized the development of Latin American cinema, privileging the
triangulated dialogue of the periphery with the competing centers of Europe and North
America; however, the slippage between nationalization and transculturation underscores
the ambiguity of this unproblematic usage of transculturation. The paradigmatic
transcultural product is again absent, making local production hardly more than mere
imitation.
The homogeneity of Latin American literature and cultural production is
consonant with the nationness privileged in film histories. The abstract space of the
nation allows the construction of a relatively autonomous and homogeneous corpus and
of a more or less coherent and unitary tradition – a critically intelligible space (“Doble
Estatuto” 9). Latin American national literature is subject to pressure from other
discursive categories (e.g., regional, subregional, continental, hemispheric, peripheral),
and complicating this homogeneous category and abstract space becomes paramount. The
solution for Cornejo Polar is not in decoding signs or expanding the representational field
but in complicating literature as a neutral space where different literatures coexist,
19
complicating signification and representation as transparently depicting referents, and
complicating the production of the nation as abstract pre-existent space. Heterogeneous
literatures are characterized by the duplicity or plurality of socio-cultural signs in its
productive process, a process that has at least one element that does not coincide with the
filiation of the other signs and creates a zone of ambiguity and conflict (“Doble Estatuto”
12). The heterogeneous plurality of Latin American literature is not simply a function of
multicultural representational strategies; it also designates the gaps in textual production
and consumption, the gaps between the referent and its signifier, and the gaps within the
Latin American subject.
Affect and the Study of Comedy
A similar investment in the bodily effects of the film experience articulated to the
heterogeneity of Latin American cultural production can be found in the uptake of affect
in Latin American film studies. In her recent book The Politics of Affect and Emotion in
Contemporary Latin American Cinema (2011), Laura Podalsky discusses the aesthetics
of sensation in contemporary Latin American cinema and advocates a similar move away
from approaches that symptomatically diagnose film narrative in an allegorical mode or
semantically decode the image, turning away from certain semiotic and psychoanalytic
approaches and toward an approach that examines the affective dimension of the cinema
experience: “Instead of examining how films organize or fix the spectator’s visual
apprehension of the profilmic space or how they deploy moral distinctions to align us
with particular characters rather than others, we need to acknowledge and account for the
myriad touch-points through which films and situated audiences encounter each other”
20
(14). Drawing on the affective turn identified by Michael Hardt, Podalsky locates the
body as a potential site for “alternative” epistemologies. Articulating the work of Hardt to
the work of Gilles Deleuze, Podalsky sees socially-inscribed and codified emotions and
the deterritorializing flows and punctuating intensities of affect working together to
produce alternative subjectivities and alternative ways of knowing (8, 12). Following
Laura Marks, she historically situates the cognitive potential of affect in the late twentieth
century at a moment of epistemological crisis wherein the visual record is rendered
unreliable if not insufficient. While I agree with Podalsky on the importance of
considering affect in the field of Latin American cinema, I diverge from her project on a
number of points. First, my study is situated in a different historical period. The
epistemological crisis she identifies with the declining currency of the photographic
record is not exclusive to the contemporary moment. I trace this epistemological crisis
and the concomitant ontological restlessness to the early and transition cinema of the
region as well as the theoretical discourses that coincided and at times preceded these
film practices both in Latin America and abroad. Second, I oppose her characterization of
Deleuze’s film theory as one that finds in the film experience the potential for an
alternative epistemology. Deleuze does not treat cinema as an art representing an external
reality but as an ontological practice that creates different ways of organizing movement
and time. What cinema affords is not alternative ways of knowing but alternative ways of
becoming and acting in the world. Ultimately, I move away from cognition and the
critical distance it presumes. I argue that comedies make us proximate to the image and
sound (in a mode that perhaps explains their exclusion if not dismissal in most histories)
21
in an affective mode, offering the possibility for a humorous mode of spectatorship — a
critical proximity — that moves away from an epistemology and towards an ethics.
Most studies of comedy in film studies have focused on the slapstick comedies of
the silent era and classical Hollywood comedy types, particularly the musical comedy,
screwball comedy, and comedian comedy. These early semiotic studies of comedy
showcase how comedic narrative operations and performance styles disrupt the structure
of the classical illusionistic fiction film. In his article on Ealing studio comedies, John
Ellis identifies two major types of comedy: the screwball or social comedy which uses
natural language and deals with social disruption and its restoration, and the crazy
comedy which displays an awareness of language and convention and works through
deconstruction and recombination (113). This typology is founded on the adherence of
the comedic film to the principles of classical dramatic film (Krutnik 51). Rather than a
classical definition of comedy founded on the restoration of order and the avowal of
hierarchies, these studies designate comedy in the excesses that temporarily suspend the
narrative and locate generic pleasure in the movement between disruption and reordering.
The linguistic play and generic deconstruction of the crazy comedy finds its paradigmatic
example in what Steve Seidman has termed the “comedian comedy.” These films are
organized around a particular type of star, a comedian with an extra-diegetic and often
para-cinematic presence. The comedian usually occupies a privileged status relative to
the other characters, less fictionally integrated and therefore disruptive of the diegesis.
The eventual fictional incorporation of the comedian often characterizes the narrative
operations of these films: the disorder externalized in the social comedy becomes
22
internalized in the comedian’s body and figured in the comedian’s problematic location
within the diegesis (Seidman 64).
These semiotic analyses provide valuable insight, particularly in their demand that
we interrogate the “tautology of genre recognition” — “it’s a comedy because it makes
me laugh!” — and acknowledge how classical Hollywood narrative presupposes dramatic
structures (Eaton 22). However, these early studies often fail to examine how comedy
functions as a body genre that registers its effects on the bodies of spectators. For
instance, departing from Seidman’s characterization of the reactionary tendency of the
comedian comedy, Frank Krutnik argues that the pleasure from the comedian comedy
derives from the movement between the diegetic absorption and filmic recognition (52).
Much like Miriam Hansen’s later discussion of female spectatorship and the star text of
Rudolph Valentino, the presence of the comedian dissociates the narrative (identification
with a character) and the scopic (the recognition of a particular object), forcing any study
of the comedian comedy to consider how identification and subjectivity are organized
differently (“Babel and Babylon” 281). Much like Linda Williams’s revision of
melodrama, this project requires less a semantic decoding than an exploration of the
bodily effects of the genre (“Revised” 42). In other words, I discuss the comedic films
not in terms of representation but rather in terms of embodiment. Humor in its cultural
specificity and its bodily effects functions as a cultural practice of embodiment: to laugh
is to express a cultural knowledge through the body and to participate in a collective body
in a modality that precludes hermeneutics or narrative inscription.
In order to move away from a semantic decoding of the representational field and
the models of identification articulated to this approach, I will refer to Henri Bergson’s
23
essay on laughter and la mécanisation de la vie (Bergson 102). Although usually
understood in terms of the incommensurability of the mechanic and the natural, I
articulate these categories to his discussion of time and duration as well as perception and
memory in Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution. The mechanic designates
habitual behavior and a relationship to an absent past; the natural refers to the perceived
present that interrupts this force of habit. His understanding of time and duration informs
his contra-definitional approach: Bergson avoids making his a nominative endeavor,
preferring to imagine the comic as dynamic and infinitely variable, processual and
relational. What happens to thought when its object is not treated as an abstract concept
to be grasped but as a living thing affected by and constituted through our engagement?
To delimit its mechanics would be to treat is a thing incapable of becoming. Laughter
relies on the recognition of habit and habit out-of-place, being and becoming, articulating
a new relation to the world that forces an awareness of the possibilities existing in the
world. The comic spirit is a way of being-in-the-world that privileges “practical, intimate
acquaintance” as opposed to instrumentalizing abstraction, a relation to the world that
affords fleeting moments of lucidity – throwing light on the workings of the inhabited
world. I will argue, particularly in the second half of this project, that comedy affords an
experience of authentic temporality in making us aware of our being-in-the-world
(Heidegger 374).
Furthermore, Bergson claims that laughter requires a disinterested spectator, a
spectator beside herself, not absorbed but not removed (5). Laughter produces a sensory
incoherence or stepping aside that I will argue positions the spectator differently. Rather
than locating the spectator as either proximate to or distant from the image, comedy’s
24
bodily effects are a function of “the play between engagement and distantiation” (Krutnik
58). I understand the proximity/distance or centripetal/centrifugal binary, which
undergirds most models of spectatorship, as participating in the construction of a
mind/body dualism and presupposes a distinction between Being and appearance that I
attribute to irony. Claire Colebrook writes a genealogy that understands Western
metaphysics as responding to the ironic posture (of Socrates) and the problem of human
meaning. Following Deleuze, irony is implicated in a history of Western subjectivism,
understood as a movement of ascent toward (metaphysical) principles that produces the
subject and grounds representation. To imagine a behind to language as an effect of a
subject before speech, supposes an ultimate point of view beyond difference (Colebrook
20). Humor is a movement of descent and singularities not limited to individuals or
governed by a system of language. Against an ironic subject that is an effect of the
structure of signification (founded on a signifier related to yet necessarily other than the
referent), Deleuze insists on a humor that focuses on the body and the excesses of the
system of language (“Logic of Sense” 166). Both irony and humor are movements or
orientations that bring us to an inhuman unity: either the totality beyond us or the
impersonal singularities from which we emerge (Colebrook 136). In order to avoid
imagining a distant (ironic) or proximate (non-ironic) spectator, I suggest a critically
proximate (humorous) spectator.
Peripheral Humor, Critical Realism
Though this project attempts to think within and beyond the geographic
frameworks of conventional regional film histories, it is delimited by the archival and
25
material limitations of study in the region. Ana López has pointed out the challenges of
scholarship on early and transition cinema in Latin America, noting that the more prolific
output and more sustained infrastructure of Argentina, Brazil and Mexico have allowed
for a larger scholarly field, adding that film texts and paratexts produce a necessary
matrix through which to conceive the cinema experience in these contexts. López
laments, however, that these material constraints have bounded the material by
“nationness” with few attempts at comparative studies across national contexts (“Early
Cinema” 50). The arrival of sound, in particular, meant a seismic shift in the mediascape,
resulting in the American penetration of sound recording and projection technology as
well as classical Hollywood film distribution and exhibition alongside a limited space for
national producers oftentimes buttressed by interventionist statist policies: “Mexico,
Argentina, and Brazil…invented, adapted, and experimented, producing a different yet
resonant version of early cinema" (“Early Cinema” 72).
My comparative study examines the formal and narrative operations of these
commercially successful, transition-cinema comedies and takes advantage of their
delimited and particularized circulation within and between diverse national contexts to
telescope local, regional, national and continental geographic frameworks. I have
organized the project in two parts: the first part articulates the bodily effects of comedian
comedies to theories of space; the second part attempts to theorize the experience of
temporality the peripheral humor affords.
Mexican comedies of the 1940s and 1950s are often discussed as paradigmatically
conservative: the restoration of order during the film’s resolution dovetails with the
socializing function of a cinema implicated in a resurgent nationalistic project after the
26
ambiguous legacy of the Mexican Revolution. My first chapter revisits the popular
comedies of Mario “Cantinflas” Moreno from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema and
argues that these films are not simply escapist and ideologically suspect but represent
peripheral spaces of subversive difference that in their cultural and historical specificity
cannot be easily co-opted by a cultural-imperialist center. Cantinflas’s humor is
characterized by his linguistic contortionism or cantinflismo, in which he says plenty
without saying anything, a verbal nonsense that sidesteps narrative registers and affords a
bodily engagement through laughter that relies on particular cultural codes and learned
structures of feeling. Starting with Cantinflas’s first successful film, Ahí está el detalle
(Juan Bustillo Oro, 1941), my analysis examines the comedian’s quick verbal play in
addition to formal devices, editing techniques, and doubled narrative structures that
‘sidestep’ on multiple levels. I discuss these films in relation to peripherization in both
senses of the term – as periphrastic operation and the construction of peripheral space.
In the Argentine context, the Golden Age period of the late 1930s and 1940s is
often discussed in relation to the forces contributing to the rise of Peronism in the 1940s.
Cinema and mass culture are implicated in the intertwined emergence of an integrative
nationalist rhetoric and polarizing class stratification that was conducive to the rise of
Juan Perón. Film comedies are again described as reactionary, providing through their
farcical narratives of upward mobility an imagined (if temporary) solution to the
ambivalent tendencies underpinning populist rhetoric. The films of Niní Marshall present
a rejoinder to the hyper-masculine comedic field. Her films and her star persona will be
the site for recovering and re-inserting the oft-neglected career of this popular
comedienne as well as considering the complex relation of gender to comedy. I consider
27
how Buenos Aires listened to Niní Marshall in order to lay out the socio-historical
context of early sound cinema in Argentina, its evolving position within the national
mediascape and its relation to other forms of mass culture, particularly the radio, and the
function of this star text in the formation and development of a national studio system. I
argue that Niní Marshall’s star text, particularly her vocal performances considered
intertextually and across media, functions in the spirit of masquerade, perhaps better
conceived as ventriloquism. Further, I revisit her early films in order to discuss how Niní
Marshall listened to Buenos Aires, her personae providing an aural map through
peripatetic traversals of the city.
The modernization of an increasingly urban and industrial Argentina and the
effect of modernity on the experience of time and space provide a backdrop for my
discussion of the films of Luis Sandrini. By focusing on Sandrini’s physical slapstick and
stuttering buffoonery, I will discuss his films as staging a confrontation with standardized
time both in terms of the reification of time in modernity and the standardization of film
through the registration gate. If comedy is “all about timing,” then I will consider how
comedy foregrounds the representability of time and, more particularly, how Sandrini’s
stutter disrupts the temporal continuum that film, a time-based medium, records. This
chapter uses the stutter heuristically, figuring it within film texts, material film practice,
spectatorial experience, and historiography. Ultimately, I argue for comedy as a critically
realist mode that in producing an embodied experience that mediates modernity, affords
an awareness of historicity.
The Brazilian chanchada or musical comedy is a popular genre from the Golden
Age of Brazilian cinema with a substantial Portuguese-language academic literature.
28
These comedies date from the early sound period and persist through the 1940s at the
height of the Atlântida studio system and into the 1970s and the emergence of the
cheaply- and quickly-made pornochanchada. The literature on the chanchada
understands these films as hybrid cultural objects, borrowing liberally from classical
Hollywood musicals, Portuguese fado, Afro-Brazilian music and Brazilian popular
theater. More particularly, this literature identifies the parodic textual strategies of the
text, presenting the carnivalesque musical romps as hybrid cultural objects and symptoms
of economic (and cultural) dependency and debating the political valence of the popular
genre. I understand the divergent political valence of the parody in these approaches as a
function of their problematic construction of spectatorship along the axes of distance and
proximity. By revisiting the key film texts of the comedic duo or dupla of Oscarito and
Grande Otelo that figure in this debate, I underscore the problematic assumptions driving
these foundational critical arguments and suggest a model of humorous spectatorship
through which to consider the effects of these parodic texts. Furthermore, this chapter
will argue that “laughing at” someone can be a productive and ethical response,
particularly in light of the permeable subject/object relations that previous chapters have
already identified in the comic.
I peripheralize theories of space and time by tracing their differential circulation
and currency in Latin America and articulating these to the collective modes of
spectatorship and bodily effects comedy produces. In my discussion of peripheral humor,
I consider the linguistic contortionism of Cantinflas in light of Miriam Hansen’s
vernacular modernism and Angel Rama’s narrative transcultuation and Henri Lefebvre’s
theory of spatial production, before turning to Argentina to re-consider feminist film
29
theory from the periphery through the vocal stardom of Niní Marshall and the itinerant
theory of Giuliana Bruno. In redefining critical realism as a vehicle for historical selfawareness, I remain in the Argentine context to transvaluate the concept of the stutter in
light of a Bergsonist-inflected reading of Lukács, Benjamin and Kracauer. Finally, I turn
to be Brazilian context to discuss irony and humor in a Deleuzian spirit to argue that
Latin American comedy produces a critically-proximate, humorous spectator.
Ultimately, my project examines different models of linguistic and audiovisual
play in connection with theories of space and time in order to move beyond approaches
that decode representation in an allegorical mode. By examining the linguistic play of
these comedians, this study demonstrates four aspects of Latin American comedy that
operate via embodiment and spatio-temporal location. First, cantinflismo had as its basis
not merely word play and non-sense, but misdirection, an evasive spatial practice which
positioned the viewer to resist social hierarchies within and beyond the nation. Second,
Marshall’s multiple radio and film characters and her vocal stardom constituted an
auditory map of Buenos Aires that created a different spatial intelligibility for her
auditors. Third, Sandrini’s stutter produced multiple temporalities that, in turn, positioned
the audience itself to do a double take regarding its relation to the film text and its
location within the standardized time of modernity. Fourth, the palimpsestic parody of the
Brazilian chanchanda by Oscarito and Grande Otelo produced an awareness of historicity
in a critically realist vein. Taken together, these four parallel examples of comedic
practice demonstrate how Latin American film comedies produced a critically proximate
spectator capable of perceiving and organizing space and time differently.
30
PART ONE:
PERIPHERAL HUMOR
31
CHAPTER ONE
HAZME REÍR: CANTINFLISMO AS SPATIAL PRACTICE
Mexican comedies of the 1940s and 1950s are often discussed as paradigmatically
conservative: the restoration of order during the film’s resolution dovetails with the
socializing function of a cinema implicated in a resurgent nationalistic project after the
ambiguous legacy of the Mexican Revolution. Despite the fact that comedies accounted
for the first box-office success (taquillazos) in Mexican cinema, Emilio García Riera’s
authoritative history briefly considers Golden Age comedies in the same breath as the
family melodramas of Porfirian nostalgia. The success of Mario “Cantinflas” Moreno’s
Ahí está el detalle (Juan Bustillo Oro, 1940) marks a turning point for a Mexican cinema
that had seen its production of comedies triple with the arrival of sound in the later 1930s.
García Riera credits Ahí está el detalle as legitimating the market position of comedies
and the growing star discourse around comedic actors that had previously been relegated
to supporting parts (107).
After his initial successes, Cantinflas finds the director and screenwriter – Miguel
M. Delgado and Jaime Salvador, respectively – that would become his partners in crime
for the duration of his film career. The trio capitalized on and eventually ossified the
formula of the pelado confronting the powerful: Cantinflas, a man of the people, courts a
young and humble girl while, behind his back, some villains mock his naiveté only to be
stymied by his unexpected cleverness. The codification of the Cantinflas film has been
discussed mostly in biographical and contextual terms. Cantinflas's rise and fall can be
traced alongside the diverse histories of the so-called Golden Age of Mexican Cinema.
His growing popularity has been tied to the populist nationalism of Lázaro Cárdenas
32
(1934-1940). Cardenismo's reformist agenda, in addition to the urbanization of the
country and its widespread illiteracy, contributed to Cantinflas becoming identified as an
expression of lo mexicano.
Cantinflas's generic codification and becoming-establishment were yoked to the
insitutionalization of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) with the presidencies
of Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940-1946) and Miguel Alemán (1946-1952). Similarly,
although the foundations for a legitimate film industry were laid in the 1930s, it was in
the following decade that Mexican cinema blossomed. During Ávila Camacho's
presidency, the film industry was put on commercial footing through state support to
private producers, particularly with the creation of the Banco Cinematográfico in 1942.
The Banco Cinematográfico began as a private institution with indirect federal support
from the Banco de México and the Nacional Financiera and functioned as a credit
institution that centralized the sporadic film activities of undercapitalized producers
(Mora 59). Eventually, the bank was nationalized in 1947, becoming the Banco Nacional
Cinematográfico, with state and private initiatives collaborating to offer funding. The
Second World War also saw waning competition from a bellicose Europe and United
States. Additionally, the United States supported an allied Mexican industry during the
war years, offering financial and material assistance through the US Office of the
Coordinator for Inter-American Affairs under the direction of Nelson Rockefeller. The
period became retrospectively evoked as a Golden Age, although critical opinion varies
considerably on its duration: Carl Mora argues that the Golden Age coincided with the
economic miracle of Alemanismo; Monsiváis argues for a generous period spanning the
33
years 1935-1955; and Emilio García Riera narrows the period to the years of the Second
World War (Noble 15).
Although the esteem and duration of Cantinflas's creative peak are similarly
contested, the height of his cultural influence arguably spans the period from 1940 to
1960 – from the beginnings of Ávila Camacho's organization of the film industry to
Cantinflas's full-scale Hollywoodization with his roles in Around the World in 80 Days
(1956) and Pepe (1960) (Monsiváis "Antología" 81). The decline of the comedian's films
– and arguably the Golden Age tout court – was a function of declining Hollywood
investment following the Second World War, the cronyism of state financing and
syndicate entrenchment, as well as the broadening and formula-driven narratives of the
films. Some critics, however, dismiss the comedian's entire oeuvre: Jorge Ayala Blanco
notes that Cantinflas avoided departing from his always-already anachronistic peladito
from 1936, stuck performing the same debasing character in Delgado's immobile frame, a
relic of a national and bourgeois institution that attempted to make an apolitical and
ahistorical Mexico a reality (69). Similarly, Rafael Medina de la Serna privileges the
comedian's biography, his decline a function of the unprecedented success of Detalle.
Cantinflas's success caused him to mollify and mediate the class character of his comedy
while preserving the trappings of the peladito. For Medina de la Serna, the comedian's
films post-Detalle – the overwhelming majority of his filmography – feature the pelado
in a variety of professions that would blunt satiric edge of his humor (167). These
criticisms turn on the cultural function of his pelado character. Even his staunchest
defenders cite his Si yo fuera diputado (1951) as a turning point in Cantinflas's
filmography because his persona ceases to be a lumpen representative. The film finds
34
Cantinflas becoming congressman, breaking with the pelado's constitutive marginality
(Mraz 127). Monsiváis adds that the film marks the end of Cantinflas's popular restive
phase because of the moralizing and cautionary nature of these later Cantinflas films
("Antología" 80). In a less socio-historical vein, Ilan Stavans problematically identifies
Cantinflas's apex between 1942 and 1950, extolling his collaboration with
cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa; however, Figueroa works with the comedian mostly
outside this period, only sporadically in a handful of films from the early 1940s and then
again in his later films El bolero de Raquel (1957), Su excelencia (1967), and El profesor
(1971) (41). Privileging this collaboration simply reinforces auteurist attempts to redeem
Golden Age genre and popular filmmaking: Figueroa's landscapes and Boytler's direction
are both often indebted to Eisenstein's sojourn in Mexico (41).
Although the dominant sociocultural and auteurist tendencies that have defined
much Mexican film scholarship are significant in chronicling this national cinema and
understanding it within a burgeoning urban and nationalist popular culture, my close
analytical approach capitalizes on the peculiar 'Mexicanness' of Cantinflas and his
expansive filmography less to chronologically survey popular Mexican cinema than to
explore thematically oriented and methodologically inflected lines of inquiry that
intersect with important debates in Mexican cultural history and issues in Latin American
and Euro-American film studies. My approach uses transculturation to supplement
theories of vernacular modernism, discussing cantinflismo as a peripherizing comic
operation with a particular historical and linguistic location. Vernacular modernism will
allow me to think beyond earlier readings that privilege narrative organization to consider
the way these films provide mass audiences with an affective-sensory dimension that
35
allowed spectators to confront the ambivalence of modernity. Furthermore, to avoid the
occlusion of culturally and linguistically specific film practices that prove less
circulatory, I articulate vernacular modernism to transculturation and critical realism as
frameworks that attempt to think “in the language.”
Cantinflas’s humor is characterized by his linguistic contortionism – cantinflismo
– where, as Carlos Monsiváis argues, he says plenty without saying anything, a verbal
nonsense that suggests his thoughts are ahead of his words. The disruption of stable
linguistic operations is heavily determined by particular cultural codes and learned
structures of feeling. Cantinflismo’s absurdism is contemptuous of a logic that attempts
to discipline ineffectively, ultimately condemning and rejecting Cantinflas from the
narrative-cognitive registers: “es el doble idioma de lo que se quiere expresar y de lo que
no se tiene ganas de pensar / it is the double speak of what one wants to say and what
one does not want to think” (Monsiváis “Escenas” 87). This double speak is not dialogic,
it is not a transparent communicative act but relies on performative utterance and shared
cultural knowledge that forecloses facile transmission – the meaning of the medium is not
the message. But how does this double speak sidestep narration and, more importantly,
how does this double speak represent a transcultural response to modernity?
Starting with Cantinflas’s first successful film, Ahí está el detalle [You're Missing
the Point] (Juan Bustillo Oro, 1941), this chapter will examine the comedian’s quick
verbal play in addition to formal devices, editing techniques, and doubled narrative
structures that ‘sidestep’ on multiple levels. A close analysis of this foundational film will
provide a framework that examines the operations of cantinflismo in multiple registers,
from linguistic play to textual instability, and from denotative equivocation to spatial
36
practice. A subsequent consideration of his post-Detalle filmography will expand on this
preliminary framework in order to argue that these films are not simply escapist and
ideologically suspect but represent peripheral spaces of subversive difference that in their
cultural and historical specificity cannot be easily co-opted by a cultural-imperialist
center. These film comedies are transcultural; non-sense sidesteps narrative-cognitive
registers and affords an affective engagement that relies on particular cultural codes and
learned structures of feeling. The humor is contingent on thinking within a particular
historical context and 'in the language,' suggesting that these comedies may represent a
response to modernity that is non-circulatory and may express a modernist concern for
everyday life that is transcultural.
Cantinflismo en detalle
Juan Bustillo Oro's Ahí está el detalle (1940), Cantinflas's first commercial
success, presents an intricate comedy of errors where our unnamed protagonist becomes
embroiled in a series of escalating misadventures and misunderstandings. By way of
synopsis, Cantinflas courts the maid, Paz (Dolores Camarillo), from an upper-class
couple's residence. The couple's relationship is tumultuous because the husband,
Cayetano (Joaquín Pardavé), suspects his younger wife, Dolores "Lola" (Sofía Álvarez),
is having an affair. Lola's former lover, Bobby "The Fox Terrier" Lechuga (Antonio
Bravo), threatens to blackmail her with undated love letters meant to incense her jealous
husband. At the same time, Cayetano wants to preserve his marriage because of an
inheritance his wife is expecting but cannot collect because of the disappearance of her
biological brother, Leonardo del Paso. In a complicated play of upstairs-downstairs
37
hijinks, Cantinflas is mistaken for Leonardo. Cantinflas takes advantage of this case of
misrecognition until the real Leonardo's spouse arrives with a gaggle of illegitimate
children. Cantinflas's subsequent attempts to extricate himself are frustrated when the real
Leonardo commits murder, and Cantinflas must use his natural gift – "la facilidad de
palabra / a way with words" as he explains in the film – to keep himself out of jail. The
film ends with the real Leonardo arriving at the courtroom in the nick of time to confess
his crime and recognize his partner and children.
The film provides one of the earliest examples of Cantinflas as a leading man who
cannot be followed. The disruption of stable linguistic operations is heavily determined
by particular cultural codes and learned structures of feeling. The film's title offers an
idiomatic expression that suggests how the film's literal and figurative registers are
necessarily inflected by both strategic unintelligibility and audience location: Ahí está el
detalle literally translates to "There is the detail," but its variable meanings are a function
of the contingent shifter (i.e., ahí / there) and the idiomatic use of detalle. Throughout the
film, detalle refers to a significant detail, an overarching point and an unofficial romantic
partner. Cantinflas's periphrastic comedic riffs are a function of the circumscribed
intelligibility afforded by contingent linguistic markers and the socio-cultural specificity
of his language. The comedian's linguistic contortionism – cantinflismo – relies on the
circumlocution afforded by a steady chain of shifters indicating a space that never
materializes, a circumlocution that produces always-contingent peripheral positions to an
ostensibly stable referential relationship. Regarded in this light, the title packs an
additional sardonic element: You're Missing the Point gestures toward some significance
that is always already missing. Departing from a discussion of the spoken dialogue, I will
38
demonstrate how the comedian's appeal relies on the corrosion of the spoken word and
the evasion of intelligibility and will argue that this film comedy more broadly
complicates the denotative nature of classical film language and frustrates (narrativecognitive) approaches to spectatorship.
Cantinflas's most amusing verbal encounters in the film often position his pelado
character opposite the Romantic and polished language of Paradavé's Cayetano.
Cantinflas's verbal dexterity undermines Paradavé's attempts to simulate grandiloquence,
revealing the latter's criollo hypocrisy. In their first encounter on screen, Cayetano finds
Cantinflas raiding his pantry of luxury goods while searching for his wife's presumed
lover. Cayetano confronts Cantinflas at gunpoint, interrogating the comic and threatening
his life (Figure A1). Despite his innocence, Cantinflas eludes questioning not by
physically avoiding detection or denying his complicity but rather by relying on the
vacuity of polite convention to disarm the cuckold:
Pardavé: ¡Sálgase de ahí!
Cantinflas: No, aquí estoy bien muchas gracias. ¿Por qué no entra usted?
Aquí hay galleticas, cognatico y puritos.
P: Gracias, gracias. Acabo de cenar.
C: Pues si yo también acababa, pero pues P: Sí, sí - ¡sálgase usted de ahí le digo!
C: Bueno, así de buen modo, sí salgo. Y me va usted perdonar que me
retire pero ya se me hizo tarde. A ver en qué día vuelvo. Con permiso.
P: Sí, sí. Pase usted. ... ¡Alto allí!
C: ¿A dónde?
P: ¡Allí!
C: ¿Allí?
P: ¡Aquí!
C: ¿Por fin?
P: ¿Qué?
C: ¿Allí o aquí?
P: Aquí y conteste pronto.
C: No puedo.
P: ¿Por qué?
C: Pues, todavía usted no me pregunta nada.
39
P: De veras. ¿Qué hace usted aquí?
C: No, pues usted me dijo que me parara aquí.
P: ¡Le pregunto usted qué hace usted aquí en mi casa!
C: Pues si es los que yo digo. ¿Yo qué hago aquí en su casa? De manera
que aclarado el punto con permiso me retiro.
P: Párese allí!
C: Otra vez. ¿Está usted jugando?
P: No se burle. No se burle y conteste antes de que le pegue un balazo.
C: Será mejor antes.
P: ¿Qué hace usted aquí?
C: ¿Y usted?
P: Eso a usted no le importa.
C: Con usted no puede uno entenderse, señor. Si a mí no me importa, ¿por
qué a usted le importa lo que a mí no me importa?
P: ¿Qué no se ha dado cuenta que yo soy el marido?
C: ¿Cuál marido?
P: ¡Su marido!
C: ¿Mi marido?... No diga usted esas cosas que a lo mejor lo están oyendo
y mi reputación P: No disimules. Soy el marido de mi mujer.
C: ¿También?
P: Sí.
C: Bueno, y ¿eso qué? ¿A mí qué me importa? Yo nunca me meto en
cosas privadas.
P: ¿Qué no? Yo le voy a decir a usted lo que usted está haciendo aquí en
mi casa.
C: Pues si me hace el favor y es tan amable.
Pardavé: Come out of there!
Cantinflas: No, thanks. I'm fine in here. Won't you come in? There's
cookies, brandy and cigars.
P: Thanks. I just ate.
C: I just did too, but you know P: Sure, I know. – Come out right now!
C: Now that you put it so nicely. Sure, I'll come out. Now, if you'll excuse
me, I really have to go. I'll come back soon. Excuse me.
P: Sure. Go ahead. – Stop right there!
C: Where?
P: There!
C: There?
P: Here!
C: Make up your mind.
P: What?
C: Here or there?
P: Here, and answer me quickly.
C: I can't.
40
P: Why not?
C: You haven't asked me a question.
P: You're right. What are you doing here?
C: You told me to stand here.
P: I mean what are you doing here in my house!
C: I've been asking the same question. What am I doing here? So I guess
I'll leave now.
P: Stop there!
C: Not again. Are you joking?
P: Don't mock me. Answer me before I shoot!
C: You better ask before [you shoot].
P: What are you doing here?
C: What about you?
P: None of your business!
C: I don't understand. Why is it my business if it isn't your business?
P: Because I am the husband.
C: What husband?
P: The husband!
C: My husband? Don't say that. People might hear you, and my reputation
P: I am my wife's husband.
C: Hers too?
P: Yes.
C: So? Why should I care? I never meddle in private affairs.
P: You don't? I'll tell you what you're doing in my house.
C: If you'd be so kind.
This exchange offers a brief glimpse of Cantinflas's linguistic contortionism –
cantinflismo – where, as Carlos Monsiváis argues, he says plenty without saying
anything, a verbal nonsense that suggests his thoughts are ahead of his words. Cantinflas
corrodes the spoken word from within by frustrating the meaning-making function of
speech, more particularly, the referential nature of language. Cantinflismo communicates
differently, foregrounding embodied experience, contingent referentiality and vernacular
language. More specifically, cantinflismo seems to be characterized by the use of
pronouns (su marido) and shifters (here/there) missing antecedents and referents,
respectively. The confusion of second- and third-person address – Cayetano is su
41
(your/her) husband – results in an amusing misunderstanding. Cantinflas semiotically
rewires Pardavé's florid language, misrecognizing referential relationships for strategic
effect. Moreover, in occupying the position of the antecedent, Cantinflas not only derails
the husband's questioning but also reveals that he considers himself to be a social equal.
The pronoun su refers to the formal second-person usted as opposed to the informal
second-person tú. Cantinflas's pelado is an igualado or a person who (mis)behaves as a
social equal. The humor in this sequence is not simply a matter of misunderstanding but
of class permeability and the arbitrariness of social hierarchy.
The exchange above also relies on the use of shifters with imprecise referents. If
the pronoun use above provides an example of misdirection reliant on culturally-specific
(classed) convention, the shifter use provides an example of misdirection that relies on
the spatial and temporal organization afforded by the film form and style of early
Cantinflas comedies. The exchange occurs in three spaces in three separate medium-long
shots. Early in the sequence when Cantinflas excuses himself to leave, he moves from
one space to another space. Pardavé, still in the first space, demands Cantinflas stop
"there," in a space off screen. When Cantinflas asks for clarification in the second shot,
Pardavé joins Cantinflas in the second space while repeating his command; however,
"there" is no longer off screen. Pardavé's second use of "there" refers to the "here." The
film avoids cutting away to "there," which heightens the comedic effect but also allows
referential relationships to remain in suspension. The spatial relationship between these
three shots may be continuous, but the humor resides in equivocation: "there" could be
here or there, on or off screen, actual or virtual. Throughout this comedy of mistaken
identity, the film withholds cutaways that would denote objects of narrative significance
42
or clarify allusions. Cantinflas is seldom edited in shot-reverse-shot patterns, and his
position to other objects, people, and spaces is seldom articulated by the patterns of
continuity editing. The film, like the comedian, is free to toy with referential relationships
for comedic effect. The humor arises from the potentiality of "there," from the ability to
unmoor petrified meanings and establish unexpected referential relationships. The
minimal editing coupled with the play of shifters result in a film form that communicates
differently. The humor arises both from the on-screen exchange as well as the virtuality
of the off screen, the possibility that the off-screen "there" will become actualized
otherwise.
Unmoored referentiality is not merely a function of missing antecedents but also
unclear indices. The narrative relies on Doppelgänger misconstrued because the proper
name no longer denotes. The context-dependent indexical relation of the proper name
becomes untenable and its nominative operation is foregrounded. Leonardo del Paso kills
Bobby the Fox Terrier twice: Cantinflas as Leonardo kills Bobby the Fox Terrier dog and
Leonardo kills Bobby the Fox Terrier extortionist. Remarkably, Cantinflas is never
referred to by his own proper name. Throughout the film, Cantinflas is never himself; he
is always construed as someone else. Nearly every character in the narrative would prefer
Cantinflas be Leonardo: the husband needs Leonardo to claim the inheritance; Lola needs
Leonardo to conceal the blackmail; and Clotilde needs Leonardo to recognize and support
her children. Would that the proper name functioned correctly as an index, but the humor
arises from the failures of signification. More specifically, the proper name should
function as a rhematic indexical legisign – a term that by virtue of established convention
indicates an actual connection between the term and the individual. The narrative is
43
driven by multiple attempts to make the convention ontological, forging an existential
connection between the name and the designated person, but Cantinflas avoids being
positioned. All signs erroneously point to Cantinflas, calling into question the accuracy of
signification tout court. Cantinflas undermines convention then not merely in content but
also in structure; he mocks bourgeois morality and institutional procedure, but more
importantly he destabilizes the referential connection between signifier and signified.
Cantinflismo then does not simply refer to the comedian's linguistic dexterity but
more importantly to his textual instability. He is mistaken for someone else and refuses to
designate himself. He slips in and out of positions that intra- and extra-textual others have
produced. Cantinflas is everyone but Cantinflas: he simulates others and dissimulates
himself. His refusal to be wedded to his proper name allows Cantinflas to occupy
multiple positions, and this unwillingness to become legible and referential sign is
perhaps paradigmatically shown in his coerced marriage to Clotilde Regalado, the real
Leonardo del Paso's partner. Cantinflas looks for a way out: a way out of the marriage, a
way out of the frame, a way out of the guise. The sequence features Cantinflas anxious to
escape – Yo prefiriría que fuera por allá / "I'd rather go that way" – but physically
restrained by his bride – No es por allí, es por acá / "It's not that way; it's this way." The
bride clutches his arm and refuses to let him out of her grasp, and the camera frames his
body and refuses to let him out of its sight. The ceremony begins with Cantinflas
confined in a crowded medium long shot, surrounded by all the players in this farce:
Clotilde, Cayetano, Dolores, Paz, and the gaggle of illegitimate children (Figure A2). A
restrained Cantinflas takes to his trademark evasive verbal maneuvers. When asked
explicitly by the judge whether he is Del Paso, Cantinflas responds that he is de Tepito /
44
from Tepito – the proper name becomes prepositional phrase, no longer indicating
someone but somewhere. A string of similar jokes relying on homonyms and
misunderstanding are of little use. Cantinflas then claims that he cannot marry because he
cannot sign his name. His illiteracy is of little consequence, the judge assures, because
Cantinflas can agree to the marriage by using his fingerprints:
Si no sabe firmar, mejor. Muchos han burlado la ley contrayendo matrimonio
con nombres opuestos pero ninguno firmando con sus huellas digitales. Este
señor firmará con sus huellas.
If he can't sign, even better. Many have mocked the law by marrying under
false names but none by signing with their fingerprints. This man will sign
with his fingerprints.
Cantinflas risks being yoked to his (im)proper name through the fingerprint, a
change in sign-vehicle and an escalation of the interpretant sign. If the signature functions
as a rhematic indexical legisign, then the fingerprint functions as a dicent indexical
sinsign (Peirce 260). Both operate as indices by drawing attention to an object, but the
former functions as a degenerate index, factually connected to the object even if not
bearing the marks of the object's actual existence, whereas the latter functions as a
genuine index, calling attention to its object as having a real being independently of the
representation and carrying the marks of the history of its object. This shift from
signature to fingerprint represents an escalation in singularity, in definitively locating
Cantinflas within a signifying economy. Cantinflas understandably hesitates, but Clotilde
and Cayetano grab Cantinflas's hands to record his fingerprints in the wedding registry.
Cantinflas's fingers deftly avoid the page, and the comedian attempts to explain that he is
not Del Paso. The renunciation of the proper name goes unheeded, but before Cantinflas
45
can be bound by his fingerprints, the police interrupt to apprehend Leonardo del Paso,
suspected murderer. Cantinflas's fingerprints are never registered and his unstable
referential position remains intact.
The humor from this infelicitous marriage is heightened by the misexecution of
the performative speech act. The justice of the peace administering the rite is hard of
hearing, resulting in a series of exchanges that foreground how precision in meaning and
reference are subordinate to the force of the utterance. The judge's first exchange with the
Pardavé character features the wealthy business man being obsequious to the judge, but
the latter mishears the former and grows increasingly angry at what he perceives are
offensive slights. Pardavé's volume creeps up until he is screaming futilely at the judge.
Out of breath, Pardavé quietly comments, "De verdad no oye nada / He really can't hear
anything," later adding with a kind touch of the judge's shoulder, "Es usted muy bruto,
Señor Juez / You are very dumb, your Honor." The judge's temper subsides as he
misapprehends flattery. This comic exchange underlines the vacuity of Pardavé's
behabitives and perhaps the emptiness of middle class politesse in general; moreover, the
meaning-making function of language proves less significant than its force and its effects.
The judge brings a clerk to serve as an interauditor that records the ceremony and, more
significantly, listens for the judge. His prosthetic audition makes the explicit performative
utterance become indirect speech. If wedding vows function as paradigmatic explicit
performatives with highly unambiguous expression and clear utterance origins, then this
use of indirect speech blunts the performative thrust of the vow, merely reporting
constative speech and reducing language to a matter of precise meaning. No longer is the
issuance of the vow the performing of an action; the vow becomes several times
46
removed, increasingly ambiguous and vague. Cantinflas comedies work both by
suspending logocentrism and moving at the limits of non-sense as well as by
equivocating and obfuscating the origin of enunciation. A return to narrative order is
always one stable referential relation away, and the promise of referential certainty drives
the narrative to its conclusion.
The opening of the film provides another example of the formal misdirection
underway. The opening operates as a series of miscues and misdirections that set up a
constellation of Doppelgänger for the ensuing comedy of errors. The film opens with an
establishing shot of the house before cutting to a medium shot of Bobby Lechuga
(Antonio Bravo) staring at the house from across the street. The following shot suggests
Lechuga's point of view of the house: a close-up of the light turning on in a second-floor
window. Lechuga reaches in his pocket to remove a small package but his wallet falls to
the ground, landing at his feet in close up. Cantinflas is introduced in a medium shot
hiding behind a tree, ostensibly staring at Lechuga and his wallet from the other side of
the street, possibly in front of the house. Lechuga walks toward the house in a mediumlong shot, crossing the street and peering inside the gate. Cantinflas glances to the bottom
left of the frame and tiptoes off screen to collect the wallet. Cantinflas enters the
following close up shot of the wallet from behind the wallet revealing that he was not
across from Lechuga but actually to his left. The axis of action between Bobby and the
house suggests that Cantinflas's glance to the bottom left of the frame, in response to the
dropped wallet, positions him opposite Lechuga and in front of the house. Cantinflas's
subsequent movement out of frame reveals what could be considered a breach in
continuity; however, this short example illustrates the way cantinflismo can be expanded
47
from mere word play to include a wider array of evasive maneuvers. Not only does
Cantinflas's verbal dexterity allow him to occupy multiple positions, but also the film's
form allows him to sidestep conventions of continuity editing and narrative exposition, to
misdirect both literally and figuratively.
The film concludes with a prolonged courtroom sequence where Cantinflas is
eventually acquitted after the ostensible restitution of referentiality. Cantinflas confesses
to killing Bobby the rabid dog, but the court sees him as Leonardo confessing to the
murder of Bobby the extorter. We are in a signifying hall of mirrors where every proper
name has multiple referents. By the end of the sequence, the participants mimic and
reproduce Cantinflas's speech acts and effectively participate in cantinfleo. Without direct
one-to-one analogy, testimony and legal discourse lose performative conviction; we
become aware of legalese as mere rhetoric with arbitrary effects. The sequence has
rightfully received earlier critical attention but scholars remain divided about its
subversive effect. On the one hand, the narrative presents Cantinflas triumphing over a
baroque legal system, a particularly symbolic victory for contemporaneous viewers with
limited literacy. The social control maintained by the legal system operates through
language that is as impenetrable as Cantinflas's speech (Mraz 126). Cantinflismo pillages
languages, parodying and disarming the rhetorical stranglehold of officialism, a strategy
that is particularly effective in the context of the reigning illiteracy of 1930s Mexico, with
nearly 70% of the population unable to read (Monsiváis "Antología" 73). On the other
hand, the sequence exemplifies the use of relajo as a defensive tactic with a
characteristically Mexican lack of seriousness toward discourse or value, a strategy of
displacement to avoid frustration and confrontation:
48
The scene humorously subverts a trial, one of the most important
moments for the materialization of the legal system and the actualization
of judiciary practices...But the effect is momentary. As it happens in many
comedies, relief arrives soon enough while the injustice of societal rules
stays intact, albeit this seems to hurt less when all are laughing about it
(Chavez 125).
The latter position represents a common refrain directed against comedy: politically
ineffectual because of its often restorative conclusion. The resolution of the film ignores
larger questions about the legitimacy of the trial and the wrongful accusation and near
conviction of an innocent man. While these are apt questions to consider, this position
understands political representation merely as a function of its content and the explicit
and direct critique of order. Why must the space opened through the misdirection of the
relajo be always already foreclosed? More significantly, what undermines this reductive
critique of restorative comedic narrative structure and explicit political representation is
that Cantinflas's body and speech both call into question the very nature of the
communicative act. The courtroom journalists exclaim: "Fíjense qué cara tiene. Es el
típico criminal lombrosiano. El criminal nato. Hay que ver qué cinismo. Verdaderamente
merece el paredón. / Look at his face...He's a regular criminal! Natural born killer. He
deserves to be shot." The prosecutor's case similarly relies on his criminal aspect. If
juridical procedures and, more generally, the public sphere rely on transparency and
rational communicative acts, then cantinflismo both foregrounds the arbitrariness and
exclusivity of the liberal bourgeois public sphere and produces an alternative space of
performance that operates on a different logic of representation. What you see is not what
you get. The image – Cantinflas's Lombrosian criminal aspect – and the word –
Cantinflas's (no) name – lack referentiality, and without analogic semiosis the lettered
49
public sphere collapses. To be a participant in this alternative space requires less the
desire for meaning than the pleasure in the inability to mean. The audience is not a
function of signification that is accessible to some but rather the absence of meaning as
an affective horizon of experience.
Recognizing how this film comedy engages spectators otherwise, Ahí está el
detalle sets the groundwork for a more comprehensive conceptualization of cantinflismo
as (a) the process and product of conflicting linguistic registers, (b) narrative operations
that unmoor referentiality and (c) appropriative spatial practice that actualizes a
peripheral space of difference.
Vulgar Speech, Vernacular Modernism
The limited discussion of comedy is often articulated to what Mexican cultural
critic Carlos Monsiváis calls the socializing function of cinema. Monsiváis argues that
cinema in general was a significant socializing force in the Mexican context after 1910
because it emerged in a post-revolutionary historical moment of nation-state rebuilding
and created a set of identifiable types that gradually became codified as Mexican. In his
discussion of the relationship of cinema and the Mexican state, Daniel Chávez finds in
comedy the most reactionary mode of visual representation, characterized by a
complacency toward the paternalist practices of the government and its institutions
(Chávez 117). Considering the affective and aesthetic dimensions of the comedian’s film
comedies allows us to move away from criticism that foregrounds the cultural function of
the pelado in recuperative narrative structures – criteria that privileges facile narrative
readings that presuppose the transparency of cinematic representation and presume
50
classical structure and spectatorship. For example, Cantinflas’s wartime comedy, Un día
con el diablo (Miguel M. Delgado, 1945), represents one of the more explicit
interventions of the state media apparatus in the popular filmmaking of the period. The
film follows Cantinflas literally delivering news from the front, introducing him as a
newsboy selling newspapers bearing the headline: "Nuestra nación declara la guerra. /
Our nation declares war." Cantinflas is framed in a close-up from behind hawking his
papers with a sing-songy summation of the news. His inflection, however, defamiliarizes
the message, emphasizing the wrong syllable, spouting off a string of words too quickly,
or pausing mid-word for effect. After selling all his papers, Cantinflas asks a customer
what the newspaper says. His customer replies that the nation has declared war, and
Cantinflas replies: "Which war?" The content of the message is less significant than the
delivery, both at the literal narrative level, where newspaper circulation depends on the
physical labor and salesmanship of the newsboy, and perhaps at the formal and figurative
registers of the text. The film may be ostensibly propaganda, but we must also consider
the aesthetic and affective tactics that determine how this message is communicated and
received.
Monsiváis credits Cantinflas’s success to a brand of non-transferable and
untranslatable humor that seduces less because of its meanings than because of its sounds
and attitudes (“Aires” 69). Comedic effect is a function of the sensuous and affective
registers of communcation that produce particular spaces of reception. Cantinflismo then
compels us to re-articulate mass cultural practice to the changing categories of experience
and circulation and to conceive a more expansive understanding of popular culture
informed by Miriam Hansen’s concept of vernacular modernism and her re-readings of
51
realist film theory. Hansen's earliest formulations of vernacular modernism saw her
developing the latter term, modernism, in an effort to reassess the juncture of cinema and
modernism beyond industrial-technological histories or studies of "international art
cinemas of both interwar and new wave periods" ("Mass Production" 59). Instead,
Hansen focuses on interwar modernity and the confluence of mass culture, mainstream
cinema and high modernism. In this inflection of modernism, Hansen rearticulates the
term to encompass a broader range of practices that respond to modernization and reflect
upon the experience of modernity. Hansen expands on the machine aesthetic of shock and
juxtaposition, understanding in a Benjaminian spirit the shift to mass consumption as
affording "new modes of organizing vision and sensory perception, a new relationship
with 'things,' different forms of mimetic experience and expression, of affectivity,
temporality, and reflexivity, a changing fabric of everyday life, sociability, and leisure"
("Mass Production" 60). This expansive treatment of modernism allows Hansen to
include practices that articulate and mediate the experience of modernity, discovering in
modes of mass and popular culture moments of vernacular modernism.
Hansen's later work focuses on the term "vernacular" as an alternative to the
overdetermined "popular," insisting on the former as articulating questions of everyday
life to questions of idiom and dialect as well as circulation and translatability. Vernacular
becomes a theoretical metaphor that offers a dynamic model of cultural circulation. More
than just a linguistic practice that rejects official language, these two linguistic types are
interpenetrated and constituted through exchange: "as the cosmopolitan is constituted
through cultural flows from the vernacular, so the vernacular constructs itself by
appropriation, often by unwittingly relocalizing what the cosmopolitan borrowed from it
52
in the first place" ("Vernacular" 296). The vernacular is not merely on the side of a
particular local or an ahistoric traditional, but part of the interactions that produce local
and global. Hansen emphasizes the circulatory aspect of the vernacular, highlighting "the
fluctuating, open-ended, and relational character of vernacular practices in different
cultural contexts" ("Vernacular" 298). Vernacular modernism provides a transnational
and comparative lens through its particularizing and circulatory dynamics. Cinema
contributes to the mobilization and translation of the sensations of the particular and the
aesthetic materiality of everyday life in a mode "below the level of a dominant standard
language but above that of local dialects" ("Vernacular" 300). This intermediary status
allows Hansen to consider how particular film practices engage both the globalizing and
the local features of everyday modernity, providing a ground for comparison, intersection
and competition across uneven and coeval modernities.
To locate this intermediary level, Hansen returns to mainstream cinema to
distinguish the classical Hollywood norm from the non-classical traces that endure.
Hansen cautions against upholding classical Hollywood cinema as a universal hegemonic
form, restoring its historical specificity by underscoring the coincidence of classicist style
and mass culture. Hansen faults narrative analyses of classical Hollywood cinema that
neglect how its films mediated modernity and were received in heterogeneous ways in
local and translocal contexts. The success of classical Hollywood had less to do with
narrative organization than with the ability of its films to provide to mass audiences "an
aesthetic and public horizon for the experience of capitalist-industrial modernity and
modernization" ("Vernacular" 294). The non-classical substratum, particularly evident in
popular genres such as melodrama, comedy, horror, and pornography, has an affective-
53
sensory dimension that involves the viewer's body in ways that exceed the classical forms
of narrative comprehension. The affective-sensory reflexivity afforded by genres may not
always be critical, but it allows spectators to confront the ambivalence of modernity.
Modernist reflexivity does not necessitate a distanced and cognitive aesthetic experience;
it also consists in the production of a sensorium, a process in which these commercial
films served an integral function "asymmetrically related to modernist practices in the
traditional arts" ("Vernacular" 295). Again relying on Benjamin, Hansen maintains that
"it was not just what these films showed," at the narrative-cognitive level, but also "the
way they opened up hitherto unperceived modes of sensory perception and experience,
their ability to suggest a different organization of the daily world" ("Mass Production"
71).
Hansen provides a conceptual framework through which to consider cantinflismo
as reflecting on the experience of modernity in a particularized mode. For instance,
Cantinflas's Los tres mosqueteros (Miguel M. Delgado, 1942) has a self-reflexive
framing narrative that explains his incongruous insertion into a period film; however, this
device functions differently than the self-reflexivity often associated with high
modernism. A parody of Dumas's classic The Three Musketeers, Cantinflas stumbles onto
a job as an extra on the set of a straight adaptation of the French novel. His antics cause
the production to falter, and, to get the meddlesome extra out of the way, the director has
a script girl read the screenplay of the film within the film to Cantinflas. The pelado
dreams the period film, casting himself as D'Artagnan, becoming a musketeer and
defeating the Cardinal.
54
The dialogue of this oneiric adaptation is perhaps one its most particular features,
as all the players speak with an antiquated affectation. Every verb in the second person is
conjugated in the formal second person vosotros, and Cantinflas's orthographic and
grammar mistakes (e.g., traiba instead of traía as the imperfect conjugation of the verb
traer) as well as his inclusion of contemporary vernacular best highlight the tension and
interplay between official and vulgar speech that characterize vernacular speech as well
as the conflict between peninsular and continental Spanish. In his rush to join the
musketeers, Cantinflas runs into some obstacles that he attempts to explain to the leader
of the legion:
Leader: Supongo que traeréis alguna carta de introducción.
Cantinflas: Suponéis mal porque no traigo nada. Bueno, la traía, verdad?
Pero resulta de que cuando ya la traiba en una de esas cosas, pues, me
la robaron.
L: ¿Os la robaron? ¿Quién?
C: El hombre maloso. Sabe usted, cuando al llegar yo, ya está yo
todo...comenzó el choteo...yo correctamente porque uno correcto,
verdad. Y luego me bajo yo del caballo y al bajarme luego luego
comenzó a reírse el hombre porque era amarillo.
L: ¿Un hombre amarillo? ¿Sería chino?
C: Mi caballo, el que traiba era amarillo.
L: ¿Cuál caballo?
C: El que me regaló mi papi.
L: Un caballo amarillo, me gustaría verlo.
C: A mí también, pero ya lo vendí.
Leader: I suppose you have a letter of introduction
Cantinflas: You suppose incorrectly because I bring nothing. Well, I was
bringing, right? But it so happens that when I bringed in one of those
things that, well they stole it.
L: They stole it? Who?
C: The villain. You know, when I arrived I, I was all...and the
mocking...and I uprightly because one upright, right? And then I get off
the horse and when getting off real fast he began the man began to
laugh because he was yellow.
L: A yellow man? Was he Chinese?
C: My horse, which I bringed was yellow.
L: Which horse?
55
C: The one my daddy gave me.
L: A yellow horse, I'd like to see that.
C: Me too, but I already sold him.
Cantinflas inserted into a period piece relies on many of the diverting tactics from
his earlier films: chains of clauses that never become sentences, grammar mistakes, and
pronouns with unclear antecedents. Noting particularly the confusion of the yellow horse
and man, this example highlights the logic of referentiality Cantinflas unsettles.
Cantinflas's interlocutor presumes the antecedent is the most recent noun in the sentence;
however, Cantinflas is both redundant and vague in the same breath, linking the man to
his laugh but not the horse to its color. Referentiality submits neither to proximity nor
recency. If earlier films contrasted cantinflismo to class-based civility or institutional
code, this film relies on an archaic and peninsular language as foil.
The film's self-reflexivity, however, allows us to consider cantinflismo beyond
speech that exceeds its meaning-making function, particularly when considering the
problems the comedian has on the film set. The film within a film is produced at the
CLASA film studios, the actual shooting location for most of Cantinflas's films from the
period. Cantinflas the extra causes problems on the set: from inserting anachronisms in
his costume to misunderstanding hierarchy on the set, from improvising his dialogue to
mistaking the designed set as an actual space. Cantinflas is banished from the set by the
director not merely because he is igualado – demanding the lead role despite his
marginalized status – but because his performance draws attention to the artifice
presupposed by representation. If cantinflismo, on the one hand, relies on unclear
referentiality and a slippage between terms and referents, the humor in this self-reflexive
sequence demonstrates a failure in signification founded on a different logic. Cantinflas's
56
inability to distinguish the real from the simulated – leaning against a styrofoam column
and collapsing the set – and his inability to represent someone other than himself reveal
an understanding of signification that yokes signifier and signified (Figure A3).
Cantinflas ascribes to a logic of presentation, unwilling to absent in order to represent.
The conventional cantinflista play that unmoors referentiality in the narrative world
becomes inverted in this self-reflexive moment. Understanding this self-reflexive play as
an extension of cantinflismo allows us to regard self-reflexivity in a new light. Selfreflexivity here does not function as a high modernist device of critical distantiation or
hermetic introspection that appeals to rational faculties; rather, it relies on a centrifugal
spectatorial engagement with a star text and a cinematic experience that is part of a larger
sensorial economy of modernity. Self-reflexivity does not absorb the spectator in a
hermetic text but opens on an act of public reception (Zhen xxvi).
Vernacular modernism allows us think beyond frameworks defined by high
cosmopolitan modernism (i.e., experimental film practices that emerged within avantgarde movements in the fine arts, or modernist international art cinema) in opposition to a
local authentic popular culture. The vernacular modernist text mediates modernity
through affective-aesthetic tactics that exceed narrative-cognitive comprehension.
Hansen's work provincializes classical Hollywood cinema, identifying modernist
aesthetics within mainstream cinema and understanding the narrative and affective
operations of these films as historically-situated responses to modernization. By focusing
on the ways cultural practice responds to and reflects upon modernization, this approach
addresses broader concerns over the materiality of everyday life, new relationships to
things, and new modes of organizing vision and sensory perception. Despite her
57
acknowledgement that film objects can function differently in different film traditions
and can have different affective charges in different reception contexts, Hansen stresses
the way these common concerns gesture toward a modernist aesthetics of contingency –
material everyday objects are mobilized to make our responses to modernity sensually
graspable.
Moreover, despite the possible multivalence of filmic representation, their
circulation can provide comparative sites between diverse contexts responding to local
and global forms of modernity. Borrowing from Zhang Zhen's discussion of interwar
cinema in Shanghai, Hansen notes that, in the Asian context, producers were engaged in
efforts to forge original idioms inflected by a vernacular modernism both cosmopolitan
and local through a "process of negotiation between nativist modernizing projects and
internationalist forms of modernism, elite and popular" ("Vernacular" 295). Hansen
privileges circulation and translation through star systems and generic homology. A key
example of the affective-aesthetic experience provided by generic cultural practice is the
slapstick comedy, commercially successful particularly during the silent period not
because of critical reason "but the films' propulsion of their viewer's body into laughter"
("Mass Production" 71). Hansen notes that Kracauer privileged the sensory reflexivity of
American films, particularly the "well-choreographed orgies of demolition and clashes
between people and things" of slapstick comedy ("Mass Production" 70). For Kracauer,
slapstick films highlighted the failures of Fordist mass culture and suggested the latent
anarchic excess potentially produced by the same rationalizing industrial impulse, what
William Solomon refers to as slapstick modernism: "in which a series of willfully
undisciplined acts of cultural improvisation defied the priorities governing large-scale
58
capitalist manufacture" (171). The genre deflated the homogenizing terror of mass
culture, articulated the arbitrariness of mechanization, reflected the conflicts of a
multiethnic society, and mediated the anxieties over changing gender roles.
The transition to sound and the emergence of Latin American film comedy,
however, make the genre a more ambivalent site. The inability of comedy to travel well
complicates the circulatory dynamics of the ‘vernacular’ in vernacular modernism and
problematizes its transnational and comparative frame. Hansen’s approach may
provincialize Hollywood cinema and may historicize classical narrative and continuity
editing, but when used in a transnational and comparative spirit, it threatens to occlude
culturally specific film practices that prove less circulatory and less translatable. As
Franco Moretti notes, comedy relies on “short circuits between signifier and signified
[that] are weakened by translation” (94). The declining international box office returns of
Hollywood comedies, Moretti argues, are due in part to the way humor arises out of tacit
assumptions with particular cultural associations. Taking comedy seriously puts pressure
on the vernacular in Hansen’s project. Vernacular modernism allows us to move beyond
earlier readings that privilege narrative organization to consider the way these films
provide mass audiences with an affective-sensory dimension that allowed spectators to
confront the ambivalence of modernity; however, comedy foregrounds the inwardlooking dimensions of this reflective experience of a modernity situated in the periphery.
In addition to this change in geopolitical orientation, we must also consider the
historical specificity of vernacular modernism when using the concept to articulate global
and local interrelations. The production of a global sensorium – classical Hollywood
cinema as global vernacular – occurs under the aegis of a dominant American silent
59
cinema and the emergence of classical Hollywood narrative and style. In mobilizing
vernacular modernism in her discussion of early Chinese film culture, Zhen also studies
early (silent) cinema but finds the category less a rigidly defined period or aesthetic than
an emblem of competing visions of modernity, “the ‘non-synchronous synchronous’
global horizon of film culture” (Zhen xviii). The experience of modernity that vernacular
modernism claims to reflect must not simply be situated in space but also in time. In
Mexico, John Mraz credits the American invasion of Mexico and the arrival of
photography in 1847 with the beginnings of a modern visual culture; however, the
urbanization, nationalization and breakdown of traditional values that characterized the
experience of modernity in the Mexican context becomes particularly marked after the
Mexican Revolution in the late interwar period (13). This time lag in periodization
compels us to broaden our approach to encompass both textual analysis as well as a range
of practices from the film experience such as stardom, trade and popular publications,
and broadcast media. More significantly, we must attempt to understand how
synchronous sound may in fact accentuate the non-synchronicity of the global horizon of
film culture, providing yet another register through which to affectively engage
spectators, reflect on modernization and make the experience of modernity sensuously
graspable.
This peripheral form of vernacular modernism evinces a negotiation between
center and periphery as well as tradition and modernity that is historically situated and
inscribed in the text. This negotiation becomes particularly apparent in examples where
Cantinflas encounters foreign-language speakers. The confrontation and
miscommunication with a foreign-language speaker is a common gag in most of
60
Cantinflas's films. More than a simple linguistic encounter modeled after the popular
carpa theater, these confrontations serve as historical markers, revealing a growing
awareness of foreign presence while playfully negotiating this increasing
cosmopolitanism. In El gendarme desconocido (Miguel M. Delgado, 1941), Cantinflas
upsets an effete French patron at a cabaretera-type show in the upscale hotel where he is
undercover as the King of Diamonds. After spilling a drink by tossing it overhead,
Cantinflas is approached by the angry French character in a fit:
Frenchman: Ooh la la! Ooh la la! Regardez-moi, monsieur! Regardezmoi. Vous m'avez tout mouillé.
Cantinflas: Wa? Wa?
F: Fait attention. Vous m'avez tout mouillé. Regardez-moi.
C: Regardé? Esto también es regalado. Y quoi?
F: Je ne dis pas ça. Je ne dis pas ça.
C: Je ne de pas sa.
F: Après, vous avez été tout la nuit regardé à ma femme.
C: Un momento. ¿Qué yo vüí a la changüí?
F: Qu'est-ce que vous dîtes? Je n'ai compris pas.
C: Je ne compré pa.
F: Faites attention, s'il vous plaît.
C: Fais attention. Oui. Wa [grabs monocle]
F: Donnez-moi mon monocle. Non. Donnez-moi mon monocle.
C: Ooh la la. C'est pres. No sé pa que que wa wa oui oui. ¡Qué relajo es
éste! Total, pour trois.
Cantinflas's encounters with foreigners suggest an exchange has nearly taken
place, perhaps he has made himself understood. What these encounters reveal is the logic
subtending cantinflismo. Cantinflismo does not simply rely on chains of shifters and
strings of fragments, puns and word play, or substituting some words for others. What
these exchanges reveal is how cantinflismo frustrates the meaning-making function of
language by foregrounding the substrate of language, the materiality of the signifier. In
this instance, the foreign language provides sounds that Cantinflas reproduces and imbues
with local (non-)meanings: regardez become regalado (the French imperative "look"
61
becomes the Spanish adjective "given") and compris becomes compré (the French verb
"understood" becomes the Spanish verb "bought"). Moreover, Cantinflas gallicizes
Mexican slang in response to the claim that he has been ogling the man's wife: "¿Qué yo
vüí a la changüí?" can be understood to mean "That I saw the girl?" with a gallicized
form of the verb "ver" and the slang term "changuita." Ironically, his response suggests
that he does understand the Frenchman's complaint and that his use of invented French is
as much a function of ignorance as it is of cleverness. Perhaps this process of
onomatopoeic play suggests a larger strategy for negotiating and mediating foreign
influence. Cantinflas does not simply copy the foreigner; he attempts to make himself
understood by playing within linguistic registers and between language barriers. More
significantly, this play generates new expressive possibilities in the Spanish language.
Cantinflas not only corrodes the referential nature of language but attempts to produce
new modes of signification.
Cantinflas's later Ni sangre ni arena [Neither Blood Nor Sand] (Alejandro
Galindo, 1941) features both intra- and inter-textual negotiations with foreign, more
specifically, American influence. The title of the film is an allusion to the silent success
of Rudolph Valentino, Blood and Sand (Fred Niblo, 1922) and a Mamoulian film of the
same name starring Tyrone Power and Rita Hayworth from 1941. An adaptation of an
earlier successful Spanish novel, the former film follows the transformation of Valentino
from a village boy born into poverty into the greatest matador in Spain. Valentino loves a
virtuous girl from his village but embarks on an intense affair with a seductive widow.
His romantic troubles result in recklessness in the arena and his eventual death at the
hands of the bull. In this parody, the title is categorically negated and the film narrative is
62
similarly inverted. Rather than a straightforward coming of age narrative featuring
women in prescribed roles of virgin and vamp, the parody features a doubled male
protagonist and undercuts the identification that comes with the masculinist
Bildungsroman. Cantinflas portrays two characters, both the pelado and the bullfighter,
Manolete, who both court the same virtuous woman. After a bout of mistaken identity
where the pelado arrives to town before the bullfighter as a stowaway, and Manolete is
arrested as the law-skirting pelado, a climactic bullfight sees the bum nearly lose his life
before order is restored.
In a brief sequence in the beginning of the film, Cantinflas hawks stolen cigars
outside the bullfighting ring hoping to raise enough money to purchase a ticket, his calls
to the street a flurry of confused syllables, intonated syncopatedly into a rhythmic and
musical refrain of puros, toros, and nervios. Cantinflas bumps into an older couple and
the man speaks in American-accented English. Cantinflas responds alternating broken
English with his vernacular Spanish:
American: What's the matter with you?
Cantinflas: Puro for your bullfight.
A: ¿Usted no habla inglés? [You don't speak English?]
C: No más entresemanas, mister. [Only on weekdays, mister]
A: Y los domingos, ¿por qué no? [And why not on Sundays?]
C: Pues los domingos me la dejaron muy cortado. Usted quiere un puro
pa- en lugar de de...que...ándale comprele, hombre. Dos puros por five
cents. Two puros por five cents. You and you.
American’s Wife: Nosotros querer [sic] cigarettes Lucky.
C: Lucky. Cigarros Lucky. No, no. Lu- Lo que hay aquí son puros. Pero
son buenos. Pa' los nervios, mister. You want?
AW: No, no. I don't like.
C: Alright. Diga, ¿quién es la changuita?
A: My wife!
C: Buen provecho.
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This exchange presents yet another encounter with a foreign language. Because
language does not operate symbolically for Cantinflas; in other words, because language
does not necessarily refer to objects through convention, Cantinflas is seldom at a loss
when he encounters a foreign-language speaker. Cantinflas parrots and repeats,
reassembling phonemes and molding the sounds for comedic effect – Lucky becomes "lo
que" or "that which is." In effect, his sales pitch in Spanish is no different than his pitch
in English. The words reduced to phonemes become the ground for all linguistic play. If
the hawker's speech attempts to jar the pedestrian from her habitual mode of walking in
the street, Cantinflas's speech similarly compels us spectators to listen to the language
anew.
Although these moments of literal linguistic conflict (peninsular / continental in
Los tres mosqueteros or foreign / native in Ni sangre ni arena) are useful in elucidating
how we might figure cantinflismo through the vernacular modernist lens, I want to
expand on what Monsiváis terms the “incomprehensible jazz of his verbal
rhythms...[that] seduces not through its meaning but its sounds and attitude” (“Aires” 69).
Returning to El gendarme desconocido [The Unknown / Undercover Policeman] (Miguel
M. Delgado, 1941), the basic plot parallels W.C. Fields' The Bank Dick (Edward Cline,
1940) with are elements from Abbot and Costello's Buck Privates (Arthur Lubin, 1941).
Cantinflas's pelado idles about in a café trying to court the daughter of its hatchet-faced
owner. A slapstick confrontation with three bank robbers in the café leads to Cantinflas
being credited with their capture. After being appointed Officer 777 at the police
precinct, he comically foils the disciplinary attempts of the police academy. After a series
of exploits as a bumbling policeman, the police commissioner assigns Cantinflas to go
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undercover as the "King of Diamonds" to apprehend diamond thieves preparing their big
heist.
In the police academy, the instructor interrogates a confused Officer 777.
Cantinflas responds in his typical cantinfleo where nothing is truly expressed; however,
what I wish to underscore is not that language fails to signify but that the failure to
communicate "creates a speech open to everything but meaning" (Monsiváis "Antología"
73). The instructor asks Cantinflas to define "medicina legal / legal medicine," and the
latter responds:
Cantinflas: ¿Qué es medicina legal? Medicina legal es el conjunto de una
escencia que pudiéramos llamar nostoros, conforme a la fisiología,
tiene usted dos clases de medicina legal: la medicina legal que es legal
ya estando legalizada y de la fisiologia o sea más bien la antonomia.
Tenemos entonces en ese caso qué tenemos hacemos una comparación
para analogar cierta centices que al apóstre no, no...qué, por qué - mire
usted entonces ya cambia el asunto y en ese caso la medicina legal es
esa. Hay otra pero todavía no se sabe.
Profesor: Ud. Sabe lo que está diciendo?
C: No. Yo no. Y usted lo sabe?
P: Yo no.
C: Pues entonces no hay que hablar.
Cantinflas: What is legal medicine? Legal medicine is the group of an
essence we could call, as per physiology, you have two types of legal
medicine: the legal medicine that is legal having already been legalized
and the physiology in other words antonomy. We have then in this case
what do we have a comparison to analogize certain entities that the
concerned no, no...What? Why? Well look here then the thing changes
and in that case legal medicine is that one. There's another but it's still
unknown.
Professor: Do you know what you are saying?
C: No. I don't. And do you know?
P: I don't.
C: Then we don't need to say anything at all.
His explanation does not communicate anything; in fact, the outcome of this
interrogation is that nothing needs to be said. In this extract, Cantinflas emancipates
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words from phrases and sounds from words; the relationship between phonetic, phatic
and rhetic loosen. Syllables are misplaced, and parsing distinct words becomes an
impossible feat. What does this non-meaning-making speech make accessible? This
speech makes us attendant to the very materiality of the language - the sounds, the
rhythms, the registers - produced by the comedian's body. Further, Cantinflas argues
tautologically, ultimately noting that legal medicine is legal having been legalized, the
one that is not the other that is still unknown. This tautological construction, understood
in the context of propositional logic, is not only true in every possible variation and
therefore empty of meaning but also relies on temporal uncertainty. Cantinflas's answer
uses verbs in different tenses (past and present), modes (indicative and conditional), and
aspects (simple and perfect). As Monsiváis notes, Cantinflas's performance is the
"instantaneous translation of the yet-not-said" ("Antología" 73). What Monsiváis
suggests then is that we become open to both the different temporalities as well as the
corporeal sensations embedded in language, compelling us to experience a different
relationship of language to time. Cantinflas does not express but rather transmits the
sensations of language; his bouts of relajo become hypnotic sessions with the body
struggling against the unknown (Monsiváis "Antología" 80).
Following this brief exchange, the instructor invites Cantinflas to the blackboard
and asks him to write the number 365. Cantinflas writes 5-6-3 from right to left,
explaining "Soy chueco / I'm crooked." He is asked to perform an elementary subtraction,
which he literally performs:
Tenemos 365 contra 278, verdad? Ahora decimos así: de 5 quitamos 8, no
se puede. Pues ya empezamos con dificultades. A no , pero sí se puede.
Por que le vamos a pedir prestado al 6 - a ver si quiere prestar porque
también no se le va obligar verdad.
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We have 365 against 278, right? Now we say this: from five we take away
eight, we can't. Well we already begin with difficulties. But wait, yes we
can. Because we are going to borrow some from the six - let's see if it
wants to lend because we can't force the thing, right.
For Cantinflas, signifiers and phonemes occupy a double position: one that
denotes something else and another that stubbornly presents itself as such. His
crookedness suggests how he regards language otherwise: his communication is askew,
expressive if somehow backward and compelling us to look at signifiers anew. Language
use then is not communicative but sensuous, suspending the cognitive function and
conscious registers of communicative acts. Cantinflas obligates language to be
understood otherwise: it loses its tether to the known referential and does not signify.
With signification in suspension, the plasticity of language provides the ground for
sensory experience.
In a later moment in one of the film's most protracted gags, the comedian
discovers a bomb in the basement of his sweetheart's café. The bomb is set to go off at
noon but could be detonated by any sudden movements. Officer 777 discovers the hidden
bomb and takes official note of the proceedings. In a rote and stilted tone, Cantinflas
speaks aloud what he scribbles on his pad:
A las 11:35 encontré en el sótano u bodega una bomba de aspecto
terrorífico con síntomas de no haber explotado en el ángulo exterior,
externo y paralelo al mismo rectangular por lo que procedí a recogerla y
investigar con síntomas sospechosos procedencia, lugar u incumbencia.
Post data: cuidado con la bomba.
At 11:35 I found in the basement or storage a terrifying looking bomb
with symptoms of having not exploded in the exterior, external and
parallel angle to the same rectangle and so I proceeded to retrieve it and
determine with suspicious symptoms its provenance, place and purpose.
Postscript: be careful with the bomb.
67
Cantinflas's report attempts to record and communicate the events as transpired;
however, his parodic use of official-sounding speech obfuscates. The ostensible purpose
of institutional language may be to report events objectively, but his baroque testimony is
more than mere communicative act. Cantinflas's actions are ineffectively captured by the
official record because his oral and gestural performance exceeds the documentary
capabilities of the record. Cantinflas's inability to bear witness is underscored by the
conclusion of this bomb sequence. After a race against the clock that includes a series of
slapstick pratfalls, a dawdling Cantinflas mesmerized by a street vendor, and the bomb
jostled by unsuspecting bystanders, Cantinflas arrives at the precinct, a car-brake sound
effect mickey-mousing his body's halting near stumble. He barges into the commander's
office in a panning long shot that includes a clock in the background with mere minutes
to our deadline. Cantinflas finally exclaims: "¡Va a estallar! / It's going to blow!"
Cantinflas and his superior engage in a back and forth who's-on-first routine in shotreverse-shot. His superior asks him to explain himself as clearly as possible:
Cantinflas: En vista de haber acabado, es decir, haber rendido mi deber
que usted me impuso, me dirigí yo a comer hacia una parte donde se
come sabroso y delicioso y además barato, jefe. Me encuentro yo, mire
no más usted, me encuentro yo una cosa ligera para no recargar mucho
el cuerpo y estar siempre atento a las circunstancias. Entonces me doy
cuenta, jefe, por qué día vamos...
Jefe: Al grano, al grano. Vamos...'O voy a estallar'
C: De eso trata, jefe. Mire usted qué coincidencia. Me encuentro yo ahí
como autoridad que soy y que usted me ha dado y si usted no lo cree lo
discutimos con cualquier terreno, jefe. Asusordenes, jefe. Este, me
llaman a mi, más bien desde un punto de vista análogo, asusordenes,
jefe, y entonces resulta de qué, en vista de que como policía dije pues
aquí no pasa nada, pues sí pasó, jefe.
J: Lleva usted dos minutos hablando y no ha dicho nada. ¿Qué fue lo que
pasó?
C: Con todo gusto, mi superior. 'Según la remisión a las 11:30 am, como
quién dice, amaneciendo, encontrándome en susodicho café, me
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comunicó un infante lo que sigue. Qué 'interrogación' 'puntos
suspensivos' qué cosa. Vamos a ver - asusórdenes, jefe - que a las
11:35 y precisamente en el lugar de los hechos 'coma' sucedió 'punto'"
Perdón jefe pero como no sé escribir me cuesta trabajo leer lo que me
escriben.
Cantinflas: In light of having finished, that is to say, having fulfilled my
duty that you imposed, I myself proceeded to eat towards an area where
you can eat well and cheap, boss. I found myself, I mean look at this, I
found myself something light so as to not overeat and always be alert to
the circumstances. Then I realize, boss, what day is it?
Jefe: To the point, to the point...'I'm going to blow up!'
C: Precisely, boss. What a coincidence. I found myself there as the
authority I am and which you gave me and if you don't believe it then
we can discuss it anywhere, boss. Yes, sir. Well, they call me, rather
from an analogous point of view, yes, sir, and then it so happened that
what, in light as a policeman I said nothing to see here, but there was,
boss.
J: You have been speaking for two minutes and have said nothing. What
happened?
C: With pleasure, my superior. [Takes out notepad and reads] "According
to the record, at 11:30 am, as they say, at dawn, finding myself in the
aforementioned café, an infant communicated to me the following.
What 'question mark' 'ellipsis' What. Let's see - yes, sir - that at 11:35
precisely in the site of the events 'comma' it happened 'period.'" Sorry,
boss, but since I can't write, it's hard for me to read what they've
written for me.
Cantinflas continues to 'read' his report, finally displaying the bomb he has
brought into the precinct. His alarmed superior glances at the clock on the wall and races
toward the door. The clock chimes at noon, and the camera cuts to a medium shot of
Cantinflas ineffectually climbing a hat rack. The package does not explode; Officer 777
misplaced the bomb along the way to the precinct. In this second instance of Cantinflas
speaking "on the record," the reports do not match – what transpired on screen, what was
written and what was read do not coincide. Although we could consider this through the
socio-historical context of widespread illiteracy in the growing urban centers of the
country, what I want to foreground is the ways that Cantinflas eludes being captive to
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transcription. Cantinflas's indirect reporting demonstrates a paradigmatic form of
cantinfleo: "You have been speaking for two minutes and have said nothing." The
baroque language of officialism is compounded by the interjection of spoken asides and
vernacular expressions. Obsequiousness becomes irreverence as "a sus órdenes, jefe"
becomes a compound word, with the syllables mangled and the consonants dropped:
"asuordens, jefe." Moreover, Cantinflas 'reads' the punctuation, the grapheme becomes
phoneme, undermining semantic transparency. Cantinflismo is not nonsense; rather, it
presents a collision of linguistic registers: the formal and vulgar, the official and
vernacular, the oral and written, the material and discursive. His performance
foregrounds the limits of institutional discourse and cinematic documentation. Perhaps a
metaphor for his status on the celluloid itself, Cantinflas's verbal and corporeal dexterity
cannot be contained by the fact of inscription and representation. His performance must
be understood beyond the communicative and documentary competency of the filmstrip,
more accurately characterized in the dynamic interplay between the profilmic, the filmic,
and the extrafilmic.
What’s in a Name? Revisiting Mexican Spectatorship
Rather than periodize Cantinflas in relation to production histories, sociocultural
context, or the ossification of his pelado character, we must consider Cantinflas’s films in
relation to their use of formal and narrative devices that capitalize on his play with
referentiality, particularly the (ab)use of proper names that no longer denote. The context-
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dependent indexical relation of the proper name becomes untenable and its nominative
operation is foregrounded. After being mistaken for someone else in his first commercial
success, Cantinflas is never referred to by his own proper name in his first dozen films.
Most of these film narratives hinge on mistaken identity, with the humor deriving with
the failures of the proper name as index. Cantinflas's textual instability begins to affect
the signifying order of his surroundings: not only is Cantinflas's name occluded but
general nomination is also frustrated. In El gendarme desconocido, Cantinflas becomes
referred to by his title, Officer 777, a title that refers to our hero even though at an
institutional remove. The villains threaten: "No le voy a dejar ni un siete. / I won't leave
him with even one seven." Cantinflas's name and ostensible institutional and narrative
position is literally under erasure. Eventually, the jewel thieves attempt to con Cantinflas
who now pretends to be the King of Diamonds. They deliberately bump into him after the
cabaretera-style performance in the hotel ballroom:
Matías: Ah, es usted.
Cantinflas: Sí. Yo soy yo, le extraña? Usted me conoce?
M: Permítame que me presente. Matías Luis Riquelme y Cuarenta.
C: Cuarenta. Y, ¿por qué no sesenta? Digo, ¿por qué no se sienta?
Matías: Oh, it's you.
Cantinflas: Yes. I am I. Is that strange? Do you know who I am?
M: Allow me to introduce myself. Matías Luis Riquelme y Cuarenta.
C: Cuarenta [Forty]. And why not seventy? I mean, why don't you take a
seat?
Cantinflas identifies himself with a meaningless and tautological introduction:
"I am I." His circuitous response fails to designate because no connection is forged
between the term and the individual; instead the pronoun refers back to itself. Further, the
last names of the villain – Riquelme y Cuarenta – refer to family background and class
position; however, for Cantinflas, they do not operate as proper name, referring instead to
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the number forty. The proper name becomes misunderstood as symbolic rather than
indexical. The destabilization of referentiality affects the way other characters and
perhaps we spectators come to designate and code the narrative world. His professor at
the police academy, Profesor Melo, becomes dubbed by Cantinflas, Profesor Malo [Bad
Professor] and then Profesor Mole. In correcting the comedian, the befuddled instructor
corrects him: "¿Cómo mole? Malo. Melo. No sé lo que digo. / What do you mean mole?
It's Malo. I mean Melo. I don't know what I'm saying." Cantinflas occupies multiple
textual positions and compels others within and outside the diegesis to do the same. The
illusory wholeness of the professor splinters, his encounter with cantiflista misdirection
and tautology motivating a confrontation with the limits of subjectivity.
Gran Hotel (Miguel M. Delgado, 1944) represents a veritable compendium of the
gambits used in the comedian's early films to avoid using his proper name. Loosely based
on the MGM classic Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932), the film follows the pelado
taking odd jobs after being evicted from his home, eventually securing a position as a
bellboy at a prestigious hotel courtesy of his chambermaid girlfriend. Cantinflas gets
mistaken for the noble Duke of Alfanje by a seductive heiress who herself is the victim of
a plot by thieves to steal her jewels. The bellboy foils the jewelry heist but succumbs to
amnesia and to his given role as duke. The conclusion of the narrative hinges on
Cantinflas remembering the location of the jewels and arriving at his own identity. From
juggling multiple monikers to unmooring the referential currency of the proper name,
Cantinflas floats along the surface of the text, and the narrative restoration of equilibrium
demands that he be put in his place. When introduced to the jewel thieves who are posing
as aristocracy, Cantinflas forgoes not merely decorum but also the indexical singularity
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of the proper name: The ostensibly Italian Count Zapatini becomes misnomered by the
bellboy as Count Pantfulini and Alparagatini. Of course, the proper name is doubly
unreliable, both the assumed name of the otherwise nameless grifter and subject to
cantinflista deconstruction. This play on words here is not a function of phonic
equivalence (as was the case with Professor Melo / Malo / Mole in Gendarme) but of
symbolic equivalence: zapato is Spanish for shoe, and Cantinflas substitutes other shoe
types (pantufla and alpargata) in the con artist's alias.
Another early sequence in the hotel features our hero attending to the golddigging heiress while donning a bellboy uniform tailored to his persona – buttons undone,
two sizes too small and pants below the waist. The heiress is on the lookout for the Duke,
having heard the nobleman is fond of traveling incognito by taking on menial jobs. She
asks the bellboy for his name, and Cantinflas responds: "Yo me llamo – Sabe usted, aqui
no se llama uno. Yo soy el bellboy y cuando me hablan, me hablan por el número. / My
name is – You know, here one isn't named. I am the bellboy and when they call me, they
call me by my number." The heiress understands this reticence to give his proper name as
a sign of someone in disguise. Cantinflas's namelessness allows others to project onto
him what they presume or desire; he stands in for anyone and everyone else, a logic of
substitution that subtends the narrative. Cantinflas is always ersatz and never original,
and the narrative tries to produce him as original, as self-identical. This drive toward selfidentity is perhaps most manifest in the later sequences in the film when our hero suffers
from amnesia. Upon waking up after being knocked unconscious, a doctor asks him who
he is and Cantinflas responds:
Cantinflas: ¿Y a usted qué le importa?
Doctor: ¿Cuál es su nombre, joven?
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C: ¿Y usted no lo sabe?
D: No, yo no.
C: Y entonces, ¿para qué me pregunta a mí? Yo tampoco sé.
Cantinflas: What’s it to you?
Doctor: What is your name, young man.
C: You don't know?
D: No, I don't.
C: Then, why are you asking me? I also don't know.
The heiress claims the man is the Duke, and Cantinflas unknowingly plays the
part of another man. Cantinflas has been doubly produced as someone else, at first
imagined and later designated. He delights in the attention he receives as nouveau
nobility, even agreeing to marry the heiress. Everyone is particularly obsequious not only
given his newfound class status but also with the hopes that the man will remember the
location of the missing jewels. Eventually, the remaining players get desperate, assaulting
Cantinflas in order to jog his memory and remember his identity. The stakes of the initial
interview are echoed in an absurdist way with three different characters breaking into his
room and bonking him on the head. This slapstick solution works after the first hit, but
the second hit undoes the first only to be superseded by the third. Cantinflas's memory
may be back but he remains elusive in a police interrogation:
Police: ¿Quiere decime quién es usted?
Cantinflas: ¿Usted quién cree que sea yo?
P: El Duque de Alfanje.
C: Pues se equivoca usted. No ande creyendo eso.
P: Entonces, ¿quién pretende ser?
C: Yo no pretendo nada. Yo soy quien soy y no me parezco a nadie. Soy
el bellboy número 13.
Police: Would you care to tell me who you are?
Cantinflas: Who do you think I am?
P: The Duke of Alfanje.
C: Well, you are mistaken. Don't buy that.
P: Then, who are you supposed to be?
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C: I don't suppose / pretend anything. I am who I am and I don't resemble
anyone else. I am the bellboy number 13.
Cantinflas reveals his true self: he does not pretend to be anything at all. A
succinct distillation of the logic undergirding the cantinflista play with proper names –
"Yo soy quien soy y no me parezco a nadie / I am who I am and I don't resemble anyone
else" – his self-identity is a constant movement between undifferentiated and
differentiated states. This two-fold self-declaration couples tautological infinity and
difference, with humor arising from the failure to understand identification as a dynamic
process.
Avoiding self-identity becomes more challenging once Mario Moreno portrays
two different characters on screen in Ni sangre ni arena. We first see the bullfighter
Manolete in the arena, the camera framing him in a medium shot from behind, ostensibly
the point of view of the spectator Cantinflas. Manolete enters a high-angle shot from the
stands, gesturing toward the crowd and dedicating the fight to his patron and the father of
Anita, Don Pancho (Figure A4). He catches a glimpse of Anita and a quick shot-reverseshot implies a romantic interest between the pair. The bullfighter tosses his hat into the
stands, and Cantinflas thanks Manolete: "Gracias, hermano" (Figure A6). An extended
sequence of bull fighting in extreme long shot is punctuated with close ups of an excited
Cantinflas cheering on his Doppelgänger. The narrative does not hinge on disentangling
the pelado from an assumed identity (e.g. Leonardo del Paso or the King of Diamonds)
but in the confusion derived from having a physical double. In other words, Ni sangre ni
arena is the first film where the failures of signification are not a function of deliberate
cantinflista play that capitalizes on the presumptions (both material and linguistic) of
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others; instead, these mistakes are due to the legitimate confusion derived from identical
physical aspects. The mise-en-scène, particularly the pelado's wardrobe and
characterization, help spectators avoid the same confusion, but the signifying universe
begins to solidify around Cantinflas.
Although the film does not feature a trick shot where the actor would appear in
the frame with his double, the above sequence presents a particularly uncanny experience
of spectatorship where the pelado as absorbed spectator ostensibly watches himself in the
arena. If Valentino's Blood and Sand functions as a key text in Miriam Hansen's critique
of classical Hollywood cinema and Anglo theories of spectatorship, then its parody, Ni
sangre ni arena, suggests a way to consider the horizon of reception for Cantinflas as
well as the specificity of the spectatorial experience in Mexican Golden Age cinema.
Hansen draws on Valentino's star text to suggest that the star phenomenon
challenges the classical paradigm, eluding the focus on narrative and complicating the
identificatory mechanisms undergirding the classical apparatus: "the star's presence in a
particular film blurs the boundary between diegesis and discourse, between an address
relying on the identification with fictional characters and an activation of the viewer's
familiarity with the star on the basis of production and publicity intertexts" ("Babel and
Babylon" 246). If formalist discussion of narrative foregrounds the unity and closure of
the textual system of classical Hollywood, then the presence of a star activates a
collective and centrifugal process of spectatorship and identification. Identification
structures viewers' access to the film through a "process that organizes subjectivity in
visual and narrative terms" (280). Classical apparatus debates on identification assumed a
transcendental and neutral spectator position constructed in a linear process of
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identification. Subsequent critiques attempt to conceive the question of identification in
terms of instability, mobility and temporality by incorporating questions of empirical
reception, gender, class and racial difference, and cultural and historical specificity.
Hansen uses star texts as privileged sites to reconcile the textual spectator and empirical
audience through a both/and methodology of textual analysis and historiographic
speculation. The star dissociates the narrative (identification with a character) and the
scopic (the recognition of a particular object), and undermines claims of 'primary'
identification with the look of the camera because there is necessarily a collective
dimension to the star system. We gawk at the star aware that (and perhaps because)
others also marvel at him or her: "The fascination with the star...entails both a projection
of the fan into the figure of the star as the object of admiration and an awareness that this
projection is shared by others who contemplate that same figure" (281). The bullfighting
sequence in the film Ni sangre literally and figuratively presents us with this ambivalent
process of identification, oscillating between imaginary self-identity and inscription in a
public body. The pelado is figured as cinematic spectator, observing the torero as a
member of a public while projecting himself into the figure of Manolete. The film
narrative features bouts of spectacular episodes and affords moments of direct display
that foreground the collective dimension of the star's appeal. If Valentino functions as a
site to reconsider the question of female spectatorship, his gaze one of reciprocity and
ambivalence rather than mastery and objectification, then Cantinflas as star text becomes
a site to discuss the changes to the national imaginary and the transformation of the
public sphere.
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Departing from Cantinflas and informed by Hansen's framework and Monsiváis's
chronicles, we can articulate the collective dimension of the star system to the national
and modernizing impulses in Mexico to consider a cultural and historically specific mode
of spectatorship. The reconstruction of the horizon of reception for a star requires
considering spectatorship inside and outside the film: both the textual configuration of the
performer – with tensions between reading positions marked by tensions of narrative and
spectacle – as well as the public discourses surrounding Cantinflas. These extratextual
discourses include modernization and nationalism, demographic changes and the rural
exodus to growing urban centers, illiteracy and the transformation of the public sphere
and the tradition of popular theatrical (carpa) entertainment ("Babel and Babylon" 253).
Monsiváis's "All the People Came but Did not Fit on the Screen," a key article for
Mexican screen studies, argues that cinema plays a role in the cultural processes of
modernization and Mexicanization. Cinema mediates "between the shock of
industrialization and the rural and popular urban experience which has not been prepared
in any way for this giant change" (151). What Monsiváis adds to this Benjaminian
description of the effects of modernity on the category of experience is the problem of
identification. For Monsiváis, the 'shock' registers as a shock of recognition, the
possibility of instantaneous identification and direct address. The faces on the screen
operate for Monsiváis both as synecdoche and surrogate, and this uncanny moment in Ni
sangre presents us with this ambivalent example of identity and difference that subtends
spectatorial identification. The pelado does not fit in the arena, experiencing the spectacle
by proxy of his double, but the performance allows him to imagine (and eventually
realize) his place in the arena. Monsiváis argues that this imaginary identification with
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the face on screen by way of collective inscription is articulated to the production of an
urban mass audience in Mexico. In a veritable mise en abyme, the pelado watches
Manolete; we spectators watch Cantinflas; and Moreno watches Valentino. We bear
witness to and consent being incorporated into a series of overlapping collective bodies,
belonging at once to publics local, national and global.
The eventual climax of the film features the pelado in the ring, successfully, if
unexpectedly, defeating a bull in lieu of Manolete. If the assumed identity was ill-fitting
in Cantinflas's previous films and collapsed in a farcical resolution, the narrative in Ni
sangre affords a moment of narcissistic doubling whereby the subject of the look
constitutes itself as object, undone with Manolete's eventual return to the arena.
Based on the Fernandel and Noël-Noël film Adémaï aviateur (Jean Tarride,
1933), Cantinflas's ¡A volar joven! (Miguel M. Delgado, 1947) features our comic hero
as a conscripted soldier and former farmhand shirking his military responsibilities while
courting a lovely maid from his former workplace. The owners of the hacienda have a
sickly and plain-looking daughter, María, who they coerce Cantinflas into marrying. To
avoid the marriage, Cantinflas attempts to secure a spot in a rigorous and secluded
aviation school, but his wealthy father-in-law foils his plans, orchestrating the ceremony
before Cantinflas's departure. Cantinflas marries the plain María against his will before
being shipped off to aviation school. The film culminates with an extended sequence
where Cantinflas and another first-time pilot meet in their instructor's office for their first
lesson; however, each novice believes that the other is the instructor. The two board a
plane and successfully take off before realizing that neither knows how to land the plane.
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The inexperienced pilots remain airborne, breaking the record for the longest sustained
flight and becoming national heroes.
After nearly a dozen films in over a decade that feature Cantinflas in a variety of
guises entangled in farcical scenarios of mistaken identity, ¡A volar joven! is his first film
to refer to the pelado by his own proper name. In a brief scene nearly halfway through the
film, a commanding officer refers to the protagonist as Cantinflas. Although the narrative
still relies on misrecognition, the naming of Cantinflas changes the effects of
cantinflismo. Earlier films relied on doubling, on producing multiple versions that
dislodge an original. These comedies of errors either shoehorned the pelado into the guise
of another (Cantinflas as long-lost brother Leonardo del Paso) or relied on the actor
playing dual roles (Cantinflas as Manolete). The pelado used his linguistic doublespeak
to avoid self-identity; his inability to communicate, a tactic deployed to avoid being
captive to the narrative, the semiosphere and the apparatus. In ¡A volar joven!,
Cantinflas's inability to communicate becomes a hindrance. The valence of cantinflismo
has changed: transparency becomes desirable and his doublespeak, a shortcoming.
Cantinflas constantly attempts to clarify, but his surroundings obscure and his
interlocutors ignore. For example, after going missing for an extended period of time,
Cantinflas attempts to explain to a commanding officer that he does not wish to marry
María. His explanation is interrupted by the sound of an airplane engine that overwhelms
the soundtrack and is disregarded by a general swayed by the relative status of
Cantinflas's future father-in-law. He falls into comedic situations because of who he is
rather than who he is not.
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During the wedding ceremony in the film, we observe an inversion of the
marriage to Clotilde Regalado from his early success, Ahí está el detalle. If the early film
features explicit performative speech acts become indirect speech and a cunning
Cantinflas that avoids becoming inextricably linked to indices, then this film finds
Cantinflas ineffectually resisting the yokes of matrimony and referentiality. A medium
long shot finds Cantinflas in a similar predicament, overwhelmed in a crowded frame and
struggling to breathe in a necktie knotted too tightly. The justice of the piece races
inarticulately through the formalities, barely audible over the wedding march. He pauses
to ask the groom whether he accepts María as his wife. Cantinflas says that he does not
accept María while simultaneously nodding his head as he struggles with his necktie. The
judge takes Cantinflas's nod as a sign of acceptance over and above his explicit utterance.
The indirect speech act takes on greater force than the explicit illocutionary vow. The
ritual takes effect despite the misfire that should have rendered the act void (Austin 25).
Cantinflas is interpellated by an institutional framework despite his equivocation. The
pelado still relies on his evasive tactics – the majority of the film finds the soldier going
missing or requesting a transfer to avoid marriage, literally attempting to flee from the
diegesis – but the coded world constantly ensnares him in its referential matrix.
¡A volar joven! marks a significant moment in the comedian’s career because it
literalizes the ossification of the pelado. By ossification, I do not mean to suggest that the
character is metaphorically ineffectual because he functions as therapeutic stereotype;
rather, nominative operations and formal conventions gradually solidify the semiosphere
and put the pelado in his place. The centrifugal process of spectatorship enacted by the
presence of the star folds onto the centripetal hermeneutics of the narrative. Rather than a
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dissociation of narrative and scopic, the intradiegetic recognition of Cantinflas qua
Cantinflas telescopes these modes of identification and organizes subjectivity more
forcefully. This signifying calcification is nowhere more evident than in the film's final
moments. The first-time pilots successfully land the plane and are hoisted on the
shoulders of their peers. The camera pushes back into a long shot of the moving image
now framed on a movie screen, a self-reflexive newsreel film within the film (Figure A5).
The camera cuts to a close up of a couple in the audience, Cantinflas and a transformed
María. Cantinflas swallows some popcorn and points to the screen, exclaiming: "¡Ese soy
yo! / That's me!" (Figure A7). The literalized narcissistic doubling discussed in Ni sangre
ni arena is figured more categorically in the conclusion of ¡A volar joven! In the former,
identification is figured both textually and discursively. The subject of the look
constitutes itself as object through the scopic relation between matador and bullfighting
aficionado; of course, Moreno portrays both poles of this scopic relation so that
Cantinflas actually regards himself in the arena. In the latter film, the process of
cinematic identification is foregrounded in a similar moment of narcissistic doubling.
Difference is disavowed and self-identity is secured through an imagined correspondence
with the projected image on screen: That image on screen is not a synecdoche or a
surrogate because it is me. Rather than an unstable and mobile process of identification
that vacillates between identity and difference, the film depicts a linear process of
identification in a more unified and closed textual system.
Cinematic Misdirection as Spatial Practice
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Cantinflismo refers not only to linguistic play in the narrative world but also to
formal play with the film grammar perfected by the neighbors to the North. The opening
sequence of El gendarme desconocido features the inciting bank robbery through a
pattern of shot composition and editing suited to the urban thriller of its subject matter:
off-center framing, an urban and angular set design with expressionistic lighting, and
disorienting sightlines and ostensibly discontinuous space. Once the comedian is
introduced, this expressionistic film grammar is preserved but the comedian constantly
undermines the disorienting and suspense-driven logic motivating these formal choices;
Cantinflas capitalizes on the necessary (if disavowed) discontinuity of continuity editing.
Late in the film, the diamond thieves' plan to con the King of Diamonds entails
the seduction of a cabaret performer. She meets our hero by the pool and invites him to
dive off a ten-meter platform. The woman and Cantinflas are framed in a low-angle long
shot atop the platform. The woman leaps in an extreme long shot and gracefully splashes
into the pool. A shot-reverse-shot between the woman in the pool and Cantinflas
apprehensively backing away from the edge precedes Cantinflas's own dive. The extreme
long shot captures Cantinflas's humorous body in flight, his legs awkwardly bowlegged
and his arms held as if in prayer. The woman is off to the side of the pool in a mediumlong shot, her applause stops as she looks at the water concerned. A reverse shot of the
pool shows a body at the bottom of the pool with a halo of bubbles rising to the surface.
The woman jumps up and asks for help to save the drowning man. An extreme long shot
reveals a crowd gathering around the woman and a lifeguard diving from frame right.
The reverse shot of the pool begins with the lifeguard diving from frame right (again), the
camera following the swimmer in search of the drowning victim. This point of view shot,
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however, not only evinces a discontinuity in screen direction – the lifeguard dives from
frame right on both sides of the axis of action – but also in linear time – the lifeguard
dives twice, an elaboration meant to appear as continuous action. The woman in long shot
anxiously glances at the water in long shot surrounded by a crowd of concerned
onlookers. Slowly, a figure emerges from the crowd and stands next to the woman, a
figure we quickly identify as Cantinflas! Cantinflas banters with the woman asking what
has happened and commenting on the foolishness of the diver who did not know how to
swim. The editing appears to produce a space continuous in time and space, but
Cantinflas slips through the fissure of the cut, making continuity editing a game of threecard Monte: to find the King of Diamonds one must attend to narrative cinema's
constitutive discontinuity.
The climax of the film begins with the leader of the thieves surprising Cantinflas,
entering his hotel room and commanding the camera's mobility. The camera pans with
the thief, and Cantinflas's attempts to back away from this threat are also an attempt to
step out of frame. Cantinflas seldom owns a point of view shot, and the film grammar
cannot seem to account for his fluid position in the narrative and in the diegesis. If the
previous sequence generated humor from his ability to fall out in editing, this sequence
finds its humor in containing the comedian within the frame. The borders of the frame are
not simply the edges of a window onto a scene but are also thresholds for comedic
misdirection. When the leader searches for the real King of Diamonds in the hideout, he
instructs his hostage: "Usted no se mueva. / You don't move." Cantinflas replies: ""No, si
no puedo. / No, I can't." After a shot outside the house where we see the arrival of police
backup, we cut back inside to Cantinflas and his captors now situated elsewhere and
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having swapped places in the frame. The leader asks Cantinflas once more for the
location of his alter ego, counting down with a gun pointed at Cantinflas's chest. A shot
fires and Cantinflas collapses out of frame; however, the thief grips his arm and turns as
the police arrive. Cantinflas manifests the effect without registering the cause.
If causality governs the logic of classical Hollywood cinema, Cantinflas and his
humor rely on causes without effects and effects without causes, an absurdist logic that,
more than undermining classical style, liberates the potentiality of the discontinuous and
the off-screen. For instance, Cantinflas often finds himself in chases that are not chases,
sequences that use the grammar of a classic film chase to humorous effect. In a wartime
sequence in Un día con el diablo, a recently promoted Cantinflas is charged with leading
a troop of soldiers past enemy lines. Cantinflas encounters a Japanese solider and attacks
in a comedic scene that finds him misusing a live grenade. After swapping uniforms with
the enemy, Cantinflas infiltrates the Japanese camp but is discovered once he is unable to
use chopsticks and asks for hot sauce to season his meal. Cantinflas runs out of the
enemy encampment followed by a group of soldiers in pursuit. He exits through a door
frame left, and in the subsequent exterior shot the soldiers are seen racing screen left in
pursuit. The camera pans right and reveals Cantinflas hiding behind sandbags in the other
direction. Cantinflas runs off screen toward the camera, and the next shot shows the
soldiers running away from camera with a man running toward the pursuing soldiers. The
editing suggests that Cantinflas is the straggling soldier but we soon learn that this man is
another soldier who is trying to indicate that Cantinflas has fled in the other direction.
The soldiers run back toward the camera as Cantinflas dashes toward camera in a
separate shot. Cantinflas seems to be in the middle of a chase; however, he pauses and
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tosses a grenade at an ammunitions depot. A different group of Japanese soldiers in some
unrelated space are startled by the explosion. The following shot returns to the pursuing
soldiers, but their relation to Cantinflas and the other Japanese soldiers is not explicit.
Although we have the film grammar of a chase sequence, with pursuer and pursued
running in consecutive shots through redundant spaces in parallel screen directions, we
have no continuity of time and space and none of the relations between the component
elements of the chase are clearly articulated though editing conventions. What looks like
a chase proves to be a tactical strike, as the chase ends with the capture of the pursuers.
Cantinflas's mission behind enemy lines succeeds in the narrative through misdirection
and disguise; however, the film does not present his haphazard success as an orchestrated
stratagem in continuous time and space. Rather than considering these misleading editing
cues and conflicting screen directions as continuity mistakes which would imply a
dependence on and a failure to emulate Hollywood convention, we must regard these
formal devices as comic practices that use and misuse foreign influence in order to
rearticulate cinematic codes for the purposes of tactical comedic effect.
The question of foreign influence and its relation to local cultural production
represents an ongoing concern in Latin American cultural studies. In examining twentieth
century Latin American literature, Angel Rama notes that the continent’s literary output
has to be understood structurally as operating between two opposite poles that from the
continent’s inception have produced a matrix of historically evolving forces: “the
internationalist pole, which registers the successive external waves distinguished by their
variability, and the autochtonous acriolladas” (“Tecnificación” 30). Latin American
cultural output becomes understood as either derivative of foreign (e.g., Hollywood)
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models or as defensive authentic cultural expression. Angel Rama understands these
poles not as enacting a mutually exclusive binary but as producing a materially
determined and historically shifting matrix, adopting an approach that challenges
traditional conceptions of space and representative cultural production. Drawing on
dependency theory, Rama notes that devices and media arise in the center in conformity
with a developed material base and are offered to the periphery as neutral technologies
that promise similar development; however, the material base of the periphery determines
and limits the incorporation of these techniques. The tension and conflict around the
incorporation of foreign techniques determines the lines of development of the Latin
American vanguard: innovation and development (vanguardism/modernism) or resistance
and autonomy (regionalism/tradition). Transculturation represents a way to avoid this
binary and explains the relationship between center and periphery by tracing cultural
influence and understanding cultural production as a series of responses to modernization
that are neither merely derivative nor defensive and that determine the construction of a
national culture (i.e., "the lettered city").
Transculturation represents a more expansive view of vanguardismo that
spatializes and situates modernist practice in a relational geopolitical frame.
Vanguardismo often becomes defined exclusively in opposition to traditional and
regionalist currents, erasing heterogeneity under the aegis of modernization. Rama
proposes an understanding of parallel vanguards, allowing a more precise visualization
of existent differences between cultural areas and showing the existence of two
simultaneous cultural dialogues established under different terms: one, internal,
connected to unequal zones of culture in the continent attempting to reach modernization
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without losing traditional constitutive factors; the other was external, establishing direct
communication with external centers from where transformative flows reached already
modernized Latin American sites. Both these cultural dialogues are authentic to the
continent and can be considered under the same modernizing impulse; however, Rama
distinguishes the internal transcultural vanguard from the external cosmopolitan
vanguard. Although informed by universal heritage and a repertory of foreign devices,
the latter supports a surviving cultural tradition in defensive regions of the continent,
developing its output from these regions and its singularities (“Tecnificación” 77).
Transculturation usefully articulates spatial relations to cultural production, becoming an
often (mis)used term in Latin American cultural studies. If vernacular modernism
expands modernism to encompass a range of practices that reflected the experience of
modernity, Rama’s approach represents a further elaboration that situates the nonsynchronous experience of modernity in space and time.
Transculturation is often used in Latin American film histories to allow a more
expansive geopolitical frame that simultaneously accommodates local cultural
production; however, these histories often disregard the paradigmatic transcultural
objects that are not only the site of cultural exchange but also represent a productive and
discursively elided difference – an alternative to the binary logic of defensive tradition
and homogenizing modernization that characterizes post-independence canons. If
Zuzanna Pick's New Latin American Cinema, on the one hand, underscores the political
and social impact of modernist cinema and outlines the contours of a post-war continental
project; others, such as John King, deemphasize the New Cinemas to consider the
"commercial, melodramatic prehistory before the dawn of modern, revolutionary
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consciousness" (2). King’s efforts represented an important corrective to earlier histories
that imagined the continent’s cinematic origins in the political Third Cinema; however,
his characterization of earlier sound cinema relies on an understanding of mass culture
and popular cinema opposed to modernism and its political and aesthetic tactics.
Despite the diverse cultural objects privileged in these significant historical
narratives, they are all peculiarly characterized by their use (if not abuse) of the term
“transculturation.” Literary critics advocating for narrative transculturation address both
the spatial and cultural dimensions of transculturation. In locating the protean boundaries
of center and periphery as well as nation and region, they attempt to construct imagined
spaces that negotiate the local, national and global spheres of political, economic, and
social practice. Moreover, they recover particular cultural texts elided from representative
literary canons of twentieth-century Latin America. Their paradigmatic transcultural
products are sites of ambivalent and divergent responses to modernization that are
produced, circulated, and understood in these redrawn peripheral spaces.
In departing from the continent as a geopolitical frame of reference and
examining the construction of national cultures throughout the region, these scholars each
attempt to map the region in different ways to avoid reproducing the national as a natural
geographic configuration. Instead, the nation is understood as determined in large part by
the fraught relation between center and periphery, and a national culture becomes a
marker of the way this relationship historically played out. Examining the discursive
construction of a national culture becomes a way to trace this evolving dynamic between
(and within) the center and the periphery.
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If transculturation usually does cartographic work in these histories, I wish to
highlight the ambivalent cultural dimensions of this concept in literary studies and
examine the features of the paradigmatic transcultural text epitomized in Angel Rama in
the literature of José María Arguedas and Augusto Roa Bastos. Neither a utopian dialogic
project nor the mere nationalization of foreign models, the contestation over the regional
imaginary plays out in the cultural sphere in Rama's study. The conflict between an
ascendant increasingly urban middle class and a declining aristocratic dominant class in
the interwar period plays out in the literary debates between national regionalists of the
late-nineteenth century and both the cosmopolitan vanguard and critical realists in major
urban centers. Rama casts regionalism as a movement that, in its unwillingness to be
understood as separatist, ultimately became complicit with metropolitan norms of
national unity and limited its ability to counter the homogenization of the metropole (here
both national capital and foreign). Instead, cultural particularities were merely reinserted
into a national culture to contain difference and become mythical sites of origin and
tradition removed from foreign influence. The interwar modernization that resulted in
growing urban centers in Latin America resulted in a growing conflict with interior
regions, presented with two possible responses to the restless process of modernization:
conform and renounce these local idiosyncrasies or remain backward and disconnected.
Rama advocates a solution that resists the regionalist compromise through Fernando
Ortiz's transculturation, a transitive process of reciprocal (if asymmetric) cultural
exchange. Rama advocates an immersive and inclusive approach where the author does
not perceive himself outside a regional culture and therefore does not cast himself as
recorder of regional irregularities and variants relative to an external norm but capitalizes
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on the possibilities afforded by constructing a specific literary language. Rama
understands modernism as an attempt at universality and aesthetic invention as a response
to the rationalizing spirit of modernity; his approach instead privileges the linguistic
perspective from the periphery, which provincializes modernity and restores a regional
vision to the world (“Transculturación” 43). The periphery expresses itself despite (or
because of) the rationalizing advance of modernity, strengthened not by defending
tradition but through transculturation.
A more exacting analysis of the cultural implications of the term
"transculturation" leads to a more precise understanding of this transitive process in both
its spatial and cultural aspects. Transculturation suggests a cultural response to
modernization from the periphery, a response toward a foreign center and a peripheral
metropolis. Drawing on Lefebvre’s Production of Space, Rama understands the
organization of space in Latin America as determined by a colonial administration that
built according to plan, establishing a radial segregated hierarchy in order to maximize
the extraction of resources (Rama “Lettered” 11, Lefebvre “Production” 151). Rama’s
understanding of space conceives of space as experience and perception rather than as
abstract concept or mental thing. Highlighting the Lefebvrian undercurrents of Rama’s
theory allows us to reframe the immersive approach advocated by transculturation that
cultivates the narrative possibilities afforded by linguistic particularities and subcultural
nuance. The relation of center and periphery is not a matter of abstract physical locations
but the embodiment of historically produced, reconfigured and transformed social
relations. Rama avoids the homogeneity and mental abstraction of cosmopolitan
modernism, a mode that Lefebvre claims aspired to readability, visibility and
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intelligibility and preferred space as conceived to space as perceived and lived (Lefebvre
“Production” 53). His immersive “cosmovisión” – the imperative to think in the
indigenous language – attempts to relink space as lived and perceived to space as
conceived through spatial practice and the localized everyday.
Transcultural texts, inscribed by the negotiation of center and periphery, bear the
marks of the reconfiguration and production of social relations. The circumscribed
circulation and intelligibility of comedy as well as its affective-aesthetic dimensions
produce spaces that counter the abstract space of modernization and demonstrate a
concern for the localized and everyday that redeems the categories of experience and
perception. Rather than recapitulate the diegetic and narrative stratagems of misdirection,
I want to consider how the semiotic instability Cantinflas and the multiplicity of positions
afforded concomitantly affect his relation to space. In other words, if "the art of turning
phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path," I want to consider what type
of space is produced by Cantinflas's language play (De Certeau 100).
Returning to another example of a chase sequence, on his first day on the job at
the circus in El circo (Miguel M. Delgado, 1943), Cantinflas is asked to be a stagehand.
The ringmaster directs him inside to join the others. Cantinflas dashes inside only to find
himself running into the ring with four acrobats. The ringmaster yanks him aside and
points out that he was meant to join the other stagehands and not the performers.
Cantinflas ambles into the ring only to be surreptitiously included in the act atop a
stacking column of acrobats. The crowd delights in this unplanned delight. Cantinflas is
then ordered to go out on the floor to help carry the strongman's weights. He walks right
up to the ringmaster who orders him out of the ring. A confused Cantinflas tries to
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explain that he is receiving conflicting directions before sitting in one of the ring-side
boxes. Once the strongman finishes, Cantinflas singlehandedly carries all of the
strongman's (Styrofoam) weights. The incensed Hercules chases the comic in the
backstage in an extended chase sequence that confuses screen direction and collapses
backstage and onstage space. Cantinflas run out frame left with Hercules in pursuit.
Outside the tent, Hercules enters another tent, running from right to left, but Cantinflas
appears in a different shot hiding in a different place frame right. Cantinflas materializes
out of nowhere, or rather out of the interstices of continuity editing. Hercules runs into
what appears to be the main backstage area from the previous shot, and Cantinflas
appears again further ahead and Hercules follows. The chase continues in the same way,
a reversal of a conventional chase sequence that usually presents the pursued before the
appearance of the pursuer. The sequence is motivated not by a logic of suspense or
causality but rather as a matter of space: a winding chase that fails to constitute a path,
fragmentary shots unable to produce an abstract trajectory or conceived space.
Eventually, Cantinflas manages to join another act in his attempts to avoid being caught,
collapsing the spatial organization altogether.
In another example of the way cantinflismo constitutes spatial practice, Ni sangre
ni arena opens with an extended sequence in and around the bullfighting arena.
Cantinflas is outside the arena, scheming to get inside to watch his idol in action. Failing
to sell enough cigars and embroiled in conflict with other salesmen and eventually the
police, Cantinflas decides to approach the guards, claiming that the troublemaker is over
yonder and that they should follow in pursuit. The character performs the type of
doubling-as-misdirection that the film narrative also enacts: He is the troublemaker in
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question but produces another self off screen. Cantinflas is both on screen and off screen,
here and there (and by extension now and then). In effect, Cantinflas has no place. As De
Certeau continues, walking is to lack a place, a process of being absent in search of a
proper, and "the moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city
itself an immense social experience of lacking a place" (103). Cantinflas affords a
horizon for the experience of an urbanizing capital city not merely through the stereotype
he represents but more particularly through this experience of placeless ambulation in his
linguistic and cinematic play.
Once inside the arena, the guards follow him off screen as he sneaks into the
arena, a series of extreme long shots following him once inside, running somewhere else.
Cantinflas enters the arena in a long shot, dressed as a seat cushion salesman. He enters
one frame and takes a seat at the bottom of the frame, his tower of cushions obstructing
the spectators' sight lines. The angered spectators expel him from the frame. The crowd
roars, and Cantinflas rushes into another frame. Another audience member tosses him
aside, and down the frame Cantinflas tumbles (Figure A8). In an extreme long shot,
Cantinflas falls downs the stands into the box of the film's love interest, his white
uniform differentiating him from the wealthier crowd. Cantinflas falls into an empty seat
in the front row, a close up punctuating his descent. An usher eventually approaches him
and tries dragging Cantinflas out. Anita intervenes and gives him a ticket so that he can
remain in his spot for the duration of the match.
The arena and the frame both function as representations of space, established
spaces with prescribed interdictions and possibilities accorded to its inhabitants. If
Lefebvre argues that abstract spaces are subject to fragmentation and hierarchization
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although conceived as abstract unity, then we can imagine the arena as an institutional
space that is subdivided and hierarchized in order to endow the space with exchange
value in relation to a spectacular center ("Production" 282). Political power attempts to
dominate space, and the attempts to appropriate this space entail a particular use of time
that underscores the plasticity of space ("Writing on Cities" 237). Cantinflas's path both
within the arena and across the frame manipulates spatial organization, creating
ambiguities within this regimented space. Cantinflas underscores and unsettles the
classed hierarchy that determines seating within the arena, instantiating in his walking
different relations among differentiated positions. Cantinflas's tumble to the ring-side box
enacts a literal appropriation at the narrative level, occupying a seat belonging to a
(classed) other.
Beyond the narrative, however, the expulsion from the frame coupled with
Cantinflas's own figurative splitting in order to gain access to the arena suggest a more
expansive view of this project of appropriation. Mapping Lefebvrian appropriation onto
cinematic practice, however, comes with certain caveats given his reservations about the
medium: "Like all signs, images kill" ("Production" 97). For Lefebvre, cinematic
representation produces an abstract space of interchangeability both by reducing time to
the constraints of space, subjecting the former to an instrumentalized linearity, as well as
by privileging legibility and clarity through fragmentation and fetishization. Lefebvre's
critique, however, presupposes that cinema is a medium of visualization that transports
the body outside itself and produces a non-corporeal eye/gaze. If we consider cinema
both as an architecture of transit as well as within the context of a changing sensorial
economy, then perhaps we can consider cinematic representation not merely in terms of
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the object pictured but rather the representational affect enacted (Bruno “Atlas” 60). As
Giuliana Bruno articulates, screen studies presupposes an optical position, forgoing the
fact that film descends historically and formally from the architectural promenade (62).
Given the relationship between cinema and architecture, Bruno posits that cinema is a
panoramic art and an architecture of transit and that film spectatorship is a spatial practice
whereby the spectator moves across an imaginary path, incorporated into the moving
picture (56). If we consider cinema as a practice of transport that relates motion and
emotion, then comedic film spectatorship can function as an act of appropriation that
restores the body and the senses in a space that is lived and not represented or conceived.
("Production" 363). Moreover, we can consider the broader implications of this spatial
practice in the context of a peripheral geopolitical territory.
Cantinflas's tumble not only represents an act of walking that appropriates space
or multiplies the possibilities of an object (De Certeau 98), it presents a mode of
performance that undermines the abstracting logic of signification and cinematic practice
that upsets the temporal linearity of the narrative and the spatial contiguity of
verisimilitude afforded by continuity editing. Further, comedic film spectatorship returns
film spectators to the body in laughter; if emotion produces movement, then comedy
could be a privileged site through which to conceive of cinema not as communicative
interface but as a practice of transport and spatial practice. Appropriation here is figured
at the levels of cinematic representation, presentation, and spectation.
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CHAPTER TWO
EDUCATING NINÍ: VENTRILOQUISM, PERIPETEIA, AND
NINÍ MARSHALL’S VOCAL STARDOM
The modernization of an increasingly urban and industrial Argentina and the
effect of modernity on the notions of femininity and nationalism provide a backdrop for
my discussion of the films of national comedic icon Marina Esther Traveso “Niní
Marshall,” dubbed the “Chaplin with a skirt” by her co-nationals. Marshall began her
career as a radio personality portraying dozens of personae before becoming one of the
most prolific film personalities of the Golden Age of Argentine cinema. The comedienne
used orthographic and grammar mistakes as well as an array of accents to produce a
repertoire of beloved characters that represented both the Old World inhabitants of the
turn-of-the-century port city as well as the more recent migrants from the interior
provinces, providing a veritable auditory map of the urban transformations of Buenos
Aires.
My discussion of Marshall will be two-fold, capitalizing on the transitive and
intransitive senses of the verb ‘listened.’ First, I will consider how Buenos Aires listened
to Niní Marshall in order to lay out the socio-historical context of early sound cinema in
Argentina, its evolving position within the national mediascape and its relation to other
forms of mass culture, particularly the radio, and the function of this star text in the
formation and development of a national studio system. Having established this
contextual framework, I will revisit her early films in order to discuss how Niní Marshall
listened to Buenos Aires.
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Marshall’s film career and her vocal performance provide a framework to
consider the particularities of popular Argentine cinema and its model of stardom.
Popular cinema from the Golden Age period of the late 1930s and 1940s is often
discussed in relation to the rise of Peronism, the military coup of 1943 and the election of
Perón in 1945. The restricted political system ushered in by the military coup of 1930,
conservative economic interventionism, and massive internal migration revived labor
militancy in the 1930s and Argentine workers’ sense of exploitation, creating a receptive
audience for Juan Perón’s populist message of the 1940s and 1950s. Cinema and mass
culture were implicated in the intertwined emergence of polarizing class stratification and
an integrative nationalist rhetoric that was conducive to the rise of Juan Perón. If
historians often cite the overwhelming presence of radios and movie theaters in
neighborhoods as indicative of the conservative impact of mass culture, film studies has
attempted a more concerted investigation into both the empirical audiences as well as the
narrative content of these early sound films. The dominant narrative of Argentine cinema
in the period begins with the arrival of sound in 1933, traces the emergence of genres,
directors, and stars in relation to the circulation of popular culture, and charts the growth
of the domestic studios in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
A Star is Born: Radio, Cinema and Stardom
The growth of national cinema was determined on the one hand by Hollywood
classical cinema, and on the other hand by the incorporation of Argentine popular culture
(i.e., sainete and tangos). Hollywood cinema provided material technologies of
production and exhibition, popular films that sustained continued film-going in local
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theaters as well as presumptive industrial models for a burgeoning studio system.
Moreover, it also provided a cultural apparatus then articulated to existing forms of
entertainment, particularly radio and popular theater. Neepa Majumdar, in her discussion
of stardom in early Indian cinema, notes that alongside film equipment, film genres, and
narrative forms, stardom may be regarded as one of the cultural technologies imported
from Hollywood, a technology that included not only Hollywood films but also the
material practices of publicity and the ideologies underlying stardom (3). Majumdar’s
project, however, foregrounds how star studies outside Hollywood is compelled to think
relationally, with Hollywood as paradigmatic of stardom, in order to challenge the
assumptions undergirding star studies. Paradigmatic star studies relies on film roles,
biographical information, and extra-cinematic discourses in order to constellate the star as
a visible social icon. Majumdar argues that film discourse in the Indian context delinked
stardom from the ideologies of conspicuous consumption and visibility underpinning
Hollywood stardom (understood as antithetical to the project of Indian nationalism).
Historically situated film practices reveal the problems of applying a theory based on
Hollywood stars to other cinemas.
Returning to the Argentine context, Niní Marshall’s stardom provides an excellent
case study in order to place the material film culture and comedic narrative genre in the
wider context of parallel negotiations with other popular forms of representation. As a
radio personality turned movie star, Niní provides a model for understanding these
negotiations across media and the industrial practices of the nascent studios in Buenos
Aires, a cultural discourse articulated to what Ana López has called the radiophonic
imaginary of Latin American cinema (“Radiophonic”). For López, radio and mass culture
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provide both a material and discursive framework for the evolving formal and narrative
practices of early sound cinema in the region, from featuring prominently as diegetic
setting or plot device to determining serialized narrative structure or syntactic narrative
operations. In Argentina, radio in the 1930s was a widespread medium, heavily indebted
to the importation of technologies in the 1920s from Europe and the United States. The
two most popular radio stations — Radio El Mundo and Radio Belgrano (formerly Radio
Nacional) — offered a similar repertoire of classical and popular music, radio novelas
and comedic programs. Despite similar programming, Radio Belgrano emerged early in
the decade in a makeshift facility in the outskirts of the city backed financially by an
ambitious European immigrant; Radio El Mundo emerged in the mid-1930s in a top-ofthe-line radio facility in the heart of the city, receiving support from the state and having
poached executive and creative talent from its older competitor that had devised the
programming formula for widespread commerical success. The 1930s were eventually
marked by the escalating competition between the two stations which came to a head
with the eventual officialization of radio diffusion by the state in the late 1930s (Gallo
67).
Marshall’s career begins on the radio as a polyglot chanteuse in the smaller Radio
Municipal. Between songs, Marshall would play the fool and perform a bit part as a
Galician maid and cook, Cándida. The Galician stereotype still persists in Latin America,
often highlighting the Spanish region’s rural and classed characteristic and its emigrants’
presumed unsophistication and stubbornness. Marshall was persuaded to perform the
character in the context of a larger comedic program, “El Chalet de Pipita.” The success
of her character prompted a sponsor to hire the performer for her own show in the larger
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and more prominent Radio El Mundo. Marshall wrote the comedic scripts often framed
as a conversation with the former crooner Juan Carlos Thorry. Eventually, another
sponsor for a popular department store, La Piedad, approached her about starting a
different radio show. She developed the character of Catita, a second-generation,
working-class girl, modeled on the young women who hoped to get an autograph from
Thorry outside the recording studio. As Marshall describes, these women were “gossips,
busybodies, and meddlers who dressed with bad taste, almost extravagantly. They
represented a social stratum, the product of the tenements that existed in that period” (qtd.
in Karush 125). Despite the initial resistance of her sponsor, who feared that auditors
would think themselves mocked, the character was a resounding success and eventually
prompted studio owners to approach the actress to appear on screen. Most of Marshall’s
original radio broadcasts from the 1930s do not survive. The extant material of her radio
work for Radio El Mundo comes from the later broadcasts from the 1960s preserved by
Marshall’s own family. In addition, a series of paratexts and intertexts provide a
constellation of the many characters she developed throughout her radio career. From
publicity stills and interviews in fan magazines — Marshall began her career writing
under a pseudonym (Ivonne D’Arcy) for the journal Sintonía — to her autobiographical
memories of these characters, the analysis of Niní Marshall’s star text must necessarily
traverse media platforms and textual fragments. Reproducing these characters spoken
into the air means analyzing their cultural remanence and turning to their reiterations
decades later when they had become characters of a Buenos Aires long past. Perhaps the
most enduring intertext available is from televised broadcasts, both her stint on
“Teatrelerías” on Channel 9, the variety show “El humor de Niní Marshall,” the silent
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cinema parody “El Pequeño Marshall-Luz Ilustrado,” and the popular 1979 transmission
of her one-woman show, her “café-concert” “Y se nos fue redepente” [sic] on Channel 13
(Marshall 231, 242). The final one-woman show was set during the funeral wake of Don
Pascual, the neighborhood cobbler, and featured a series of monologues from her
different characters come to pay their respects to the deceased.
Among her over two dozen characters we can mention a few notable recurring
characters: Catita’s brother Mingo and her grandmother Doña Caterina Gambastorta de
Langanuzzo fill out the contours of this first-generation Argentine family of Italian
descent living in the immigrant and working class neighborhoods of the capital city. The
intolerable (perhaps aspirational) aristocrat Mónica Bedoya Hueyo Picos Pardos de
Unzué Crostón lives in Barrio Norte in Buenos Aires, embracing consumption and
rejecting forms of popular culture. Doña Pola is an older Jewish woman and owner of the
store “The 3 Hemispheres.” The impressionable niña Jovita is an older single woman and
avid reader of romance novels who dreams of being rescued by a prince charming.
Jovita’s maid, Belarmina Cuelo, is an immigrant from the provinces, somewhat clumsy
and unreliable and often reprimanded by her employer. Marshall’s Lupe is modeled after
the female leads of Mexican melodramas, long-suffering and hopelessly in love with her
drunk and lazy husband Margarito. Marshall took advantage of her many languages and
created characters from other national contexts, including an Italian soprano (Giovannina
Regadiera) and a German woman who owns a very long dachshund (Fraulein Frida).
Marshall’s film career begins with “exclusive” contracts with three different
studios (Lumiton, Establecimientos Filmadores Argentinos (EFA), and Sono Film), with
each studio obtaining the rights to one of her radio personalities. Despite the oft-made
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comparisons to the Hollywood studio system (Paranaguá 87), the practices of these
different studios was determined by their industrial origins. For example, Sono Film was
created by a local film distributor and exhibitor, Angel Mentasti; Lumiton and SIDE were
developed by entrepreneurs in sound technologies, radio pioneer Eduardo Susini and
discography engineers the Murúa brothers, respectively; and Establecimientos
Filmadores Argentinos (EFA) was developed out of national laboratory facilities that
expanded to build studios equipped for sound recording. The industry grew 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. Marshall’s prolific output contributed to
this growing commercial cinema, and the specifics of her contract exclusivity suggest one
way that these early studios were as informed by Hollywood structures as they were by
already extant media practices. Her success as Catita for Lumiton in her first featurelength films, Mujeres que trabajan (Manuel Romero, 1938) and Divorcio en Montevideo
(Manuel Romero, 1939), resulted in EFA approaching the actress to develop her earlier
radio personality in the feature-length film Cándida (Luis Bayón Herrera, 1939). Finally,
Sono Film approached the actress in that same year and hired the star under a third guise,
Niní Reboredo. Not only does the model of radio sponsorship inform the nature of
contracts and star discourse in the early studio era, but the comedienne represents a case
of aural stardom that challenges image-based star studies, particularly in these
specifically vocal ways of “constructing/performing/being” (Dyer 20). Discussing
stardom in the Argentine context necessitates then reconsidering the relation of body and
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screen presence, voice and persona, extra-cinematic and para-cinematic. Three studios.
Three personae. Three voices. One actress.
On film, we bore witness to Cándida and Catita’s misadventures. Her work as
Niní Reboredo for Sono Film with Luis César Amadori provided the only opportunities
to represent other characters, either through a framing narrative, such as her portrayal of
Carmen in an extended dream sequence in Carmen (Luis César Amadori, 1943), or
through self-reflexive narratives such as Hay que educar a Niní (Luis César Amadori,
1940) or Yo quiero ser bataclana (Manuel Romero, 1941), where she plays the part of a
screen double and revue theater actress, respectively. In Hay que educar as Niní,
Marshall plays an out-of-work actress hired to pretend to be a wealthy man’s daughter
but the blackmail conspiracy requires that she portray the daughter full-time. The film
opens with Niní as an extra in the fictional Cachi Mayo Film studios. After upsetting the
star of a film within the film and losing her job, and desperate for money in order to
afford her marriage, Niní manages to secure an audition in a morality propaganda film
with the help of her fiancé, Arturito. Unfortunately, Niní’s only previous on-camera
experience comes as a prostitute in another film within the diegesis, El angel del puerto.
She loses the job because of her ostensible immorality and decides to sue the studio for
sullying her reputation and jeopardizing her career. She unsuccessfully lobbies two smalltime lawyers to her defense, but these men have higher hopes. They persuade the actress
to play the part of a wealthy businessman’s long-lost, teenaged daughter. The man has no
children from his marriage, and, rather than pay the men to keep the scandal quiet, he
agrees to support the young girl in boarding school. Niní remains in the school in order to
secure payment, playing the part of a mischievous young schoolgirl. Her attempts to get
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expelled fail; however, she befriends another young schoolgirl, Eugenia, who is deeply in
love with an older man. Niní pleads with her fake father to help the poor girl and
eventually reveals the long con the two lawyers were trying to pull. The grateful man
takes in Eugenia and agrees to help Niní with her wedding expenses.
Hay que educar a Niní presents one of the few instances on film where the
comedienne uses her voice to impersonate multiple characters, a reflexive staging of sorts
of her radio program. The actress seeks legal counsel to file a lawsuit against the movie
studio for tarnishing her reputation by casting her as the vamp in an urban melodrama.
The waiting room full and Marshall impatient, the actress harasses the staff in order to get
a brief moment with the lawyers. After being dismissed multiple times, the actress
decides to impersonate their priority clients. One of the lawyers confuses the actress for a
staff person and instructs her to have Ms. Mitoski come in from the waiting room.
Sensing an opportunity, the actress knocks on the door. The two lawyers are framed in a
medium shot inside as the camera whip pans to the door and the source of the knock.
Marshall peers her head in, introducing herself with an Eastern European accent as Ms.
Mitoski. The camera pans with her as she approaches the confused men who do not
recognize her. Marshall, now framed between the men in a medium close up, engages
with the men. She claims to be Ms. Mitoski’s sister, come to refer them to the case of her
actress self, Niní Reboredo. The men ask the question organizing the film narrative, if not
the extrafilmic star discourse: “Who is Niní Reboredo?” Marshall responds in the voice
of the actress: “That’s me.” The men interrupt the actress, dragging the actress away from
the camera and out of the office. The outraged actress begins yelling once again with her
affected accent. Later on, the actress finds a note on the receptionist’s desk instructing the
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receptionist to call on a theater actress Trinidad Madrid. The camera frames the lawyers
in a medium shot, their conversation interrupted by a voice-off speaking in heavily
accented peninsular Spanish. The person is asked to step inside the office to reveal the
source of the voice. The camera cuts to a medium close up of the door as Marshall steps
inside and speaks to camera in character as Madrid, smoking a cigarette while making
excuses for her tardiness. The sequence capitalizes on the sound hermeneutic for comedic
effect: The actress interrupts as voice-off, her guise only working as long as she remains
unseen. Marshall’s strategic use of her voice is betrayed by her visage. The camera cuts
to the irate men who stare at each other before approaching the woman. The camera pulls
back as the men frame the woman and reprimand her: “See here.” The actress interrupts
the men, “I won’t see anything because my case is very urgent!” The men explain that
now she will only be seen after everyone in the waiting room has had their turn. Of
course, Marshall need not be seen, only heard. Marshall takes off her hat, tousles her hair,
and grabs a pen and notebook. She enters the waiting room in long shot and speaking in a
less nasal voice with fewer idiomatic expressions — in the manner of someone from a
professional class —announces that the lawyers are retiring for the day and instructs all
clients to leave the offices. The waiting room empties, and the actress secures her
meeting with the lawyers, remarking: “Se fueron todos, doctor / They’re all gone,
doctor.” The irate lawyer invites the actress into his office, but corrects the woman, “Yo
no soy doctor, Señora. / I’m not a doctor, Mrs.” Marshall responds, “Yo tampoco soy
señora. / I’m also not a Mrs.” This exchange, like so many in the film, hinges on
misrecognition even in the instance of ocular proof. The man is neither doctor nor
lawyer; he is a charlatan, conning wealthy men by extorting them with claims of
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parentage or attempting to seize an inheritance by manufacturing a long-lost sibling. If
the early exchanges indicate that what you hear is not what you get, then the film
suggests that what you see offers little epistemological comfort.
Authentically National, Authentically Cinematic
Contemporaneous discussion of Marshall’s stardom, particularly in Argentina,
shows a deep ambivalence about the nature of her stardom, ostensibly symptomatic of a
greater concern for writing an authentic national cinema. Pascual Quinziano laments the
lack of aesthetic unity and auteurist vision, characterizing comedy as an impure genre
given the theatrical and radio origins of its most successful performers (143). Niní’s
multiple personae would seem to confirm the impurity and surface play that Pascual
Quiniziano claims characteristic of Argentine film comedy. For Quinziano, the lack of
auteurist style or generic cohesiveness among disparate comedic texts, in addition to the
borrowing from precinematic and paracinematic cultural forms, prevents discussion of
comedy as an “authentic [i.e., medium-specific] phenomenon within our filmmaking”
(143). This quest for the authentic becomes an overriding project for critics and scholars
writing a national film history, articulating ontological modernist arguments onto
nationalist claims of specificity. The authentically cinematic and the authentically
Argentine configure an interpretive matrix that can only discuss comedy as a problematic
phenomenon, its success mostly a function of a star system seen as a foreign cultural
technology. Comedy can only be included when understood as a genre about impurity
and falsity; the genre becomes a limit case for these national film histories. The
prevailing conflict between tradition and modernity that structures most popular
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narratives across media — a conflict that in a Jamesonian vein allegorically stages what
becomes construed as authentically national — becomes extended to comedic narratives
as a conflict between appearance and reality (Quinziano 142). Marshall’s films provide a
useful site through which to challenge this binary of surface and essence, one that has a
longstanding history in feminist film discourse as positioning woman on the side of
appearance, falsity and surface.
Psychoanalytic feminist film theory returns to Freud’s ruminations on femininity
to trace the contours of this binary, the ways the cinematic apparatus is implicated in its
reinstantiation, and the possibilities of female spectatorship. Freud aligns femininity with
the enigmatic, undecipherable other through the invocation of the hieroglyph in an
exclusionary tactic that Mary Ann Doane sees as reflecting man’s ontological doubts and
defensively evicting woman from discursive agency. The hieroglyph’s pictoriality
makes it a contradictory site: indecipherable and readable, opaque yet immediate. The
hieroglyph’s ostensible accessibility is a function of a lack of distance or gap between
sign and referent — it is reduced to mere appearance. The absence of this distance or gap
specifies both the hieroglyphic and the female, and this alignment of woman and picture
metonymically connects her with the cinema as a form of “writing in images of the
woman but not for her” (“Masquerade” 75). Freud posits a binary system where subject
and object positions are a function of sexual difference, and this binary of
appearance/depth or proximity/distance in relation to the image locates film spectatorship
within the problematic of sexual difference (“Masquerade” 78). Given the complicity of
the cinematic apparatus in reinforcing this binary, the possibilities of locating a female
spectating position are limited: the female spectator can either identify masochistically
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with the castrated woman or identify with the male spectating position. Unlike the
voyeuristic pleasure of the male spectator that assumes a distance relative to the image,
the female spectator’s pleasure can only be described in terms of a narcissistic closeness
and over-presence or a disavowal of difference altogether. Doane bristles against these
options because they assume the proximity of the female spectator to the image: “Female
specificity is thus theorized in terms of spatial proximity. In opposition to this 'closeness'
to the body, a spatial distance in the male's relation to his body rapidly becomes a
temporal distance in the service of knowledge” (“Masquerade” 79). Doane posits a third
option — masquerade — that appropriates and adapts the processes of identification in
order to develop a female spectating position.
Rather than indulge in certain strains of French feminist theory that locate
feminine specificity in spatial proximity and valorize corporeality and nearness, most
psychoanalytic feminist film theory from the Anglo-American tradition attempts to define
a female spectating position by recovering critical distance and temporal removal, which
are constitutive of subjectivity in psychoanalysis. Although masquerade in its more
conventional psychoanalytic usage denotes a reaction-formation, a mode of being for the
other that would seem antithetical to the agentive project of feminist film theory, for
Doane masquerade entails flaunting femininity, an “acknowledgement that it is
femininity itself which is constructed as mask-as the decorative layer which conceals a
non-identity” (“Masquerade” 81). If femininity is aligned with surface, then masquerade
as a play of surfaces denies femininity as mere image, proximity, and presence.
Masquerade realigns femininity by simulating distance between oneself and one’s image.
Moreover, masquerade at the level of representation disarticulates the phallic regime of
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looking founded on the object’s stability which affords ontological stability. Masquerade
makes the image unstable and manipulable, problematizing hermeneutics and ultimately
divulging non-identity.
What masquerade makes evident then is that femininity itself is non-existent
because it relies on the definition of masculinity. Femininity then is not an ontological
category but rather a mask to disarm essentialism. Returning to Lacan, the emphasis on
appearance that masks afford attributes a certain emptiness to the very concepts of
masculinity and femininity. The play of surfaces of masquerade both conceals the
assumption of a subject position and highlights the constructedness of the feminine
position, “a way of appropriating distance or gap...of deploying gap for women, of
reading femininity differently” ("Reconsidered" 47). Masquerade designates the
impossibility of a stable feminine position, but this discussion invites two elaborations,
particularly in the case of the paracinematic vocal stardom of Niní Marshall: one
pertaining to the status of sound and the voice; the other, to the status of comedy as a
body genre.
See What You Hear
Doane’s discussion of masquerade departs from an understanding of femininity as
aligned with the image, and sees its play of surfaces as designating the impossibility of a
stable feminine position. If most feminist film theory foregrounds the specularity of the
mirror stage as the privileged site whereby the subject experiences a splitting, Kaja
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Silverman returns to Lacan to highlight the voice as another site for this subtractive
process of subject formation (“Acoustic” 7). Silverman traces the successive waves of
film theory through their figuration of loss or absence at the heart of cinematic
production: “The absence which cinema locates at the site of the female body has its
origins elsewhere, in the operations of the signifier and the foreclosure of the real”
(“Acoustic” 14). The real and the site of production are both absented in the process of
inscription and signification, the transition from referent to cinematic sign. These losses
threaten the integrity of the viewing subject, and Silverman casts film theory, particularly
in its ontological concerns, as enacting a double movement of disavowal that finds an
analog in the formation of subjectivity through the process of sexual differentiation in
psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic feminist film theory understands realism as the desire for
the restoration of actuality and the return to a pre-subjective condition where indexicality
is a symptom of this desire for fusion and non-differentiation and for overcoming the
distance separating representation from the real. Within this framework, subjectivity is a
function of a process of subtraction that produces both subject and object; subjectivity
again turns on the recognition of distance. The viewing subject lacks both actuality and
symbolic mastery given a system of language that operates through absence and
difference and the foreclosure of the real; therefore, cinematic operations that disavow
the gap between sign and referent and occlude the missing site of cinematic production
allow the viewing subject to preserve an imagined plentitude. Psychoanalytic feminist
film theory identifies these operations of disavowal in classical Hollywood cinema and
prescribes an anti-realist film practice that foregrounds the material heterogeneity of the
medium.
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The voice in the cinema plays a dual role in securing a position of imagined
symbolic mastery for the spectator: both contributing to the production of a sonic
vraisemblable and coherent diegesis that obviates the site of cinematic enunciation as
well as operating through a series of displacements that locate the male voice at the site
of ostensible enunciation and that diegetically contain the female voice. If, “classic
cinema’s success can be measured by the degree to which it manages to substitute
fictional fields for the irretrievably absent one” (“Acoustic” 12), the voice plays a pivotal
role in erecting unified fictional spaces in order to occlude the material heterogeneity of
the cinema. In order to conceive of this heterogeneity and locate the role of sound, Doane
identifies three spaces that are successfully articulated by the classical cinematic
apparatus: The space of the diegesis, the visible space of the screen, and the acoustical
space of theater work in lockstep to envelop the spectator (“Voice” 39). Both the
institutionalization of viewing practices and the signifying practices of film bind these
spaces together, and film sound — particularly the voice — occupies a privileged place
in this process of unification. The use of level sound, room tone, reverberation, and sound
perspective spatialize sound and contribute to the impression of reality in the space of the
diegesis; in other words, the fetishistic operations of film sound rely not upon actual
sounds but upon a sonic vraisemblable, an acoustic organization that affords an
impression of reality (“Acoustic” 44). More importantly, when we hear the voice of a
character who is not visible in the frame — a voice-off — the space of the diegesis
exceeds the space of the screen, denying the frame as limit and affirming the unity of
diegetic space (Doane “Voice” 38).
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Silverman engenders this process, adding that it is the male subject’s discursive
impotence that is disavowed in redrawing the diegetic boundaries through the use of the
voice, situating him in a position of proximity to the apparatus at the expense of the
female voice: “At its most crudely dichotomous, Hollywood pits the disembodied male
voice against the synchronized female voice” (“Acoustic” 39). Woman’s exclusion from
symbolic power, which makes possible the male subject’s identification with enunciative
agency, is articulated as a passive relation to classic cinema’s scopic and auditory
regimes. This discursive system requires both the female body and the female voice to
function as fetishes, representing the plentitude lost to the male subject upon entry into
language. Although the voice is often figured as pure presence, Silverman underscores
how this imagined presence disavows the splitting that constituted subjectivity. The voice
functions as a part object in this Lacanian framework, separated from and thereby
constituting the subject and becoming a symbol of this process of becoming subject. The
voice becomes a testament to the subject’s symbolic castration and entry into language
and the Oedipal matrix but gets fetishistically imagined as closing the gap between
signifier and signified (“Acoustic” 43). Moreover, recalling the gendering of proximity
and distance, the voice as present-to-itself (like the image and the body) gets aligned with
femininity. Silverman argues that synchronization comprises a fundamental ideological
operation in the cinematic arsenal. Departing from Chion’s discussion of synchronization
as a vocal striptease, Silverman aligns synchronization with specularization. Through
codified practices of synchronization and postdubbing, the double diegeticization of the
female character, and the use of regional accents and idiosyncratic grain, the
subordination of the female voice to the female body and the forms of enclosure of that
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voice serve to reveal female discursive lack and isolate her from the site of discursive
authority (“Acoustic” 69).
Ultimately, Silverman mobilizes Lacan in order to underscore the radical
ambivalence of the voice as materiality contra the voice as meaning-making medium and
to recover the absence and distance that undergirds its power. Silverman supplements
Doane’s lament against the alignment of woman with proximity and presence; however,
while Doane attempts to posit masquerade as a mode of spectating that recovers distance
for the female spectating subject, Silverman offers fewer avenues to consider (perhaps a
function her study’s more pronounced concern with male discursive impotency and its
disavowal). For instance, when discussing the embodiment of the voice-over, Silverman
notes how the atemporal and atopic voice gets thrust into diegetic immediacy and “is no
longer in a position to masquerade as the point of textual origin” (“Acoustic” 53). Despite
Rick Altman’s insistence that “in the narrative world the right to speak conveys
narrational power,” woman does not speak, she is spoken (“Ventriloquism” 68).
Silverman identifies how classical cinema does not afford any distance or any ability to
masquerade to the synchronized voice in film. Would it be possible to conceive of
masquerade in cinema’s auditory regime? Would it be possible to conceive of vocal
deployments that somehow flaunted femininity or highlighted the constructedness of
femininity (and by extension its non-identity as such)? Niní Marshall’s star text,
particularly her vocal performances considered intertextually and across media, function
ostensibly in the spirit of masquerade, perhaps better conceived as ventriloquism.
Returning to the opening of Hay que educar a Niní, as a young girl approaches
the actress, Niní addresses her while keeping her face motionless, ventriloquizing so as to
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not disturb the production of the image. Her first appearance on screen finds her voice
and her image split. The production of the image may demand her silence, but the actress
throws her voice, generating an unusual effect where the sound source is visible yet the
sound cannot be matched. The boom microphone bobs into frame and nearly falls on the
actress. She lets out a scream as the sound technician further reprimands: “¡Silencio! Si
usted habla antes del tiempo, no puedo controlar el sonido. / Silence! If you speak before
you’re supposed to, I can’t control the sound.” Marshall replies: “Y para eso tiene que
meterme el micrófono en la boca usted? / And for that you have to shove the microphone
in my mouth?” (Figure A9). The actress’s thrown voice appears to have no visible source,
undermining the sound hermeneutic fundamental to the cinema experience — “whereby
the sound asks where? and the image responds here!” (“Ventriloquism” 74). The
ventriloquized voice can only be connected to the paratextual and material dimension of
the screen space. We attribute the voice to the paratextual radio star. If we earlier noted
how the star image could dissociate the narrative and scopic registers of spectatorship, the
case of aural stardom similarly allows us dissociate the narrative and discursive
operations of the soundtrack and become aware of the tension between indexical and
symbolic signifying sound practices.
The intrusion of the microphone figures as the apparatus’s response to the
uncanny effect of ventriloquism, an overly literal attempt to locate the source of the
sound in the actress’s body. Kaja Silverman engenders the sound hermeneutic, aligning
synchronization with specularization, but the case of aural stardom complicates the
engendered sound hermeneutic. The sound can be located in relation to the image or the
extratextual star text. More is at stake in synchronization in order to avoid dissociating
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the narrative (location of a sound source) and acoustic (recognition of a sound) processes
of audition. Sound cinema had promised to present a radio star — to see sound, to
represent the materiality of the voice, to demonstrate the site of production. In fact, the
star’s throat appears as the site of fascination for Argentine critics, regularly mentioned in
the paratexts surrounding her star persona. In the magazine Sintonia, critic Gerardo Bra
discusses the arrival of Marshall in 1937: “Niní Marshall ingresa al mundo de la
farándula radiofonica con toda la gracia de su simpatia y la expresividad de una
garganta diez puntos. Actua con libretos propios interpretando personajes tornados de la
vida real, enriquecidos por su ductilidad / Niní Marshall enters the world of radiophonic
show business with all the grace of her charm and the expressiveness of her A+ throat.
She acts with her own scripts, interpreting characters taken from real life and enriched by
her ductility” (qtd. in Gallo 186). Later on, in the prologue to her autobiography, Claudio
España notes that “La imitación, la creación en fin, de un personaje con su privilegiada
garganta fue su mejor modo de comunicación. / The impersonation, the creation in fact,
of a character with her privileged throat was her best method of communication” (2).
Marshall’s throat functions as an unstable fetish object, a non-representable site of
production that cannot yield to the apparatus despite the instrument’s anatomic scopic
origins. In locating early cinema within a constellation of popular spectacles centering on
the body and sexuality (i.e., the anatomy lesson and the bearded lady), Giuliana Bruno
situates cinema within an epistemophilic genealogy obsessed with performing acts upon
the body (“Streetwalking” 61). Early cinema appropriated both panoramic and anatomic
vision, rereading the cinema of attractions as a curiosity about the body's landscape and
an analytic desire to observe and map out movements that crystallized around the female
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body (“Streetwalking: 67). The film Hay que educar a Niní repeatedly restages this
moment of anatomic lust, ostensibly organizing the film as a series of attempts to present
the throat as site of production. For instance, Marshall is usually introduced as a voice-off
before entering the frame. The engendered sound hermeneutic must be understood as an
acoustic variation on the anatomic lust underlying cinematic observation.
Ventriloquism has a longstanding history in sound studies as a model for
understanding sound-image relationships in the cinema. The dummy/image disguises the
source of the sound (the ventriloquist/sound track) in a relationship of mutual redundancy
that convinces the viewer that the image/sound relationship exists independently of the
technology (“Ventriloquism” 67). This model assumes a discrete one to one relationship
between sound and image (the trick works!), but Marshall’s star text redraws diegetic
boundaries differently through the use of her voice. Her films do not so much detach
sound from source in an anti-realist modernist modality; instead, they provide multiple
and incompatible synchronization effects articulated to the same star image.
In the context of Latin American feminist criticism, ventriloquism also appears as
a model for understanding the construction of woman in the Latin American context,
where the asymmetries in phallocentric binaries identified by psychoanalytic feminist
film theory are coupled with the asymmetries instantiated by the historical reality of
dependence. As literary critic Lucía Guerra notes, echoing Bakhtin, woman is in an
ambivalent discursive position, ensnared between the lucidity of a homogenizing
phallogocentric discourse and the opacity of a deterritorializing feminine discourse:
“[C]omo un eficiente ventrílocuo, la mujer asume las voces de un lenguaje ajeno
permitiénidose en los intermedios el carnaval polifonico de su feminolecto marginalizado
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/ Like an efficient ventriloquist, woman assumes the voices of a foreign language
allowing herself, in the interstices, the polyphonic carnival of her marginalized
feminolect” (“Sombras” 136-137). Speaking about women writers in the region, Guerra
understands these women to be juggling multiple codes; their speech intelligible but
inscribing difference in the symbolic contract. Moreover, literary critic Sara CastroKlarén adds that the Latin American woman writer must speak from a position of double
negativity, responding to both a Western tradition of feminine oppression and a Latin
American history of marginality (43). Guerra’s ventriloquist inscribes difference while
speaking both a Western phallocentric discourse and an imperialist foreign discourse.
Although ventriloquism in sound studies designates the ideological operations of the
cinematic apparatus and the (transcendental) subject-effects it produces, Latin American
feminist criticism suggests that dependence has meant always already being spoken. If
the Latin American spectator/subject is herself a ventriloquist and discursive agency
necessarily textualizes a plurality of social languages, perhaps the diegetic spell of its
cinema functions differently. Turning to literature, Castro-Klarén identifies the recovery
and reinscription of woman’s experience as subject in the “desescritura [and]
desmantelamiento de agrupaciones semanticas / rewriting and dismantling of semantic
groups” (39). She locates this dismantling of semantic types and dislocation of syntax in
the works of several authors, including García Márquez and Arguedas, authors who
Angel Rama and Jean Franco characterize as transcultural. Their approach privileges an
immersed linguistic perspective from the periphery that expresses an awareness of
historicity and offers a site for rereading a history distorted by a dominant class. CastroKlarén extends transculturation beyond the framework of dependency theory, articulating
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a phallogocentric axis to the center/periphery and foreign/national coordinates that Rama
plots in his criticism.
In addition, ventriloquism can be extended as a useful way of conceiving Latin
American literary criticism and its relation to French-Anglo-American theory. If debates
about the authenticity of forms of cultural production that utilize borrowed frameworks or
imported technologies often determine the region’s cultural criticism (with
transculturation one intervention in this debate), then the question of the legitimacy of
applying frameworks from dominant currents of Anglo-American and French literary
theories provides yet another arena for this debate to play out. As literary critic Debra
Castillo cautions, Latin Americanists must avoid an imperialistic approach by
foregrounding the breadth of cultural circulation and the specificity of the object studied
(33). Although the generalized opinion of Latin American criticism warns against blind
appropriation of metropolitan theory and insists on an independent approach suited to the
historical and sociocultural specificity of Latin America, metropolitan institutions and
theoretical structures have played a significant role in the development of a Latin
American feminist tradition (Mederios-Lichem 51). Jean Franco identifies how
metropolitan theory, particularly through the coinciding circulation of deconstruction,
semiotics and Marxist theories, contributed to the re-evaluation of Latin American
literature through a reassessment of the determining influences of cultural institutions
(“Feminista” 41). Furthermore, the material support of the North American academia,
notably in the many instances of exile during the period of the Cold War, has meant that
the Latin American feminist critic necessarily navigates multiple institutional and
theoretical spheres. Rather than locating (much less producing) an indigenous theory
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unblemished by the metropole as a mode of anti-imperialist practice, the immense
heterogeneity of the field must be appreciated. Gayatri Spivak deconstructively opposes
both cosmopolitanist and nativist essentialisms because they foreclose thinking the
heterogeneity of experience; the intellectual is caught granting to the oppressed either the
expressive subjectivity she criticizes or instead total unrepresentability (“Worlds” 209).
She suggests a methodology that avoids searching for a woman’s identity but rather
speculates about a woman’s discourse while grounded in necessarily provisional and
particular conceptions of woman. This analysis requires an understanding of history that
engages with theory as well as the stakes of institutional forms of knowledge production.
Critically sensitive to accounts or truth claims based on privileged (politically interested)
figurations, Spivak compels us to think both the structure or means of production of
cultural explanation and the heterogeneity of (embodied) experience (“Critique” 147).
An engagement with the discourse of woman in the region underscores the
significance of French theory in Latin America. Despite warning against blind
appropriation of feminist theory, Castro-Klarén’s opposes a fixed, constant and visible
feminine identity by drawing on Kristeva and Irigaray. Hers is a search for a place from
which to speak in interaction with the inherited patterns of (Western) thought and within
a historical context (“Novelness” xx). This turn to French theory is one that Spivak
understands within a larger economy of theoretical and political exchange; in fact, Spivak
claims that French theorists engaged with non-Western discourses because of their own
questioning of Western metaphysics and the sovereignty of the subject which they related
to the structure of capital (“Worlds” 136). If French feminism had been consigned to a
subset of area and language studies in the United States and had been reduced and
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articulated to mainstream Marxist (i.e., Althusser and Lacan) theory in the United
Kingdom to explain the constitution of the subject, then French feminist theory in Latin
America is taken up in order to trace a specifically feminine discourse that understands
the constitution of woman as object and locates the woman as subject in “speaking
otherwise” (“Worlds” 141). The figure of ventriloquism then functions as a way both to
speak otherwise in the intertextual space of a masculinist and imperialist ideology and
deconstruct the metaphysics of identity (Guerra “Silencios” 77). This ostensible tangent
into French feminist theory compels us to return to psychoanalytic feminist film theory in
order to both locate it within an Anglo-American tradition and delineate how a
historically-specific feminine discourse informed by particular embodied experiences
might broaden our understanding of feminist film theory. I will attempt to suggest some
directions for this type of inquiry through an exploration of comedy, body genres, and the
voice.
Women, Comically Speaking
Psychoanalytic feminist film theory appropriates processes of identification in
order to develop a unique female spectating position within a framework undergirded by
a Sausurrean theory of language that valorizes distance and removal. Psychoanalytic
feminist theory mobilizes Lacanian psychoanalysis to understand how Saussurean
linguistics is articulated to the problematic of sexual difference. Assuming Irigarayan
self-presence and proximity as the conditions of feminine specificity within this rigid
structural understanding of language necessarily locates the female spectator’s desire in
kind of narcissism, consigns the woman to the body and forecloses the possibility of
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discursive agency (“Masquerade” 78-79). Silverman extends this critique into the realm
of representation and the function of the voice. The embodied voice-over and
synchronized female removes spatial distance and temporal protection. Figuring the
voice-over and the disavowing operations of the gendered soundtrack, she claims that
embodiment strips the voice of “enunciatory pretense” (“Acoustic” 53). I will
demonstrate how the assumptions about subjectivity and feminine difference posited by
psychoanalytic feminist film theory necessarily position woman as “unfunny” and
necessarily constructs comedy as a phallocentric mode of signification.
As Steve Neale recapitulates, the tripartite structure of the joke in Freud is the
structure of desire itself: featuring language, a speaking subject, an other (an absent
object of desire), and an Other (an interlocutor whose presence and reaction are crucial to
the status of speech and speaker), with pleasure and aggression as effects of their
interrelations (30). The comic, on the other hand, involves two persons: the comic and the
laugher. The laugher identifies with the comic in order to affirm difference in a
narcissistic-aggressive movement (Neale 32). The joke and the comic are differently
oriented structures with different functions: The joke has a structure of address, the comic
has a structure of observation (Neale 33). Neale ultimately situates comedy as a mode of
signification sharing aspects of both the tripartite joke structure and the binary comic
structure. Comedy shares the linguistic dimension of the joke as well as the structures of
intersubjectivity of the comic. Neale argues that the processes of identification involved
in the comic involve a narcissistically-oriented aggression and superiority that is
inherently unstable (35). The ego’s affirmation of superiority is eroded from within
because of the simultaneous identification with the inferiority of the other. Laughter is
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less an indicator of mastery then a marker of the experience of the possible loss of
difference between self and other. This instability and aggression is narrativized in the
film through the relative positions of viewer and character as well as between characters:
“The disruption of the ego's position would ultimately be contained by the narration
itself, order restored by the story precisely for the ego of the viewer” (Neale 38). The
instability of intersubjectivity in the comic’s structure of observation is defused through
entry into the joke’s structure of address. The move from comic to joke is tantamount to
an entry into language, both producing an interlocutor whose laughter will secure the ego
and absenting the observed comic object and site of unstable identification.
If the structure of the joke is a structure of address, then Doane reminds us that
woman as the absent object of desire functions as the common ground for both structures.
In attempting to explain how the exclusion of woman from enunciative agency is
narrativized in Hollywood cinema, Doane turns to Freud’s speculation on the joke in her
discussion of a 1948 photograph by Robert Doisneau, “Un regard oblique”
(“Masquerade” 84). Despite the prominence of a woman looking at an unseen image
within the photograph, the title and composition of the photograph indicate that the site of
scopophilic power is defined by the masculine axis of vision along the (oblique) margins
of the frame. The pleasure derived from the humorous photograph is produced through a
triangulated joke structure — the man, the nude, the spectator — that frames, contains
and negates the female. In this photograph, the joke is linked to scopophilia, relying on
the depiction of sexual exposure and the oblique act of seeing and desiring. Doane
extends this connection in order to map the mechanics of the joke onto the mechanics of
the cinematic apparatus. Not only is the woman the butt of the joke, necessarily absent in
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order to ensure humorous signification and the masculinization of the spectator, but in
order to get the joke, the woman spectator must either adopt a masochistic position of
over-identification or divest herself of femininity and assume a masculine subject
position. The woman within the joke structure — as within classical cinema, configured
as homologous modes of address within a structural and psychoanalytic framework — is
destined to be excluded. Within a framework undergirded by sexual difference as a
prerequisite for subjection, woman cannot be funny less because of culturally specific
problematics (Walker 7, 9), then because of the position they occupy within a
phallogocentric economy. Arguing within and against this psychoanalytic framework in
the late 1980s, Tania Modleski argues against Doane, claiming that a woman can “get” or
read the joke even if she does not enjoy the joke; moreover, other pleasures (e.g., that of
analysis) are available to her (“Blackmail” 310). Doane’s response cautions against the
conceptual slippage between “getting” and reading or comprehending: “You may
understand [the joke’s] mechanisms but you will never get it” (“Reconsidered” 50). She
locates the pleasure of getting the joke in timing, privileging induced affect in addition to
comprehension. “Getting” is an act of reception for Doane and a critical act for Modleski.
In the former, reception is a function of proximity and (being) positioned; in the latter,
reading is a function of distance and temporal removal. In comedy, these restricted
possibilities available to the woman spectator — masochistic over-identification or
identification with the masculine position — are figured as equivocating between the
comic and the joke, between laughter directed at an identifiable presence and an absent
object of desire. Linda Williams provides a rejoinder to psychoanalytic feminist film
theory from within the Anglo-American academy, noting that theories that locate
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spectatorship in positions of spatial distance and temporal removal to the text objectify
and instantiate a mind/body split: “Despite its focus on the visual pleasures of cinema,
psychoanalytic film theory's preoccupation with the visual 'senses at a distance' has
perpetuated this mind/body dualism by privileging the disembodied, centered gaze at an
absent object over the embodied, decentered sensations of present observers”
(“Corporealized” 15). The pursuit of a female spectating position within this structural
framework necessarily produces restricted avenues for locating female spectatorship and
conceiving of feminine desire governed by a limited understanding of sexual difference.
An alignment of the feminine and the comic might suggest another avenue
through which to conceive of feminine spectatorship. Interestingly, Doane describes the
experience of “getting” the (sexist) joke as an experience of exstasis, the outcome of an
organization of physical investment colluding with ideological ordering of the sexual
(“Reconsidered” 50). “Getting” the joke is both an experience of proximity and
simultaneity and exstasis and distance. The identification with the comic is ostensibly a
precondition for the joke, so that laughing at the joke comes from finding oneself
becoming other, suggesting perhaps the possibility of a type of subjectivity that
transcends an abstract subject-object dichotomy. In inscribing these moments within a
classical realist text, this strain of Anglo-American film theory defuses these moments of
“getting,” where laughter is an indicator of the loss of difference between self and other,
and prescribes an anti-realist, avant-garde film practice. This prescribed poetics assumes
that the classical realist text attempts to disavow the operations of the signifier and the
foreclosure the real. If we recast realism in a critical mode less as a naturalistic
transparent representation or an expanded representational field than as an
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epistemological process and vehicle for historical self-awareness, then these moments of
“getting,” which introduce a discontinuity in subjectivity, need not be always already
defused. Instead, they produce mediated and historicized moments of apprehension and
contribute towards an understanding of comedy as a critically realist mode. Classical
cinema aspires to effect an atemporal subject except in the case of comedy. These
moments of “getting” function as moments of deterritorialization that challenge the
imaginary plenitude of the viewing subject. Tellingly, comedy provides exceptions to the
rules of synchronization that ensure the disavowal of discursive impotency (“Acoustic”
47). Although Silverman cautions that these comic violations are necessarily temporary
and merely reinforce disavowal, she also locates the possibilities of female authorial
enunciation within the classic film text in “isolated formal and diegetic irregularities”
(“Acoustic” 209). Rather than persist in characterizing the comic as reactionary and
palliative within an efficient classic narrative economy, I find these moments of violation
as possible loci through which to conceive of (female) enunciation. Niní Marshall’s voice
becomes a site through which to consider how comedy disallows disavowal and perhaps
affords a different axis of subjectivity.
The backstage plot of Hay que educar a Niní features several self-reflexive
moments. The film opens with an establishing shot of the Cachi Mayo Films studio and
follows a young girl with a delivery for the actress Miss Rubi through a series of
dissolves that takes us from the exterior to the dressing room and finally to the closed set.
The young girl arrives on the set and asks whether Miss Rubi is on set. The camera turns
to a medium close up of a woman wrapped in a white fur, facing a camera within the
frame and lit with three-point lighting, the back light visible behind her (Figure A10).
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Our profilmic star, Niní Marshall, turns to the camera and waves, recognizing the young
girl who has just arrived. An off-screen voice commands her to remain still, adding, “Es
un primer plano y si se mueve no la puedo iluminar / It is a close up and if you move I
cannot light you.” This self-reflexive direction, referring at once to both the diegetic close
up as well as the filmic close up of our comedic star, initiates a complex series of
doublings. Subsequently, the director enters the frame, consulting with his crew on the
particulars of the shot. After agreeing that they can begin shooting, he yells: “¡Fuera la
doble! / Get rid of the double!” Recalling Miriam Hansen, the presence of the star
challenges classical apparatus debates that assumed a transcendental spectator position
constructed in a linear process of identification (“Babel and Babylon” 280). If formalist
narrative analysis relies on the unity and closure of the textual system that effect a
centripetal mode of spectatorship, then the presence of the star activates a centrifugal
process of spectatorship. The star text can cohere the narrative (identification with a
character) and scopic (the recognition of an object) registers of spectatorship. In this
instance, however, the film playfully dissociates the narrative and the scopic, comically
capitalizing on our misrecognition — that is our star but she is not the star.
Although Slverman figures these moments of double diegeticization as
consigning woman into diegetic interiority (“Acoustic” 69), the self-reflexive moments in
Marshall’s films are often figured as visual and aural punchlines. After getting fired by
the film’s director, Niní speaks to her friend about her plans while sitting in a theater box
and listening to what appears to be diegetic music. Ostensibly in a concert hall or cinema,
the two women speak in hushed tones, until the younger girl spots Niní’s fiancé. The
women get up from their seats as if exiting the box but instead of leaving through the
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curtain behind them, they step through the wall and into the neighboring box revealing
that they have been sitting in a movie set. They continue traversing the movie set until its
edge, where Arturito, her fiancé, helps them climb off with a makeshift ladder. Of course,
the music accompanying this gag is diegetic; the source of the music is within the
diegesis although we spectators have misattributed its location, forced to redraw the
boundaries of the diegetic space with this reframing. Moreover, the music is both diegetic
in relation to the filmic space (Marshall and her friend) but non-diegetic accompaniment
to the scene being filmed in the movie studio. Much like Marshall’s body becomes the
site of multiple synchronizations, the visible space of the screen becomes the site of
multiple synchronizations, therefore complicating our ability to wed the space of the
screen to the space of the diegesis. Rather than reinforcing the boundaries of the diegesis
and locating us spectators proximate to the absent site of cinematic production, the
comedic organization of vision and audition means that any particular moment can
occupy either register, and the boundaries of the filmic and diegetic are constantly
blurred.
Later in the film, we watch as Niní gets a small part in the fictional urban
melodrama El angel del puerto [The Angel of the Docks]. Niní arrives on set and
discusses her lines with the director. She asks: “¿A quién se lo digo? / To whom should I
say this?” The director instructs her to address him. A confused Niní asks the director,
“And who are you?” The outraged director exasperatedly repeats his title within the
production hierarchy. Niní’s “you,” however, refers to a fictional interlocutor within the
film’s diegesis and not the profilmic director: “Digo, ¿quién figura ser? / I mean, who are
you supposed to be?” The director suggests she imagine a street vendor. This brief
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exchange expresses a characteristic confusion in Marshall’s film between self and
fictional role(s). Marshall begins the exchange as Niní the actress only to slip into the
registers of her fictional character. The director occupies one position in the diegesis;
Marshall occupies subject positions in both the diegesis and the film-within-the-film. The
comedic misunderstandings arise from her playfully equivocating between these
positions, a conflict between a masculine hierarchy and scopic organization of space and
her intersubjective fluidity within this space. This equivocation between filmic and
diegetic is reinforced in the remainder of the sequence. An assistant director stands next
to Marshall in a medium shot filling in the details of the shot in a clapboard. Marshall
asks some final questions as the camera pushes into a close up (Figure A11). The director
yells, “Camera! “Action!” A dissolve from the clapboard to the marquee of the film’s
opening night punctuates the sequence and jumps forward in time. The close up that ends
the sequence on the soundstage is also ostensibly a close up in the film El angel del
puerto — the omniscient camera becomes diegetic camera. This instance of selfreflexivity echoes the opening of the film, adding yet another frame through which to
regard the woman in a veritable mise en abyme: the close up in the film-within-the-film
is also a diegetic close up of the fictional actress on a soundstage as well as a filmic close
up of Marshall, our comedic star.
The subsequent sequence finds Marshall in attendance at the movie’s premiere
with the producer of the morality propaganda looking to cast the actress in his next
project. The extreme interior long shot of the screen of the movie theater displays the film
within the film. The shots of the docks give way to a congregation of men around a
detective who complain about the misdeeds of a woman just off-screen. While Marshall
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explains to the producer in the theater that the woman in question is the villainess of this
melodrama, the men on the screen urge the detective to take a gander at the woman. A
low-angle long shot and point of view of the detective of El angel del puerto sights a
woman looking out onto the street: our actress makes her film debut as a melodramatic
villainess (Figure A12). Marshall watches herself on screen propositioning a man on the
street. Her brief part, which originally entailed merely glancing out a window, has been
edited into a sequence where her looking is now charged with sexual desire within a
phallic scopic economy. Her glance is inserted into an exchange of looks that positions
her as vamp; her desire is manufactured in a stroke of Kuleshov-like mischief. The fate of
her character on screen befalls the actress as well when the producer drops the actress
from his picture, even threatening to denounce her to the police for lewd conduct. The
actress insists, “A mí me dijeron que era un caramelero. A ese marinero yo ni lo conozco.
/ I was told he was a candyman. I don’t even know that sailor.” The producer appears
unable to differentiate the actress seated next to him from the role performed on screen,
but perhaps even more noteworthy is the actress’s relationship to her on-screen self.
Although we could construe this example in light of psychoanalytic feminist film theory
as an instance of narcissistic over-identification with the image, an understanding of the
body as an event, constituted and/or diffused through the affective connections between
the film and viewer, suggests perhaps a different reading. The first part of the actress’s
defense suggests that, unlike the producer, she locates herself in the scene of production,
understanding the distinction between self and fictional other. The second sentence
however, situates her in the diegesis of El angel. The actress appears to undergo a
coincident process of self-recognition and self-distance, of becoming spectator and
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becoming image. If psychoanalytic feminist film theory claims that classical cinema
produces an atemporal subject that disavows difference and the materiality of the
apparatus, the actress both affirms and denies difference, inscribing temporality into the
viewing position by articulating her relation to the image in both past and present tenses
as well as referring to the scene of production while also figuring the unity of the
diegesis. Comparable moments of self-identification occur in other self-reflexive
comedian comedies from Latin America such as Cantinflas’s ¡A volar joven!. I have
argued that in these self-reflexive instances, self-recognition forcefully organizes
subjectivity, affirms self-identity and plentitude, and produces an atemporal spectator. In
Marshall’s film, the actress’s first-person “I” is the site of multiples selves that surface
differentially in relation to the image; the temporality of representation and the
temporality of the body disallow the instantiation of discrete subject/object relations.
In order to avoid having the alignment of the comic with the feminine merely
reinstantiate arguments about woman as (self-)presence and the binary structures
undergirding theories of the cinematic apparatus, it is necessary to reconceive our
understanding of the body. A different understanding of the body can perhaps allow a
study of these moments of deterritorialization without celebrating them as sites of
feminine difference or defusing their potential in masculinist classical narrative. Claire
Colebrook maps out the different understandings of the body through different stages of
feminist philosophy: the first wave demanded equality; the second demanded difference;
the third deconstructs the sameness/difference opposition (“Corporeal” 76). Both the first
and second waves assume that the body precedes social construction: the former argues
that gender difference is imposed on equal beings, the latter finds that different bodies
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demand different forms of articulation. Within this genealogy, classical psychoanalytic
feminist theory arguably belongs in this second wave. As D.N. Rodowick suggests,
questions of spectatorship and sexual difference reached an impasse because of the
prevalence of binary structures that presuppose a division from a prior unity or totality so
that true differences are eliminated (“Difficulty” 2). These “true differences” harken to
Deleuze, who re-conceptualizes difference as change and transformation rather than in
relation to a primary idea. The third wave then critiques the appeal to a prerepresentational body as a primary idea: “Women are neither the same nor essentially
different; to decide such an argument one would have to appeal to a body from which
social representation derives or upon which representation is imposed” (“Corporeal” 76).
If we concede that the pre-representational body is effected through representation then
we could move beyond essentialist discussions and foreground how the body is
continually changing according to the connections it forms with other bodies, institutions
and discourses. In other words, rather than discuss questions of representation, a turn to
embodiment, temporality and affect entails exploring how bodies, identities, and
subjectivities are decomposed and recomposed with different encounters and according to
different kinds of connections, always becoming different from themselves rather than in
opposition to another term (Rizzo 3). This approach does not represent a yearning for a
pre-subjective plentitude that Silverman identifies in French theory (“Acoustic” 8),
instead it attempts to think of the body as an event, in terms of its becomings, connections
and activities. This project entails being attentive to the affective connections between the
film and the viewer. Comedy produces particular moments that privilege bodily
sensations that can disrupt any sense of wholeness or unity and potentially undo
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transcendent, atemporal subjectivity. If classical cinema aspires to effect an atemporal
subject, then the temporality of the body in comedy poses a challenge to its
representational logic.
The remainder of the Hay que educar a Niní finds the actress hired by these conmen in order to impersonate the long lost daughter of a wealthy businessman. The men
do not count on the businessman’s enthusiasm for developing a relationship with the
illegitimate daughter of a former lover. In order to arrange a meeting with his fabricated
daughter, they hire the actress to play the part of his daughter studying at an all-girl’s
school. The con-men have not only underestimated their mark but have also
miscalculated the girl’s age. The businessman reveals that his affair occurred nearly 15
years ago between his first and second marriages, not before his first marriage more than
two decades ago. The con-men decide to scrap the plan, but the persistent actress wants
the promised fee. The men are attempting to dissuade the businessman before a knock on
the door interrupts their conversation. The camera frames two legs in knee socks in close
up. The camera tilts up from the feet, revealing the girl’s torso and school uniform, before
pulling back to reveal the actress in costume in a medium long-shot. She approaches the
men and speaks awkwardly — at times slowly over-enunciating and overly formal, at
other times over-excitedly speaking too quickly and barely catching her breath. The
actress persuades the businessman that she is a schoolgirl half her actual age; however,
the childless businessman demands to meet the girl regularly at the boarding school. The
actress is trapped in the ruse indefinitely, playing her role until the businessman delivers
a large payout. If the earlier sequences of the film still relied on a distinction between the
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profilmic movie studio and the filmic screen, this scenario finds the discrete spheres
blurred in the everyday.
The 28 year-old actress and the 14 year-old school girl are both located in the
same body, sometimes conflicting and sometimes dovetailing, a synchronic tension that
complicates the distinction between copy and original and foregrounds the play at work
in the construction of subjectivity. This tension becomes compellingly textual in a
sequence later in the film. Having been caught smoking, the schoolgirl is sent to
detention to write lines. The camera opens with a close up of a lit cigarette, the girl
smoking at her desk while lazily writing the occasional phrase, “A feminine girl should
not smoke.” The girl gets distracted and gossips with another punished classmate. When
the school principal arrives, the school girl explains that she has been writing a letter:
“Como todas las niñas reciben y yo no, yo me estaba escribiendo a mí misma. / Since all
the girls receive them and I don’t, I was writing one to myself.” The principal reaches for
the letter to see what she has written. The schoolgirl pulls the letter out of reach, “Ah, no.
Si todavía no la recibí. / No. I haven’t received it yet” (Figure A13). In this quasideconstructive gesture, the subject and object fold onto one another. The temporal and
spatial removal that is the precondition for signification, transmission, and the
instantiation of the subject/object split is both enacted and foreclosed. As Derrida has
suggested in his discussion of the (non)arrival of the postcard, acts of transmission are
akin to acts of deconstructive reading or writing. The postcard is dependent on
circumstance so that it communicates not just its message but whatever else supplements
it. Furthermore, sending correspondence entails conceiving of the message as potential,
inserting the message within a matrix of past and future texts, original and potential
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states, and textual and hermeneutic structures (Elias 9). The idea that a message may not
arrive, in addition to the fact that a postcard seldom elicits a reciprocal response, moves
Derrida to develop the notion of sending oneself to oneself. The epistolary foregrounds
how the impossible yet necessary address to the alterity of the future addressee provides
the ground for localizing the subject; however, its iterability and dissemination gesture
toward a subject always arriving, always on the threshold between a response and its
absence (Derrida “Post Card” 29). As she writes a letter to herself, already written but not
yet received, Marshall takes herself as other, playfully suggesting the impossibility of a
transcendental subject and the difference inscribed in the pronominal, unable to capture
the referent and designating instead the failure (or attempt) of this function. The concept
of Derridean play marks a departure from “play in the world” – conceived as an activity
where a subject manipulates an object and instantiates the subject/object split – and
functions as “play of the world” (“Spurs” 69). In other words, Marshall’s continuous
taking-herself-as-other, both at the level of film narrative and star discourse, foregrounds
the otherness and incompleteness undergirding the playful process of subjectification.
Her own memoir provocatively presents a self-image containing multiple selves:
Me miro al espejo. Muy de vez en cuando. Al margen de reconocer que
soy una coqueta incorregible, más que mi rostro, veo reflejado en él los de
mis personajes, algunos arquetipos de esa sociedad que me tocó vivir y
que se conformó tras la integración de las corrientes inmigratorias. Allí
están Catita, chismosa incorregible y de lenguaje atravesado, herencia de
sus padres italianos, la Niña Jovita, soltera con esperanzas. Veo a Doña
Pola, a Frida, a Caterina, caricaturas de judíos, alemanes e italianos que
tanto hicieron por el engrandecimiento de nuestro país. Luego a Mónica,
tilinga y snob, producto de una generación posterior. Callada, con su piel
oscura, sus tristezas e inhibiciones veo a Belarmina y a Cándida, gallega
por los cuatro costados, con su capacidad de trabajo y su corazón
grandote... Allí están Gladys... el Mingo... don Cosme... Trini... Loli...
Lupe...Yo, ya no me veo. Son personajes que conocí y extraje de la
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realidad, los fijé en mis libretos, les di mi voz, mi cuerpo y hasta mis
entrañas… y ya no me pertenecen (Marshall 255)
I see myself in the mirror. Every now and then. Apart from
acknowledging that I am an incorrigible coquette, more than my face, I
see reflected those of my many characters, some archetypes of that society
in which I got to live and which came together after the integration of
migratory waves. There are Catita, the incorrigible gossip with her
mischievous language, inherited from her Italian parents; the Niña Jovita,
the hopeful old maid. I see Doña Pola, Frida, Caterina, caricatures of
Jews, Germans and Italian that did so much for the growth of our country.
Then Monica, foolish and snobby, product of an earlier generation. Quiet,
with her dark skin, her sadness and inhibitions I see Belarmina and
Cándida, Galician through and through, with her work ethic and big heart.
There are Gladys…Mingo…Don Cosme…Trini…Loli…Lupe. I don’t see
myself anymore. They are characters I met and extracted from reality,
placed in my scripts, gave them my voice, my body and even my
loins…and they no longer belong to me (Marshall 255).
Marshall’s senescent mirror stage finds her unable to (mis)recognize herself. Less
a return to imaginary plentitude, what Marshall describes is a less a process of (subject
formation as) subtraction than commutative addition, the body a site of fluid exchange
between self and others, recognizable in a flash before yielding to another, her body the
site of an assemblage. In addition, the characters no longer belong to her because they
were drawn from real life and have cultural remanence. These characters spoken into the
air are her personal postcards to/of Buenos Aires, circulating in a cultural history without
an authorized source or destination and generating meanings other than those that were
intended; however, they are also dated and deliberate, irreducibly specific to those
ostensibly addressed.
Peripatetic Travels with Catita and Cándida
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If Edgar Morin’s Les stars, available in Latin America in translation as early as
1964, argues that the value of stars lies in the fact that they tell us something about
identity formation and play a key role in helping us form our own identities, then what
then can we learn from Marshall and her particular iteration of radio and film stardom?
Marshall walked the streets armed with a tape recorder, capturing the many vernacular
speech types in the city. The gender, racial, class, and national differences of Marshall’s
personae — she developed more than twenty personalities during her career — provide
an aural map of the city and transcribe a transformation of tradition between media.
Buenos Aires then provides the epitext and her radio audiciones / auditions and film
appearances created a panorama of the city. In the case of Catita, Marshall employs a
panoply of radio comic devices: rapid-fire speech, squeaky high-pitched voice, tendency
to run words together, and uncluttered catch phrases. For Abel Posadas, Catita rejected
the standards of her social superiors; her distinctive speech patterns reflected ignorance
and were a self-conscious rejection of elite standards (127). Her first series of successful
films depicted her as a sidekick in a melodramatic love story. The films function as an
ostensible travelogue: from Buenos Aires to Paris to Montevideo and Rio De Janeiro, the
story is serialized over the three films in a mode more reminiscent of the radio novela
than the comedian comedies of the period.
After much haranguing by director Manuel Romero and Lumiton studio owner
Eduardo Susini, who both wanted to capitalize on the popularity of Catita, Marshall’s
first on-screen appearance was in the studio’s Mujeres que trabajan. The radio star was
under exclusive contract for her Catita character but had negotiated the rights to adapt the
dialogue written for her character, even receiving credit in the film’s opening title
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sequence (“diálogos de Catita adaptado por Marshall / Catita’s dialogues adapted by
Marshall”). Modeled on Gregory La Cava’s Stage Door (1937), the film saw Marshall in
a supporting role as a shopgirl in a modern department store living in a large boarding
house with a group of working women representative of various types of new Argentine
women: the communist militant, the fallen woman from the provinces, the naive girl
caught up in radionovelas and serialized romantic novels (Di Núbila 104). The main plot
follows Ana María (Mecha Ortiz), the daughter of a ruined financier, who must begin
working to earn a living after her father commits suicide. After being rejected by her
upper class friends and the women in her fiancé’s life, Ana María’s steadfast chauffer —
also Catita’s love interest in the film — helps her find room and board at the boarding
house and a job at the department store where all the girls earn their keep as store clerks.
The film has merited some critical interest in its representation of urban, working-class
women and its frank depiction of class difference: "Though the focus on women in the
workplace represented an important challenge to the dominant cinematic practice of the
day, the film's melodramatic structure and romantic plot are thoroughly conventional"
(Karush 126). Karush perhaps too quickly ascribes class solidarity to a transformed Ana
María in the service of an argument that seeks to identify polarizing class-based elements
within necessarily integrating, if not reactionary, narrative structures in a move that fails
to consider the way gender might complicate this structure. Further, the progressiveness
of the film is articulated to a heightened realism identified in an expanded
representational field, revealing an understanding of representation that assumes the
transparency of the apparatus. The class dynamics at play receive a similar
characterization by Pascual Quinziano, who notes that the loss of class is a humiliating
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lapsarian moment that initiates a process of authentic affirmation in a deliberately
moralizing register (134). Quinziano articulates this class-based opposition to a binary of
female types, the opposition between a brunette "mujer morocha" and "rubia frívola," the
latter perhaps best illustrated by the romantic comedic work of Paulina Singerman during
the same period (1938-1944). The virgin/vamp dichotomy becomes reconceived in a
nationalist context through the lens of class difference that fails to challenge the binary.
These synopses tellingly forget the working women that surround our star players. At the
level of the narrative, Ana María at first bristles under the pressures of labor, capitalizing
on her cultural capital to develop a relationship with the department store owner, a former
friend of her father’s, in order to quickly ascend within the department store hierarchy.
The only reason Ana María abandons this relationship is because of the fate of another
woman, the owner’s former secretary who is now pregnant with his child. The
unapologetically opportunistic Ana María’s proof of solidarity in the climax of the film
comes from her rejection of the wealthy suitor because of his unwillingness to recognize
the illegitimate child of another woman, not simply out of developing good work habits
and a sense of solidarity.
If the above discussions on Mujeres foreground the ideological tendency of
narrative structures as evacuating the politics from the film, then Hansen reminds us that
film meanings are not determined simply by directorial intention or a social masculinist
discourse but are also shaped by other voices, including the mode of performance, the
agency of female star in a star system, and processes of repetition and interpretation on
the part of a mass audience of women, classed and ethnic others (“Fallen” 16). Another
lens through which to consider Catita and the women of Mujeres is through the figure of
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the “New Woman.” The figure of the New Woman is part of a growing body of work on
the gendering of modernity that situates the woman’s body as site for the contradictions
of modernity (Felski 14). The woman became both a visual metonym for urban
modernity, figuring the city in its allure and illegibility, and a narrative metaphor for a
civilization in crisis (Hansen “Fallen” 15). Hansen adds that although female figures may
be a privileged fetish for masculinist stereotyping, they are also sites of ambivalence and
mobility. By conceiving of modernism in a more expansive vein, disarticulated from a
prescriptive poetics of formalist experimentation and distantiation and critical reason, she
recovers these films as modernist texts that dramatize conflicts and contradictions that
cannot be resolved with recourse to a restoration of a traditional social order. Ultimately,
these approaches differ in their conception of spectatorship: the former assumes a passive
spectator, a subject effect of the apparatus and classical narrative; the latter presupposes
an active spectator engaging with a mode of experience that allows its viewers to imagine
their own strategies of performance and sociality “to make sense of living in the
interstices of a radically unequal time and place” (“Fallen” 20).
If the women characters in Mujeres oscillate among different types and
incompatible identities, then what strategies of performance and sociality are afforded by
the comedic scene-stealing of Marshall’s Catita? As Di Núbila notes, Catita’s humor was
based on the skilled observation of a proletarian form of snobbism expressed through
telling details gleaned from everyday life and popular reality (104). Rather than debating
the relative merits of the caricature — whether Catita was a problematic stereotype or a
generously well-drawn character — which often hinge on discussion of authenticity and
authorial intention, Marshall’s characters offered a reflexive horizon for the culturally
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specific experience of modernity to a heterogeneous mass public. The department-store
setting of Mujeres que trabajan provides an obvious starting point for a discussion of the
experience of modernity and its ties to gendered subjectivity. Anne Friedberg argues for
the department store as instantiating a model of urban spectatorship for a rising female
middle class:
The department store that, like the arcade before it made use of flânerie
itself in order to sell goods, constructed fantasy worlds for itinerant
lookers. But unlike the arcade, the department store offered a protected
site for the empowered gaze of the flâneuse. Endowed with purchase
power, she was the target of consumer address…The department store
may have been, as Benjamin puts it, the flâneur's last coup, but it was the
flâneuse's first (37).
On the other hand, Tom Gunning credits the department store — “a primal form
of urban spectacle” — with the decline of the flâneur and the ascent of the gawker
(“Kaleidoscope” 31). Both Benjaminian models of urban spectatorship, the flâneurnarrator’s independence from and insight into the scenes witnessed becomes
compromised by the absorption of the gawker, whose lack of intellectual mastery and
over-identification with the crowd produce him as essentially passive viewer
(“Kaleidoscope” 29). Gunning acknowledges the problematic position of women within
these available models but seems to argue against Friedberg in articulating the female
shopper with the absorption constitutive of the gawker. In Gunning’s estimation, the
shopgirl and the prostitute are promised a similar space within a rigidly phallic scopic
economy: the site of a complicated “play of revelation and concealment that constitutes
the visual terrain of the modern city” (“Kaleidoscope” 43). Gunning seems to
reinstantiate problematically the woman as cipher yet more productively suggests that her
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absorbed/embodied spectatorship constitutes the city. The presence of Catita as shopgirl
and scene stealer suggests that we can trace a particular (comedic) mode of constituting
the city. In fact, the etymological relation Diana Niebylski identifies between travesura
[prank, mischief] and travesía [crossing] or atravesar [to cross], all related to the Latin
“transversare” which arrives in the English through the Germanic variant “thwart,”
suggests that the comedic must be conceived as spatial practice, as constituting a
transversal space, producing athwart to conceived spaces (9). When Catita steals scenes
she thwarts the scene as both unit of narrative organization as well as the visual terrain of
the conceived city.
Marshall’s follow up to Mujeres sees her Catita take on a leading role in Divorcio
en Montevideo (Manuel Romero, 1939). In the film, Catita and her friend, Adriana, are
manicurists in Buenos Aires. The women work together while listening to radio soap
operas and sharing their thoughts on the latest serialized romance literature, Romance de
juventud, a fictional narrative about a stenographer who magically finds love, wealth and
happiness. In the film narrative, a young wealthy man, Claudio, is in love with a selfproclaimed “modern woman,” Dora, who takes advantage of the man’s advances, making
him jealous in order to extort more affection and gifts. His misogynist friend, Goyena,
recommends that he finally rid himself of the machinations of Dora. During a routine
manicure, they devise a plan to have Claudio marry and quickly divorce another girl in
order to make Dora jealous and collect his inheritance. Claudio proposes to Adriana, his
manicurist, and the girl accepts in order to pay for an operation for her sick father.
Claudio remains in love with Dora and despite Adriana’s best efforts, he abandons the
poor girl. Adriana refuses payment, noting that she has been compensated with some
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instants of illusion more valuable than money. After Dora proves less than faithful,
Claudio realizes his affection for Adriana and reunites with the girl. Goyena
begrudgingly admits he has grown fond of Catita, and the two also end the picture
coupled. Despite Karush’s claims that Marshall’s casting as lead defuses her subversive
potential to steal the scene (128), the film presents two features both related to spatial
practice: first, as the film title suggests, the construction of the visual terrain of the
(foreign) city gets figured in the mobility of the comedic female characters; second, the
film is the first of a serialized trilogy, a cinematic feuilleton that functions as a veritable
travelogue.
Divorcio’s narrative begins in Buenos Aires, follows the honeymooning fake
couple across the Atlantic to Paris and ends in Montevideo. The film’s climax is set in
Montevideo, the land of the expedited divorce. The title card over the cityscape
announces our (and our characters’) arrival to the city, followed by a series of extreme
long shots of landmarks of the city accompanied by non-diegetic music (Figure A14).
The succession of representational spaces metonymically constitutes the city. Our women
characters arrive on a boat, framed in a medium long shot in front of a rear projected
view of the port in Montevideo. The use of rear projection to insert our women characters
into diverse locales is similarly deployed during the Parisian honeymoon. After an
establishing montage full of dissolving views of the landmarks of Paris, Claudio
abandons Adriana and goes to London. Catita accompanies the girl through the streets of
the City of Lights. After a stint at the Louvre, which Catita describes as a flea market full
of “old things and broken statues,” the two embark on a bus tour. Framed together in a
long shot atop a two-story tour bus, the women marvel as the city passes by behind them,
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flattened in rear projection. Unable to understand French, Catita looks confused as
Adriana translates their guide’s observations. Passing La Madeleine, Adriana translates:
“It’s a very old church.” Catita scoffs: “Qué va a ser antigua, mija. No estás viendo que
se la copiaron de la catedral de nosotros / How old can it be? Can’t you see they copied
our Cathedral?” Returning to Lefebvre, where space is not an abstract thing in itself but
imbricated with the concept of production and inseparable from forces of labor which
shape it, these monuments function as representational spaces formed by social activity
— space as lived through images and symbols, described and passively experienced. The
monument carries an emotional or religious significance that makes the space intelligible.
Representational spaces are opposed in his framework to both representations of space
and spatial practice. The planner’s blueprint makes space intelligible in an entirely
different mode, presuming a position from which the world can be imaged. Spatial
practice produces space slowly; perceived space is gradually deciphered and appropriated
(“Production” 38). The subject’s situation (in its both temporal and spatial meanings)
becomes a function of relating perceived, lived and conceived space. These spaces cohere
through the operations of a code accessible to those who use and produce space within
their lived experience. If space is brought into conjunction through social practice, then
the tourist cannot grasp the social relationships inhering in space because they bear a
different temporality and different social practice (“Production” 137). Catita as tourist in
Paris is unable to situate herself in space. Rather than describe her spatial practice as
fragmenting space, which would presuppose space as a passive receptacle and reproduce
embedded social relationships (“Production” 89), she playfully deciphers the space
according to a different code.
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Marshall produces a transversal Paris, shot through with an inversion of the
relations of dependence. Later on during the bus tour, the obelisk is visible in rear
projection (Figure A15). Catita glowers: “Pero no te dije. ¡Qué copiones son estos
franceses! Hasta el obelisco se lo copiaron…Las calles son iguales, las fortunas, las
inteligencias. Eso sí, en Buenos Aires no cualquiera le sabe el francés. En ves aquí hasta
las criaturas lo hablan a corrido. / Didn’t I tell you? These French are copycats! They
even copied our obelisk…The streets are the same, the wealth, the intelligence. Except in
Buenos Aires not just anyone knows French, whereas here even the children can speak it
fluently.” The city of Paris is produced atop a map of Buenos Aires in Divorcio. Of
course, historically, the Haussmannisation of Paris and modernization of the medieval
city served as a model for the comparable modernization of Buenos Aires during the finde-siècle period preceding Argentina’s centennial. In his discussion of the lettered city,
Angel Rama articulates this process of urban planning to dependency theory, adding that
this representation of space meant creating cities for (neo)colonial administration and
economic exploitation and imposing an ill-fitting conceived space over a space produced
differently, a function of different embedded social relationships (“Lettered” 4). If the
European urban narrative found agricultural development gradually constituting an urban
pole where market and communication organized, then Latin America witnessed the
founding of the colonial city strategically located in the hopes of eventual agricultural
development. When Rama describes the Latin American city as an unreal city detached
from the needs of the milieu, what he highlights is the way that conceived space is at
odds with lived and perceived space (“Lettered” 16). This fragmentation of social space
(conceived against lived and perceived space) defines the experience of modernity for
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Lefebvre; the production of abstract space, particularly in the periphery, meant to
perpetuate power and the cultural and socio-economic structure this power guaranteed.
The solution then is not to localize in or fragment pre-existing space but to spatialize a
social activity and appropriate rhythms, to constitute a spatial temporal unit and affirm a
right to the city through an appropriation of rhythms (“Writing” 237). Catita’s spatial
practice is not a mere reversal that merely reinstantiates the copy as derivative of the
original. The landmarks do not mark this concrete space but rather another, so that
perceived space is articulated to a different lived space. When Marshall jokes that the
goalkeepers in France must have terribly long arms to tend the goal/arco of the soccer
club Triunfo upon seeing the Arc de Triomphe, she restores the body in space over and
against abstract space. She articulates the contradictions of space and therefore articulates
the contradictions of uneven social relations. She uncovers embedded social relations of
dependency in the production of space in the context of Argentine modernity (and
perhaps less directly commenting on colonialist social relations undergirding the
production of space in Paris given the Egyptian origins of the Luxor Obelisk). By
locating Buenos Aires as origin and center, she underscores the inversion of the European
urban narrative that determined the design of Latin American cities and rearticulated the
social relations therein embedded.
Buenos Aires gets produced differently than Paris in Divorcio. The women
characters’ arrival is presented similarly to the Montevideo sections through a series of
extreme long shots of the dock and panoramic vistas of the cityscape. Noticeably absent
in this Buenos Aires are the landmarks associated with the city. The code already
accessible and the space already intelligible mean that a comparable restoration of the
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body happens differently at home. The concluding sequence of the film, where Claudio
searches desperately for Adriana in the city, presents the search for a body in the city that
forces our characters and us spectators to make sense of the city differently. The first
strategy devised by the male characters finds them sending out a search party for the
manicurist in every salon in the city. A series of canted exterior long shots of several
barber shops and hair salons is alternated with the occasional interior shot of the men
grabbing at any woman, turning her around and forcing her to reveal herself for visual
inspection. The diagonal wipes and frantic sound effects punctuate the search sequence.
Unable to find Adriana, the men resort to the police who methodically search for the girl.
The epistemophilic tendencies of the camera converge with the investigation of the police
and a spatial practice that privileges treating space as abstract thing, to be carved out,
allotted and scrutinized. The final attempt to search for Adriana finds Claudio recalling
the women’s fascination with radionovelas as well as their distracted listening to the
radio while working. Claudio buys up advertising time in order to broadcast his search.
The women are found when space is considered as lived.
Divocio was followed by two sequels, Casamiento en Buenos Aires [Marriage in
Buenos Aires] (Manuel Romero, 1940) and Luna de miel en Rio [Honeymoon in Rio]
(Manuel Romero, 1941). Marshall’s early Catita films narrate the romantic travails of our
porteña heroines in serialized form across Latin American urban spaces. Unlike other
comedian comedies that situate the comedian’s character in new but homologous generic
scenarios, these early films are heavily serialized. The characters and intrigues from the
first film carry over into the subsequent films. Catita and Goyena’s marriage in the
second film and their honeymoon in the third, provide the organizing narrative events;
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however, Dora, Adriana and Claudio’s love triangle also persists. These early Catita films
not only use the radio as narrative device and borrow the radio persona of our female star,
but also organize the narrative in the tradition of the radionovela and feuilleton. This
tradition of feminine serialized popular culture is introduced in the opening beats of
Divorcio when Catita encourages Adriana to accept Claudio’s proposition. She
understands the situation through the lens of the feuilleton: “Qué coincidencia. Lo mismo,
lo mismo que la novela que estoy leyendo. Resulta que el amigo bueno, que viene a ser él
[Claudio] está enamorado, y entonces el amigo sirvengüenza, que viene a ser usted
[Goyena]. / What a coincidence. The same thing is happening in the novel I’m reading.
The good friend, that would be him [Claudio] is in love, and then the scoundrel friend,
that would be you [Goyena].” Janice Radway has used Nancy Chodorow’s
psychoanalytic object-relations theory of gendered development to argue that popular
romance fiction provides a paradigm for entry into female personhood and that women
read these romances as an act of resistance to the patriarchal family within which they are
positioned as wives and mothers (96, 138). More significantly, Tania Modleski has
discussed the serialized romance narrative as a narrative form that locates pleasure not in
hermeneutic closure or a return to order but in continuous disorder and the anticipation of
an ending: “the drama of perepetia [sic] without anagnorisis” (“Soap Opera” 17).
Peripeteia in Latin American Spanish [peripecia] refers both to a reversal of fortune or
dramatic turn as well as in more colloquial usage to the roundabout maneuvers used to
arrive at a destination or resolution. The serial romantic fiction complicates the economic,
restorative, progressive classical (masculinist) narrative.
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The revelation, recognition and possession of truth that resolves dramatic action is
always already deferred, and the pleasure derived from waiting entails a different
experience of time and, by extension, a different production of space. Given her claim
that films are territorial in the sense that stories take place and constitute an itinerary that
makes boundaries and transforms place into space, Giuliana Bruno understands the serial
narrative form of popular culture in relation to Benjamin, finding a homology between
the flâneur and the feuilleton writer as comparably mapping the city (“Streetwalking”
177, 189). Peripeteia designates not merely dramatic turns but ambulatory changes in
direction. Marshall’s early Catita films function as travelogue. Placed within the
experience of travel, her films must be understood through a mobile theory of
spectatorship that finds pleasure other than that of mastery and opens onto the collective,
nomadic and historical dimensions of spectatorship through a kinetic embodiment of
visuality ("Streetwalking" 37-38). Their seriality produced a constellation or panorama,
an itinerary without destination that offered a descriptive and social landscape through a
mode of watching with a public dimension. If Catita as suburban porteña provided an
experience of travel for the Argentine spectator, the Galician Cándida provides an inverse
experience that represented the assimilation of the immigrant into the national social
fabric (Quinziano 146). What the spatial turn underscores is that this process is
necessarily one that occurs through the production of space. The integration of the
immigrant into the nation entails the dissolution of old social relations (and the
concomitant social space produced) and the generation of new relations. In other words,
the process of national assimilation follows the spatial logic of modernity whereby social
practice is disarticulated from a homogenizing abstract space. The body, both social and
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individual, is shattered. If we simply characterize the Galician maid as a problematic
stereotype and underscore the resolution of the film narrative as complicit in a nationalist
project, we shut down lines of inquiry that find in the Galician’s anachronism and
peripeteia — her being out of time and her being roundabout — a restoration of the body
and the production of differential space.
The character’s introduction in the eponymous film happens on a boat arriving
from Spain to the docks of the port city. An officer from the boat framed in a medium
shot glances up, asking someone off screen what she is doing out of place and whether
she is going to show her papers to immigration. A voice-off responds in the instantly
recognizable heavily-accented Spanish of the radio character. The camera pans to an
empty ladder, pushing into the rungs in expectation. Cándida’s limbs descend slowly into
frame until finally we see the character on screen (Figure A16). Cándida approaches the
customs officials who ask her for her name, before cutting her off: “Cándida Lourello
Ramallada. Lourello on my father’s side. Ramalla—.” Her provenance of utmost
importance, she then proceeds to answer where she is from: “De Beluso de Arriba. Que
viene a quedar pasando la ría adjunto al muelle de pescadores, cerca de carga Lauredo
perto costado de pasando la casa del Tío Antonio sob la cueva de cabras, en frente de la
ferrería de la Tía Presentación, ahí está mi casa. ¿Sabe la que le digo? / From Beluso de
Arriba. Which comes to be passing the river next to the fisherman’s dock close to the
Lauredo ship just next to passing the house of Tío Antonio under the cave of goats, in
front of the foundry of the Tía Presentación, there is my house. Do you know which one
I’m talking about?” Rather than rely on an address designating a location in abstract
space, she situates herself through a chain of representational spaces, mapping a concrete
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space through peripecias. Her arrival to the city is presented through a panning, point-ofview extreme long shot of the Buenos Aires cityscape; the Galician declaring: “Virgen
Santis! Hay qué grande parece. / Mother of God! It seems so big!”
Cándida is given room and board in the “Immigrant’s Hotel” where she interacts
with immigrants from other European locations. As she falls asleep, the camera frames
her in a tight close-up before superimposing a montage of scenes from Galicia
accompanied by blaring bagpipes intoning the rhythms of her homeland (Figure A17).
The exterior establishing shot of her farm dissolves to a long shot of Cándida tending to
her animals, before twice dissolving into a panning medium long shot and medium closeup of the woman stroking her pigs. This dream sequence is markedly different from the
immediately following sequence where Candida tries to navigate the sidewalks of Buenos
Aires. The fade to black opens onto a piercing whistle and a moving car that reveals
Cándida in medium long shot trying to cross the street. The actress is in fact standing in
front of a rear projected long shot of a city street, her shadow visibly cast onto the screen.
The hubbub of street traffic overwhelms the character as she turns to see the rearprojected scene. A hard cut to a close up of a colectivo driver’s foot is followed by an
exterior on-location long shot of an oncoming colectivo. The sequence cuts to a medium
close-up of Cándida staring down the streetcar before turning to a long shot that frames
the actress jumping out of the way of the streetcar now projected on the screen facing the
actress. A slight jump cut finds the actress jumping once again as the projected streetcar,
now rear-projected in close up, whizzes by the performer. A close up of Cándida finds
the Galician staring confusedly in all directions, still inserted into a street scene through
rear projection, before superimposing several close ups of drivers’ feet, steering wheels
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and blaring horns, and on-location footage of oncoming streetcars, trucks and
automobiles. The camera pushes into a blurred extreme close-up of Cándida, witness to
this onslaught of vehicular modernization (Figure A18). The sound effects swell on the
sound track as the camera begins framing the passing traffic through successive canted
angles that pan with the motorcycles, cars, and trucks traversing the city streets.
After the circuitous directions to her house, the film presents Galicia as imagined
space through a series of panning shots that establish the scene and situate the character.
Subsequently, an identical cinematic device yields a very different space. No longer
opening onto an establishing shot and gradually dissolving into the details of the scene in
conventions that preserve the unity of space and time for an ostensibly omniscient
vantage, the sequence on the streets of Buenos Aires registers nearly as an exercise in
European high modernist montage. The average shot length decreases, the editing
elaborates and condenses time, the successive close-up shots yield no position of optical
(and epistemological) mastery. The rhyming, superimposed close up of Cándida suggests
that this fragmented and piecemeal experience of space corresponds with the Galician’s
own experience. The sequences suggest a mode of spatial practice for the character that
in the former cohered with lived space and in the latter is unable to make space
intelligible. For us spectators, the former relies on continuity editing as code that makes
the space intelligible by producing it as abstract space or space as passive receptacle; the
embodiment of visuality in the latter finds mastery impossible and disarticulates abstract
space from lived and perceived space. The film never quite succeeds in integrating
Cándida into the national fabric: the anachronism and peripecia persists across the
subsequent Cándida films. The fish-out-of-water humor emerges from decohering
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perceived space and conceived space, from disallowing our habitual appropriation and
abstraction of diegetic (and theatrical) space.
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PART TWO:
CRITICAL REALISM
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CHAPTER THREE
LUIS SANDRINI’S STUTTER, EARLY ARGENTINE FILM COMEDY
AND THE REPRESENTABILITY OF TIME
The limited discussion of comedy in Latin American film histories is often
articulated to what Mexican cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis calls the socializing function
of cinema (Monsiváis “All the People” 149). In order to consider comedy as comedy and
not as inadequate realism or a derivation of melodrama, I engage with a general study of
comedy as a broader cultural form with a longstanding history, in tension with and
transformed by realism. Much like Linda Williams’s revision of melodrama, this project
requires less a semantic decoding than an exploration of the the bodily effects of the
genre (“Revised” 42). In other words, I discuss the comedic films not in terms of
representation but rather in terms of embodiment. Humor in its cultural specificity and its
bodily effects functions as a cultural practice of embodiment: to laugh is to express a
cultural knowledge through the body and to participate in a collective body in a modality
that precludes hermeneutics or narrative inscription.
For the purposes of this chapter, I will consider the case of Argentina in the 1930s
and the early comedian comedies of Luis Sandrini, a Chaplinesque everyman (Karush
118). Luis Sandrini was an accomplished circus performer and stage actor who became
one of the most popular Argentine movie stars of the 1930s after appearing in the first
Argentine sound feature-length film, ¡Tango! (Luis Moglia Barth, 1933). The
modernization of an increasingly urban and industrial Argentina and the effect of
modernity on the experience of time and space provide a backdrop for my discussion of
the films of this national comedic icon. I will discuss his films as staging a confrontation
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with standardized time both in terms of the reification of time in modernity and the
standardization of film through the registration gate. More specifically, Sandrini’s films
rely on the comedian’s stutter – his stutter literally disrupts the temporal continuum that
film records. This chapter uses the stutter heuristically, figuring it within film texts,
material film practice and spectatorial experience. Ultimately, I hope to argue for comedy
as a critically realist mode that in producing an embodied experience that mediates
modernity, affords an awareness of historicity.
In his successful film Bartolo tenía una flauta (Antonio Botta, 1939), Luis
Sandrini plays the role of struggling musician Bartolo Carlomagno who performs as
flautist in an itinerant band. During one of his gigs in the outskirts of the city, he
encounters a rich and spoiled young girl, Mecha Toledo, who mocks and humiliates the
gullible musician. Bartolo composes songs in order to make ends meet and provide for
his ward. One of his songs is plagiarized, and Bartolo earns a large settlement in court.
His song becomes distributed successfully as a vinyl record and circulates widely on the
radio. His earnings allow for some social mobility and his eventual engagement to his
sweetheart, a nurse who helped care for his sick ward. In an early sequence, after
returning to Buenos Aires with his newly-orphaned ward and a stray dog, Sandrini
composes his song by candlelight in the middle of the night in a sequence riddled with
discontinuities in sound (i.e., the use of non-level sound in the same shot) and image.
This brief sequence features many instances of stuttering. The fluid camera frames
Sandrini from behind in a medium close up. Sandrini composes his song by candlelight in
the middle of the night. As he transcribes the lyrics to his song, the camera pans across
the darkened small apartment. His young ward sleeps in Sandrini’s bed; the blinds cast
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shadows against the wall into the shape of an beatific beam of light. The camera
continues to pan and settles on a long shot of the dog’s house, a miniaturized version of
the estate where he met Mecha Ortiz in the beginning of the film. A pulsing light from
the flashing signs and advertisements on the street intermittently flashes onto the house as
Sandrini repeats the chorus of his song: “El amor se acaba / Love ends.” The camera
tracks out into a long shot of the interior that finds Sandrini again, now in profile and
suggestively positioned under the beam of light. An awkward cut to a medium shot finds
Sandrini noting that his candle is down to its nub — “y la vela también [se acaba] / and
the candlelight also [ends].” The cut appears disjunctive because the earlier shot featured
a yawning Sandrini still finishing the lyric and lit by the pulsing light while the
subsequent shot has Sandrini quickly beginning the lyric and the pulsing light “turning
on” to light Sandrini. His candle down to its nub, Sandrini blows out the candle and
laments that he will never be able to finish his song. Suddenly, the pulsing light from
advertisements floods into the room, and Sandrini looks up: “Después quién dice que la
publicidad no sirve para nada? / Who says that advertisements are useless?” (Figure
A19). The pulsing light shines, and Sandrini furiously returns to his composition. He
rushes through his lyrics before the light turns off and quips: “se acabó el amor / Love
ended.” His ward wakes up, and Sandrini assures him that every time the advertisement
returns, he composes a verse, adding: “Claro que el valse escrito así a cachito va a
parecer tartamudo. / Of course, the waltz written like this in fits and starts is going to
seem to stutter.” Sandrini scolds the child and reminds him to go to bed. The child
apologizes: “No te enojés, Bartolo. / Don’t be upset, Bartolo.” The child’s response has a
lot of reverberant qualities that were missing in the early part of the same shot, suggesting
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that the earlier bit of dialogue was a function of a different microphone setup, most likely
from the earlier medium shot. From the representation of the stutter as an effect of
modern urban experience to the disjunctive editing and disjunctive sound mixing in the
sequence, the figure of the stutter encompasses a wider range of film practices pertaining
to comedy in general. In order to reconsider narrative structure and realistic
representation through an affective perspective, I begin by situating comedy and Sandrini
historically before discussing (1) the stutter of the performer, in order to consider how
equivocation reveals the sensuous and non-sensuous dimensions of language; (2) the
stutter of the soundtrack, in order to expand this equivocation into other signifying
operations of the film and to consider how the films present an ostensible material history
of peripheral production, and finally (3) the stutter of the image, in order to discuss the
experience of humorous non-coincidence as critically realist.
The Comedian Stutters
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 grew 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 (Getino 40).
The growth of national cinema is often credited to the market presence of Hollywood
films and the uses of popular culture as a mode of product differentiation, often
neglecting the determining effects of sound-on-film technologies. Film comedies have
often been excluded in these national origin stories despite their status as an object of
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popular culture and, more importantly, their coincident emergence with the transition to
sound. The coincidence of sound film technologies, national industrial development and
comedic film practice, however, would suggest that comedy is worth revisiting in order
to re-assess the region’s film histories.
Criticism from the 1930s lamented the popular appeal of the genre usually
considered as lowbrow working-class fare (Karush 82). Contemporary criticism isn’t any
kinder to these films, describing them as reactionary for providing through their farcical
narratives of upward mobility an imagined (if temporary) solution to the ambivalent
tendencies underpinning populist rhetoric (Karush 123). A contemporary return to
comedy must avoid over-relying on narrative content, star texts, and cultural signifiers —
criteria mobilized then (and now) in the production of a representative national canon. By
discussing these comedies in terms of embodiment and experience rather than mere
representation, I argue that they provide an awareness of historicity that affords a
dynamic conception of history.
In order to move away from mere representation and the models of identification
articulated to this approach, I will refer to Bergson’s essay on laughter as a key text in
humor studies to discuss how the stutter – as literal physical performance, figurative
formal device and metaphor for cinematic spectatorship – allows us to discuss these films
as staging a confrontation with standardized time. This understanding of time departs
from Bergson’s canonic views on laughter and la mécanisation de la vie (102).
Bergson’s treatise is usually understood in terms of the incommensurability of the
mechanic and the natural. In film studies, Chaplin’s Modern Times provides a useful
reference point that Garret Stewart calls the “quintessential Bergsonian comedy” because
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of the artificial mechanization of the human body (299). The mechanic and the natural,
however, not only refer to actual machines and bodies on screen but also to temporal
relations. Through the lens of Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution, the mechanic
indicates habitual behavior and a relationship to the absent past; the natural is understood
as the perceived present that interrupts this force of habit. Laughter relies on the
recognition of habit and habit out-of-place, articulating a new relation to the world that
forces an awareness of the possibilities existing in the world. The comic spirit is a way of
being-in-the-world that privileges “practical, intimate acquaintance” as opposed to
instrumentalizing abstraction, a relation to the world that affords fleeting moments of
lucidity – throwing light on the workings of the inhabited world.
When Sandrini stutters, we get an embodied manifestation of this temporal
conflict, the conflict between what-should-be and what-is. In order to discuss the stutter
of the performer, let us consider a significant exchange from Luis Sandrini’s second
collaboration with Luis Moglia Barth from 1937, La casa de Quirós. Argentine film
historian Domingo di Núbila cites the film as a lapsarian moment for Argentina cinema
despite the local character afforded by Sandrini; a first symptom of hybridity given its
origins in the Spanish sainete, a popular genre that drew on the traditions of the género
chico, the zarzuela and the grotesque (Di Núbila 95). The film provides an interesting
case study to consider the relations of cultural exchange between Europe and Latin
America at the level of production and adaptation as well as the economic and industrial
exchanges with the United States. The film was adapted from a theatrical piece by the
Spanish playwright Carlos Arnices who collaborated on the adapted scenario. The
original sainete from 1915 tells the story of a condescending Asturian nobleman whose
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only daughter falls for a decent boy without title. The Argentine film ships the bankrupt
nobleman overseas to Argentina, where remnants of his family promise immediate
accommodation given the man’s lineage. The nobleman, Don Gil (José Olarra), proves to
be an abrasive boor who constantly laments his provincial surroundings and emphatically
foregrounds his noble distinction. His only daughter, Sol (Alicia Vignoli), falls in love
with Casimiro, Luis Sandrini’s character, the son of a local merchant Valeriano (Miguel
Gómez Bao), who is rejected by Don Gil despite the fact that the merchant family
subsidizes the Quirós estate. The film follows Sandrini’s escalating attempts to court Sol.
Quirós abounds in examples of syncopated play with proper names. In a sequence
at Valeriano’s general store, a distracted Sandrini is unable to listen to his father’s
directions or the customers’ orders. The father confronts the comedian, idly mooning
over the store’s merchandise: “¿En qué piensas? / What are you thinking about?” The
comedian replies with a stutter: “En la - En mi - En fa.” The father asserts, “En Sol.”
What begins as a stutter, a seeming evasion of the question at hand, becomes a musical
scale. “En la / In the” signals the beginning of a response that uses “la” as a determinate
article. Sandrini falters and appears to begin anew: “En mi / In my” marks a second
attempt to respond using “mi / mí” as either a possessive or object pronoun. Sandrini
apparently stumbles again, restarting with “En fa.” This third moment can be construed
as the beginning of yet another response, with “fa” the first syllable to whatever Sandrini
will claim is on his mind; however, it also ostensibly functions as a punchline, forcing us
to reread the fits and starts and apparent reticence of our character as musical notes.
Sandrini’s stutter occasions this moment of signifying equivocation, “fa” is both a
discrete word with a concrete meaning as well as a meaningless phoneme that can only
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gesture toward a closure in signification to come. The father’s response (“En Sol”)
functions as a tag to the joke. Sol is a homonym, designating in this instance both the
musical note as well as the proper name of his love object. The interruption and
elaboration of enunciative time results in a synchronous moment of homonymous
equivocation. In the above joke structure, we can note how multiple temporalities are
generated by the stutter, and a circular and linear temporality coexist: what appears to be
repetition or a temporal loop proves to be a sequence of musical notes only to culminate
with a beat that functions as both the closure of the temporal loop and the continuation of
a sequence, marked perhaps by Sandrini’s response, “Sí,” both the Spanish word for yes
and yet another musical note.
The humor in this exchange derives from the familiar play with proper names,
(mis)understood not as bearing a context-dependent indexical relation to the person.
Although the humor registers as a failure of signification whereby the index becomes
symbol, Sandrini does not suspend nomination. Instead, Sandrini generates new meaning
from inserting a gap into the word. By treating the word as mere sign and obviating its
rhematic indexicality, Sandrini stutter-steps to unbind the syllables and suggest new
latent meanings — at both indexical and symbolic registers. If Cantinflas’s film
narratives were driven by frustrated attempts to make the connection between signifier
and signified ontological — to locate, Sandrini’s film narratives are driven by the desire
to parse out the conventional from the ontological connections in signification — to
precise. In other words, Cantinflas sidesteps to generate a chains of indices always
already pointing elsewhere (and ultimately nowhere); Sandrini pauses so that the same
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sign can point to multiple elsewheres. His sidestepping is less circuitous dance than it is
syncopated rhythm.
The temporal elasticity of the stutter is perhaps literally figured in the
protagonist’s name, Casimiro. The son’s name, Casimiro, is abridged to coin a nickname,
Casi. Of course, “casi” is also the word for “almost” or “nearly” in Spanish. Sandrini’s
character becomes suggestively yoked to an adverb and adjective that refers to
incompleteness and lack. In a later sequence when Sandrini attempts to open a wooden
box containing the Quirós’s belongings, Sandrini stubs his thumb with a hammer. A
concerned Sol asks: “¿Se lastimó mucho, Casi? / Did you hurt yourself, Casi?” Sandrini
stutters while holding onto his aching hand: “Casi- Casi nada. / Almost nothing.” “Casi”
perhaps self-reflexively refers to the stutter as such. The comedian’s words, the joke’s
punchline, and the sequence’s resolution are casi or nearly at hand. The stutter is not
merely a pathology of modernity; it also suggests a strategy for working within and
between competing temporal registers.
In one of Sandrini’s earliest successes, Riachuelo (Luis Moglia Barth, 1934), we
get another example of this stutter, now employed more strategically. Produced by
Argentina Sono Film, the film performed well at the box office, earning over one million
pesos over the course of the year. The film follows Sandrini as Berretín, a character he
had developed in his theatrical career as well as his first films ¡Tango! and Los tres
berretines (Enrique Susini, 1933). By way of plot summary, Sandrini’s character is a
pickpocket who lives in a tugboat in the working class docks. Berretín robs a fellow poor
person and upon returning the much-needed money, falls for the young girl that will
compel him to leave his life of crime behind and become an honest worker. The film ends
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with Berretín catching the neighborhood gangster — and his romantic rival — in the act
of robbing the shipyard where he works. Berretín delivers him to the police and weds the
young girl. An early example from the film shows Berretín at work as a pickpocket in the
neighborhood after a series of brief comedic exchanges. Sandrini is simply walking about
his neighborhood framed straight on a in a medium shot. After unsuccessfully flirting
with a woman by touching her shoulder to see if he was dreaming her into being, a
heavy-set sailor enters into the frame and startles Berretín. The sailor asks for directions
in German, although the performer simply recites a string of German proper nouns. After
Sandrini instructs. the sailor takes off his hat and thanks our comedic hero. Sandrini
rearranges his tie in the man’s leaning bald head before the sailor exits in the direction
Sandrini has indicated. The German says, “Auf Wiedersehen,” and Sandrini replies,
“¿Pa’ qué me voy a recordar? / “Why should I remember?” These two brief exchanges
highlight how the vision of our comedic hero functions differently. His flirtatious
exchange betrays an epistemological uncertainty in mere observation and the need to
supplement vision with touch; his playful gag with the sailor’s bald head, a vision that
imagines reflection. Our hero’s point of view is compromised, failing to see what is there
and seeing what is not, relying on sensuous registers to navigate space and produce
knowledge.
The camera tracks and follows Sandrini as he encounters yet another German
asking for directions. After a throwaway remark that this one must be fresh off the boat,
Sandrini gives a series of instructions, eventually advising the man to reach the end of the
dock and throw himself into the water. Sandrini bemusedly comments, “Cómo está
esto…Ya no se puede salir a la calle sin intrépete [sic] / Look at the state of things…no
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you can’t go out without an intrepeter [sic].” The camera pans with Sandrini still on
screen before awkwardly cutting to Sandrini entering a medium-long shot from offscreen. Finally, Sandrini encounters a well-dressed Italian immigrant who comments on
the weather. Sandrini engages and gestures toward his umbrella, adding that this is not an
umbrella: “Ésto no es un paraguas. Es un para- para- para cachar [hiles].” Sandrini asks
the man for a light and an insert close-up shot shows Berretín pickpocketing the man’s
pocket watch and dropping it into the folds of his umbrella (Figure A20). Sandrini thanks
the man in a medium close up before walking off frame to the man’s “Arrivederci.”
Berretín walks off in a long shot as the Italian immigrant realizes he has been robbed.
This brief sequence arguably represents the changing demographics of the capital city
affected by internal and external migration, highlighting the difficulty to communicate in
an increasingly cosmopolitan metropolis. Sandrini attempts to make himself understood
by suggestively modifying his cadence, parroting his interlocutors’ words and
gesticulating wildly. His final conversation with the Italian immigrant, on the other hand,
presents a Sandrini strategically making himself misunderstood, using his stutter to
obfuscate his speech. Sandrini steals the immigrant’s pocket watch, a theft of time that
literalizes Sandrini’s confrontation with and co-optation of reified time. Sandrini’s stutter
is not only the physical embodiment of disparate temporal relations – the speaker is both
ahead and behind of his thoughts, his body’s rigidity disrupts the flow of speech – but
also points to unforeseen meanings that can arise as a function of this rigidity: paraguas
or umbrella becomes para- or the preposition “for” or “in order to.” The stutter then
becomes a figure through which to apprehend the non-instrumental potentialities laden
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within the everyday, which run counter to the instrumental structuring principles of
narrative construction.
The Soundtrack Stutters
The stutter can be usefully expanded beyond the diegetic stutter of the comedian’s
speech to include a wider array of devices that arrest continuity and undermine the
semantic operations of the film. Sandrini’s early films illustrate how this stutter becomes
inscribed in the film. These early films offer several examples of suggestive
discontinuities, jump cuts that fracture continuous space and time in a mode that is not
necessarily disorienting but arguably forces the viewer to re-place herself in moving
reality. In Don Quijote del Altillo (Manuel Romero, 1936), Sandrini continues building
his persona of an idle if well-intentioned and unattractive if decent young man living
hand to mouth. His character, Eusebio, is unemployed and three months’ late on the rent
on his altillo, an attic studio apartment. By way of plot synopsis, Eusebio falls for his
new neighbor, Urbana (Nuri Montsé), a young receptionist at a local textile factory who
begins a romantic affair with her boss, Martínez (Eduardo Sandrini, the comedian’s
brother). Eusebio discovers that Martínez is married and bribes the boss into providing
him a job and staying away from Urbana. Eusebio eventually proves himself worthy of
his new position and winds up engaged to Urbana.
Quijote presents discontinuities in the image — ostensible ‘errors’ in relation to
the (by then) established classical Hollywood conventions of continuity editing. In the
opening minutes of the film, Sandrini stands atop the stairs in front of his attic apartment
in a medium-long shot, frustratingly trying to one up Urbana’s mischievous young
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brother by convincing the boy to play at descending the stairs backwards. The boy claims
not to understand, and, as Sandrini begins to demonstrate, the boy pushes his sister’s
suitor down the stairs. Sandrini falls out of frame. The extreme long shot of the steep
stairs captures the comedian violently tumbling down in a supposed continuous shot;
however, the body does not fall in continuous motion. The continuous shot is in fact a
stuttering trick shot composed of three separate shots of the comedian. Sandrini does
three separate somersaults in three separate shots edited to appear continuous. The seams
of the trick shot are exposed, however, and Sandrini jerks from one step to the next; his
body — like his speech — unable to simulate continuity.
One of the formal elements that significantly contributes to the illusion of
continuity in this sequence is the film sound: The tumbling body in the image is
accompanied by labored sound effects that loop continuously despite the discontinuous
trick shot. Listening more closely to the soundtrack, however, reveals the seams of this
aural trick and forces us to consider the stutter not simply in the image track but also in
terms of the component elements of the soundtrack and the resultant sound-image
relations. This film is particularly suited to a discussion of sound practices as its
producers and sound engineers were the sound technicians Alfredo y Fernando Murúa,
founders of the record and film company Sociedad Impresora de Discos Electrofónicos
(SIDE), also responsible for the early film successes of Libertad Lamarque. Murúa had
developed a native sound-on-disc technology used in the earliest sound film experiments
of the late 1920s and early 1930s in association with the production company Ariel (Di
Núbila 44). Quijote was among the first feature-length films Murúa would produce and
oversee using a variable-density optical soundtrack; as such, the film presents an example
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of an early soundtrack produced using still-unsystematized sound practices with
unresolved relations between the sound and image and changing interrelations between
the component soundtrack elements (i.e., dialogue, music, sound effects).
As Rick Altman notes, earlier sound practices oftentimes exhibited an all-ornothing logic for music and effects “wholly dependent on earlier sound practices,”
suggesting that each of these functions as an autonomous and uncoordinated track
(“Inventing” 347). Sound studies traces the process of maturation as well as the resultant
ideological operations of the classical Hollywood soundtrack. It regards the
normalization of particular sound practices in a historical and cultural context rather than
interpreting the distinct elements in the soundtrack as supplements to the operations of
the image. Rather than considering sound-to-sound connections as ancillary elements of
the sound film, Altman advocates an understanding of film sound that analyzes
relationships among soundtrack components (i.e., dialogue, music, sound effects). Film
sound is not a monolithic univocal unit; it must be understood as a “site of conflict…a
theater of war” (“Inventing” 343). His is a historical argument that seeks to understand
the history of film sound through evolving inter-component and intra-soundtrack
relationships – a “mise-en-bande analysis [that] concentrates on the interaction among the
various components making up the soundtrack” (“Inventing” 341).
Quijote displays many of the characteristics of the early sound film’s mise-enbande. Early traditions in sound practices as well as technological limitations contributed
to this proto-soundtrack. In the aforementioned sequence, the long shot at the top of the
stairs features synchronized dialogue that ends with the child screaming in delight as the
comedian falls out of frame. The child’s cry jarringly stops once the tumbling sound
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effects begin and the image cuts to the subsequent extreme long shot. Once Sandrini
lands at the bottom of the stairs, the image cuts to a medium shot. Despite having finished
his tumbling pass, the sound effects continue for a few additional beats and are just as
suddenly removed from the soundtrack with the arrival of new dialogue. The dialogue
and sound effects function as autonomous sound elements each driven by their own
logics. These early sound practices allow us to understand the stutter not simply as
temporal discontinuity but as a conflict between component parts, a visible and audible
manifestation of ongoing negotiations of technological and industrial practices, narrative
and formal devices, and temporal and spatial registers.
Sound studies foregrounds how the soundtrack is neither an innocent recording of
ostensibly natural sounds nor technologically neutral; in fact, it traces the maturation of
the soundtrack as a function of the technical labor and professional commitments
particular to classical Hollywood. If there is significant social and cultural work that
determines the contours and standard practices of Hollywood film sound, then the
development of sound practices in a different cultural and historical context necessarily
occurs along different axes. In the Argentine (and by extension Latin American) context,
we must also consider how this process occurs later in the decade and necessarily
includes the negotiations and exchanges between local and foreign sound practices and
technologies. The normalization of film practices through both foreign and local as well
as intra-national and regional competitors becomes inscribed and manifest in the stutter
of the film soundtrack.
Quijote provides additional examples of “early sound-cinema’s characteristic
jurisdictional conflict” and its interdependence on evolving narrative conventions
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(“Inventing” 351). In a subsequent scene when Martínez gets his warehouse workers to
threaten Sandrini, the comedian uses his well-trained dog to outsmart his foes. Sitting on
the sidewalk outside the factory in a silent extreme long shot, Sandrini waits for Urbana
to leave work. Three large men approach the comedian, entering into a tighter long shot.
The image cut precedes the arrival of ambient sound by several beats. The men stand
looming over Sandrini and threaten the comedian, the volume levels of their speaking
voices relatively high to ensure intelligibility. Sandrini’s dog responds to the threat,
barking three times while framed in close up. The bark unsettles for several reasons.
First, the barking is not synchronized to the dog’s mouth. Further, as the scene pulls out
to a long shot, with the earlier shot’s sound setup for capturing dialogue, the dog bark has
dropped out of the soundtrack. Finally, there is an audible difference in the space
occupied by the dialogue and the dog bark. The former’s reverb lends a sense of space
missing from the flattened and non-synchronized dog bark.
Not only does the film display a conflict between soundtrack elements but also
within an ostensibly autonomous component; the dialogue, music and sound effects are
similarly not monolithic. The dog bark again provides a useful sound effect, now in
conflict not with narratively consequential or humorous dialogue but with other sound
effects. Later in the film during their romantic affair, Urbana and her boss exit the factory
together in a silent extreme long shot while Sandrini looks on disconsolately. The camera
moves into a long shot of the car from the point of view of the comedian. The soundtrack
remains silent until the slamming doors of the car are accompanied by shuddering sound
effects. A subsequent cut to a final long shot shows the comedian’s dog barking and
following the accelerating car. The dog barks are more carefully synchronized to the
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dog’s mouth but are awkwardly intercut with the sound effects of the moving car. The
sound effects are not layered but alternated on the sound track, producing a syncopated
and stuttering effect.
The all-or-nothing logic of this paradigmatic early soundtrack has significant
effects on the relationship between image and sound tracks. Throughout the film, the
intensity and volume levels of live recorded sound, particularly dialogue and ambient
sounds, change from shot to shot: close-miked during close ups and medium shots but
softer and reverberant in long shots. In the very first scene with synchronized dialogue,
Sandrini’s landlady knocks at his door demanding his rent. The long shot inside the
apartment faintly picks up the disheveled comedian’s dialogue and the muffled
reproaches of the landlady speaking from behind a closed door. Subsequent alternating
medium shots of Sandrini and the landlady on either side of the door are significantly
louder. The landlady’s threats become muffled once again when the image cuts to a close
up of the dog inside the apartment. If the stuttering sound effects were a function of an
alternating sound mixing logic, then these variations in the volume levels and
intelligibility of the dialogue evince sound recording and editing practices that match
camera and microphone position (i.e., scale matching) — an attempt to emulate natural
perception.
Returning to Rick Altman’s argument, the narrative-oriented conventions of
Hollywood classical sound treatment established by the mid-1930s were the outcome of a
period of crisis and negotiation, informed by the sound conventions of radio, theater and
silent cinema as well as the technological changes of the period (“Deep-Focus” 17).
Moreover, in the spirit of his semantic and syntactic understanding of film genre, Altman
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identifies a productive tension between narrative and discursive systems in radio sound
conventions that undergird the development of the film soundtrack. The discursive
manipulation of sound to organize flow and address audiences exists in tension with
narratively motivated sounds that contribute to dramatic action and performance. This
synchronic tension results in the eventual appearance of discursively-oriented narrative
sounds such as loud punctuating sound events or the musical reinforcement of narratively
significant information. In the context of early sound cinema, Altman traces the
development of sound realism not as the accurate recording of an actual spatial situation
but as learned sound configurations that acquire meaning through interrelationships
(“Deep Focus” 10). Sound realism in the classical Hollywood film soundtrack entails the
occlusion of discursive manipulation by making the operations of the apparatus appear
narratively motivated. Much like the critique of the classical realist text in apparatus
theory, Altman encourages us to consider the heterogeneity of the film soundtrack and
the ways it does not simply reinforce image perception but makes spectators conscious
that they are also auditors (“Deep Focus” 3).
The use of level sound to create spatial unity was as significant to Hollywood
sound film as were continuity editing conventions. Hollywood sound realism featured
instances of scale-matching in order to provide verisimilitude and evoke space, but the
discursive manipulation of sound for narratively important material meant scalemismatching, level-volume dialogue, non-diegetic music use, and the reduction of spatial
characteristics. During a subsequent sequence, the continuous scale-matching and the
stuttering logic of alternation on the soundtrack compromises the sequence’s temporal
continuity. Rather than an unsophisticated sound track, however, we should consider how
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this logic produces a different mode of narration that reinforces the comic operations of
the film. In a brief sequence from the same film, Sandrini sullenly mopes in the frame,
having been rejected by Urbana, until in a flash he rushes into his studio apartment and
retrieves his dog and a gun. The melodramatic music swells as he rushes in and out of
shots. The brassy music stops to allow for a hostile exchange of words between the
landlady and Sandrini. Sandrini pulls out his gun and threatens the woman who drops
some plates while stumbling to the ground. The sequence cuts to a close up of the broken
plates on the ground without providing any subsequent shots of the woman, the gun or
Sandrini. Has Sandrini harmed the meddlesome landlady? Has she simply fainted upon
seeing the gun? The clash of the plates as a sound event operates both as a synchronous
effect as well as an ostensible symbolic substitute for the gunshot. If the cinema
experience relies on a sound hermeneutic whereby the sound and image mutually
reinforce their dissimulation through there apparent redundancy, then this sequence
undermines this process by positing a sound with both an indexical and symbolic relation
to the image (“Ventriloquism” 74). The production of the diegesis relies on the
spectators’ rerouting from apparatus to diegesis; however, the collision of sound effect as
transcription and sound convention produce a fracturing moment. The comedic
polysemic play of the comedian, capitalizing on animating the semiotic possibilities of
the word, finds a counterpart in the soundtrack, capitalizing on the synchronic tension of
narrative and discursive systems as well as indexical and symbolic signifying sound
practices.
After his encounter with the landlady, the film shows Sandrini in an extreme long
shot in a forest. The relationship of this space to the previous space is a mystery only
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accentuated by the lack of both a sound bridge and natural diegetic sound effects in the
green space. Sandrini ambles across the frame before the sequence cuts to another
extreme long shot of a broad street and a waiting car. A man enters the frame, racing to
the car. Despite the suggested continuity in screen direction, the two men are not
identical; furthermore, the spaces seem entirely unrelated, particularly an effect of the
continued silence on the sound track. The camera moves in to a medium long shot of the
parked car with two goons peering off frame left as a third man approaches the car to
announce the arrival of someone else. The sequence becomes an exercise in parallel
editing, but these two plot lines remains separate or unrelated without non-diegetic sound
cues or diegetic sound relations between the narrative spaces; in other words, without the
discursive manipulation of sound to produce diegetic coherence, the simultaneity
suggested by the parallel editing becomes compromised by the scale-matching that
separates space into discrete areas.
The film cuts to Sandrini in long shot as he pulls out his gun. Sandrini brings the
gun to his head but hesitates, encouraging his pet to leave him to die (Figure A21). The
dog stays at the comedian’s side. The comedian gesticulates with the gun, its barrel
pointing toward then away from the comedian. The sequence returns to the road in an
extreme long shot. Another car approaches to the left of the waiting vehicle; the goons
approach the moving car. The camera reveals a young woman behind the steering wheel
ambushed by the would-be kidnappers (Figure A22). The woman faces the camera with
audible dialogue; the men face away from camera, the dialogue less than intelligible. The
woman screams for help, “¡Socorro! / Help!” We leave this space to return to Sandrini,
still standing with his gun pressed to his temple. Sandrini pulls the trigger, but the gun
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fails to shoot. Sandrini opens the gun chamber before trying several more times – the
audible click of the defective gun the only sound in this narrative space. The sequence
returns to the road, with the woman still crying as she struggles against the might of the
two kidnappers. The camera returns to Sandrini, still pulling the trigger ineffectually. The
sound track finally cedes as the barely audible pleas of the woman are faintly heard in the
distance. Sandrini, unaware of the screams, throws the gun to the ground in frustration.
The gun discharges, and the gunshot motivates a cut to a medium shot of the woman as
she is released by her startled kidnappers. We return to Sandrini in long shot, staring at
his gun in annoyance. Suddenly, the woman’s screams are perfectly audible, and Sandrini
turns in their direction. The two plot lines come together as Sandrini enters another silent
extreme long shot of the road (Figure A23). The woman runs toward him and is framed
in a medium shot with her erstwhile savior. The resolution of this parallel sequence
suggests that Sandrini was a few feet away from the kidnapping, just off the road. The
discontinuous spatial relations, reinforced by the absent discursive sound markers, are
less significant here than the way the sound resolves these relations for comedic effect.
The faint pleas of the woman just before the crucial gunshot suggest that the separation of
the spaces is less a function of faulty sound mixing than of orchestrating a gag. Both plot
lines proceed unaware of the other until a loud punctuating event brings the two spaces
together on the sound track well before they are brought together on the screen. The
errant gunshot functions as a double misdirection: the bullet misses the comedian’s
temple, and the kidnappers mistake the bullet’s direction. This sequence displays the
operations of a discursive sound system in tension with a narrative system, but one less
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invested in the narrative-oriented conventions of Hollywood classical sound treatment
(“Deep-Focus” 7).
The misapprehension of the sound event allows the comedian to rescue the
damsel in distress, but perhaps also figures the sound film spectator’s constitutive
misapprehension. Altman proposes that sound cinema uses the illusion of synchronized
sound and image to conceal the work of production and technology — the apparatus
attempts to convince us that the sound is coming from the narrative world rather than a
loudspeaker (“Ventriloquism” 69). Much like the spectator rerouting the source of the
sound from the ventriloquist to its dummy, the kidnappers misattribute the source of the
gunshot. If this process of rerouting that binds sound and image is an ideological effect
that secures the unity of the subject (“Ventriloquism” 71), then this gag suggests that the
comedic play with the sound hermeneutic self-reflexively undermines the unity of the
subject.
A similar example of comedic polysemic play that capitalizes on the synchronic
tension of narrative and discursive systems as well as indexical and symbolic signifying
sound practices can be found in a later film for Lumiton, El cañonero de Giles (Manuel
Romero, 1937). The comedian stars as simple man from the provincial town of Giles who
is contracted by a soccer club in the city of Buenos Aires. Having left his sweetheart
Anita (Luisa Vehil) back home with her militaristic father, Sandrini finds himself lured
by a barrage of escalating distractions that ultimately lead to the decline in his play on the
pitch. From liquor and seduction to kidnapping and bribery, the opposing team will stop
at nothing to compromise Sandrini’s character. The film functions as a useful document
of the many forms of popular culture of the period: from the actual soccer team, Club
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Atlético Rio de la Plata, to the milonguera matahari that seduces our hero, and from radio
broadcasting to aerial photography of the rapidly growing capital city. The fish-out-ofwater plot allows Argentine critics to discuss the film as an example of the growing
thematic conflict between old and new and tradition and modernity, here figured along
the lines of the country and the city (R. Williams 289, Quinziano 139). Although this
discussion of narrative content is useful in considering the sociocultural context of these
comedies, Quinziano seems to neglect the concurrent transition to sound as a significant
development in the industrial emergence and critical production of a national cinema.
This transition to sound not only afforded the possibility of listening to vernacular speech
but also resulted in changes to local and international industrial contexts, in technological
developments that affected film production, and in challenges to film form and
convention. In other words, our concern here is not just that lunfardo – i.e., an Argentine
dialect originating at the turn of the twentieth century in the lower classes of Buenos
Aires – is on the soundtrack, but rather in exploring whether the use of lunfardo has an
effect on film form and genre structures.
In Cañonero, the footballer carries a secret: He is only an effective striker when
he hears a dog barking. A traumatic childhood encounter has made his legs summon
enormous strength when confronted with a barking dog. The humor derives in part from
the fish-out-of-water conceit, but, more importantly, the premise of the film hinges on a
sound event. The sporting sequences feature extreme high angle long shots of the match
in progress — television soccer coverage avant la lettre — as well as panning long shots
of the pitch and occasional insert close ups of the players and the soccer ball. The action
is occasionally interrupted by shots of the spectating crowd, sometimes a handheld shot
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panning over the crowd on location and other times a closer medium shot of characters
commenting on the action. A sound loop of crowd noise accompanies all these shots, its
volume only slightly decreased for the necessary sideline commentary of the film’s
characters. After a cut away to a long shot of a barking dog, its bark is added to the crowd
noise. Despite being directed presumably at Sandrini on the pitch, the dog bark is
perfectly audible alongside the crowd noise, regardless of the shot scale. After the initial
shot of the dog clues us into the source of the sound effect, the effect continues unabated,
a loop cycled over the deafening crowd noise. Rather than exhibiting a concern for scalematching and emulating natural audition as in the comedian’s earlier sound films, the
effect quickly becomes a narrative-oriented convention, both a marker that avows the
coherence of a diegetic space as well as a narratively-motivated sound. In fact, the effect
returns in subsequent montages of further matches and violent encounters without
showing dogs on the image track. The move toward a soundtrack laden with symbolic
cues, less tethered to the image track, camera position and the preservation of natural
audition, follows the model of Hollywood classical sound treatment established by the
mid-1930s (“Deep-Focus” 18). However, the humor in the film eventually comes from
the ways the physiological effect of the dog bark can be achieved without a concurrent
attention-getting sound on the soundtrack. For example, the opposing team’s trainer, the
entrenador Wao, approaches Sandrini to bribe him into deliberately throwing the game.
His name, an onomatopoeia in Spanish for a dog bark, becomes another trigger for
Sandrini’s violent legs. The comedian misrecognizes sounds, and therefore the image
functions as a false dummy to the ventriloquizing sound.
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The Body Stutters
We are a long way removed from discussing film comedy merely in terms of
narrative content and cultural signifiers. These types of analysis tend to assume that
audiences identified with the characterization of Sandrini as a lazy berretín (i.e., an
amiable yet idle member of the Argentine popular classes) — a perfunctory model of
class-based identification — without considering how comedy functions as a body genre
that registers its effects on the bodies of spectators. As Linda Williams notes, in the case
of comedy, the audience does not mimic the sensations experienced by the clown –
identification is not necessarily a function of sameness (“Film Bodies” 4). Sandrini’s
stutter is not just his shtick on screen but, borrowing from Bergson on the Quixote, also
“plays on the same chord within ourselves” (14). We follow the Quixote run after the
ideal but stumble over realities – his comic rigidity elicits our palliative laughter.
However, we also stumble ourselves, our habitual suspension of disbelief upended by
corrective reality. We watch stumbling and stumble ourselves, the film registers its
effects on our body.
Returning to Riachuelo, early film historians discuss the film and its use of
vernacular or cocoliche born in the circus of the XIX century, perpetuated in tango and
popular theater, and circulated en masse in the cinema (Pellettieri 18). The film also
features location shooting of the Riachuelo River in the busy port of Buenos Aires,
images that are understood as representing the industrial modernity of the port and the
thriving national commerce as well as the picturesque flavor of the working-class La
Boca neighborhood (Karush 80). Karush lauds this early commercial success for the
documentary representation of the shipyards and its working-class labor. When
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discussing the narrative of the film, however, Karush hesitates: Despite the moral lesson
imparted through Berretín’s entry into a respectable working-class community, Sandrini’s
comic presence functions subversively because it engages audience sympathy. Sandrini’s
laziness and resistance to discipline and subjection “encourages the audience to laugh at
the notion that hard work and honesty can lead to mobility” (119). Karush’s valuable
historical project underscores the content of these films to consider the contradictory
status of these mass cultural objects: what is represented is both reactionary narrative
structure and progressive semantic content. His assessment, however, hinges on a
perfunctory model of class-based identification that imagines melodramatic narrative
structures as always already reactionary, obviating the psychoanalytically and
phenomenologically inflected models of identification that re-conceive melodrama as a
cultural mode distinct from classical realism, where multiple reading and viewing
positions are affectively produced (Gledhill 45). The feminist literature on melodrama
avoids arguing over the progressive or regressive nature of particular texts, understanding
melodrama as a broader cultural form always grounded in a strong element of realism.
Emotion is not necessarily manipulative; instead, it affords a dual recognition of how
things are and how they should be: “The pathos of melodrama becomes the pathos of the
assertion of the self in face of encroaching meaninglessness and nonentity” (Williams
“Melodrama Revisited” 78). Moreover, Karush privileges the documentary qualities of
the realistic location footage over the illusionism and theatricality of the narrative
proceedings, betraying a facile understanding of film’s subversive potential in its
reflective faculties. To characterize melodrama as excess or aberration is to concede the
dominance and normativity of the classical realist text. In order to avoid discussing
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comedic films as progressive in their realistic moments and regressive in their
melodramatic episodes, effectively constructing the comedic mode as inadequate realism,
I consider both the bodily effects of comedy as well as its ambivalent relation to realism.
Departing from an understanding of comedy as a practice of embodiment means
reconsidering narrative structure and realistic representation through an extended
discussion of the aesthetic devices and affective operations of the filmic image.
In the film, Sandrini’s character, Berretín, is a pickpocket who lives on a tugboat
in the working class docks. In an early sequence in the film, Berretín walks two women
home when neighborhood gangsters confront him and accost the women he accompanies
in the midground of a long shot of a city sidewalk. The following medium shot reframes
the confrontation from the side as the gangsters proposition the women. Both shots
feature overwhelming non-diegetic music, barely attenuated to make the synchronous
sound and dialogue intelligible in the latter shot. Sandrini defends the women and
attempts to intimidate the men. One man easily shoves Sandrini back while the leader
grabs the younger woman. The camera cuts to a long shot of a new character entering the
frame who lands several punches and single-handedly defeats the gangster. Sandrini
attempts to help the man but struggles with his umbrella in a bit of slapstick humor
(Figure A24). The gangsters retreating, the camera shows a close up of our romantic
hero, Remanso (Alfredo Camiña), before pulling back to a medium shot of our group.
In this sequence, the early shots use synchronized sound; however, once the fight
begins, the long shot occurs without synchronized sound and with a slower frame rate
that seems to accelerate the action. We bear witness to continuous action over
discontinuous frame rates, ostensibly due to the sound technologies and practices of the
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period. The fisticuffs were filmed without synchronized sound and without the
standardized frame rates required by sound recording. More remarkably, however, is that
Sandrini’s movements, due in large part to his slapstick struggle with the umbrella,
remain closer to the frame rate of the earlier shots. Sandrini appears slower than his
surroundings, still beholden to a standardized frame rate. Sandrini literally stumbles
between shots – both at the level of the narrative brawl and the material frame rate.
Michel Chion argues that sound temporalized the image by normalizing film projection
speed; further, the addition of diegetic sound imposed a sense of real time to the
proceedings on screen (17). If diegetic and synched sound inscribed the image in a rigid
linearized time, then Sandrini’s stumble recovers the elasticity of time, revealing the
multiple temporalities enfolded in everyday experience. The stutter stages a confrontation
with standardized time not simply in the comedian’s linguistic performance but also in
the materiality of the film. Despite the vectorization of time on screen (through the
collusion of synchronous sound and classical narrative) and off screen (the forward
march of technological progress and industrial modernity through the codification of
sound practices and the circulation of sound recording and projection technologies),
Sandrini’s films demonstrate how peripheral modernity was experienced nonsynchronously, with both the performer’s body and the spectators’ bodies caught in
material and figurative non-coincidence.
To understand the effects on the body of the film comedy, we must necessarily
engage with the changing category of experience in modernity. If the verbal stutter
defamiliarizes the word and makes us attendant to the instrumentality of our listening,
then a more expanded conception of the stutter in experiential terms can help us think
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about the comic as reifying perception and making us attendant to virtual interrelations.
We move from an instrumental mode that perceives images as associated with habit or
memory to an intuitive receptivity attune to incidental and aleatory configurations that are
necessarily provisional. This expanded conception of the stutter then points to an
engagement with standardized time that does not advocate critical distantiation but rather,
as Kracauer explains, “letting nature in and penetrating it” (“Theory” 40). The stutter,
following Miriam Hansen, affords a “mode of cognition involving sensuous, somatic, and
tactile forms of perception, a noncoercive engagement with the other that opens the self
to experience” (“One-Way” 329). The comedian’s performance foregrounds the distance
and reification imposed by the semiotic aspect of language.
A remarkable series of moments from La casa de Quirós provides an apt site
through which to consider the differences between peninsular and the continental
worldviews and theirs effects on representational regimes and the valence of history.
Among the objects the nobleman Don Gil brings from overseas is a gallery of oversized,
ornate family portraits he salvaged from his European estate. Don Gil unveils each
portrait by announcing the name, title and rank of each ancestor of the Quirós family. He
proudly notes that the only object of value he has brought from the Old World are the
“effigies” of his ancestors. The sequence plays out like a royal procession, each
nobleman’s arrival announced before the court. Don Gil points to the empty walls where
he will place one figure and then another. The camera cuts to what appears to be a pointof-view shot, a panning camera shows the paintings now hung on the wall. Don Gil’s
voice continues to announce names, and the camera follows his voice as he identifies one
person after another. After this clever temporal elision, Don Gil appears in long shot
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ordering the house servants to mind his ancestors: “Enderezad a Don Iñigo de Quirós.” /
Straighten Don Iñigo de Quirós.” For Don Gil, these effigies are monuments and a
testament to his embeddedness in history. Tellingly, he does not refer to the paintings as
representations but as the literal bodies of his ancestors. He will address the paintings as
interlocutors throughout the film in such a way that suggests that the presence of the
signified persists. Eventually, the nobleman will eventually find himself forced to sell his
paintings to provide for him and his daughter, an affirmation perhaps of a modern
Argentina where the painting functions less as monument than as commodity.
This sequence provides perhaps a paradigmatic illustration of Benjaminian
disintegration of the aura, whereby technological reproducibility affects the status of art
by eliminating the qualities accrued to the unique artwork, namely its presence,
authenticity and authority. As Miriam Hansen notes, however, the disintegration of the
aura converges with the reorganization of perception and the development of self-critical
tendencies in the institution of art (“Blue Flower” 183). The reorganization of perception
that modernity augurs manifests itself in in the “detemporalization of subjectivity”: The
reification of time has eroded the communicability of experience as memory and an
awareness of temporality (“Blue Flower” 189). Rather than imagine a nostalgic or
reactionary return to a prelapsarian sensorium, however, Benjamin understands that only
in the process of disintegration can the aura be recognized. Hansen frames Benjamin’s
larger project as a recuperation of the cinema as a medium of experience. Through an
understanding of representation that underscores experience over and above content and
semantic meaning, we can return to this sequence in Quirós. Sandrini does not so much
disavow the historical value of these portraits as he does present a different mode of
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reading, one that humorously equivocates between non-sensuous and sensuous modes of
apprehending the world.
Sandrini comments on the paintings alongside Don Gil, mocking the odd clothing,
amusing expressions and strained formality. Sandrini continuously interacts with the
paintings in a mode that suggests a different organization of the senses and a different
relationship to representation. In a later sequence, Sandrini dresses as a ghost in order to
get into the Quirós house to see Sol. His plan backfires when the household employees
form a mob to try to vanquish the ghost. Sandrini is chased around the house trying to
evade the crowd. Eventually, Sandrini grabs the sword and helmet of a relic in the
historical gallery and stands in front of a painting of a crusading Quirós who wears a
similar ensemble while standing in a desert landscape. The mob passes him by, failing to
notice the man disguised as a painting. Sandrini starts brandishing the dull blade and
knocks out one man after another. Sandrini understands the portrait as representing an
absent person, and, more importantly, is able to play with the signifier to his advantage in
order to absent himself. Ironically, it is in this moment that he becomes what he
masquerades — a ghost. We bear witness to a doubled movement that deconstructs one
sign through the instantiation of another.
Shortly thereafter, one of the household employees devises a plan to avoid being
harmed by the ghost; he dresses as a ghost in the hopes that, if spotted, the ghost will
consider him a friendly companion. The two ghosts happen upon one another and begin
to mirror one another in a mode reminiscent of the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (Leo
McCarey, 1933). The ghosts first spot one another in different medium shots, intercut in a
shot-reverse-shot pattern. One ghost raises his right arm, the other, his left. One ghost
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steps back, the other steps back as well. Each movement is accompanied by a mickeymoused sound effect, but the mirrored effect is compromised by the editing pattern that
suggests successive reactive movements rather than simultaneous mirrored movements.
Eventually, the two ghosts approach one another in a long shot and ostensibly mirror
each other's movements. Closer attention to the scene, however, reveals that an
impossible mirror is being suggested. When one ghost motions with his right arm, the
other motions with his right arm. When one raises his right leg, the other raises his right
leg. These ghosts are not mirror images because they are identical. The mirror reflects
back not identity but chirality, an opposite form (enantiomorph) disavowed in the
imagined relation between an object and its reflection. The humor derives from a failure
to acknowledge difference, from presuming the mirror image as copy rather than
simulacra, from privileging unity over difference. Once again, Sandrini’s attempt to
become a self-identical object forces an awareness of difference not subordinated to unity
(Deleuze "Difference and Repetition" 41). In both instances of Sandrini’s becomingpainting and becoming-mirror, the comedian’s performance foregrounds the distance and
reification imposed by the semiotic aspect of language and affords moments for sensuous
apprehension through the “powers of mimetic production and comprehension” (Benjamin
722).
Benjamin’s concept of mimesis represents a departure from the traditional
Platonic concept of mimesis, positing a relationship with nature that “would dissolve the
contours of the subject/object dichotomy into reciprocity and the possibility of
reconciliation” (Hansen “Blue Flower” 195). Benjamin celebrates our mimetic faculty,
the ability to perceive similarity and the concomitant compulsion to become similar.
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Much like the decline of the aura in the context of mechanical reproducibility, the
mimetic faculty wanes given the historical developments that have privileged the primacy
of language and Enlightenment rationality — a shift from the contingency of mimesis to
the rigid structure of semiosis. Benjamin’s project does not necessarily advocate a return
to “primitive” mimesis, but rather seeks avenues for the recovery of image-based,
sensuous communication in a world dominated by linguistic representations. The
recovery of the mimetic faculty does not precipitate a return to pre-signifying structures;
instead, we apprehend the world differently by figuring our historically-contingent
relationship to reality — the disjunctive temporality of reading.
What Benjamin suggests is the possibility of a different use of language “that
could mobilize the mimetic power historically concentrated in language" (Hansen “Blue
Flower” 199). Chaplin’s mimicry of technology’s fragmenting effects on the human body
provides one model of sensuous communication that gives the encounter with technology
an expression in the image world (Hansen “One Way” 332). If self-alienation is made
perceivable in the mimetic innervation of Chaplin’s movements (Hansen “Play” 26), then
Sandrini’s stutter affords a similar moment of sensuous experience in mimicking sound
technology’s fragmenting effects on the human body and voice. Sandrini’s engagement
with representation reveals a playfulness that sees in (or perhaps through) linguistic
correspondence an opportunity for mimicry that equivocates between identity and
similarity and between non-sensuous and sensuous communication, in order to make selfalienation perceivable and afford in that disjunction a moment of historical selfconsciousness.
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Peripheralizing Realism
Mimesis — in the context of a Frankfurt School informed by Bergsonism — is
not concerned with perceptual likeness between sign and reality (i.e., iconicity) but rather
material contiguity and the temporality of writing and reading (i.e., indexicality) (Hansen
“Blue Flower” 217). Realism seen through this lens — Benjamin, Kracauer, Lukács — is
not a function of the transparency of representation but rather of the mediated
presentation of a worldview. Drawing on the realist theories of Lukács and Kracauer with
an eye toward the periphery means fashioning a critical realist framework that
understands the objective as always already inflected by the subjective. From his early
criticism written in exile during the interwar period through his late literary theory
written after the failures of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Gyorgy Lukács erected an
eclectic canon of realist literary texts understood in opposition to the modernist literature
prevalent in the period. Lukács's controversial defense of realism as a literary mode is
often misunderstood as obsolete and compromised by Stalinism, particularly in light of
the 1938 Expressionism Debate: realism as mere reflection of objective reality, assuming
the transparency between aesthetic form and reality. Adorno insisted that Lukács
considered formal and sytlistic aspects of modern art to be reactionary decadence,
defending formalism against realism as the precondition for autonomous art
(“Reconciliation” 142). Paradoxically, his opponents insisted on the mimetic value of
modernism —modernism is disjointed because reality has also become disjointed —
citing montage as a paradigmatic avant-gardist reflection mechanism (Nadal-Melsió 64).
Later on, Althusser would object to the historicism of Lukács’s concept of reification,
adopting a structural language that critiqued claims of transparency as ideological effects.
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A return to Lukács helps us move beyond these earlier dismissals to recover realism as a
strategy to overcome reification, focusing on the mediation between an author and his
material condition. Moreover, his project becomes particularly useful when considered
alongside attempts to think beyond the binary traditions of metropolitan vanguardist and
defensive regionalist literatures in Latin America.
In his defense of critical realism, Lukács discusses the problems of revolutionary
writers in capitalist society caught between a valorized modernism or vanguardism and a
dogmatic socialist realism. These two opposed tendencies constitute a literary horizon of
possibilities for the European novel: on the one hand, only a modernism or vanguardism
that casts aside an embourgeoisifying realism incapable of reflecting reality; on the other,
a socialist realism that had believed itself as transcending bourgeois literary style and
found itself ossified and incapable of innovation. For Lukács, both positions produced a
monolithic concept of contemporary bourgeois literature in opposition to a misconstrued
traditional realism and supposed a problematic relationship to reality and everyday life
(“Crítico” 12).
Lukács dubs vanguardism as “bourgeois artistic therapy,” a pursuit of formal
divergence in literary technique which necessarily opposes the modern to the antiquated
and traditional (“Crítico” 18). The valorization of the new in opposition to the outdated
cannot be an adequate criterion for aesthetic value in the work of a revolutionary writer;
instead, Lukács evaluates the merits of literature based on the Weltanschauung or
worldview of the author. This worldview is the position of the author toward his vision of
reality, his estimation of the image of the world so mediated. The question of form
persists but in a less formalist sense. Realism for Lukács then is not a function of the
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transparency of representation but rather of the mediated presentation of a worldview, of
a human relation to the social world. Ultimately, Lukács attempts to recover the
sociohistorical from what he characterizes as a profoundly ahistorical vanguardism which
conceives of its characters for eternity: the individual exists essentially only for eternity,
ontologically independent of all human and social relations (“Crítico” 22). He continues,
noting that the fundamental concern of vanguardist literature is the abolition and
dissolution of reality: “The dissolution of the world and the dissolution of man are united,
mutually reinforcing. Its fundamental cause is…[man’s] transformation in a confused
succession of momentary experiences and therefore his impenetrability” (“Crítico” 30).
The contemporary moment is characterized by changes to the category of time, its
reification resulting in both the extreme subjectivism of stream-of-consciousness high
modernist literature as well as the equally problematic extreme objectivism of naturalist
depiction. For Lukács, the expression of authentic experience in high modernist literature
paradoxically accompanies an unmoored perceptual and sensorial unity. Lukács
references Bergson to explain how this paradox must be considered through the changing
category of time: “Time unmoored from the objective world transforms the interior world
into an unrecognizable empty and abstract flow, and, although it may appear paradoxical
from a formal perspective, leads to a dissolving immobility” (“Crítico” 48). Lukács’s
reception of Bergson’s metaphysics of time — the juxtaposition of subjective,
experiential duration and objective, measurable time — informs his realist project,
particularly in its presentation of the human relation to the social world.
Although Lukács faults Bergson’s idealism in his later work (a function of
Stalinist critiques of Bergson), the latter’s perceived dialectical thinking influenced
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Lukács earlier writings, particularly his reading of Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale
in The Theory of the Novel (Gabel 171 n7). As he notes in his seminal piece of literary
theory: “The greatest discrepancy between the ideal and reality is time: the process of
time as duration. The most profound and most humiliating impotence of subjectivity
consists…in the fact that it cannot resist the sluggish yet constant progress of time”
(“Theory” 121). Lukácsean realism understands the presentation of the worldview as an
epistemological process driven by the need for ontological closure against the passage of
time. Lukácsean realism conceives of the objective as always already inflected by the
subjective, in a mode akin to the phenomenological aspects of Bazinian realism identified
by Phillip Rosen or of Kracauer's realism by Miriam Hansen. The realist text does not
assume an empiricist subject that values direct perception of an object as the basis for
secure knowledge; this conception of representation, which more precisely characterizes
naturalism, would only reproduce the reification of time.
Naturalism represents an extreme objectivism mired in the detail, a technique with
no principle of selection, an absence of hierarchy. Comparing naturalism to the
operations of instant photography, Lukács faults this mode of representation as failing to
provide the critical distance to select and discern, a leveling that disallows both the
depiction of duration and transformation as well as the time of reflection (“Crítico” 65).
Naturalism represents the triumph of description over narration and the successful
negation of history. For Lukács, naturalism’s egalitarian thrust reduces all things to
objects, making them interchangeable parts to be assembled, successive still lives to be
chronologically tethered (“Narrate” 127). What Lukács reminds us is that chronology
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does not necessarily communicate relations of causality, and, in fact, interchangeability
risks negating history (“Critico” 42).
If both modernist subjectivism and naturalist objectivism reinforce the continued
polarization of time, ultimately disallowing the presence of real time and material history
by reducing everything to individual experience or interchangeable fragments, then
realist literature captures real time by negotiating these opposed modes of representation
and their concomitant conceptions of time. Realist writers allow for the subjectivization
of time but only in the interest of characterizing the present moment more precisely, an
instant of provisional unity that permits our conscious awareness of quotidian dispersion
(“Crítico” 49). Returning to Flaubert, Lukács notes that
“duration advances upon that instant and passes on, but the wealth of
duration which the instant momentarily dams and holds still in a flash of
conscious contemplation is such that it enriches even what is over and
done with…What is depicted is the total absence of any fulfillment of
meaning, yet the work attains the rich and rounded fullness of a true
totality of life” (“Theory” 126).
For Lukács, the novel is the only genre where memory occurs and where time passes,
allowing our conscious awareness of everyday sentiments that suddenly flash in the lived
instant. During this instant that stills duration, abstract and concrete possibilities — actual
and virtual registers — become evident through action, reciprocation and retrospection:
“only in reciprocal, vital and concrete action between men and their surrounding world
can there emerge from an infinity of abstract possibilities a concrete possibility that
confirms how that concrete possibility determines that man in that stage of his evolution”
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(“Crítico” 27). The realist text infuses the dramatic present by projecting events into the
past: the privileged instants of action require retrospective consideration of events and the
selection and organization of details determined by the past (“Narrate” 128). Sara NadalMelsió argues that Lukács’s theory of narrative must be understood as a theory of
Marxist history: not a sum of parts or a facile deterministic cause and effect relationship
but hypotactic interrelationships between unequal parts (70). Naturalism gets mired in
equivalent details paratactically, avoiding hierarchization or selection as subjective
operations; however, in doing so, history is obviated and everything is contemporized.
Rather than an introspective and narcissistic confrontation with the self, realism
presents a subject who confronts the becoming of the world as a stranger (“Crítico” 47).
Lukács’s individual must avoid abstraction and become a social being by entering the
collectivity of history through narrative that produces her as both subject and object of
history and knowledge. This subject/object doubleness or stranger self-consciousness
implies a view of oneself from the outside, the integration of otherness into individual
subjectivity without ceasing to be other (Nadal-Melsió 75). This self-awareness moves
beyond the modernist critique of the representational as natural, adding the relational,
ethical, and historical. The figure of the stranger as a model for encounter with the world
is similarly mobilized by Kracauer. His “camera reality” positions us viewers as strangers
in the spirit of Proust’s photographer. The success of the photo image and the film
experience is a function of “reflecting the photographer’s surrender to the experience,
sharing it with others…The surrender is not passively receptive” (Barnouw 114). Much
like Lukácsean realism and its reflection of enunciative historicity, Kracauer foregrounds
how camera reality (Wirklichkeit) reflects a composite worldview of photographer and
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observer. Photography can afford a perspective that, at its extreme, strips the captured
photograph of any associated memory images. The photograph disarticulates the image
from a commemorated ‘way,’ and the wandering stranger can link them in accidental
agglomerations that are “necessarily provisional” (“Mass Ornament” 62). Although
Kracauer will differ from Lukácsean organic totality by privileging the ephemeral
configurations afforded by reality to the photographer and spectator, the stranger
becomes a useful figure for both theorists to argue against habitual perception and
reification while championing the intersubjective mode of realist representation.
Reification, for Lukács, occurs when the subject is unable to see the lenses
through which he sees, is unable to perceive mediation as an integral part of reality.
Lukácsean realism is “not a prescriptive poetics but an epistemology of consciousness…a
theory of knowledge, a vehicle for historical self-awareness” (Nadal-Melsió 76). The
critical realist text introduces a discontinuity in subjectivity, producing a mediated and
historicized moment of apprehension that undermines the reification of subject/object
distinctions. Mediation becomes a precondition for the apprehension of reality in time.
Lukács prescribes critical realism, not socialist realism, as an antidote to decadent
vanguardism. Moreover, the revolutionary writer in bourgeois society cannot present a
post-revolutionary socialist worldview. Vanguardist formal play and naturalist leveling
betray a worldview lacking any perspective; critical realism selects and elevates the
significant in order to make it comprehensible, denouncing the immediate character of its
environment. In order to see the present as a function of history and not merely an
accumulation of equivalent details, the revolutionary writer must orient himself or herself
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toward the future while avoiding habitual associations or preconceived prejudice
(“Crítico” 77).
Dagmar Barnouw similarly invokes critical realism to describe Siegfried
Kracauer’s project beyond the narrative of nineteenth-century naturalist conventions of
verisimilitude. A brief discussion of Kracauer’s project allows us to consider the
Lukáscean model beyond the written word. Furthermore, Kracauer’s investment in the
redemptive possibilities of mass culture opens the Lukácsean project onto a public
horizon of shared experience. Kracauer’s Theory of Film attempts to discern the
particular features of film from its being founded in photographic, analog representation,
exhibiting “a marked affinity with the visible world around us” (xlix). Within cinema
studies, Kracauer’s work is situated within a tradition of classical film theory understood
as primarily concerned with questions of ontology and medium specificity. More
particularly, Kracauer’s Theory of Film is discussed in the context of postwar theories of
cinematic realism as advocating a normative ontology and naive realism (Andrew 19).
Miriam Hansen, drawing on the conceptual slippages in and the experiential thrust of his
writings on cinema, recovers the modernist inflection of Kracauer’s realism, a departure
from the nineteenth-century concepts of referential verisimilitude and formal closure
invoked by semiotic critiques of realist film theory (“Experience” 254). For Hansen,
Kracauer’s Theory is not a theory of cinematic realism but a theory of “cinema as a
sensory-perceptual matrix of experience,” drawing on the both phenomenological
postwar American context as well as the writings of the Frankfurt School (“Experience”
255). Gertrud Koch describes the contours of this matrix along three axes: a sensualist
aesthetics pivoting on the visceral faculties of the spectator, a philosophy of the real
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based on an existential ontology and a redemptive figure based on the photographic
affinities of the film medium (106).
Understanding Kracauer’s realism within the framework of a phenomenological
project means reassessing the indeterminate meanings he ascribes to physical reality.
Kracauer privileged surfaces less as pure objective reality than as a site stripped of
meaning in modernity, confronting the transcendental subject of epistemology. This nonunivocal concept of physical reality offers a materialist rejoinder to both concepts of the
transcendental subject as well as notions of pure phenomenology (Koch 12). Photography
as a language of surface affords moments that disrupt the production of transcendence;
therefore, cinematic realism is less a function of narrative and cognitive registers than of
the visceral appeal of surfaces in their reified and alienated facticity (Koch 82). Kracauer
insisted on the relational play of personal perspective and abstracted factuality,
understood less as objectively reliable then the concretion of other perspectives and
voices in physical reality (Barnouw 49). Kracauer’s realism underscores intersubjectivity:
“a kind of knowledge that is interdependent with the shaping and shading of objectivity”
(Barnouw 60). More particularly, he emphasizes less the meanings of analog
representation or the objectivity of the camera than the composite temporality of camera
reality, the capacity of the medium to enable a shared experience over time of the
concrete visible world (Barnouw 80).
Kracauer explicitly disagreed with Lukács in his Weimar essays and
correspondence, particularly with regards to the latter’s defense of a revolutionary
intellectual vanguard and the Hegelian invocation of totality (Barnouw 38). Despite these
differences, Lukács’s reappraisal of subject-object relations proved informative to
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Kracauer. This rejoinder to metaphysics provides a connecting thread; however, if
Kracauer recovers the politics of mass culture through a publicity beyond the Lukácsean
literary and partisan vanguard, then Lukács reminds us of the specificity of shifting
historical configurations. If the cinema, for Kracauer, provides a paradigmatic mode of
encountering and discovering the world in the wake of the crisis of modernity, what
Lukács brings to bear is the specificity of modernity experienced differently in the
periphery. For Lukács, the desired transition from critical realism to socialist realism
comes with the eventual arrival of socialism, a function of the differential and sociohistorically specific development of capitalism. Writing from the interwar period through
the Cold War, Lukács understands the development of capitalism and the prospect of
eventual revolution as a function of national institutions and civil society. Given the
determining influence of material reality on the development of representative formal
devices, critical realism is determined by the geographically variable evolution of
capitalism. Realism cannot be a set of imported aesthetic devices removed from everyday
life; it must be articulated to the continuity of national forms and contents. Critical
realism expresses a national character not emerging from essentialist and ahistorical folk
qualities, but “a function of the peculiar way in which each people develops due to
diverse circumstance, historically and socially” (“Crítico” 127). Critical realism, then, is
not a stable literary category or a prescribed set of formal devices: older traditions,
decadent currents and reflective tendencies are adapted to describe a changing reality.
These transitional elements and peculiar forms of expression reinforce the connections
between evolving modes of writing, foregrounding both continuities and contradictions
rather than resolving them synthetically (“Crítico” 145). A critical realist text functions as
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an index of both sociocultural reality and cultural modes of representation: its form
shaped by competing formal tendencies adequating themselves to capture particular
content. The critical realist text is invested in presenting its historicity in order to makes
us aware that depicting the present is a function of the absent past (“Crítico” 116).
Critical realism is a term with some significant currency during the postwar
period in a region self-consciously writing its history through its literature, shaped along
the faultlines of vanguardism and social realism. The emphasis on the national character
of this transitional literary mode, a function of the differentiated development of
capitalism and socialist evolution, forces us to consider the sociohistorical reality of Latin
America in any articulation of a realist aesthetics. If each European people passed
differently through the feudalist stage and experienced different forms of capitalist
development (“Crítico” 127), then the uneven development experienced in the periphery
determines an objective reality that must be depicted differently. Nadal-Melsió speculates
that Lukács's location in a European cultural periphery perhaps explains his ambivalence
toward high modernism, adding that “uneven superstructures need to play a role in any
account of Lukácsean criticism” (63). Lukács notes that the competing literary tendencies
in countries where the remnants of feudalism still exert a dominant force in everyday life,
struggle in an attempt to herald and produce a bourgeois (and nationalist) society, citing
the Spanish playwright García Lorca as an European example (“Crítico” 91). These
different articulations of realism are particularly significant “in countries that are lagging
and en route to liberation,” and Lukács cites India as an example of a postcolony still
negotiating the modern nation-state with a residual medievalism and an emergent
socialism (“Crítico” 91). Further, the arrival of foreign influence presents a double risk
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that produces a certain problematic of transition: entrenchment in the old or the overly
abstract expression of new content (“Crítico” 147). The singularity of social development
in the context of Latin America must give rise to equally singular literary developments
that cannot be fitted into existing abstract aesthetic categories.
The reception of Lukács, particularly in the Anglo-European academy, was very
much a function of the Cold War as well as the prevalent structuralism in 1960s France
that characterized him as a vulgar Marxist at best and a Stalinist dogmatist at worst.
Moreover, the anticommunist politics of the Cold War coincided with a canonization of
modernist works and the relative disparagement of realism (Franco “Critical” 286). The
politics of the Cold War determined the institutional and cultural forces that produced
modernism “as historico-aesthetic telos” (Larsen 66). Lukácsean realism may have fallen
into disfavor in the Anglo-European academy, but the differences in Lukács’s circulation
and translation perhaps reveal differences in his reception in peripheral contexts. For
instance, the English language translation of his Wider den missverstandenen Realismus
(1957) gets reprinted once in several decades; however, the text gets republished in
Spanish five times in Latin America in the span of two decades. Lukács’s literary theory,
particularly his discussion of the historical novel, becomes particularly prevalent in
postwar Latin American criticism that attempts to reassess literature in relation to
national and regional cultures. The sociohistorical specificity and temporalized aesthetic
of Lukácsean realism informed postwar literary debates in a region self-consciously
writing its history through its literature, shaped along the faultlines of vanguardism and
social realism. Critics such as Angel Rama responded to questions of national scenarios
and Cold War culture, which pitted universalism against social realism, by rethinking the
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production of tradition and nation as a process of modernization (Franco “Globalisation”
443). Jean Franco similarly attempts to think beyond the debate between literary realism
and modernism, noting the virtual disappearance of the argument for realism, defined as
either dogmatic social realism or a provincialism condemned to cultural anachronism
(“Critical Passions” 286). Franco understands literary modernism as an attempt to
cultivate active readers in order to reflectively transgress bourgeois ideology, but she
cautions against readily ascribing a revolutionary poetics to this modernist project. The
devices of shock, simultaneity, and bricolage can be understood as either distantiating
techniques that activate perception or methods to break down traditional attitudes
standing in the way of modernization. Franco strives to recover a critical realist literary
tradition that has a historicity and reveals elided connections, enabling the reader to take
a critical position in relation to the events. Realist writing not only speaks directly to the
conscious awareness of the readers but also presents the fault lines and inconsistencies of
this realistic totality in order to reveal its production and limitations. Like Rama, Franco
sees novelists José María Arguedas and Augusto Roa Bastos as critical realists whose
representation of reality stands in marked contrast to contemporaneous ‘boom’ novelists
of the 1960s. Franco characterizes these transcultural and realist writers as critical of
Eurocentric narratives that conceive of history as continuous progressive development.
These writers’ awareness of historicity made theirs a dynamic conception of history and
their texts a site for revision and rereading a history distorted by the dominant class
(“Critical Passions” 287-288). Critical realism, then, is not a classical or naive realism but
an epistemological process and vehicle for historical self-awareness.
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The Historian Stutters
Returning briefly to the film that opened this chapter, Bartolo tenía una flauta,
during the band’s trip to the outskirts of Buenos Aires, the director of the band meets
several prominent members of the community in a pub. The director is soliciting
patronage from established and wealthy families summering out of the city, and the older
men give the director a list of the prominent members of the community. One of the men
interrupts the conversation, warning against approaching the family in the Estancia El
Trébol. The three men agree and warn the director to avoid the El Trébol at all costs. The
director asks unconvinced: “¿Qué hay en ese Trébol? ¿Fantasmas? / What’s in that
Trébol? Ghosts?” They caution that its owner is a crazy woman who could very well give
you a fortune or shoot you on sight. The camera cuts to a close up of a third man who
adds: “Vea que la Señorita Toledo es una - / Understand. that Miss Toledo is a -.” The
camera abruptly cuts to a medium close up panning away from this third character.
Despite the continuity in dialogue over the cut, the editing appears disjunctive because
the cut appears unmotivated. Moreover, the character never finishes his sentence and an
abrupt change in the background noise between this suspended characterization and the
subsequent dialogue seems to point to another moment of disjunctive sound editing.
Close scrutiny of these fissures in the scene suggests that there is missing recorded
material. A sequence that was once a continuous shot from one character to another now
features an awkward jump cut in both visual and aural registers that forces us to confront
lacunae. The changes in background noise suggest that the conclusion of this insulting
sentence remain forever suspended, excised by choice or lost to circumstance.
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These lacunae might compel a rote dismissal of any close reading of the film text;
however, such a position would only contribute to the continued neglect and possible
disappearance of these popular films. More importantly, such a position denies the
historicity of the text and presumes that any close reading necessitates an ideal original
text and reader. Rather than dismiss close reading of the film text, I maintain that these
gaps both inform how the text generates narrative meanings and stage a confrontation
with the historicity of the text and, by extension, our own historicity as spectators. At the
level of the narrative, the missing dialogue suggestively characterizes Miss Toledo
through its absence, ostensibly functioning as an ellipsis: so objectionable is Miss Toledo
that to finish the sentence would be obscene. Arguably, the entire narrative of the film
could be construed as operating between and within ellipses: The original running length
of Bartolo was a feature-length 78 minutes, but the extant material available amounts to
just over 52 minutes (Di Núbila 252). If the stuttering comedian embodies nonsynchronous experience that points to unforeseen meanings that can arise from noninstrumentalized perception, then this stuttering text generates unforeseen meanings
through elliptical suspension. The disparate temporal relations in this case, however, are
not between the rigid body of the comedian and his fluid meaning-making speech but
between an extant text and a missing hypotext — a conflict between the historicity of the
spectator and the historicity of the text. The figure of the stutter can be further expanded
to denote a historiographical mode, characterized in the spirit of Kracauer, by the
fortuitous and provisional. Siegfried Kracauer’s unfinished book on history proceeds his
canonic Theory of Film, finding in the temporality of reading the photograph an analogon
to the writing of history. As Dagmar Barnouw notes, the analogy between photography
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and historiography is based on the potential for multiple and different acts of viewing
both shared synchronically and diachronically — the projects of the historian and
photographer “are shaped by different degrees of temporal distance and of acculturation
in perception” (Barnouw x). In other words, both photography and historiography recover
past experience into the present, preserving the otherness of the world while also
reflecting the acculturated perception of the onlooker.
Barnouw describes the historian and photographer as occupying a state of
extraterritoriality, a mobility in space and time that is a function of an awareness of
change and transience (14). History resembles photography as means of alienation,
enabling us to look at the present from a distance that is not fixed or outside history. In
fact, these epistemological modes both rely on a negotiable distance that recognizes
otherness and strangeness within and across space and time (Barnouw 115). The past is
regained from different perspectives and even different moments in one lifetime. The
challenge Kracauer poses is to recognize our own temporality and historicity in accessing
past actuality (Barnouw 105). ‘Camera reality’ and ‘historical reality’ both attempt to
record a present as fully as possible and preserve for future viewers that which had gone
unnoticed. The historian’s perspective is then temporally composite — looking past in
order to gather in the present for future reading. Both the photographer and historian must
be attendant to the endless, the fortuitous, and the fragmentary. This temporal
compositeness, occluded in photographic verisimilitude and most official histories,
becomes foregrounded in critically realist texts and stuttering histories. Kracauer’s
approach avoids imposing an ideal of exhaustive recording. Our stuttering history must
be wary of reconstructing events as mirror images of what transpired, attendant instead
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“to the flow of random events as the context of human agency” as well as the engaged
worldview of the historian (Barnouw 105). History then is both representational and
presentational, representing the past while presenting its self-determining historicity.
Rather than dismiss textual reading or historical claims as incomplete, these
lacunae compel us to reflect on loss, consider the processes of destruction and discursive
sleep, and examine the remanence of these forms of popular culture. This
historiographical doubling back recalls once again Giuliana Bruno’s study of Neapolitan
silent cinema and the films of Elvira Notari. Given the dominance of absence and lacunae
in the historiographical return to silent film, Bruno draws on archaeological,
psychoanalytic and preservation theories to open the investigation of Notari’s intertext.
Lacunae force the historian to rely on indexical signs in a mode particularly appropriate
to the cinema. As Foucault notes, this new mode of history as archaeology is less
commemorative than transformative, examining the way documents become monuments
and understanding the writing of history as a systematic distribution of gaps and absences
discursively shaped by rarity and remanence (7, 12). The cinema shares with history and
archaeology as well as psychoanalysis and physiognomy an analytic paradigm based on
the use of indexical signs (“Streetwalking” 149).
This common genealogy based on an epistemology of investigation allows Bruno
to claim that history and cinema are less techniques that reproduce the empirical past than
processes that constitute an apparatus of remanence. Textual analysis as both the
interpretation and the assemblage of indexical signs becomes an integral method for
working with voids. Turning to preservation theory, Bruno argues against an older
paradigm that remade, simulated, or speculated in the place of discursive absences and
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destruction, preferring instead methods that acknowledge the passing of time and
privilege the document on the basis of what it has become, “following it through its sleep
to its present historicity” (“Streetwalking” 149). Rather than remanufacturing missing
parts in the name of authenticity emanating from authorial intentionality, we deal with the
work and its acquired second historicity (“Streetwalking” 150). This method allows the
historian to chart an inferential walk by working within voids and between intertexts,
treating lacunae dynamically in a palimpsestic mode that Bruno relates to the figure of
bricolage. Rather than figuring a transparent document or positing an authentic hypotext,
the film historian traces a web of textual relations, discovering not truths about texts but
“areas of textual pleasures [and] generative narrative matrices” (“Streetwalking” 152).
Bruno produces herself as a bricoleuse that draws on available materials and looks for
dialogic voices in excavating the absent hypotext. Bricolage in this context presupposes
fragmentation as a function of high modern capitalism and the discursive leveling and
reordering that characterizes its concomitant analytic practices.
Despite the similar challenges — the paucity of materials, the marginalization of
non-Euro-American cinematic traditions, and the peripheralization of film traditions
construed as extrinsic to the contours of nationalist projects — the historian of Latin
American cinema, however, is less bricoleur than stutterer. The available material at our
disposal is both a function of the discursive operations characterized by Bruno as well as
the uneven development of capitalism and the differential experience of an epistemology
of investigation. As Ana López notes, the scholarship on early cinema in Latin America
is tenuous, limited to a few extant films and scattered paratexts and epitexts. With film
industries emerging in circumscribed contexts and, more importantly, film preservation
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and scholarship determined by national politics and academic traditions, “the available
material seems bound by ‘nationness’” (50). López attempts to produce a transnational
comparative study despite the fragmentary nature of the extant material. More
importantly, she underscores that tenuousness and provisionality are a sign of Latin
American modernity. Drawing on Aníbal Quijano, she adds that Latin American
modernity is marked by a temporal warp in which the premodern and modern coexist and
are mutually determined, resulting in a different experience of time and space and,
therefore, necessarily requiring a different mode of historiography (49). If what is
sequence in other countries is simultaneity in Latin America, then the film historian of
early and transition cinema in the periphery faces an archaeological project of a different
sort (Quijano 149). The stuttering historian equivocates amidst the multiple temporalities
implied by the play of sequence and simultaneity: he or she does not accumulate truths
diachronically but rather traces an itinerant path before doubling back. History writing
then represents the past while preserving its intersubjective compositeness and present
historicity; moreover, this history foregrounds the indices followed and forking paths
produced. We stuttering film historians, like Sandrini’s Casi, have very nearly (if never
just quite) arrived.
Conclusion
Let us take a final moment from Riachuelo to consider how these comedies
function in a critically realist mode. After following Sandrini’s pickpocketing exploits,
the film presents an extreme long shot of the metallic constructions in the port of Buenos
Aires. In a transitional sequence, the film features an early example of the attempt to
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provide a seamless transition from exterior to interior space. The camera tilts down the
length of the edifice and pauses at its base (Figure A25). A very subtle jump cut
punctuates the pause and the camera begins to track back, the image of the docks now
framed on a wall, designating that the camera has gone through a window and into a new
space (Figure A26). This trick shot uses a still photograph of the docks to conceal the
transition from exterior to interior space. The camera begins to track inside a room,
pulling back to reveal the main hall of a cabaret bar, its working class patrons enjoying
the music from the all-female band. Although on-location exteriors, here shot with silent
film equipment, were not new to early Argentine sound cinema, the representation of
working-class spaces was less common at the time (Karush 80). However, given our
revised conception of realism, the expanded representational field is perhaps less
significant than the discontinuity, the subtle jump cut, which opens more productively
onto questions of temporality. The transition from moving picture to still photograph
perhaps best illustrates how the film can become a vehicle for historical self-awareness.
Not only is there a transition from movement to stasis, but the fixed frame within the
frame provides a moment of hesitation, of doubling back – the photograph is legible as
framed photograph and diegetic window. The stutter on screen elicits perhaps a double
take, a doubled awareness of the actual and virtual possibilities that inhere in experience
as such.
By way of conclusion, Kracauer understands the redemptive potential of cinema
to be yoked to its realist tendencies in a transformation of perception, and the comic
represents the impingement of presence that undermines habitual perception and
frustrates attempts to absent the signified real. Realism becomes less a question of
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verisimilitude or ontological specificity than it does the (in)ability of a substitutive or
metaphoric logic to representation, that is, the impossibility to foreclose the temporality
of representation. The temporal relation to the imaginary past is comically interrupted,
the comedic event is shot through with the possibilities that would have been. If comedy
is “all about timing,” then its effect comes from affording an immediate experience
through which to re-place oneself within moving reality. The comedy produces us as
stutterers, functioning as (1) a form of sensuous communication that makes us aware of
multiple meanings that inhere in non-sensuous codified language, (2) a visible and
audible manifestation of ongoing negotiations of technological and industrial practices
and narrative and formal devices, and (3) an experience of temporal disjunction or noncoincidence, making reification perceivable.
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CHAPTER FOUR
FUNNY HOW? TOWARDS A HUMOROUS SPECTATOR
OF THE BRAZILIAN CHANCHADA
Turning to a different linguistic and historical context in lusophone Brazil, this
chapter continues to explore in a comparative modality the way that critical realism
affords a different experience of temporality and peripheral humor functions as spatial
practice within a national context that similarly sought to elevate its regional politics
while simultaneously employing nationalist and Americanist rhetoric (Gabara 18). The
film Aviso aos navegantes [The Nutty Stowaway] (Watson Macedo, 1950) showcases the
regional interrelations that a comparative approach can discover. The film features a
Brazilian revue company’s final performance in Buenos Aires before returning home to
Brazil for carnival. The film begins with a musical performance by the chanchada star
and “Brazil’s sweetheart” Eliana at a Buenos Aires theater. The leading man and naval
officer, Alberto (Anselmo Duarte), watches from the loge, marveling at this bit of Brazil
that stirs and confounds Buenos Aires. Backstage, Eliana packs up, announcing that
although she has enjoyed Argentina she cannot bear to spend carnival away from Rio de
Janeiro. Her performing sidekick, Federico (Oscarito) begs to be taken along: “I wanna
go back to my country. I’ll even go in the baggage compartment. But I have to go back. I
can’t stand this place anymore. Every day it’s just tango, tango, so much tango! I wanna
hear samba, batucada, gafieira; spend the night at Lapa; drink coconut rum; live again in
Madureira; go out in Niterói.” He cannot afford his return trip and so becomes the titular
stowaway. The Argentine capital is touristically depicted through a montage of extreme
long shots of on-location footage: the Capitolio, Avenida Corrientes and the obelisk are
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connected through dissolves to the fast cars on the street and the melange of Spanish
flamenco, Argentine tango and militaristic march that heralds the extreme long shot of
the boat that will take our heroes to Brazil (Figure A27).
The Brazilian chanchada or musical comedy is a popular genre from the Golden
Age of Brazilian cinema that has received significant critical attention both in lusophone
Brazil and in the Anglo-European academy. Featuring comedic plots interspersed with
musical numbers, these comedies date from the early sound period and persist through
the late 1940s at the height of the Atlântida studio system and into the 1970s and the
emergence of the cheaply- and quickly-made pornochanchada. If contemporaneous
criticism in Brazil disparaged the genre and its anaesthetic vulgarity, subsequent
considerations of the genre have been decidedly mixed. The earliest attempts to produce a
comprehensive Brazilian film history in the late 1960s and up to the 1980s constructed a
national film history entirely in relation to Cinema Novo, using its prescriptive
manifestoes as aesthetic models and its auteurist production strategies as paradigmatic.
The engaged politics of Cinema Novo produced a film culture “synonymous with
Brazilian cinema” (Johnson “Cinema Novo” 96), understood as marking a radical
departure from the compromised commercial cinemas of the earlier decades. Subsequent
histories in the 1990s and 2000s return to this period of studio-based cinemas, which
followed the transition to sound and Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo (1937-1945) through
the second Vargas presidency (1951-1954). The return to this period is framed around the
imbrication of visual culture with populist nationalism, inserting cinema into a
constellation of popular cultural practices concerned with forging brasilidade or a
Brazilian national identity. If the early histories consider the interpenetration of the genre
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with state power in a pedagogical mode, the later histories recover the performative
modes of representation that instantiate the nation (Bhabha 221). Despite their conflicting
views on the political valence of the popular genre, both historiographical approaches
understand the chanchada through the concept of parody, presenting the carnivalesque
musical romps as hybrid cultural objects and symptoms of economic (and cultural)
dependency. I understand the divergent political valence of the parody in these
approaches as a function of their problematic construction of spectatorship along the axes
of distance and proximity: the former produces the spectator as too proximate to the
chanchada, whereas the latter attempts to recover critical distance through the
subversiveness of the film content. By revisiting the key film texts that figure in this
debate, I underscore the problematic assumptions driving these foundational critical
arguments and suggest a model of humorous spectatorship through which to consider the
effects of these parodic texts.
Non-Ironic Spectator
The earlier mode of film history locates Cinema Novo, in both its early neorealist
and later self-critical modes, as fulcrum, determining how preceding and proceeding film
practice should be read against a paradigmatic national movement. In an early piece on
popular cinema in Latin America, John Mosier differentiates what he terms commercial
cinema from the “genuinely popular cinema” of Cinema Novo auteurs such as Nelson
Pereira dos Santos, claiming that the popular film is not concerned with supply and
demand but with translating the worldview of o povo or the people (179). This
commercial cinema received much criticism from critics and intellectuals — the term
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chanchada was originally a pejorative term for the carnivalesque musical films in 1930s
print journalism. Mosier goes on to characterize the films as exploitative in their
unwillingness to articulate values that audiences might be expected to hold, and
mystifying difference in order to secure the integration of working classes into a civil
society dominated by Creole elites. He describes the chanchada as “malicious slapstick
comedies" often centering on preparations for carnival, involving singing and dancing
and slapstick, "illustrating the worst aspects of machismo" (181). He locates one example
of a worthwhile chanchada in the overtly satiric elements O homem do Sputnik (Carlos
Manga, 1959), which follows the comedian Oscarito’s exploits against incompetent
Russian and American intelligence agents. The negative portrayal of the foreigner makes
this a recuperable text for Mosier, who reductively ascribes a politics to the image as a
function of its content: The positive images of Brazilians and the negative images of the
hegemon redeems the generic film.
João Luiz Vieira and Robert Stam complicate this reductive understanding of
Brazilian popular cinema and the politics of the image, tracing the emergence and
development of parodic practice in Brazilian history. Departing from the foundational
film histories of Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes and Jean-Claude Bernardet and articulating
these to the literary theory of Bahktin, Vieira and Stam attempt to animate theoretically
the marginality of Brazilian cinema. They locate a relative continuity in both commercial
and avant-garde cinema in their parodic strategies, understood as “a creative response to
[Brazilian cinema’s] own marginalization due to hegemonic structures of production,
distribution and exhibition. Parody both reflects these structures and affords a means to
resist them” ("Marginality" 21). Indebted to the dependency theory that animates the film
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history of Salles Gomes, Stam and Vieira underscore how the carnivalesque strategies are
determined by the reality of political and economic dependency that conditions Brazilian
cultural production. Brazil is not lagging behind, which presupposes a developmentalist
telos of modernization; rather, it is locked into a negative position in a global system
which generates development at the center and underdevelopment in the periphery
(Cardoso and Faletto 23). Drawing on the semiotic literature of Genette and Bahktin’s rereading of modern European literature, Vieira and Stam define parody as a “reflexive
mode of discourse which renders explicit the processes of intertextuality through
distortion, exaggeration or elaboration of a pre-existing text or body of texts”
(“Marginality” 21). Bakhtin uses parodic intertextuality as a means of framing and
historicizing modern European literature, and Vieira and Stam produce a similarly
oblique map of Brazilian cinema that understands parody’s role as an appropriation of
dominant discourses that introduces a variation. In the context of asymmetric power
relations, they locate the politics of parody in producing an awareness of marginality, an
“ironic consciousness of simultaneously belonging to two cultures — one’s own and that
of the metropolitan centers of powers” [emphasis mine] (“Marginality” 22).
Their periodization of Brazilian cinema traces carnivalesque strategies, figured in
the literal depiction of carnival and the more figurative ludic and parodic modes of
representation, from the early cinema actualities capturing the carnival celebrations in
Rio de Janeiro through the early sound cinema production of chanchadas and arriving at
the coinciding decline of the chanchada genre and the emergence of Cinema Novo. The
chanchada was intimately linked to the world of carnival, even produced in its earliest
incarnations for release during the celebratory period. Its earliest examples situated the
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narratives either during carnival celebrations or followed the preparations for a carnival
marcha. The commercial success of the chanchada meant producing them outside the
release window of carnival and eventually doing away with the diegetic presence of the
festivities. The carnivalesque strategies of social inversions and the particular mode of
comedic and musical narrative organization persisted in subsequent iterations of the
genre. Despite the narrative continuities provided by parody across historical periods, the
political valence of the films varies between periods, mostly as a function of the posited
spectator. The chanchada is understood within a schema of cultural dependency where
parody vacillates between upholding or subverting the cultural emitter at the center:
“Parody stands at the point of convergence of multiple contradictions, serving at times a
negative aesthetic based on self-derision and servility, and at other times becoming an
instrument of carnivalized revolt against hegemony” (“Marginality” 26). Vieira and Stam
situate chanchada production in an overwhelmingly self-derisive mode with a few
exceptions reserved for self-reflexive examples that explicitly comment on the restricted
means of representation available to the Brazilian filmmaker in an anti-realist modality.
An oft-cited example of the latter tendency, Carnaval Atlântida (José Carlos Burle,1952)
is set at the fictional carioca studio Acrópole Films. The Brazilian director Cecílio B. De
Milho (Cecil B. Of the Corn) wants to make a sandal-and-swords epic of Helen of Troy
despite the attempts of his cast and crew to produce a carnivalesque musical. In a plot
reminiscent of The Bad and the Beautiful (Vincent Minnelli, 1952) crossed with The
Band Wagon (Vincent Minnelli, 1953), the director is eventually persuaded to produce
the chanchada. A key sequence finds the director speaking to recently demoted
scriptwriters Grande Otelo and Colé about his vision for the film. Grande Otelo informs
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the director that he knows a mulata named Elena in the samba school of Morro da
Formigas. The director rejects the idea, adding that she is “not from Troy.” He adds that
he is interested in the Helen from Greek mythology, “the image of Beauty itself,” which
has nothing to do with a mulata from a favela. He gestures off screen to the movie set
adorned with classical architecture: “I can see Helen of Troy being served by her loyal
servants.” A dissolve inserts the women onto the set, a vision conjured by the director.
The camera pushes in to Helen gazing at herself in a hand mirror and flanked by two
black servants fanning the maiden, one recognizable as the singer Blecaute (Blackout)
and the other, the director’s interlocutor Grande Otelo (Figure A28). The sequence
returns to the director, interrupted by Grande Otelo and Colé who explain that they do not
see any of that and that the director’s vision will not sell. They propose their own version
of the epic which returns to the earlier scene. In their version of events, Blecaute steps
into the foreground to sing “Dona Cegonha” (“Miss Stork”), a carnival hit from the same
year. The servants all begin dancing in festive samba choreography and Grande Otelo
joins Blackout and Eliana (Figure A29). Stam underscores the binaries the film
articulates explicitly — first and third world, Hollywood and chanchada, USA and Brazil,
epic and musical, palace and favela —and adds that the sequence favors the latter terms
(“Racial Politics” 107). Similarly, João Luiz Vieira discusses the film as an “allegory of
inappropriateness,” understanding the narrative outcome’s defense of the chanchada as
symptomatic of the director's own thwarted Hollywood ambitions and perhaps selfconsciously commenting on the impossibility of such a cinema in Brazil (“Parodie” 56).
Vieira and Stam underscore how the film defends “a model of cinema based on sublime
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debauchery and carnivalesque irony” given the inappropriateness of Hollywood style
super-productions [emphasis mine] (“Marginality” 26).
Although it would appear that we have moved away from reductive
understandings of the politics of the image by acknowledging the competing and multiple
voices in the film text, the political valence of the films Vieira and Stam discuss are still
circumscribed to a select few. If Mosier privileged the direct critique offered by Sputnik,
Vieira and Stam locate parodic counter-hegemonic struggle mostly in the self-reflexive
chanchadas of the studio period. Most chanchadas are figured as eliciting self-derisive
laughter that avows the paradigmatic aesthetic and market dominance of the American
hypotext, a tendency the authors trace through the emergence of the ‘exploitative’ cycle
of pornochancadas in the 1970s. The authors use the Western parody Matar ou Correr
(Carlos Manga, 1954) as an example of this self-contemptuous streak in the chanchada
genre, citing in particular its reverence to borrowed generic convention. The film spoofs
High Noon (Fred Zinneman, 1952) — the film’s Portuguese title had been Matar ou
Morrer — in a mode akin to Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974). The film follows
Oscarito as Kid Bolha (bolha refers to blister) and his sidekick Grande Otelo as Cisco
Kada (a play on Cisco Kid and the cocada coconut candy). The two men roam the
country hawking miracle elixirs until they arrive at City Down, foil the plans of bankrobbing villains, and become town sheriff and deputy, respectively. The villains swear
vengeance and challenge the new lawmen to a climactic duel that our protagonists
comedically win in slapstick style. Stam and Vieira identify Oscarito as the target of
parodic criticism, “in direct and demeaning contrast with the heroism and strength
displayed by Gary Cooper” (“Marginality” 29). The portrayal of Oscarito as cowardly
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clown who survives the film through chance and happenstance is understood as a
negative representation of the Brazilian elements of the film, relying on an understanding
of good representation as being a function of an agentive goal-oriented protagonist in the
mode of the classical patterns they attempt to critique. In characterizing the cowardice of
the comedic characters as self-derisive in contrast to the heroism of the American
characters, they make an assumption about what constitutes a desirable self. The authors
prescribe a representational strategy that reverses the positions within the parodic
structure without questioning the desirable self that is secured. Stam and Vieira claim that
Matar’s faithfulness to generic codes produces a realistic representation and lament that
the insertion of comedic protagonists does not subvert these overdetermining
conventions. Ultimately, I understand their critique of the chanchada in its negative
iterations as assuming a politics of the image founded on an anti-realistic (modernist)
aesthetics of critical distantiation. Matar ou correr shows a familiarity with Hollywood
conventions that they argue seems unaware of the material and aesthetic limitations
imposed by dependency:
The problem with the film lies in its failure to recast critically the codes of
a genre. Its ultimate effect is less to bury obsolete forms or demonstrate
their irrelevance to the Brazilian context, than to reinforce the myth of
Hollywood superiority. Rather than operate a deconstruction or
transvaluation, the film ultimately leads the audience to direct its laugh at
the 'alien' Brazilian characters unable to master the codes of City Down
(“Marginality” 30)
In failing to expose the formulae, the film seems to have no self-consciousness
about its peripheral position, an ostensible instance of uncritical (neo)colonial mimicry.
The films are read through a derogatory comparison that reinforces the technical and
aesthetic superiority of the dominant cinema. The evocation of the original that
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characterizes the parodic mode in these non-self-reflexive examples is destructive of the
copy rather than the original: Parody marks a "repressed desire of becoming the dominant
cinema of high technological proficiency...masking a melancholy cinematic
consciousness" (“Marginality” 36). We watch the parody and desire the original.
The suggestive use of melancholy gestures toward the spectator their model
presupposes, one that is proximate to the image and crippled by an inability to disavow
loss, an incorporative desire that regresses to a narcissism that splits the ego. If Doane
understands the possibilities for a female spectating position along the axes of proximity
and distance as limited to a masochistic over-identification with the image or a
transvestist identification within a masculine scopic economy, then Stam and Vieira seem
to imagine a similar impasse for the Latin American spectator of commercial cinema. The
Latin American spectator they presuppose can either take herself as the parodic target of
self-contemptuous laughter or identify with the dominant position. This critique assumes
self-reflexivity and anti-realistic representational strategies are the only strategies that
ensure a political anti-colonial gesture. More particularly, in order to be political, the film
must effect a critical spectator at a distance; it must complicate spectatorial identification
rather than produce uncritical admiration of the original (“Marginality” 35). The turn to
parody is political when effecting a spectator similar to Doane’s turn to masquerade,
instantiating a relationship of distance to the image and gesturing toward the emptiness
and constructedness of the dominant position: “If the filmmakers managed to articulate a
distanced critique of the model being parodied. They might provide space for reflection
on the cultural and economic conditions faced by Brazilian cinema and expose the
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powers of infiltration of foreign film in alienating the Brazilian spectator” (“Marginality”
37).
Cinema Novo, particularly in its cannibal-tropicalist phase, becomes the desired
telos of this historical periodization, an arriving point that necessarily determines how
earlier films are read politically. Parody becomes productive in an anti-illusionistic vein,
“instead of customary realistic depiction” (“Marginality” 43). Ana López similarly
understands parody, when disarticulated from humor, to designate a critical practice that,
recalling Foucault, ushers in a critical and self-reflexive modern episteme that lays bare
the device (“Parody” 63). López characterizes New Latin American Cinema as
hypertextual and palimpsestic practice, but her approach invites the question of why the
need to disarticulate critical practice from humor. The effects of comedy seem to wed us
to the proximity and immediacy of an act of reception that ostensibly disallows a critical
distance (Doane “Reconsidered” 50). As Linda Williams reminds us in the context of
psychoanalytic feminist film theory, however, theories that foreground distance,
objectification and critical space participate in the construction of a mind/body dualism
that privileges the disembodied, centered gaze directed at an object over the embodied,
decentered sensations of present observers (“Corporealized” 15 ). What these early
national film histories, written in the aftermath of Cinema Novo and New Latin American
Cinema, presuppose is the impossibility of a critical spectator of earlier commercial
cinema, a non-ironic spectator and consumer of mass culture. Why does laughter
necessarily recoil back onto Brazilian filmmaking and the Brazilian spectator? Does
realistic depiction necessarily preclude critical distance? Privileging perhaps the language
of political cinema from the 1960s, these authors seem unwilling to allow the possibility
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of a spectator with any self-awareness not produced through anti-illusionistic selfreflexive aesthetic experimentation. In other words, these authors posit a spectator that is
thoroughly non-ironic.
The National and/or Popular Spectator
If early national film histories imagined a non-ironic spectator too proximate to
the image of a parasitic and inauthentic commercial cinema, a historiographic conceit
informed by the coincident Cold War debates of dependency theory and political cinema;
then subsequent studies return to the period of studio-based cinemas in order to locate the
emergence of commercial cinema in a larger nationalist project of brasilidade. Their
methodical contextualization proves an invaluable rejoinder to the at times rote dismissal
of forms of popular culture that preceded the engaged cinemas of the post-Vargas state;
however, they merely shift the question of the authentically national from a selfconsciousness afforded by vanguardist formal experimentation to the content of an image
articulated as the outcome of the ongoing triangulated negotiations between vernacular,
statist and foreign interests. In privileging the content of the image, these histories decode
the complex semantics of the image and produce symptomatic readings of the popular
films texts from the period. These histories necessarily depend on a transparent image
whose content can be read unproblematically in order to diagnose symptomatology.
Turning away from the apparatus meant moving from a non-ironic spectator of
commercial cinema to a (trans)historical consumer of popular culture.
As Lisa Shaw explicitly claims in her work on the chanchadas, these histories aim
to revisit the musical comedies of the Estado Novo to “challenge the interpretation of the
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chanchada as highly derivative and ruthlessly commercial…to explore the ambivalent
and self-parodic images of national identity and examine the [genre’s] oppositional
stance to Hollywood representation of brasilidade in context of the Good Neighbor
Policy” (“Vargas” 63). Shaw underscores how earlier criticism of the genre, both
contemporaneous print journalism and early scholarly criticism, faulted the films’
technical inferiority and cast the genre as an apologetic response to Hollywood
hegemony. Shaw argues against the claims of derivativeness with reference to the
transmedia nature of the light musical comedy, particularly its connections to radio,
carnival and popular music. The descendant of films about annual carnival from the silent
and early sound era, the genre formally emerged with the establishment of Rio de Janeiro
based Cinédia and its first feature-length film Alô, Alô Brasil (João de Barro and Wallace
Downey, 1935). The earliest examples borrowed radiophonic rhetorical strategies — the
“Alô, Alô” in the titles of of Alô, Alô Brasil and Alô, Alô Carnaval (Adhemar Gonzaga,
1936) alluding to the radio speakers’ address to carnival revelers — and often structured
the narrative plot around live performances for a presumptive radio broadcast. The plot of
the first chanchada followed an avid radio fan who falls in love with a female singer. The
film was made for the carnival celebrations of that same year, featuring radio stars
singing and dancing to camera and performing popular songs in the lead up to carnival.
The narrative of the film features loosely-connected scenes that feature Carmen Miranda
and popular composers singing marchas, positioning its audience in a mode similar to the
live-studio audiences watching performances and contests (“Vargas” 64). In fact, even
the sound recording technologies, particularly at the height of the Atlântida studio
system, were an outcome of “derivative” re-appropriation within Brazil. The Duvergé-
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Emon-Bonfanti (DEB) sound was processed within Brazil, developed through the
collaborative efforts of Antoine Mathium Bonfanti, a French technician who erected the
Multifilmes Studios in São Paulo and developed a system for studio rentals to curb
overhead costs, and Paul Duvergé, a French engineer and owner of a condenser factory in
France who came to Brazil to install transistor laboratories by reassembling French,
Swedish and Brazilian equipment.
Ultimately, the arguments against the derivativeness of the genre rely on a
doubled move to insert the genre within an always-already adulterated broad mediascape
and to identify the local references in the content of the image. Shaw aligns national
identity with everyday life and argues that brasilidade was conveyed in the musicals
from the 1930s through topical references to problems specific to urban modernization.
Moreover, solidifying a sense of national identity became a significant strategy of the
Vargas apparatus. Concerned with forging a national consciousness in the aftermath of
the 1930 revolution and the relative instability following the coup, the Vargas
administration sought to create a coherent image of Brazil in response to the need for
material national integration, an increasingly multi-ethnic demographic, and the
traditional role of regional politics (Shaw “Vargas” 68). In an address to the Assosação
Cinematográfica de Produtores Brasileiros (Cinematographic Association of Brazilian
Producers), Vargas extolled: “The cinema will be the book of luminous images in which
our coastal and rural populations will learn to love Brazil, increasing confidence in the
Fatherland. For the mass of illiterates, it will be the most perfect, the easiest, and the most
impressive pedagogical tool" (qtd. in Johnson “Film Industry” 47). Throughout his term,
Vargas would promote the pedagogic and patriotic aspects of the cinema through a series
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of measures, including the National Institute of Education Cinema in 1937 and the 1939
film law that implemented screen quotas and film censorship guidelines.
This historical approach shifts the discussion of the national away from an
authentic cinematic form (often posited in the language of modernist concerns for
ontological specificity) and onto the semantic valence of the image. This methodological
movement ostensibly disallows theoretical engagement with the apparatus itself so that
all discussion of the political becomes limited to the realm of representation. For
instance, Cinédia’s second chanchada features a parody of the “Canção do avuntereiro”
from the patriotic opera O Guaraní that targets national(ist) and creole elitist examples of
official culture (Shaw “Vargas” 64). Vieira and Stam found self-parodic humor to be selfcontemptuous because of the theoretical frameworks on which they draw; for Shaw, on
the other hand, the self-parodic explicitly references the sociocultural changes in the
country, even going so far as to characterize the films from the 1930s as “primitive and
authentic” because of their local parodic targets and indebtedness to pre- and
paracinematic forms of popular culture (Shaw “Vargas” 64). This history identifies the
content of the image and soundtrack as transparently representing forms of cultural
practice (i.e., carnival marchas and samba schools) that too readily become aligned with
the local, the popular and the authentic. It claims that cinema as technology is embedded
in local, national and cosmopolitan spheres of technological and industrial influence, but
that we can single out the culturally specific in representation.
The impact of World War Two and the Rockefeller-led Inter-American Affairs as
well as the forging of an exoticized vision of Latin America in Hollywood, meant that the
national also became a function of foreign representation, with Brazil looking to the
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United States for self-definition. For instance, Carmen Miranda proves a pivotal star text
through which to understand the ambivalence of brasilidade and the discursive shift from
national to popular. As Sérgio Augusto notes, Carmen Miranda became a polemical
figure, cast as the passive instrument of American cultural imperialism and subsequently
recovered by camp-oriented cinephiles decades later (359). The paradox of Carmen
Miranda can be expanded to include the use of music and costuming of black Brazil
despite being the daughter of Portuguese immigrants. She functioned as a stand-in for all
of Latin America in the United States but was attacked at home for being complicit in
perpetuating stereotypes. Despite being the highest paid women in Hollywood during her
heyday, she had a restricted position in Fox and would eventually buy herself out of her
contract. Additionally, the baiana costume that came to define her star persona was
originally the attire of black women street vendors of Salvador and only became national
costume in the Brazilian imaginary after its appearance in Hollywood musicals.
The ambivalence undergirding constructions of the national is not limited to the
image. In the Carmen Miranda vehicle, Laranja-da-China (Ruy Costa, 1940), Ary
Barroso’s anthemic “Aquarela do Brasil” makes an appearance, surprisingly sung in
Spanish in a reportedly cucaracha-like mode (Augusto 96). Lisa Shaw underscores that
these iconic images and sounds are not merely rehashed but appropriated with an ironic
slant, undermining the nation-building ideology of the Vargas regime by subverting the
force of the song and alluding to the confused and exoticized (pan-) Latin America
portrayed in Hollywood films. What for Vieira and Stam was self-derision is for Shaw a
self-deprecating streak she comes to identify with national authenticity and the heart of
brasilidade: “Brasilidade hinges on the contrast between the nation's exotic, fertile image
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and the realities of daily life, and the creators of popular song and cinema appealed to the
povo's shared perception of these paradoxes which formed the essence of their identity,
portraying the duality of the developed/underdeveloped in everyday existence” (“Vargas”
70). If the earlier film histories conceived a non-ironic mass audience, these histories
produce a thoroughly ironic spectator critically distant from the ambivalent image of
national identity, drawing particularly on the critical literature that finds resistance to
domination in samba and other forms of cultural expression. “The ironic contrast
between the glossy image that Brazil enjoyed in the outside world and the realities of life
in the Vargas era held the key to the Brazilian people's sense of self, and was thus the
essence of the brasilidade that was so humorously and affectionately portrayed in both
popular song and popular cinema in the 1930s and 1940s” [emphasis mine] (“Vargas”
72). Rosângela de Oliveira Dias adds that the carnivalesque and comic interpretation of
reality was crucial for the expression of a worldview of popular classes (44). The
contemporaneous print journalism on these parodic texts evinces signs of this ironic
spectator. The following publicity materials from the Cinelândia film magazine on Matar
ou Correr (1952) express an awareness of the material limitations of representation:
"Nesta película, o objectivo é percorrer, com sentido humorístico, os lugares comuns dos
'westerns' americanos, um gênero de violência e de ação em que os cineastas de
Hollywood, seus criadores, tornaram-se mestre inimitáveis. Não há, pois, imitação, mas
sim paródia dos film de oeste / In this film, the goal is to traverse, in a humorous way, the
common spaces of American westerns, a genre of violence and action in which
Hollywood filmmakers, their creators, became incomparable masters. There is no
imitation, rather there is parody of these Western films” (52). Whereas Vieira and Stam
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see the film’s cowardly heroes as examples of a self-contemptuous mode of
representation symptomatic of underdevelopment, Shaw reclaims the film as a vehicle for
attacking Hollywood cultural values (“Vargas” 71). The interlocutors characterize the
film comedic duo or dupla identically but arrive at different valences of the image given
the different spectators they presuppose.
Subsequent comedies from the postwar period are excluded from this “national
authentic” cycle because they explicitly copy Hollywood templates (Bernardet
“Propostas” 80). Moreover, if Cinédia drew on carnival and radio to provide the content
and structure of its productions, Atlântida modeled itself more explicitly on MGM
musicals and attempted to instantiate an effective star system using established actors and
actresses rather than the coterie of radio stars from the previous decade (Augusto 103).
For Shaw, these postwar comedies were less concerned with articulating the parameters
of national identity than in mediating the changes to popular identity during a period of
socioeconomic transformation (“Popular” 17). The changes to production at Atlântida
provide a historical parallel to the discursive shift Shaw identifies. Despite Atlântida
studios’ patriotic mission statement from 1942, declaring their desire to create a cinema
capable of providing indisputable services toward national greatness (Augusto 104), their
eventual success came from their comedic enterprises. The studio aimed to create a
national cinema industry comparable to Hollywood but introducing an element of social
commentary; in fact, its first film, Moleque Tião (José Carlos Burle, 1943), was a
dramatic fictionalization of the biography of popular comedian Grande Otelo (né
Sebastião Berardes de Souza Prata), following a young Afro-Brazilian child from Minas
Gerais pursue an acting career in a Black Experimental Theater group (Stam “Fade” 18).
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The developmentalism of its mission gave way to the commercial success of its
comedies, particularly those starring the comedic pairing of Grande Otelo and Oscarito
— which Brazilian film critic Jean-Claude Bernardet would later characterize as a
racialized variation on Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, respectively —starting with
Tristezas não pagam dividas (José Carlos Burle, 1944) and continuing for another decade
in thirteen productions (“Propostas” 80).
The 1950s saw two populist governments committed to mass industrialization: the
return of Getúlio Vargas in 1950 until his suicide and the developmentalist presidential
term of Juscileno Kubitschek (1956-1961). Vargas’s policies of industrial development,
labor and trade union legislation and the creation of Petrobras and the Banco Nacional de
Desenvolvimento Económico resulted in economic expansion. Kubitschek’s promised
“fifty years of progress in five,” a developmentalist nationalism via import substitution,
foreign investment, and the development of a domestic market and heavy industry.
Additionally, the postwar period witnessed a rural exodus to the cities despite the State’s
promises for agrarian reform, with the urban population rising from 30 to 70 percent of
the national total during the decade. For João Luiz Vieira, this period of social upheaval
necessitated the production of a cultural and political space for popular classes, and urban
cinemas and the successful comedies therein afforded both physical and imagined spaces
in the city (“Cinema Carioca” 174). The genre constituted a privileged site for popular
identification, creating a sense of community through apparent likeness to the on-screen
characters, helping alienated urban arrivals cope with urban life and modernization, and
expanding consumption practices across multi-ethnic and multi-class demographics. In
Lisa Shaw’s symptomatic framework, the chanchada evolves from articulating a national
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specificity within and against the cultural apparatus of Vargas’s estado novo to mediating
“the Brazilian masses' unstable sense of belonging to a society that was experiencing
dramatic shifts at its very core in the context of Hollywood hegemony and consumer
capitalism in the 1950s” (“Popular” 17). The shift from the national to the popular,
however, also means refiguring the spectator. Although comfortable acknowledging the
constructedness of the nation and locating an ironic spectatorial ambivalence to the
category of the national, these national popular histories seem quick to produce a
totalizing and resistant popular identity. If Vieira and Stam found the self-parodic humor
to be self-derisive, then the self-deprecation that used to be a marker of national
specificity now becomes the key to popular identity. On the one hand, national specificity
was understood as constructed and the iconic images ambivalent, but popular identity
seems to be essentialist and a function of identification with the image. The ironic
spectator aware of (if still complicit) in the construction of the national becomes
“unsophisticated,” closely identifying with the familiar faces on screen who were
recognizable types to popular classes (“Popular” 18). The marginalized protagonist,
sometimes an uneducated yokel (see O homem do Sputnik (Carlos Manga, 1954)) and at
other times merely an idle malandro, navigated a complex urban landscape: “his
ignorance of how to behave…is symptomatic of his sense of disorientation in the city”
(“Popular” 20). An analysis that finds in the filmic representation a reflection of
consumer society and the popular rejection of developmentalism in the constellation of
poor and idle characters assumes a transparent image that would appeal to a proximate
audience. Seen through the lens of an uncritical conception of popular culture, the
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chanchada shares the worldview on modern life with its marginalized audience,
articulating the concerns of this audience with modernity, alienation and urbanization.
For Jean Franco, popular culture does not refer to an authentic uncontaminated
alternative to mass culture. Popular culture has a complex history that is not simply
equivalent to traditional culture. If historically the popular has been an index of Latin
American difference – the distance from modernization and the metropolis – mass culture
has affected these cultural logics. Moreover, drawing on Gramsci’s "national popular,"
Franco laments that "popular culture" increasingly does not refer to counter-hegemonic
practice. Franco sees popular culture through “a dynamic perspective…within a historical
process, which, in the last decades, has involved the violent incorporation of Latin
America into a new stage of capitalism and which has therefore lead to a series of cultural
breaks and discontinuities” (“Critical Passions” 176). This dynamic perspective
associates popular culture with the cultural practice of diverse classes experienced and
decoded through “subtle subcultural distinctions acquired largely in a non-institutional
setting” (“Critical Passions” 179). Popular culture encompasses practices of everyday life
that elude institutional control and discursive interpretation. This less essentialist
conception of popular culture allows a recovery of cultural elisions lost in the exchange
between and within metropolises: “perhaps the cracks are in the incompatibility between
the discourse generated by the center and the scrambling of that discourse at the margins”
(“Critical Passions” 215).
In a similar appraisal of popular culture in the region, Antonio Cornejo Polar
avoids dismissing popular texts, objecting rather to the characterization of popular texts
as transparent expression of an authentic identity or as anachronistic mimesis. This
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characterization risks ossifying, artificializing and even falsifying popular practices.
Instead, he understands the popular as a process of re-semanticization, skewing received
tradition and forcing it to bear new meanings (“Totalidad” 48). Opposite an essential or
pre-representational popular identity, Cornejo Polar and Franco’s positions are best
understood as a defense of the vernacular. Here we return to the vernacular in order to
preserve (if not recover) the way that popular language is integral to peripheral
enunciation, informing and animating both official and subaltern cultural production. The
vernacular foregrounds how language is alive and creative, capable of transmitting
specific traits without relying simply on popular content as having a referential or
characterizing function. The vernacular compels us to consider how the popular cannot
be merely transcribed because its innovative élan prevents replication of what is neither
stable nor reproducible; rather, what vernacular implies is an assimilation of the
productivity of popular language. The un-reproducibility of the vernacular does not entail
prescribing anti-realistic form, as this would again figure the popular as something to be
captured. In fact, what this strain of Latin American literary criticism foregrounds is that
peripheral literary production is realistic when presenting the instability and tension in the
necessary incorporation of the vernacular in cultural production. Cornejo Polar returns to
oft-maligned forms of literary production to identify these tensions productively, finding
excesses in the realist imperative derived from the ineluctable difference of these
peripheral forms. Further, to criticize the realist imperative for exhausting its referent is
to privilege the realm of representation and underestimate the innovation, heterogeneity
and dynamism of the popular referent. Realism in this instance speaks less to the
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accuracy of reproduction than to the literary reproduction of the structure and history of
disintegrated societies (“Doble Estatuto” 21).
The uncritical assessment of popular culture in Brazil recalls Matthew Karush’s
similar project in pre-Peronist Argentina: both take for granted the revelatory and
expository properties of the cinema, understand their film texts as articulating concerns
semantically within ideologically-complicit structures, and assume certain models of
identification that necessarily imagine laughter as a safety-valve response. The politics of
form, medium and address are gone. Esther Gabara characterizes these historical
reappraisals as belonging to an alternative modernist studies that, while geographically
diversifying the field of modernist studies, have reduced the aesthetic concerns of these
peripheral movements to dividing the text into an imported form with Latin American
content (28). The national or popular object becomes inserted into an imported
composition. In the context of film studies, the unavailability of exhibition data through
the 1950s, particularly outside of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, as well as the relative
unavailability of pre-war and wartime chanchadas, is partly to blame for this focus on
representation and content, the literature mostly consigned to the plot synopses and
paratexts circulating around certain film texts (“Popular” 18). However, image and
spectator will always be merely ambivalent in these histories when we locate politics in
what gets represented without complicating the transparency of representation and the
stable (subject/object) relationship to representation that this approach presumes.
Considering both the lessons learned from apparatus theory and dependency theory in
addition to the particular experience of peripheral modernity and the historicity of visual
culture allows us to consider these popular films in an affective mode.
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Roberto Schwartz locates Brazilian literary critic Antonio Cândido within a
similar impasse between a structuralist-inspired emphasis on anti-naturalist vanguardism
and a historicist allegorical decoding of literary work from the region. If structuralism’s
linguistic emphasis on form evacuated history, then the recovery of history often avoided
formalist frameworks and relegated historical relations to the realm of content stripped of
any critical interest (26). Linking literary work to its social milieu articulates the
interdependence of literature and society over and against universalist conceptions of
form, but within peripheral national historiography during the cold war, “the demand for
contextualization acquired conformist, if not apologetic connotations” (29). Not only
must one avoid discussing literary work in terms of form without history but similarly
one cannot articulate this work to a context without historicity. One cannot discuss
imported models without reference to the necessary reorganization they undergo “within
the gravitational field of another historical experience” (Schwartz 20), and similarly one
cannot imagine a homogeneous (national) context necessarily in opposition to the center.
In other words, fidelity to contexts does not mean that there is an external, ready-made
frame through which to bracket and situate texts (e.g., Estado Novo nationalism or
Cinema Novo politics) but rather to understand the social as external frame and internal
structuring force in a critical mode that preserves contingency and heterogeneity. Fidelity
to context, then, does not mean verisimilitude or reading allegorically for the (absent)
context; instead, it means locating in the material heterogeneity of the text the flashes of
contingency. Writing against the dominant trend in international criticism in the 1960s,
Cândido warns against the abandonment of external reference, “derisively considered as a
kind of photographic reproduction” (Schwartz 24). In a period advocating a politicized
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formalism, Cândido returns to sociohistorical relations in order to complicate the terms of
referentiality. His turn to referentiality does not naively defend the registration of the
world but rather underscores how the mediation of other texts and language necessarily
complicates the reduction of realism to mere illusionism.
Cândido attempts to open up a space between naive realism and anti-mimetic
rupture: if the former presupposes the transparency of language at the moment of
transcription, the latter presupposes the transparency of language at the moment of
reading — particularly in its derisive estimation of the mimetic. Cândido underscores that
the novel neither merely reflects reality nor does it rework earlier novels. Locating the
authenticity or national specificity of the novel in the former approach or celebrating
intertextuality and hybridity in the latter approach are not mutually exclusive. These
processes coexist and their negotiation becomes the key through which to understand the
specificity and historicity of the work. In other words, Cândido touts the need to pass
back and forth between aesthetic analysis and sociohistorical reflection, and we need to
turn to the image armed with the lessons of both the linguistic and cultural turns
(Schwartz 18).
For the peripheral critic, the challenge becomes to avoid establishing direct
causality between literary process and literary history. Cornejo Polar cautions against
comparative projects that seek to locate and interweave texts from various origins into a
singular temporal track within the course of hegemony. Imagining Latin American
literature as a neutral category prevents an awareness of its plurality and the conflict of
fragmented literatures and society. This emphasis on heterogeneity produces some
counterintuitive results, foregrounding the relative heterogeneity of parodic texts where
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the referent and form are developed within a system defined by its foreignness.
Moreover, Cornejo Polar criticizes those who fault the derivativeness of heterogeneous
texts because this position presupposes that homogeneity is desirable and ignores the
necessary heterogeneity between production, consumption and referent. (“Doble
Estatuto” 16).
Cornejo Polar understands national literature to be beholden to a presumption of
homogeneity. The nation as realized unity (or unity to be realized) provides a
homogenizing framework that fails to consider how this category emerges from the
historical experience of the consolidation of the European nation-states, an experience
relatively incompatible with the formation and development of Latin American nations
(“Totalidad” 38). If he recovers the open-endedness of popular culture by complicating
approaches limited to the realm of representation and turning to the dynamic generative
vernacular and the historicity of writing and reading, then a similar emphasis on form,
difference and historicity allows him to re-evaluate national literatures and recuperate
heterogeneity. Cornejo Polar finds most contemporary approaches to this project overrelying on Bahktinian dialogism, often construing nation as synthesis and outcome.
Material heterogeneity attempts to think dialogism in time, attendant to the virtualities of
voice and word. How would we write national literary histories if we did not assume
synthesis and/or consensus and mediation but rather radical contradiction and
fundamental incompatibility? The object of study would be strictly relational rather than
determined by a pre-representational essence: “the true object is this web of
contradictions and its subject is the history that inextricably imbricates several diverse
and very opposed times, consciences, and discourses” (”Cajamarca” 193).
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Having undermined the stability of the popular and the national, Cornejo Polar
ultimately arrives at a subject produced in a necessarily different way. The subject no
longer has recourse to stable, pre-representational entities that locate and ground her. In
becoming attendant to the ineluctable difference determining these categories and their
historically-specific articulations, the subject understands that her identity is also the
destabilizing identity of the other, a “mirror or shadow which [s]he incorporates
ambivalently” (“Cajamarca” 193). Mimesis then is not limited to representing the reality
of the world but also functions as a vehicle for self-definition — mimesis is both worldmaking and therefore subject-making. Understanding the nation and the popular as
discursive constructions and presupposing difference and incompatibility mean
challenging the transcendental and coherent subject. The subject is not constructed in and
for itself but rather in relation to other subjects and the world (Cornejo Polar “Sujeto” 8).
This process is necessarily complicated by the neocolonial condition of dependency
which denies the colonized his identity as subject by unmooring all relations that would
configure him as subject and by imposing other ties that disarticulate. The subject
emerging from the colonial situation belongs to a network of divergent crossroads, caught
in an equivocating and contradictory space between an unanchored memory figured
nostalgically and a meddlesome present. This subject is mutable and fluid, made of
fissures and superimpositions, accumulating various temporalities in a single temporality,
and unable to enunciate without flattening his constitutive heterogeneity (“Sujeto” 9).
Cornejo Polar proposes not only a heterogeneous literature but a heterogeneous
historiography that demands a subject far removed from the stable, whole Cartesian
subject. Rather than aspire to a definitive identity within an hierarchic world, Cornejo
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Polar touts the periphery were the self and the other are confused “in a mirror of a world
that it embraces without mutations or dissidence” (“Sujeto” 15). Mimesis then does not
refer to the naturalistic reproduction of objective reality but rather to a mode of
representation that represents (and allows for) a discontinuous, dispersed and decentered
subject as an assemblage of anomalies — a recognition of the self not in one but several
rostros [faces].
Parody and Temporality
Recalling Rosângela Oliveira Dias’s description of the chanchada as um rosto e
várias caretas / a face and several masks,” this revised conception of mimesis forces us
to think about parodic para- and intertextuality differently. Parody becomes less a
counter-hegemonic appropriative strategy than a writing practice that inscribes the
historicity of textual production palimpsestically. Like tracing the years through the rings
of a tree, reading the parodic text compels an awareness of the thickness and
heterogeneity of its gradual and processual production. Moreover, the historicity of
reading means that each traversal through the palimpsest yields a different path, so that
history remains open and can result in several possible outcomes: “each version conceals
its own distinct archaeology, as if though it accumulated internally formal and signifying
strata that correspond to their confused itinerary of spatio-temporal actualizations,
consistently charged with social and ethnic content” (Cornejo Polar “Cajamarca” 172173). Evoking Benjamin, reading the parodic text does not merely evoke history; it also
repeats it in a present that is each time different so that the outcome cannot be prefigured.
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Understanding parody archaeologically means that these references have a historicity;
these allusions refer to social content with variable temporal and spatial relations to the
moment of enunciation and the moment of reading. Different histories and temporalities
are layered in parody and reading the parodic text enacts a performative repetition. For
Cornejo Polar, this represents a move from understanding literary history as dialectical
narrative caught between foreign origins and local appropriations to literary history as
spatial practice, where each reading designs a map of the text that establishes the diverse
fields in which social subjects act, fields determined by the marks left by earlier social
actors (“Cajamarca” 173).
The parodic text provides a privileged site in Latin American literary studies
through which to consider heterogeneity, one that foregrounds questions of historical
specificity while bearing in mind the theoretical and structural challenges this history
poses. Rather than decoding the chanchada by tracing allusions to local popular content
and foreign influences, an approach that takes for granted that what you see is what you
get, Cornejo Polar compels us to consider these parodic texts not as anti-illusionistic play
but as realist presentation of discontinuity with a historicity that produces a dispersed
subject. By figuring the chanchada as palimpsest, I argue that these films decenter the
subject through an accumulation of temporalities that is necessarily different with each
traversal. This temporal dispersal can be traced in the narrative, formal and material
registers of the genre.
Returning once again to the controversial High Noon parody Matar ou Correr, we
can avoid maligning its indebtedness to Western formulae or celebrating its instances of
popular expressivity by underscoring the articulation of disparate temporalities within the
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inexorable linearity of the film reel. The epitext's narrative events unspool in real time,
and its Brazilian parody's play with temporality suggests that a critically realist approach
provides an avenue through which to consider this film anew. The Brazilian film eschews
the real-time conceit but climaxes with a similar deadline structure. The film’s outlaw
Jesse Gordon (José Lewgoy) and his sidekicks Ringo and Gringo (ironically, the latter is
played by a Spanish-accented Wilson Viana) confront the newly-appointed bumbling
town sheriff Kid Bolha to a shootout after arriving on the two o’clock train. After
receiving a telegraph at ten minutes to two warning him of Jesse’s impending arrival, the
sheriff, terrified and hiding in the town jail with his friend Cisco Kada, stands on a chair
and turns back the hands of the clock (Figure A30). This attempt to arrest the flow of
time is interrupted by the sound of a train whistle and a quick cut to several close ups of
the arriving train. Although Stam and Vieira generally disparage the film, they pinpoint
this moment as a deconstruction of “the spatio-temporal coordinates of mimetic
representation” (“Marginality” 30). Having recast mimesis as a vehicle for (historical)
self-awareness rather than naive naturalism, this instance can be read as critically realist.
In fact, the film narrative is founded on the struggle against a singular linear temporal
order.
A comparable moment of incompatible temporal superimposition can be seen in
the formal elements of Aviso aos navegantes. After opening with a number sung by
chanteuse Eliana in a theater in Buenos Aires, Oscarito scandalizes the porteño crowd
dressed as a baby. The stage manager reprimands the performer: “Last year you dressed
as Romeo, and what a Juliet you brought.” The brief aside functions as a retrospective
allusion, a reference to the previous year’s Atlântida box-office hit Carnaval no fogo
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(Watson Macedo, 1949), featuring Oscarito and Grande Otelo in a much-lauded parody
of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet.
Oscarito eventually re-encounters his filmic partner in crime, the latter now as a
cook and employee on a ship headed to Brazil. Grande Otelo finds Oscarito on board as a
stowaway and extorts the man’s labor in exchange for keeping his secret. In addition to
the romance between Eliana and the film’s heartthrob, Anselmo Duarte, the film features
a spy intrigue onboard. Venerable villain José Lewgoy plays the role of hypnotist
Professor Scaramouche who plans to meet an agent on the ship to exchange valuable
intelligence. Scaramouche affords another reference to the past and the comedic tradition
of commedia dell’arte. The rogue clown that commonly wears a black mask is a sly,
conceited fellow often beaten by Harlequin because of the rogue’s overinflated opinion of
himself. Eventually, Oscarito and Grande Otelo discover Scaramouche’s secret in a
sequence predicated on misrecognition of sound sources. Scaramouche chases Oscarito
from one level to another in a series of long shots that follow the performers going down
a series of stairs and cutting on action to the “lower deck.” The next shot features the
performers entering a suspiciously similar space from the top of the flight of stairs. The
grammar of the chase sequence holds, but the spaces traversed are identical, so that what
suggestively proceeds in linear time and produces an enormous (and impossible) ship
with multiple identical levels also reads as an elaboration and temporal loop. The chase is
similarly repeated in the climax of the film when the villains follow the heroes into the
baggage compartment of the ship and twice traverse the same spaces.
Finally, Scaramouche uses his powers of hypnosis to entrance our comedic pair.
The sequence begins with our comedic pair appealing to the heroine Eliana in her cabin.
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Scaramouche enters the cabin unobtrusively and hypnotizes Eliana in a long shot. The
comedians sidestep the trickster and run out of the cabin. An exterior long shot frames the
men running down the hallway as Scaramouche appears at the door. Scaramouche lifts
his hands, arches his eyebrows and entrances Oscarito and Grande Otelo (Figure A31).
The two men stop. In a literal reversal of the earlier shot, the two men retrace their steps
down the hallway and into the room. This shot does not simply show the performers
turning around and obediently returning; rather, it literally reverses the direction of
projection and presents the performers’ uncannily moving backwards. The trick shot
continues inside the cabin, respooling the performers’ evasive sidesteps and then
continuing with actions unaccounted for earlier in the sequence. The performers' reverseprojected backward motion charts a different path, somersaulting over the bed, jumping
backward over a coffee table and into a small loveseat (Figure A32). Forward motion is
arrested and literally reversed, but the backward motion produces a new itinerary. Does
time move forward while they move backward or does time move backward while they
move forward? Movement is disarticulated from temporal progress, and the sequence
introduces a discontinuity in time, forcing us spectators to retrace our inferential steps
and identify what is out of place and out of time.
Understanding that early chanchada production schedules were determined by
their carnival release window in February and that the films were also a platform to
promote radio play and discographic sales of popular songs featured in the film, means
further excavating the material determinants of parody as archaeology. In October,
producers chose the musical selections they thought would be most popular during
carnival (to be held the following February). The scenario was drawn up and the script
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generated in November, and the filming took place in the early summer during
December. This production schedule forces us to reconsider the chanchada: its parody is
not merely a laminar accumulation of allusions to the past to be traversed
archaeologically but also contains references to come. The film produced is not merely
beholden to a congealed past but remains open to the future. The chanchada inscribes a
forecast within a palimpsestic parodic mode of history. The film becomes shot through
with moments of futural speculation, which attempt to account for the historicity of
reception, crystallized in the musical performances. Carnaval Atlântida self-reflexively
presents the chanchada as a parody that embeds the future in its lateral and backward
glance.
In a confrontation with the set designer, director De Milho reprimands the crew
for wasting its time designing sets and costumes for a musical number that will never be.
The set designer informs the director that he is working on De Milho’s daughter’s orders
and explains what the sequence will look like. The imagined musical sequence begins
with a hard cut to an obvious sound stage designed to appear as a kiosk on the streets in
Rio. The camera pushes into a newspaper boy falling asleep and dissolves into a spiraling
kaleidoscope effect punctuated by a cut to a long shot of the life-size cover of a
magazine, “Revista.” Grande Otelo bursts through the cover, and the camera pans with
his arrival to reveal that he is flanked by a series of life-sized film magazine covers
literally inhabited by scantily-clad women performers. The music is reminiscent of
Singin’ in the Rain’s “Gotta Dance” sequence (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952); the
choreography perhaps more reminiscent of its “Beautiful Girls” sequence. As the samba
begins, a baiana-dressed woman standing in the cover of “Cinelândia” joins the
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comedian. Eventually, the warrior in “Manchete,” the sailor in “Revista da Semana,” the
newsie in “Fon Fon,” the indigenous woman in “O Cruzeiro,” and the patriotic model in
“Carioca,” similarly come to life and dance around the baiana (Figure A33). The
performance is doubly nested within the dream of a character in a planned sequence to
come. Just as the musical sequence within the narrative is only conceived and described
in futural terms, so was the samba “No Tabuleiro da Baina” (written by Ary Barroso, the
man responsible for the anthemic “Aquarela do Brasil”) selected because of its planned
release through Continental Discos. The future conceived in the past through the
performance of a song that was among Barroso’s first successes nearly two decades
earlier in 1936, written for the theatrical revue piece Maravilhosa, also featuring Grande
Otelo.
The Trouble with Irony
In the Atlântida studios’ successful musical comedy Carnaval Atlântida (José
Carlos Burle,1952), a Brazilian director Cecílio B. De Milho (Cecil B. Of the Corn)
wants to make a sandal-and-swords epic of Helen of Troy in the fictional carioca studio
Acrópole Films. The director’s efforts will eventually be foiled through the machinations
of his cast and crew who wish to produce a more relevant, dynamic and commercially
viable carnivalesque musical. In his attempts to secure a working adaptation of the
classical story of the seduction by Paris, De Milho enlists the help of a local scholar of
antiquity, played by comedian Oscarito, who teaches at an all-girls school. The scholar is
introduced through a lecturing voice-off as the camera cranes over a classroom of
schoolgirls staring distractedly at the front of the classroom and the ostensible source of
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the voice-off. The instructor’s name, Xenofontes [Xenophon], not only gestures towards
the character’s hellenophilia but also functions as rich intertext. The etymology of the
character’s name — xeno- referring to foreign or stranger and phone referring to sound or
voice — speaks to the ambivalence within the narrative regarding the adaption (and
parody) of foreign sources. The scholar’s first response to the project is a simple:
“Helena de Troia no cinema nacional? / Helen of Troy in the national cinema?” The
film’s climactic embrace of the musical comedy genre over the epic blockbuster comes
with the scholar’s conversion. In his baptism of sorts, Xenofontes approaches the director
in casual wear aside his dancer sweetheart (played by the Cuban dancing sensation María
Antonieta Pons) pitching a musical comedy: “I quit Greece and embraced [adheri]
samba!” The character’s name also suggests a deeper ambivalence regarding the
peripheral position of the local and regional studio system within a market dominated by
American imports as well as a self-reflexive commentary on the necessary use of
technologies and practices developed elsewhere. A peripheral cinema would seem to
necessarily be a xenophonic practice.
The character’s name also alludes to the Greek historian, soldier and philosopher
Xenophon. Xenophon’s histories provide some of the more comprehensive extant
accounts of Athenian society as well as several Socratic dialogues that portray the ancient
philosopher as delivering practical commonsense advice in unequivocal language, read in
contemporary criticism as an overly earnest Socrates at odds with Plato’s Socrates
(Anderson 21). At stake in his characterization of Socrates is the politics of the
philosopher’s irony. Kierkegaard’s early work, On the Concept of Irony with Continual
Reference to Socrates, traces the concept of Socratic irony through the writings of Plato,
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Xenophon, and Aristophanes, arriving at an understanding of irony as “infinite absolute
negativity” that seeks to clarify by saying what something is not (262). For Kierkegaard,
the Socratic use of irony was a deconstructive technique avant la lettre that facilitated
self-reflection, critical distance, and subjectification (Schleifer 44). Xenophon, however,
becomes the object of sustained critique given the way his Socrates fails to dissimulate in
his dialogues with his disciples, rendering the philosopher innocuous (Anderson 15).
Vivienne Gray situates this early criticism as imagining a non-ironic Xenophon that
would be subsequently recovered in ironical, subversive darker readings she claims
reflect the concern of the modern world with irony (1). Xenophon’s Socrates is unlike the
ironic man of Plato’s dialogues who claims ignorance and leaves his interlocutors in
aporia, presenting instead a more positive interlocutor who provides guidance and
straightforward instruction to his disciples. Gray underscores that Xenophon avoids the
term eironeia because of its ostensible association with deception. She argues that he
locates irony along a spectrum of social play in the spirit of eutrapelia, anticipating
Aristotle’s theory of humor (330). Irony for Xenophon becomes characterized less as
humorless deceit than as “playing in earnest” and as part of an ethical theory (337). The
seriousness in play recovers the humorous and also foregrounds the presence and
positivity necessary for the effectiveness of this ethical form: “lightening the darkness
makes the darkness more telling, but also demonstrates the persistence of the lighter
spirit” (Gray 362). This earnest playfulness aligns with a mode of spectatorship founded
on critical proximity; a humorous spectatorship that relies on being in the world and
taking pleasure in a movement toward disclosure.
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Claire Colebrook writes a genealogy that understands Western metaphysics as
responding to the ironic posture (of Socrates) and the problem of human meaning (1).
Irony is implicated in a history of Western subjectivism: the idea that behind language
and actions there is a ground or subject to be expressed (20). Irony most commonly refers
to saying what is contrary to what is meant, a definition attributed to Roman orator
Quinitilian. In additional classical contexts, from the comic plays of Aristophanes to the
Socratic dialogues of Plato, irony or eironeia refers at worst to lying or deception and at
best to a complex dissimulation and a capacity to conceal what is really meant. In order
to function, however, irony must both be recognized and open onto the possibility of not
being recognized or being mis-recognized. If communication is context dependent, then a
word is used ironically when it seems out of place or unconventional. The recognition of
irony foregrounds the social and conventional aspects (i.e., the pragmatics) of language:
“We can assume a speaker is being ironic only if we share the same norms” (Colebrook
17). The interlocutor must have access to the assumed norms and codes, must be familiar
with the place, to identify signification that is out of place. Understanding the structure of
irony means moving beyond rhetorical irony and the identification of separate or hidden
meanings. Instead, irony refers to and produces groups of speakers in a shared context:
“Irony is explained by how ‘we’ use language” (Colebrook 61). The distinction between
the ironic and the non-ironic relies on the assumption of a "we" and the production of a
double audience: one that hears but shall not understand and another that is aware of the
additional meanings and of outsiders’ incomprehension. Hence, the necessary possibility
of being misrecognized means that ironic effect relies on producing or imagining an other
incapable of irony, without access to the norms and/or unable to understand convention.
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The assumption of a “we” has political implications, and Colebrook identifies two
countervailing positions: one that considers irony as evidence of the coherence of
language (or at the very least the possibility of coherence), and another that underscores
how irony produces an awareness of incoherence and incompatible viewpoints (42-43).
For Colebrook, the debate over irony’s effects are a dispute over the status of politics,
with the former ultimately espousing a politics of agreement, recognition and consensus
and the latter imagining a politics founded on difference and incommensurability: “Those
who emphasise the stability of irony value, or assume the value of, a politics directed
towards community and unity. Those who celebrate the destabilising force of irony, by
contrast, insist that politics is the rejection, contestation or disruption of shared norms"
(44).
The turn from classical rhetorical irony to a more generalized irony, defined as a
critical attitude toward reason and enlightenment, is one that Colebrook situates in
Romanticism. Irony during the period became a way to mark the insufficiency of
language and gesture toward an almost mystical component of language. Marxist critics
object to the Romantic elevation of irony to the spirit of life, which occludes the outer
material world and the conflicts and differences of political life. Romantic irony
imagined an unrepresentable condition, often stripped of political and historical location.
Often seen as a universalizing and de-historicizing position, contemporary, historicallyinformed scholarship rejects the transcendental strivings of Romantic irony by restoring
its context. However, drawing on Derrida and de Man and their belief in the impossibility
and necessity of irony, Colebrook complicates this New Historicist position by noting
how its anti-transcendentalism merely produces context as one more transcendental
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condition: “the very act of speaking about the world creates a position other than the
world” (118). In other words, the cultural turn’s attempt to explain content through
context ostensibly creates a transhistorical “we.” Instead, Colebrook advocates thinking
oneself as contextually located and immanent to some field, imagining both a general
horizon and context and refusing to set oneself in opposition to a privileged metacontextual position, aware of the ethical and epistemological implications of assuming a
“we.” We cannot avoid irony’s questioning but we can also not achieve a pure separation
from context. Irony ultimately is less a position or product than a movement, one that can
help us reflect on this gap between being and being other than the world. Irony means
being aware of incompleteness, an inability to be fully aware of origins, and an
opposition to closure. Irony works against the drive for completeness, aware that this
drive can only fail, “but that the failure is itself a moment of partial illumination”
(Colebrook 67). Ultimately, Colebrook does not advocate an abandonment of contextual
analyses and historicism. She wants to return to the ontological stakes of Romantic irony
armed with an understanding of materialist historiography. Romantic irony, then,
becomes a style of thinking that acknowledges a gap between the definition and the
process of defining, between the self and the self as represented.
Turning to Deleuze and Guattari, Colebrook notes that irony relies on the logic of
the signifier: “in order for a sign to mean it must have a lawfulness that transcends any
specific speech act” (129). The logic of the signifier supposes a non-commensurate and
generalizable system that functions because what is said necessarily means and points to
something other than the specific enunciation. Deleuze attempts to liberate sense from a
system of language by claiming that human signification and the production of a subject
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are effects of a “milieu” of sense beyond a system of speech; a system of logic emerges
because of my perceiving the world and my desire to act in the world (“Logic of Sense”
166). If irony presupposes a system of language, then Deleuze refers to humor as a
tendency opposed to irony: “Irony is the co-extensiveness of being with the individual, or
of the I with representation, humor is the co-extensiveness of sense and non-sense”
(“Logic of Sense” 141). Irony appears as a movement of ascent toward (metaphysical)
principles that produces a subject and grounds representation. To imagine a behind to
language as an effect of a subject before speech supposes an ultimate point of view
beyond difference. Irony becomes a tendency to remove oneself from the world and
eliminate difference, a tendency that Deleuze and Guattari identify with the capitalist
tendency to make everything equivalent and produce a universal point from which all
values can be exchanged.
Humor as Anti-Subjective Ethical Practice
The presumption of a stable subject undergirds both the transcendentalism of
Romantic irony and the defense of historical context and cultural specificity. Drawing on
Nietzschean irony, Colebrook argues against the concept of the subject as the ground who
brings forces into relation and into representation (99). There are no pre-representational
subjects who synthesize forces of life into world; rather, these forces collide and conflict
and produce subject positions. The critique of subjectivism has its roots in Nietzsche and
Foucault, who cite the transcendental subject as instantiating a model of ethics as
knowledge over and above ethics as active self-formation. What is worth clarifying is that
Deleuze does not so much disparage irony as a movement (of inhuman unity) as he does
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the ironic direction of ascent and the ironic position of transcendence it can secure; the
problem lies in the will to know, and Deleuze advocates for an ethics that foregrounds the
limits of a possessive intellect. Rather than foreclosing the gap between saying and
meaning or applying a logic of signification and substitution, Deleuze wishes to remain in
a position of not knowing that questions a logic of signification that necessarily absents
the world. To imagine a hidden meaning behind the ironic is to fall into a singleness of
viewpoint and intentionality that the ironic movement had sought to destroy. The self is
never fully present or at one with itself but in a “state of constant presentation,” a
succession of masks and personalities without a position (Colebrook 52). The experience
of nonlinear and multiple temporalities and the focus on the body and the senses can
produce a self that questions representation and subjectivism. Again, rather than
presuppose a pre-existent subject or a subject that is the outcome of subtractive processes
in a psychoanalytic key, Colebrook notes how irony compels an avowal of lack or at the
very least an awareness of the fiction of plentitude.
This critique of subjectivism is surprisingly mirrored in the foundational film
criticism of Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes. In his early history of Brazilian cinema, Salles
Gomes considers the difficulty in writing a national film history. Writing in the shadow
of dependency theory, he compares the cinemas of Brazil, Egypt, and India in opposition
to the American, European and Japanese film traditions. Underdevelopment is not a stage
but a condition or state, a truism he underscores by noting how the latter cinemas were
never underdeveloped as such (85). The fallacy of developmentalism becomes explicit in
this historiographic comparative essay. Salles Gomes makes an observation about the
(neo)colonial situation of Brazilian cinema that suggests that the concern with
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authenticity and representativity that characterized early film histories is misplaced. His
critique stems from a different understanding of the Brazilian subject/spectator. Using the
categories of colonizer and colonized, he notes the different colonial and postindependence histories of the aforementioned underdeveloped nations. Salles Gomes
locates Brazil within a tradition of Western representation that refuses to nostalgically
posit a pre-colonial colonized as distinct from the colonizer. Instead of figuring Brazilian
specificity positively, Salles Gomes notes: “We were not European or North American,
but stripped of an original culture, nothing was foreign to us because everything was. The
construction of ourselves happens in the rarefied dialectic between not-being and beingother” (88). Salles Gomes locates the parodic “creative incompetence” of the Brazilian
chanchada within this dialectic. The parody does not express an aspirational relation
between self and other, as Vieira and Stam argue, when the distinction between self and
other cannot be ontologically presupposed. If we assume that everything is foreign, then
nothing is foreign. Within this framework, American film is less foreign than distant or at
a remove. Alternatively, the spectator establishes an intimate relationship with the
chanchada in a humorous mode that allows for creativity in proximity (less a difference
in kind than in degree) (91).
Instead of being beholden to the law of the signifier, humor focuses on the body
and the excesses of the system of language. The logic of the signifier instantiates a certain
linear temporality because it is through speech that we have a sense of a subject who
precedes speech and a pre-representational world to be signified (Deleuze “Logic of
Sense” 144). The Derridean paradoxical impossibility and necessity of irony — speaking
about the world creates a position other than the world — can be worked through by
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rethinking time. Deleuze argues for a non-linear and multiple understanding of time;
drawing on De Man who understands that time entails the creation of an ordered world
from some stable viewpoint, Deleuze argues that irony confines singularity to an
individual and stable point of view (“Logic of Sense” 139). Against an ironic subject that
is an effect of the structure of signification, Deleuze insists on a humor that creates
surfaces: “the art of thinking the noises, sensations, affects and sensible singularities from
which bodies are composed, bodies that can then have relations” (Colebrook 130).
Humor does not entail the simple reversal of cause and effect, but rather the
abandonment of a logic of time — of before and after relations — that allows for
causality and intentionality: “We laugh when the order of time and explanation no longer
holds” (Colebrook 134). Ultimately, irony commits us to meaning and signification and
humor commits us to sense, the latter term understood as a nonsensical proposition that
can be neither true nor false and a pure ideational event irreducible to propositions, never
an origin or principle but an effect (Deleuze “Logic of Sense” 31). Both irony and humor
are movements or orientations that bring us to an inhuman unity: either the totality
beyond us or the impersonal singularities from which we emerge (Colebrook 136). In
humor, therefore, the self appears less as an organizing subject than as a collection of
body parts. The self is not an absent synthesizing point of view but a disrupted
connection of movements. Referencing slapstick comedy and the collision of body and
objects, Colebrook characterizes humor as anti-subjective because the subject is taken
down to its corporeal origins, and is less concerned with meaning because words become
noise and sensation (135). Deleuze's critique of subjectivism provides a philosophy of
time and history that is anti-ironic, one that avoids positioning itself above the events and
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flows of time and discloses forces that can never be exhausted by representation. Deleuze
describes a time of becoming from which language and subjectivity emerges, a time of
differing durations and perceptions (Colebrook 136). His understanding of humor is one
that shares the tendency toward “inhuman unity” of irony in the traditional sense but
preserves the movement of the self. In a riposte to Romantic transcendentalism, humor is
historical in that it produces an awareness both of the self as emerging from the flow of
life and the fiction of the subject as presupposed ground.
For Deleuze, the movement away from subjectivism and irony is ethically
affirmative. Foregrounding the emptiness of subjectivity entails avoiding positing a form
above and beyond identity, focusing on the body and the emergence of language from
nonsense, highlighting the finitude of the self by undermining the logic of linear time.
Kaja Silverman similarly identifies Western philosophy as an ascending (dis)orientation
away from the world of the sense to a supra-sensual domain. Departing from the
foundational Platonic allegory of the cave, Silverman underscores how the parable
presupposes a distinction between Being and appearance that produces a movement away
from the world and into a higher reality, a trajectory which Deleuze and Colebrook would
characterize as ironic. What Silverman adds to this discussion is the primacy of vision in
this movement of inhuman unity. The turn away from the world is a visual event that
entails a reorientation of vision: “to abandon the domain of phenomenal forms is to lose
one’s sight” (“World” 2). The emphasis on the visual animates her anti-Platonic
argument that imagines a form of world spectatorship that I characterize as humorous in
the Deleuzian sense. If irony supposes a hidden truth or reality and the opposition of
Being and appearance, then world spectatorship entails a humorous orientation toward
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the phenomenal. By challenging the opposition of Being and appearance that undergirds
most accounts of the Platonic cave, Silverman locates in appearance the domain where
Being can emerge. The parable presents less a drama of revelation than a drama of
concealment (of the world). Her world spectatorship entails a kind of looking which
adheres to phenomenal forms and the domain of appearance. Appearance is not a faithful
copy but the locus within which Being unfolds and presents itself (“World” 3). The world
spectator does not aspire to revelation because the concealment of the world affords
moments of ecstatic disclosure.
Silverman’s project articulates Heidegger to Lacan, allowing her to insert desire
into the former while avoiding the trap of Oedipal triangulation in the latter. Silverman’s
earlier psychoanalytic feminist theory was founded on a theory of the subject founded on
lack and separation from plentitude, a subject Heidegger characterizes as pure will-topower who objectifies the world through representation, entifying the world in order
master it epistemologically and make himself the center. A shift from subject to Being
means refiguring and avowing lack as well as understanding that presence, plentitude,
and a return to the here-and-now is not possible (Silverman 16). Introducing desire into a
Heideggerian framework means figuring what is absent (and desired) as a loss of Being
rather than an originary love-object (Silverman 40). The world spectator then is a desiring
subject that does not seek to return to a plentitude or occupy a transcendental position
because this would entail an annihilation of the self; rather, the world spectator
humorously takes pleasure in insatiability, in adhering to a concealed world that affords
the possibility of disclosure. The Oedipus complex gets recast as a compulsive repetition
of this fading of being, a representation of a loss of being or thrownness. The articulation
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of Lacan to Heidegger may prove problematic given the latter’s rejection of signification;
however, Silverman re-reads Lacan to underscore how his framework argues against a
fixed and stable relation between sign and signifier and therefore posits a similar
challenge to the logic of signification (58). More particularly, she highlights the
destructive and creative force of signification, particularly in Lacan’s distinction between
a linguistic signifier, which induces a fading of being and an absenting of the phenomenal
world, and a perceptual signifier, which can render the world affectively present. In this
light, Lacan can be aligned with Heidegger (and to an extent the Deleuze of The Logic of
Sense) as deconstructing the opposition between Being and appearance, as deconstructing
the ironic subject who conceives of a difference between meaning and saying.
The homologous rejection of subjectivism in Deleuze and Silverman (via
Heidegger) means thinking the self outside of subjectivity and conceptualizing ourselves
as an action rather than a stable point or entity. Silverman maps different types of looking
onto different relations with/in the world: a transcending ironic look, a mundane
everyday look that is with other beings in an inauthentic way, and a humorous world
spectatorship that encounters other beings disclosively (24). The first spectator retreats
from lack through disavowal into a fictive fullness that necessarily distances him from
the world. Everyday looking focuses upon the world but perceives other beings as
graspable and knowable without embracing the creative faculties of the look: “We do not
allow other beings to appear because we are not ourselves” (Silverman 24). Alternatively,
being in the world requires a mode of looking that does not take possession of other
beings but revels in the discovery of the self at the site of the other (Silverman 52). If the
first spectator holds the world at a critical distance and the second spectator is too
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proximate to the world, then the third spectator might be said to occupy what I call a
movement of critical proximity. Rather than founding our analyses on a model of
spectatorship based on a discrete subject who acts on the world held at a distance; rather,
the critical proximity of the humorous spectator presumes being in the world and within
temporality, encountering other beings proximally in order to “unfold something into the
fullness of its essence” (qtd. in Silverman 33). If our necessarily restricted viewpoint will
objectify what is seen, the humorous spectator must attempt to apprehend the world in its
perspectival diversity. In order to apprehend the world humorously, we should not yearn
for a totalizing viewpoint but understand our look in its partialness as both a function of
the concealment of the world as well as the historicity of our look.
Critical Proximity
Comedy must be understood as structured by concealment and disclosure, its
narrative a function of problems with connection and becoming. In his discussion of
melodrama, Peter Brooks speculates that different kinds of drama have corresponding
sense deprivations: blindness for tragedy, muteness for melodrama, and deafness for
comedy (57). The melodramatic narrative is a text of muteness, driven by the desire for
expression in order to make the world morally legible; comedy, on the other hand,
operates by repeated attempts to be heard and call the other into being. Cavell’s comedies
of remarriage are characterized by this common (ethical) movement: acknowledging the
other and being acknowledged establish intimacy, so that the other is the vehicle for selfknowledge and the transformation of the self (“Pursuits” 240). Our humorous
apprehension, understood not as distant spectation but as ethical action, becomes the
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condition for the world’s disclosure. Regarded in this vein, the comedies under
consideration are neither reactionary and self-derisive, which presupposes a subject tobe-derided, nor critically distantiating. Rather, they stage encounters that punctually
unbind the body and compel an awareness and pleasure in the partialness of our vision.
The move from the self as (ironic) entity to the self as (humorous) action might be
elucidated by turning from the parable of the cave to the parable of the ring Gyges from
the second book of the Republic. Henri Bergson draws on the Gygean parable to describe
our relationship to the comic: “As though wearing the ring of Gyges in reverse effect,
[the comic person] becomes invisible to himself while remaining visible to all the world”
(17). The comic stages a drama of (self-) concealment that elicits laughter when the self
establishes contact with the world.
The cinema and the comic have ostensible affinities, undergirded by homologous
(if mirrored) processes of screened relationships between self and world. The former
conceals the viewer from the world; the latter conceals the world from the viewer.
Laughter occurs at the moment of mutual disclosure: the world is made to appear, and we
revel in the discovery of the self at the site of the other. For Stanley Cavell, the cinema
can be best understood less through the former drama of revelation than through the latter
drama of (self-)concealment. In the dialogue, there is a magical Ring of Gyges that grants
invisibility to the wearer and potential immunity from moral consequence. For Cavell, the
Ring provides an alternative ontology of the cinema grounded not on the mechanical
reproducibility of reality but on mechanically absenting the audience from reality (26). In
other words, “an ontology of film is less concerned with characterizing a medium than
with understanding how our current ways of being in the world and relating to it are
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‘cinematic’” (Rodowick “Ethics” 2). The cinema does not present the world; it allows us
to view the world unseen. Alexander Galloway suggests that this merely instantiates an
ironic spectator who sees the world from a position of metaphysical transcendence, a
necessary masochism in her wished-for invisibility (Galloway 277). Moreover, he adds
that the cinematic condition and his masochistic spectator couple the disappearance of the
self with making the world proximate. Re-reading Cavell, however, suggests that
understanding the cinematic condition in terms of proximity and distance is problematic.
As Cavell explains, “[it] not so much that the world is passing us by, as that we
are displaced from our natural habitation within it…The screen overcomes our fixed
distance; it makes displace­ment appear as our natural condition" (40-41). Rodowick
suggests that the screen is less a medium than a barrier, an embodiment of our present
ontology “as a self divided from the world by the window of perception” (“Ethics” 3).
We do not distance ourselves from a world-made-proximate, rather we are concealed.
Concealment, then, is not equivalent to erasure as Galloway would suggest. Moreover,
concealment reflects our natural habitation in the world, our thrownness. The reality that
film holds up is not that of external reality but of our own perceptual condition, and
cinema opens the possibility of being present to the self. Cavell’s ontology presupposes
an ontological restlessness in the modern subject, caught in “a desire for selftransformation whose temporality is that of a becoming without finality” (Rodowick
“Ethics” 5). The cinematic condition then is an expression of a desire to regain contact
with the world through our perceptions, through seeming, through appearance. The
cinema does not reveal the world at a distance, which would presuppose a subject divided
from the world; rather, through a proximal, disclosive relation to the world, the cinema
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“returns to us our past, current and futures states of being” (Rodowick “Ethics” 8). This
means moving away from an epistemological question to an ethical concern. A critical
proximity and humorous spectatorship does not entail an over-identification with image,
the possibility of producing distance through techniques of (dis)simulation, or even
understanding subjectivity through self-presence. As Levinas suggests, the sense of the
self is not discovered in self-presence. Proximity exceeds the limits of ontology and the
human essence, and the proximal relation to the other puts the self into question (5).
Ethics arises as the self is continually summoned in the encounter with the world
disclosed. The cinema instantiates a practice, not a presence; our action in the world —
our humorous spectatorship — becomes the condition for the world’s disclosure.
Conclusion
Xenofontes’s first appearance in Carnaval Atlântida finds the teacher lecturing on
Zeno’s paradox (Figure A34):
“The philosophical school of Zeno of Elea, with his method of reduction
to absurd, awoke the sagacity of the greater thinkers of all time. Zeno
tried to demonstrate, according to Aristotle, the non-existence of space,
arguing that space presumes a space containing it. And so on…Zeno’s
argument demonstrates that space and time being divisible to an infinity
of points and distances —”
A young schoolgirl interrupts the lecturer, asking when he will finally speak about
Eros, god of love. The professor adds, “I don’t know yet. Later.” The deferral of the
lecture’s point echoes the subsequent revelation that the professor’s life work, a 25volume book project titled “History of Abstract Movement in Greek Philosophy,” will be
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completed more than 30 years later on March 21, 1987. The character, much like Zeno’s
arrow, will forever be deferred and never quite arrive. Zeno’s paradoxes, of course,
provide a useful intertext through which to consider cinematic time. Mary Ann Doane
discusses the question of continuity and discontinuity in the cinema by tracing the
successive film theoretical debates pivoting on Zeno’s paradoxes and their relation to the
phenomenon of intermittent motion in the cinema (“Emergence” 28). The illusion of
movement generated by a projected series of still frames and the illusion of continuity
afforded by continuity of editing have situated the cinema as either the corroboration (as
in the work of Bergson) or the refutation of Zeno’s claim that movement and change do
not really exist and are only apparent. By examining the early logics of editing,
particularly the single-shot actuality, and the temporal repetition and partial editing of
early narrative attempts, she contextualizes the cinematic celebration of mobility within
the experience of modernity based on flux and exchange . She finds in the disavowal of
stillness and immobility — the refutation of Zeno’s paradox — the affirmation of a
reality that is not there (“Emergence” 205). The refutation of Zeno becomes tied to the
ideological function of the cinematic apparatus. Ultimately, Doane’s project examines the
historical status of contingency in modernity and “the ways an indexically ensured
contingency played a role in thinking about the cinema as the archival representation of
time” (“Emergence” 239). Invoking Hansen, Doane finds in the inscription of
contingency a process whereby the spectator does not glean historical content but a
relation to history and duration. The intertextual and paratextual operations of these
chanchadas, their embeddedness in a multidirectional past, and their speculation about a
future cultural milieu, do not simply make the contingent legible but make the spectator’s
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contingency graspable. Once again, in the tradition of critical realism, the Brazilian
chanchada organizes time and movement differently, not only making our historicity
tangible but also making our act of reception an ontological practice.
260
CONCLUSION
When I first taught the Cuban absurdist comedy Muerte de un burócrata [Death
of a bureaucrat] (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1966) in an Anglo-European context, a student
expressed reservations about laughing at the film, wondering aloud whether local
audiences would have found it funny in the same way and whether he was performing a
neocolonial violence in laughing at the expense of this imagined audience. Laughing at
the parodic intertexts and satiric barbs as well as the ostensible filmmaking flaws, the
student speculated that the film text may not have the same effect on its local audience:
would they understand the references, and would they find the discontinuities and abrupt
tonal changes risible? These comments provide a starting point through which to consider
how a study of peripheral humor from without and between cultural, political and
linguistic contexts must be attentive to questions of spectatorship, underscoring how the
tension between abstract spectator and empirical audience takes on added political stakes
in a comparativist project.
In the context of a vibrant and dynamic Third Cinema, the formal devices of
Muerte de un burócrata can be understood in light of Julio García Espinosa’s
foundational manifesto “For an Imperfect Cinema,” originally written in 1969 and first
published in 1973. García Espinosa advocated for a deliberately imperfect aesthetics in
opposition to the technical and mystificatory aesthetic of dominant Hollywood cinema.
These imperfections reveal the material constraints on filmmaking and cultural
production in the periphery, producing an awareness of the unequal relations of exchange
between center and periphery as well as the subordinate discursive position of these texts
within broader circuits of film circulation. García Espinosa’s text is justifiably understood
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as polemical and denunciatory, positing a cinema of testimony that “shows the process
which generates problems” (31). What is often forgotten in the broad characterization of
the political and engaged cinemas of the continent following the Cuban Revolution is
their remarkable playfulness. As opposed to the narcissistic and exhibitionist “perfect
cinema,” a category García Espinosa broadens to include film praxis from any context
that becomes rigidly codified or ardently prescriptive, García Espinosa’s imperfect
cinema is playful and entertaining (divertido) and puts an end to the conventions of
elegance, authenticity, and seriousness (30). The word divertido etymologically suggests
both spritedness and spatial practice, amusement derived from turns of phrases and turns
of bodies. This imperfect cinema is one possessed with a comic spirit: vehemently
opposed to doxa and defined categories, mutable and flexible, invested in registering
processes as opposed to products, and upending the mechanistic syntax of film grammar
and genre conventions. This playfulness entails rejecting a contemplative cinema of a
priori judgment and understands cinematic realism as negotiating the subjective and
objective. To that end, García Espinosa proposed catalyzing with his cinema a dialectical
“process of dis-alienation,” creating an audience predisposed to question what appears on
screen, appealing to the cognitive and affective registers of the spectator (qtd. in Francese
438).
García Espinosa also invokes the term “Camp” to characterize the challenges of
conceiving a popular cinema, noting the backward glance of the “camp optic” that brings
marginal cultural products closer in an aestheticizing register (26). The use of the term
Camp a mere five years after Susan Sontag’s well-known essay is remarkable,
particularly given the latter’s claim that Camp is possible only in affluent societies, that
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is, in societies of rigid stratification where a self-elected class can be constituted as
arbiters of taste (63-64). García Espinosa rejects the elitist aestheticism of Camp but
imagines a similar relation toward cultural production and consumption and underscores
the political possibilities of the Camp sensibility. For Sontag, Camp strikes a pose
between distance and proximity, between seeing the world as artifice and construct and
seeing the world sympathetically and lovingly (56). “Camp proposes a comic vision of
the world,” a parodic look full of tender feeling that does not contemptuously deride
because its pleasure comes in part from identifying with what it parodies (63). Gutiérrez
Alea’s film operates not simply as satire but also suggests a peripheral camping of perfect
cinema, critiquing not simply an increasingly obdurate bureaucratic and propaganda
apparatus but also affectionately and ambivalently gesturing toward a constellation of
cross-cultural intertexts, including Luis Buñuel, Laurel and Hardy, Marilyn Monroe,
Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Ingmar Bergman, and Jean Vigo.
What this introductory anecdote ultimately suggests is how the Anglo-European
spectator and academic produce an uncritical and too-proximate local spectator. Limiting
the study of these films to the domain of presumptive authentic spectators, however,
seems problematic, uncritically positing and policing an authentic discursive position.
This characterization of the Latin American spectator is one that Gutiérrez Alea
interrogates in his own Dialéctica del espectador [The Viewer’s Dialectic], an attempt to
move between Eisensteinian exstasis and Brechtian recognition of reality founded on
sensory engagement and awareness (46). He argues against an understanding of the
cinema as mere extension of reality and the objectification of people’s emotional
processes, preferring a cinema that draws viewers closer to a peripheral and historical
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reality without sacrificing its artifice and fiction. His cinema hopes to instantiate an active
spectator, not simply understood as critically distant — a contemplative or critically
complacent spectator — but as one moved ethically to act in the world. What Gutiérrez
Alea advocates is a movement between enajenación and desenajenación, between
alienation and dis-alienation, between an exstasis he characterizes as an emotional
surrender that fractures the self and a distancing that produces an awareness of our
historicity (69-70).
Following other attempts within Latin American film studies to re-articulate its
politics and aesthetics, my project has suggested how a turn to affect can re-articulate the
film practice and theory of the periphery within a contemporary mediascape. Comedy,
then, allows us to avoid speaking about peripheral cinema in essentialist terms because
the answer to “what is local?” does not require locating practice within an abstract space
(always unstable given the operations of representational spaces and spatial practice) or
imagining a pre-representational identity or subject. Following Sontag’s suggestion that
Camp becomes a private code and badge of identity (53) — to partake in the code is to be
part of the group — I understand the comic spirit of this imperfect cinema as one that
produces a highly particularized “we.” As I have demonstrated, irony structurally
necessitates assuming a “we” and positing an other unable to understand convention.
Returning to Bergson, the production of a group “in the language” or “in on the joke” is
not merely a function of intentionality; this group or “we” self-delimits via laughter. The
comic is communal and requires feeling connected to others: laughter functions as a call
and its response or echo does not articulate meaning yet communicates and connects
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without signifying (Bergson 6). The collective spectatorship that comedy produces, the
laughing bodies it innervates, seems to provide the genre’s most explicit political charge.
I have argued that comedies mediate modernity in diverse national contexts
through affective and aesthetic tactics that exceed narrative comprehension. As
mentioned earlier, Laura Podalsky has seen this turn to affect as challenging the dominant
scholarly framework that characterizes the New Latin American Cinema as a movement
favoring critical distantiation as the only mode of political engagement. Her project looks
to contemporary cinema to trace how the neorealist sentimentality and modernist
disorientation she finds in the cinema of the 1960s and 1970s that promoted an embodied
commitment to the new nation-states persists in the formal, thematic, and industrial
tendencies that seem to characterize Latin American cinema after the end of the Cold
War. I move backward from this privileged moment in Latin American film histories,
revisiting Latinamericanist theory from the 1960s that countered dominant trends in
international literary criticism and film theory before the cultural turn of the 1980s. These
earlier forms of literary criticism and Latin Americanism worked within, through and
against the linguistic turn before the historicism that became convention decades later
(Schwartz). Articulating these theories to ongoing debates in film studies allows us
consider not only how to write comparatively but also how to write theoretically from a
(historical and geopolitical) location.
Using transculturation to supplement theories of vernacular modernism means
considering modernist cultural practice and the experience of modernity anew. A more
exacting analysis of the cultural implications of the term “transculturation” leads to a
more precise understanding of this transitive process. Transculturation suggests a cultural
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response to modernization from the periphery, a response toward a foreign center and a
peripheral metropolis. Moreover, transculturation privileges an immersive approach that
cultivates the narrative possibilities afforded by linguistic particularities and subcultural
nuance. Were film studies to take seriously Rama’s imperative to think in the language
and Franco’s plea to think historically, the question of transculturation and Latin
American cinema would move beyond an exercise in mapping the national and/or
regional stakes to posit the possibility of critical realism until now excluded from
cinematic canons. Moreover, we should avoid thinking of modernism as somehow
inauthentic in relation to a more authentic popular culture; instead, it should understand
film practice as responding to modernity, privileging modes of production, distribution,
and exhibition that provincialize modernity.
These critical realist texts manifest a negotiation between center and periphery as
well as tradition and modernity that is historically situated, relies on the lived of
experience of popular culture and everyday life, and inscribes this negotiation in the text.
By moving beyond approaches that simply decode the representational field or
symptomatically situate these texts in terms of their historical context, I have argued that
comedies’ embodied effects compel us to think theoretically from a location. I have
peripheralized theories of space and time by tracing their differential circulation and
currency in Latin America and articulating these to the collective modes of spectatorship
and bodily effects comedy produces. By considering the films of Cantinflas as
transcultural texts and examples of a circumscribed vernacular modernism and discussing
the films of Niní Marshall through ventriloquism and multiple incompatible
synchronizations, I have demonstrated how peripheral humor functions as peripatetic
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spatial practice. Further, by transvaluating the stutter and suggesting how Luis Sandrini’s
films function as a vehicle for historical self-awareness as well as discovering in the
palimpsestic temporality of the parodic Brazilian chanchada the possibility of a criticallyproximate, humorous spectator, I have shown that Latin American comedy produces an
awareness of historicity in a critically realist vein.
Our laughter in response to Cantinflas, Niní Marshall, Luis Sandrini and Oscarito
and Grande Otelo, whether in the Anglo-European classroom or in the movie theater in
the Mexico, Argentina or Brazil, compels us to examine our relation to the film text, our
position within a laughing collective body, and our historical and geopolitical location
within a cultural landscape marked by dependency. On the one hand, articulating Latin
American cultural studies and film studies critical frameworks allows us to move beyond
the iconophobia of much regional literary criticism and the celebratory invocation of the
popular by cultural studies that overstates the symbolic and iconic signifying operations
of the moving image and popular cinema. On the other hand, the differentiated
circulation of theory, the particular experience of modernity, and the discrepant material
development, archival preservation and sensory experience of the cinema in the region,
reveals the residual Eurocentrism that characterizes much film theory. To be “in on the
joke” of the Latin American comedy not only means to think in the language or within a
particular historical context but also to occupy a peripheral space, to perceive different
ways of organizing time and movement, and to become aware of our historicity and the
historicity of the text.
267
APPENDIX
FIGURES
Figure A1. Cayetano (Joaquín Pardavé) confronts Cantinflas about
his wife's indiscretions in Ahí está el detalle.
Figure A2. Cantinflas finds himself forced to marry Clotilde
Regalado (Sara Montiel) in Ahí está el detalle.
268
Figure A3. Cantinflas leans against a fake column, nearly collapsing
the set of the film within the film in Los tres mosqueteros
Figure A4. Manolete (Mario Moreno) dedicates his bullfight to a special
supporter in Ni sangre ni arena.
269
Figure A5. Cantinflas thanks his Doppelgänger in Ni sangre ni arena.
Figure A6. The first-time pilots hoisted on the shoulders of their peers
in a self-reflexive newsreel in ¡A volar joven!
270
Figure A7. Cantinflas recognizes himself on screen in ¡A volar joven!
Figure A8. Cantinflas is tossed out of his ill-gotten seat and thrown
out of the frame in Ni sangre ni arena.
271
Figure A9. Niní Reboredo (Niní Marshall) is startled by a microphone
shoved down her throat in Hay que educar a Niní.
Figure A10. Niní Reboredo (Niní Marshall) stands in for the movie
star in Hay que educar a Niní.
272
Figure A11. Niní Reboredo (Niní Marshall) is through being a double
in Hay que educar a Niní.
Figure A12. Niní Reboredo’s (Niní Marshall) screen self betrays her
in Hay que educar a Niní.
273
Figure A13. Niní Reboredo (Niní Marshall) as a teenaged schoolgirl
writing letters to herself in Hay que educar a Niní.
Figure A14. Catita (Niní Marshall) finds Paris derivative of Buenos
Aires during her bus tour in Divorcio en Montevideo.
274
Figure A15. Montevideo depicted in establishing shots in Divorcio en
Montevideo.
Figure A16. Cándida's (Niní Marshall) first on-screen appearance in
the eponymous film, Cándida.
275
Figure A17. Cándida (Niní Marshall) dreams of Galicia in this
superimposition from Cándida.
Figure A18. Cándida (Niní Marshall) cannot make sense of the
modern Buenos Aires in Cándida
276
Figure A19. Bartolo (Luis Sandrini) writes to the light of the flashing
advertisements outside in Bartolo tenía una flauta.
Figure A20. Berretín (Luis Sandrini) steals a gentleman's pocket
watch in Riachuelo.
277
Figure A21. A woman gets harassed by potential kidnappers. She
screams for help, but goes unheard by…
Figure A22. Eusebio (Luis Sandrini), whose felicitously faulty gun fails
to shoot in Don Quijote del altillo.
278
Figure A23. The parallel events in adjacent spaces are connected with
a sound event in Don Quijote del altillo.
Figure A24. Berretín (Luis Sandrini) out of sync during a fight in
Riachuelo.
279
Figure A25. On-location footage of the structures in the port of
Buenos Aires and La Boca neighborhood in Riachuelo.
Figure A26. The moving image becomes still photograph in this trick
shot from Riachuelo.
280
Figure A27. Buenos Aires as depicted by Brazil in Aviso aos
navegantes.
Figure A28. Helen of Troy as imagined by Cecílio B. De Milho
(Renato Restier) in Carnaval Atlântida.
281
Figure A29. Helen of Troy sings "Dona Cegonha" with Blecaute and
Grande Otelo in Carnaval Atlântida.
Figure A30. Kid Bolha (Oscarito) turns back time in Matar ou
Correr.
282
Figure A31. Scaramouche (José Lewgoy) hypnotizes his nemeses in
Aviso aos navegantes
Figure A32. Grande Otelo and Oscarito run backward while moving
forward in a trick shot from Aviso aos navegantes.
283
Figure A33. Grande Otelo and Eliana sing “No Tabuleiro da Baina”
in front of life-sized covers of popular magazines in
Carnaval Atlântida.
Figure A34. Xenofontes (Oscarito) lectures on Zeno's paradoxes in
Carnaval Atlântida.
284
REFERENCES
Filmography
¡A volar joven! Dir. Miguel M. Delgado. Perf. Cantinflas. Posa Films, 1947.
Adémaï aviateur. Dir. Jean Tarride. Perf. Fernandel, Noël-Noël. Vandor, 1933.
Ahí está el detalle. Dir. Juan Bustillo Oro. Perf. Cantinflas. Grovas-Oro Films, 1940.
Alô, Alô Brasil. Dir. João de Barro and Wallace Downey. Perf. Carmen Miranda, Ary
Barroso, Francisco Alves. Cinédia, 1935.
Alô, Alô Carnaval. Dir. Adhemar Gonzaga. Perf. Carmen Miranda, Francisco Alves,
Oscarito. Cinédia, 1936.
Around the World in 80 Days. Dir. Michael Anderson. Perf. Cantinflas. Columbia
Pictures, 1956.
Aviso aos navegantes. Dir. Watson Macedo. Perf. Oscarito, Grande Otelo. Atlântida,
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The Bad and the Beautiful. Dir. Vincent Minnelli. Perf. Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner.
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The Band Wagon. Dir. Vincent Minnello. Perf. Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse. MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, 1953.
The Bank Dick. Dir. Edward Cline. Perf. W.C. Fields. Universal, 1940.
Bartolo tenía una flauta. Dir. Antonio Botta. Perf. Luis Sandrini. Corporación
Cinematográfica Argentina, 1939.
Blazing Saddles. Dir. Mel Brooks. Perf. Gene Wilder, Cleavon Little. Warner Brothers,
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Blood and Sand. Dir. Fred Niblo. Perf. Rudolph Valentino. Paramount, 1922.
Blood and Sand. Dir. Rouben Mamoulian. Perf. Tyrone Power, Rita Hayworth.
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El bolero de Raquel. Dir. Miguel M. Delgado. Perf. Cantinflas. Posa Films, 1957.
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El cañonero de Giles. Dir. Manuel Romero. Perf. Luis Sandrini. Lumiton, 1937.
285
Cándida. Dir. Luis Bayón Herrera. Perf. Niní Marshall. Establecimientos Filmadores
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Carmen. Dir. Luis César Amadori. Perf. Niní Marshall. Sono Film, 1943.
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Carnaval no fogo. Dir. Watson Macedo. Perf. Oscarito, Grande Otelo. Atlântida, 1949.
La casa de Quirós. Dir. Luis Moglia Barth. Perf. Luis Sandrini. Sono Film, 1937.
Casamiento en Buenos Aires. Dir. Manuel Romero. Perf. Niní Marshall. Lumiton, 1940.
El circo. Dir. Miguel M. Delgado. Perf. Cantinflas. Posa Films, 1943.
Un día con el diablo. Dir. Miguel M. Delgado. Perf. Cantinflas. Posa Films, 1945.
Divorcio en Montevideo. Dir. Manuel Romero. Perf. Niní Marshall. Lumiton, 1939.
Don Quijote del altillo. Dir. Manuel Romero. Perf. Luis Sandrini. Sociedad Impresora de
Discos Electrofónicos, 1936.
Duck Soup. Dir. Leo McCarey. Perf. Marx Brothers. Paramount, 1933.
El gendarme desconocido. Dir. Miguel M. Delgado. Perf. Cantinflas. Posa Films, 1941.
Gran Hotel. Dir. Miguel M. Delgado. Perf. Cantinflas. Posa Films, 1944.
Grand Hotel. Dir. Edmund Goulding. Perf. Greta Garbo, John Barrymore. MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, 1932.
Hay que educar a Niní. Dir. Luis César Amadori. Perf. Niní Marshall. Sono Film, 1940.
High Noon. Dir. Fred Zinneman. Perf. Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly. United Artists, 1952.
O homem do Sputnik. Dir. Carlos Manga. Perf. Oscarito. Atlântida, 1959.
Laranja-da-China. Dir. Ruy Costa. Perf. Carmen Miranda. Sono Filmes, 1940.
Luna de miel en Rio. Dir. Manuel Romero. Perf. Niní Marshall. Lumiton, 1940.
Matar ou Correr. Dir. Carlos Manga. Perf. Oscarito, Grande Otelo. Atlântida, 1954.
Modern Times. Dir. Charles Chaplin. Charles Chaplin Productions, 1936.
286
Moleque Tião. Dir. José Carlos Burles. Perf. Grande Otelo. Atlântida, 1943.
Muerte de un burócrata. Dir. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. ICAIC, 1966.
Mujeres que trabajan. Dir. Manuel Romero. Perf. Niní Marshall. Lumiton, 1938.
Ni sangre ni arena. Dir. Alejandro Galindo. Perf. Cantinflas. Posa Films, 1941.
Pepe. Dir. George Sidney. Perf. Cantinflas. Columbia Pictures, 1960.
El profesor. Dir. Miguel M. Delgado. Perf. Cantinflas. Posa Films, 1971.
Riachuelo. Dir. Luis Moglia Barth. Perf. Luis Sandrini. Sono Film, 1934.
Si yo fuera diputado. Dir. Miguel M. Delgado. Perf. Cantinflas. Posa Films, 1951.
Singin' In the Rain. Dir. Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen. Perf. Gene Kelly, Donald
O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1952.
Stage Door. Dir. Gregory La Cava. Perf. Katherine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers. RKO Radio
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Su excelencia. Dir. Miguel M. Delgado. Perf. Cantinflas. Posa Films, 1967.
¡Tango! Dir. Luis Moglia Barth. Perf. Luis Sandrini, Libertad Lamarque, Pepe Arias, Tita
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Los tres berretines. Dir. Enrique Susini. Perf. Luis Sandrini. Lumiton, 1933.
Los tres mosqueteros. Dir. Miguel M. Delgado. Perf. Cantinflas. Posa Films, 1942.
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Atlântida, 1944.
Yo quiero ser bataclana. Dir. Manuel Romero. Perf. Niní Marshall. Lumiton, 1941.
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