In 2016, for instance, New York’s Museum of Modern Art programmed the landmark retrospective “Death Is My Dance Partner: Film Noir in Postwar Argentina.”
American academics are not the only ones to recently discover Argentine noir the exhibition sector has also taken note. This first English-language scholarly book on the subject provides a well-researched, informative, and clearly written introduction. A recent addition is David George and Gizella Meneses’s Argentine Cinema: From Noir to Neo-noir (Lexington Books, 2018). My designated noir bookshelf groans under the weight of scholarly tomes on European and Asian noir. Schrader’s Hollywood-centric conception of film noir has long since faded, and international noir studies have mushroomed. Eddie Muller-founder of the Film Noir Foundation and a noir savant-spearheaded these projects, which promise to deepen our appreciation of international noir. They can now be viewed in superb new Blu-ray/DVD dual format releases from Flicker Alley and the Film Noir Foundation. These characteristics appear to varying degrees in the Argentine features The Beast Must Die (1952) and The Bitter Stems (1956)-both seldom seen historically in the Anglosphere. They are dangerous and, frequently, armed. Inhabiting this labyrinthine ambiance are disillusioned, betrayed, despairing, or vulnerable male protagonists gripped by a bleak, cynical, or paranoid worldview. Convoluted chronologies and fragmented or scrambled narrative structures, such as flashbacks and intermittent voice-over, contribute to a hopeless or fatalistic mood, as do the shadowy, frequently nocturnal, and foreboding urban settings. The German Expressionist influence appears frequently.
Noirists past and present identify the following elements as essential: a visual style in the service of tone and mood that showcases low-key lighting and chiaroscuro effects, the irregular arrangement of space within the frame, and unconventional camera angles. There is, however, widespread agreement as to the characteristic stylistic, thematic, and other elements of noir. In the ensuing decades, the genre question has persisted unresolved, with some critics and historians resisting that designation in favor of conceptualizing noir in terms of style or as a movement or discourse. In his pioneering and oft-cited “Notes on Film Noir,” first published in Film Comment in 1972, theorist/filmmaker Paul Schrader contends that noir is unique to Hollywood during WWII and the postwar period, and that it does not constitute a genre. A Flicker Alley Blu-ray/DVD dual edition. B&W, 90 min., Spanish dialogue with English subtitles, 1956. Directed by Fernando Ayala screenplay by Sergio Leonardo based on the novel by Adolfo Jasca cinematography by Ricardo Younis edited by Gerardo Rinaldi and Antonio Ripoli production design by Germen Gelpi and Mario Vanarelli music by Astor Piazzolla starring Carlos Cores, Julia Sandoval, and Vassili Lambrinos.