La antena
Tags: neo noir

Plot synopsis:
The movie begins with a pair of hands typing on a typewriter. The denizens of a nameless city "in the year XX" have lost their voices. People communicate by mouthing out words that are spelled mid-air. The only person who has kept the use of her voice is La Voz ("the voice"), a singer working for the sole TV channel broadcast in the city, run by Mr. TV, who desires La Voz. La Voz wears a hood over her head that hides away her face. She has a son called Tomás, an eyeless little kid who nonetheless also has a voice (although this is kept a secret). Tomás lives next door to Ana, whom he one day befriends after a letter addressed to his house is erroneously delivered to hers.
Ana's parents are estranged - he works for Mr. TV as a TV repairman, she is a nurse at a hospital. When Ana loses a "balloon man" owned by the channel, her father and grandfather are fired from the studio. Soon enough, Ana's father stumbles upon evidence that La Voz has been kidnapped, and, together with Mr. TV's vengeful son, they set out to spy on Mr. TV. Ana's father pays his ex-wife to let them into the hospital, where Mr. TV and his henchman Dr. Y (a scientist whose lower head has been replaced with a TV screen showing a mouth) subject La Voz to a series of experiments of dubious nature. They plan to use La Voz's unique power to finally subdue the denizens of the city. However, Dr. Y theorizes that a second voice might counter the effect of La Voz's. Mr. TV's outraged son comes out of hiding, is overpowered, and then put away, by his father's henchmen, whereas Ana's father manages to escape with the aid of his wife.
The reconciled couple manage to rescue Ana and Tomás from Mr. TV's henchmen (led by a masked, malformed man referred to as "the Rat Man") and meet with the grandfather. Since Mr. TV is going to broadcast La Voz's voice and thus subdue all citizens, they have to broadcast a second voice to counter the effect. The grandfather suggests using an old station, The Aerial, abandoned in the outskirts of the city, in the snowy mountains. Tomás, Ana and her parents don inflatable suits (equal to those donned by "balloon men") which send them floating up in the sky. Just as the grandfather finishes elevating them, the Rat Man and his henchmen arrive and shoot him. The family are then propelled away into the mountains.
Meanwhile, Mr. TV and Dr. Y initiate the broadcast during a boxing match. The citizens become hypnotized and subsequently fall asleep. Words then start oozing out of their bodies - the machine that sucked out their voice now takes their words out of them. In The Aerial, the Rat Man and his henchmen storm into the station, stopping short Tomás's transmission. Ana's father and the Rat Man fight over a gun and stumble into a secret room in the station that reveals The Aerial's director, a young girl fitted inside a glass orb that oversees the production of the drugged food that keeps citizens under Mr. TV's control.
The gun goes off and kills The Aerial's director, who turns into an old woman after dying, and Ana knocks down the Rat Man. Back at the lab, Tomás's transmission sends Dr. Y into a choking fit and is finished off by Mr. TV. The transmissions counter each other and the citizens wake up, now able to use their voice (albeit without being able to speak). In the end, the family comes out of The Aerial, trying their new voices.

Review: LA ANTENA (Esteban Sapir - Argentina 2005).A completely unique take on silent cinema in this fairy-tale like story by Esteban Sapir, beautifully shot in black-and-white and practically without dialog, "La Antena" is a feast for the eye and a must for lovers of German expressionist cinema, with most of the nods to the works of Fritz Lang and Friedrich Murnau.'The City without a Voice', 'La Ciudad sin Voz', is ruled by Mr. TV.
He has taken the inhabitants voices and is in total control of all spoken words and images, forcing everyone to eat his own brand of TV-food.
For this purpose, he kidnaps the only one left with The Voice, a beautiful singer, but a TV repairman witnesses the kidnapping and flees to an old TV antenna in the mountains in order to halt Mr. TV's evil plans.The production design is stunning with beautiful sets and imagery.
Although shot primarily with the basic language of silent cinema, Esteban Sapir also adds a number of fresh techniques of his own, like a combination of typographic and animation techniques.
It's constantly snowing, which gives the film a very un-Argeninian feel, while the surreal setting suggests any large city in the Northen hemisphere, with only some of the songs revealing the film's Argentinian background.The pace is swift and there is so much happening on screen, it's hard to keep track of the film's surreal narrative.
I've seen this movie twice on Transilvania International Film Festival(TIFF), the movie is in competition and I really hope that Esteban Sapir will get one of the awards (at least the best image award).
As a silent cinema fan I'm interested in contemporary movies that quote or recreate the language of the yester-year cinema.
As I see it, the movie references directly Lang's Metropolis, and the allegorical-parabolic character of his plots.
I enjoyed the film mostly for its visuals, and in the meantime I found very interesting the story on muteness, and the creative means of communication used by the inhabitants of the voiceless city.
From this perspective this movie is an unique reflexion on the muteness of the silent cinema, because in the films of the silent period one can hardly find stories with mute characters.
In this case can be questioned whether the story on the stolen voices was the motivation for the silent film form, or there's an intention to play upon the muteness of the silent films.
I highly recommend Esteban Sapir's film to every moviegoer (one of the critics called it: the jewel of the festival).PS: Winners were announced, and the film won the award for best cinematography!.
For those who appreciate the intersection of silent cinema and social commentary, this is a unique film.
Part homage to German expressionism, part allegory, the film is replete with visual symbolism and an artistic style that rivals anything seen since the 1920's.
Aside from this, the plot offers an interesting commentary on the role of the media in society and its effect on social voice, perception, and opinion.
In truth, it's not so much the silence that permeates the film as it is the loss of voice and the loss of words to communicate and express thought that inevitably follows.
Some would argue that Argentinean director Esteban Sapir's La Antena is an exercise in anachronistic futility; that, while the silent films to which Sapir's pays homage were at the cutting edge of cinema when they were made, they are outdated today, leaving La Antena a meaningless oddity.I would disagree.
La Antena melds the conventions of the silent film with 21st century technology, making it the ultimate exercise in post-modern film-making.The film is set in the timeless "The City Without a Voice", so called because the citizens have been rendered speechless by Mr. TV, a dictator/media mogul with his hair painted on.
The City resembles the titular one in Fritz Lang's seminal Metropolis (1927), perhaps 100 years before that film.
It is all expressionist skyscrapers, TV aerials, and animated billboards.The citizens of the City are mollified by La Voz (The Voice), the only person with the gift of speech.
But when Mr. TV concocts a plan to steal the written word as well, La Voz and her eyeless son join forces with a renegade family in an attempt to return the freedom of speech to the people.La Antena is nothing but pure cinema.
Burdening himself with the conventions of the silent film, Sapir has to rely upon images to tell his story.
There is sound, most notably in the almost continuous score by Leo Sujatovich.
It evokes the best of silent movie music, as well as ingenuously working itself into the film's diegesis, such as the beeping of car horns, or the rhythmic ra-ta-tat-tat of gunfire.
Which is very fortunate indeed, because La Antena boasts some of the most creative and original images we've seen in a long time, all captured by Cristian Cottet's sumptuous black-and-white photography.
And there's the sinister Dr. Y, whose jabbering mouth is displayed on a television screen attached to his face.La Antena has been criticised for relying too much on its imagery, while skimping on the allegorical depth.
It is true that the sudden appearance of a mind-control machine shaped like a swastika, or the eyeless boy seemingly crucified on a Star of David, feels out of place, a tad over the top in what is otherwise merely a well-crafted fairy tale.But the lack of overt symbols (the two previous examples aside) works in the film's favour.
It allows us to make up our own minds: to decide whether to infer political meaning, to see La Antena as an allegory for fascism, the danger of capitalist monopolies, and the power and responsibility of the media; or to just take the film at face value, as a visually stunning adventure through a world simultaneously unique and familiar.The sacrifice of explicit depth in favour of unique imagery may seem like a compromise.
But, really, when a film looks as good as this, it's hard to care.
A perfect homage to early silent noir Films..
I didn't see such a movie where the creators put so much heart's blood into their work and paid attention to the finest details for a very long time.Everything was well thought and perfectly put into reality.
The titles were so fun and so perfectly choreographed.This movie just blew me away.The "Showdown" could have been cut down by 10 or 15 minutes though.It's a near to perfect homage to early silent noir Films story, acting, scenery and costumes were perfectly fitting and believable to have com from the times of silent film-making..
;o) Seriously though, back to the movie, which has classic cinema written all over it (pun intended and quite literally shown in the picture, too as you'll see)!
How could someone make a silent movie in this year and age?
A reinvention of the silent movie and a powerful cautionary tale.
La Antena, an audacious film by Argentine director Esteban Sapir, succeeds both as a reinvention of the silent movie genre and a gripping cautionary tale.
The setting is a city in thrall to mindless television, its people deprived of the power of speech except for a solitary and mysterious screen presence known simply as The Voice.
In a bid to cement their grip on power the marvellously villainous duo of television mogul Mr. TV and mad scientist Dr. Y set out to kidnap The Voice and turn her unique talent towards their own dastardly ends.
The result is a roller coaster of a story that is bewildering on occasion but never less than engrossing.This is a silent movie that wears many of its influences on its sleeve; the overt references to silent movie greats such as George Melies and Fritz Lang will be readily apparent to anyone with a passing familiarity of their work.
I particularly like the fact that Mr. TV and his henchman drive around in typical 1930s gangster cars, drawn from the decade when the silent movie era died away and a very different industry began to emerge.La Antena mines the clichéd plot devices and theatrical over-acting common to so many silent films, albeit in a very knowing and humorous way.
It is the astonishing visual style of La Antena that really sets it apart from the movies that it pays homage to.
From the hypnotic TV logo to the menacing hilltop transmission station, this film abounds with dazzling visual inventiveness that is the rival of a Studio Ghibli animation  and all this using real actors and handmade sets.Moreover, though the style is often intentionally corny and theatrical, this is still an unsettling, provocative and emotional picture.
The use of religious symbolism throughout La Antena lends added resonance to the struggle between the TV Empire and the waning power of words.
At the same time, many of the most powerful images are original ones, including the hypnotic swirl of the television sets and the nightmarish TV food factory.I hate to end this review on a sour note, but I feel that the English-language release of La Antena is let down by the subtitles.
The original Spanish subtitles are used to great effect, with much playing around with words on screen.
However, the English-language subtitles that accompany the original dialogue are frustratingly incomplete, with omissions and mistakes at times leaving the viewer to piece things together for themselves.
La Antena is nevertheless a striking piece of cinema; a visually breathtaking experience that displays great energy and humour whilst narrating a powerful cautionary tale..
This allegory on Argentinian and German fascism initially buried the real story beneath its look - that of a complex animated commercial.
However, as the film progressed, it soon become obvious to me the symbolism of the scars on the family's hands (stigmata), the blind boy who could talk and would save the city / world (Jesus Christ), the boy's single mother (Mary), the young girl (Mary Magdalene), and ultimately the boy on the Star of David, reflected a world in which religion / Judaism / Jesus Christ, vanquished the evils of fascism / Satan.So maybe a little heavy on the symbolism and allegory, ideas of religion saving the world or prophets dying to save us from our sins are all a little lazy.
This is another movie i've discovered accidentally, if i remember right in festival dedicated to animated film.
In any case, La Antena is a powerful feature film.The citizens of an unnamed city lose their voices.
And as the story progresses the protagonists are fighting to get the voices back.Explaining the plot would probably be misleading, but there is a small detail that put me off, although it might simply be a personal preference.
La Antena is otherwise a good movie..
La Antena is a beautifully crafted fairy tale that plays with the technical limitations of yesteryear's movies and uses this idea for telling the story of oppressed people, who are robbed of their speech.
The strong symbolism, the rich scenes and the believable characters make a lasting impression on the viewer and make for memorable scenes, even though the plot isn't the strongest aspect of the movie.Overall 7/10
La Antena: A Film for Cinephiles.
Having recorded this film from the television as many as four months ago, it'd been waiting in my to-watch pile for an achingly long time.
Something about its premise put me off from watching it for so long; foolish considering that no premise could accurately sell La Antena.In a big city of voiceless denizens in a time unspecified, television has a unique control over the masses, the soothing singing of the uniquely gifted "La Voz" (The Voice) fascinating them.
Such is the nature of La Antena, a film which immediately announces itself as rather more than just a narrative—wild, wacky, and wholly original though that narrative may be.
Firstly, the film is aesthetically stunning: composed in a beautiful monochrome; effulgently photographed; and composed of a miasma of fantastic effects which hearken back to cinema's earliest days.
It is undoubtedly a film for cinephiles, the throwbacks to the silent era a delight to witness, and mixed expertly with the aforementioned early techniques.
What is modern and innovative about the film, however, is its abandonment of the classic silent film inter-title in favour of words given physical, interactive form on-screen.
The words mouthed by the silent characters appear before them, echoing an earlier statement along the lines of "we still have our words".
As a (largely) silent film, it relies heavily upon its soundtrack, which does a solid job, often mixing with the actions on-screen in a slightly comical way.
Save for two particularly detractive and diminutive pieces of symbolism in the film's final act, it functions as an inquisitive social commentary, gently criticising the manipulation of the masses by the mainstream media, and suggesting that perhaps we need a saviour of sorts from the brainless garbage which attempts to control us—a role it jokingly suggests it might itself fulfil.Bookended by particularly wonderful sequences of a typewriter's words translating to music, La Antena is quite, quite unlike anything else you are ever likely to see.
Originality is this film's forté; reference and fond recreation its cornerstone.
Though its message is perhaps a little too gentle to be of any significant effect, it is the kind of film that ought to be enjoyed by all who love cinema..
As with 2012's "The Artist" and 2012's Spanish film "Blancanieves", I am enjoying watching silent films.
This black and white, silent film from Argentina is a gem.
It's nice to watch a film with no dialog and let the film itself carry the story.
I never cared for the 1920's silent because I didn't feel that the story was fully recognized.
But, with these newer films, the story is recognized much better than before.
Authorship and the film La Antena- Part 1.
Authorship and the film La AntenaBy: Rafiqfuad YarahmadiAuthorship in cinemaThe key directors of the French New Wave Jean Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer had been a filmed critic writing for the French cinema magazine Cahiers du Cinema.
This was the first film journal to treat cinema as an art form and to discuss it in an academic way.
In their writings the critics argued that film was primarily a visual medium rather a literary one and that the director was the author of a film in the same way as a writer is the author of a novel.
In one influential essay 'La Camera Stylo' (1954), Alexander Astruc argued that the film director 'writes' a film with the camera as if he was an artist with a paintbrush.
Therefore the director is the true author of a film because the visual language is the language of cinema; the script is literary, a different language entirely.
Authorship in film is a subject of debate in theory of film since the Cahiers du Cinema critics in 1950s for the first time birthed author theory.
They believed that films should reflect a director's personal vision.
(Film Art page 33)According to Francois Truffaut in an article that he published in Cahiers du Cinema in 1954, 'an expression of his own personality' an auteur converts the movie into something personal.
The main version of French authorship theory was the impression of making a film different to the director by introducing ideas of his own into the characters and the story beyond what the story needed.
The prestigious directors of the period started to write their own scripts, all followed distinctive themes and stylistic choices in film after film.
Film festivals managed to honour the director as a main creator.
Film viewers made the idea of authorship a commonplace in the film culture.
A big crew such as producer, cinematographer, director, editor, and lots of ideas and days of hard work go into collaborating on a film production.
We should know that only theory of authorship would not answer the questions for all movies.
As we know the process of filmmaking, film often supports with a more collaborative style of authorship than other artistic media.
Even there are some movies that been recognised for their writing or directing style but the true authorship lies in the intentionality of the collective that produced the final product.
This monochrome film was made in Argentina which the mostly is silent.
I can clearly say that the theme of film is about media mind control.
This film has got a comic vision and reminds me the Georges Melies's A Trip to the Moon, and the strange city in the film is remind me the film Metropolis by Fritz Lang.
The city is looks like the Fritz Lang's Metropolis and it is so similar to Expressionist movies with animated billboards, TV aerials and towers.
The Voice, the only citizen who can speak, calms people who live in this city.
The Voice is forced to have a singing programme on Mr TV, s television.
This behaviour remind us the dictatorship and totalitarianism in those countries that people hasn't have freedom of speech and the film shows swastika symbol several times.
He is working on a device and wants to hypnotize his people to be able to control citizens and this is really similar factory scene in Modern Times movie by Charles Chaplin that the factory manager tries to control all workers by using CCTV.
Bibliography:Continue => Part 2.
To say this is almost a silent film, almost an animated film, and almost a children's film, is to be stating obvious banalities for anyone who's seen it without getting close to what makes it so good.
But whereas Maddin can feel a little too self-conscious, the strange style of the telling of 'La Antena' feels completely of a piece with the strange world being portrayed, as if the narrative form comes naturally from the tale.
The ticket person suggested this movie stating that it was selling a lot of tickets.Does anyone know if and when this will be released on DVD in the States?