In recent decades, the availability of movies online and the appearance of streaming platforms have radically transformed the ways of watching movies, to the point that today watching a movie in a theater is just one more option among several. But there was a time when going to a theater was the only way to watch movies. Installation Cinema from the seats. In Buenos Aires 1930-1950which can be visited until October 27 at the Paco Urondo Cultural Centerrecovers that social experience and explores the place that theaters had in the cultural life of Buenos Aires in the period of splendor of national classic cinema.
The exhibition is part of the work carried out by the research group “History of cinema audiences” (IAE-UBA), a systematized, historical and critical study directed by the doctor in History and Theory of the Arts Clara Krieger and made up of several researchers. “The historiography of cinema has always dealt with films, stars and the industry, but cinema – like any cultural production – is completed with the public, so why not study audiences to think about the paths of cinema,” he points out. Kriger.
Cured by Cecilia Gil Mariño y Laura Gómez Gauna With Kriger and Sonia Sasiain as part of the curatorial team, the installation invites us to discover what it meant to go to the cinema in those years and how those experiences are remembered today. At the beginning of the tour, you can see photographs of rooms in the center that no longer exist, such as the Cine Florida, the Alvear, the General Roca, the Porteño and the General San Martín.
These images illustrate the richness and architectural diversity of the rooms. Next to them, several printed strips hang from the ceiling to the floor displaying premiere announcements and the typical illustrated hand programs that were handed out at the beginning of each screening with information about the films. In addition, a QR invites you to download the exhibition catalog (Cinema from the seats) available online on the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters website. From there you can also download the book Images and Publics of Classic Argentine Cinema, published in 2018, for free.
Since 2017, the group interviewed more than forty men and women who lived in Buenos Aires between the 1930s and 1950s and who went to the movies a lot during their childhood and adolescence. The first memories of cinema that appeared in these interviews did not have to do with the films, but with the theaters they attended. That is why the installation places emphasis on encounter situations and the emotional ties that were built there. The neighborhood living room was a place of meeting and belonging in which relationships were woven with neighbors, friends, relatives, couples and that mattered more than the movie they were going to see.
A sector of the exhibition is dedicated to the projection of a video made from the montage of some of those interviews with graphic and audiovisual material of the time, both fiction and documentary. The testimonies show the centrality that cinema had in everyday life, perhaps comparable – as the curatorial text points out – to the role that social networks have today.
“In the 20th century,” Kriger observes, “cinema was not just entertainment, but it structured many social and even political behaviors. We cannot think about the ways that societies acquired to get excited, fall in love or think about temporality and spatiality without cinema.”
La Paternal Cinema, inaugurated in 1920 by Luis Taricco, an ice cream man from the neighborhood, had capacity for 1,000 spectators.
For women, the rooms were also a way to leave the home. “From a gender perspective, the cinema was one of the first spaces where women could go without asking permission. A space of freedom where they could display their emotions: cry, laugh, fall in love,” says Kriger, and mentions as an example The three berretines (1933), the second premiere of the national sound cinema. In the film, the father of the family complains that the wife and daughter go to the movies every day and do not take care of the house. “It’s a comedy, but in some way it talks about the fact that women were beginning to have other interests that were allowed.”
The exhibition also explores the relationship between cinema and the city at a time when the expansion of theaters throughout neighborhoods accompanied the process of urban modernization. Cinema promoted spatial displacements of different social sectors, giving rise to new habits and subjectivities. To account for the geographical distribution of the theaters, the installation uses two large maps of its own creation that show the theaters that were in Buenos Aires in 1914 and 1949 and allow us to understand the cinematographic experience as part of cultural life.
The first map shows the rooms throughout the city, while the second zooms in on the downtown, where the most important ones were. Between 1930 and 1940, Buenos Aires had about two hundred movie theaters.. The ones in the center were dazzling spaces, true cinematographic palaces that usually offered a film, a newsreel and a short. Going to the movie theater downtown was a special occasion.
Neighborhood cinemas, on the other hand, were more modest spaces that offered three, four or even five movies a day for a single ticket. And in the neighborhoods there were also the “piojeras”, even lower quality rooms where mainly children attended. At a time when there was no television, cinema was a way to spend the afternoons.
Inauguration of the 25 de Mayo theater in the Villa Urquiza neighborhood, November 21, 2007. Photo: Juano Tesone
At the end of the tour, another video compiles photos, posters and graphic advertisements of classic Argentine films and stars such as Carlos Gardel, Luis Sandrini, Hugo del Carril and Niní Marshall. The images are set to music with the tango “Por culpa del cine”, from 1932, in the first verses of which a central concept of the exhibition appears: the idea that cinema forever modified social practices. “It is the fault of sound and talking cinema / not only the fashion of speaking in English: / also, because of it, from day to night, / things changed and are backwards.”
Cinema from the seats. Place: Paco Urondo Cultural Center, 25 de Mayo 217. Date: until October 27, from 12 to 7 p.m. Admission: free. Guided tour on Friday, October 27 at 6:00 p.m.
2023-10-24 04:46:12
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