Golden Age of Argentine cinema

The Golden Age of Argentine cinema (Spanish: Época de Oro del cine argentino or other equivalent names), sometimes known interchangeably as the broader classical or classical-industrial period (Spanish: período clásico-industrial), is an era in the history of the cinema of Argentina that began in the 1930s and lasted until the 1940s or 1950s, depending on the definition, during which national film production underwent a process of industrialization and standardization that involved the emergence of mass production, the establishment of the studio, genre and star systems, and the adoption of the institutional mode of representation (MRI) that was mainly—though not exclusively—spread by Hollywood, quickly becoming one of the most popular film industries across Latin America and the Spanish-speaking world.
Argentine industrial cinema arose in 1933 with the creation of its first and most prominent film studios, Argentina Sono Film and Lumiton, which released ¡Tango! and Los tres berretines, respectively, two foundational films that ushered in the sound-on-film era. Although they were not national productions, the 1931–1935 films made by Paramount Pictures with tango star Carlos Gardel were a decisive influence on the emergence and popularization of Argentine sound cinema. The nascent film industry grew steadily, accompanied by the appearance of other studios such as SIDE, Estudios Río de la Plata, EFA, Pampa Film and Estudios San Miguel, among others, which developed a continuous production and distribution chain. The number of films shot in the country grew 25-fold between 1932 and 1939, more than any other Spanish-speaking country. By 1939, Argentina established itself as the world's leading producer of films in Spanish, a position that it maintained until 1942, the year in which film production reached its peak.
In classical Argentine cinema, film genres were almost always configured as hybrids, with melodrama emerging as the reigning mode of the period. Its early audience were the urban working classes, so its content was strongly rooted in their culture, most notably tango music and dance, radio dramas, and popular theatrical genres like sainete or revue. These forms of popular culture became the main roots of the film industry, from which many of its main performers, directors and screenwriters came. Much of the themes that defined the Argentine sound cinema in its beginnings were inherited from the silent period, including the opposition between the countryside and the city, and the interest in representing the world of tango. As the industry's prosperity increased in the late 1930s, bourgeois characters shifted from villains to protagonists, in an attempt to appeal to the middle classes and their aspirations. Starting in the mid-1940s, Argentine cinema adopted an "internationalist" style that minimized national references, including the disuse of local dialect and a greater interest in adapting works of world literature.
Beginning in 1943, as a response to Argentina's neutrality in the context of World War II, the United States imposed a boycott on sales of film stock to the country, causing Mexican cinema to displace Argentina as the market leader in Spanish. During the presidency of Juan Perón (1946–1955), protectionist measures were adopted, which managed to revitalize Argentine film production. However, financial fragility of the industry led to its paralysis once Perón was overthrown in 1955 and his stimulus measures ended. With the studio system entering its definitive crisis, the classical era came to an end as new criteria for producing and making films emerged, including the irruption of modernism and auteur films, and a greater prominence of independent cinema. The creation of the National Film Institute in 1957 and the innovative work of figures such as Leopoldo Torre Nilsson gave rise to a new wave of filmmakers in the 1960s, who opposed "commercial" cinema and experimented with new cinematic techniques.
Argentine cinema is almost as old as cinema in the world. Thomas Edison's first kinetoscopes arrived in Buenos Aires in 1894, but true film projections were only possible thanks to the Lumière brothers' cinematograph, with which a series of presentations were made on 28 July 1896 at the Teatro Odeón. In 1897, the first projectors and cameras—from the Lumière and Gaumont firms—reached the country through Enrique Lepage's photography store, Casa Lepage. Their technician, the French Eugenio Py, became the first person to systematically film in Argentina; he shot the 1897 short La bandera argentina, a register of the national flag which is generally considered the country's first film. Other authors consider that the first films belong to the German Federico Fignero, who shot different views with a vitascope in 1896, aided by the camarographer José Steimberg. In addition to Lepage and Py, the third figure who dominated film production at this time was the Austrian Max Glücksmann, who was initially an employee of Casa Lepage and later acquired the firm in 1908. The works of these early years of Argentine cinema correspond to actuality films. As noted by historian José Agustín Mahieu, this stage of national cinema "naively discovers the magic of movement, the direct capture of the landscape, of the event. The camera is still a primary eye planted in front of the facts. Over any other concern (artistic or cultural) prevails the technical curiosity, the exploration of a tool that is just beginning to be known." Thus, a small-scale commercial exploitation began, with the Casa Lepage offering projectors and films to restaurants, cafes or other entertainment venues. The company dominated the country's film production for a decade, dedicating to filming curiositites and current events such as official state visits, festivities and tourist sights. In 1900, the first movie theater, the Salón Nacional, was inaugurated, and soon more venues dedicated to the projection of films were opened.
At the end of the 1900s, the incipient Argentine cinema made significant progress with the appearance of the first narrative films, which encouraged production and distribution. These were the work of the Italian Mario Gallo, who had arrived in Buenos Aires a few years before as part of an opera company. There is confusion as to which was the first narrative film in the country: those who date its release in 1908 consider it to be El fusilamiento de Dorrego, while more recent researchers point out that this film is actually from 1910 and the first one was really La Revolución de Mayo, released in 1909. For this reason, May 23 is considered National Film Day in the country, in commemoration of the release date of the latter film. In the manner of the French film d'art trend, Gallo's films were closer to photographed theatre, almost always on historical topics. In 1914, Glücksmann produced the oldest surviving feature film, Amalia, very similar in style to Gallo's films. The film was an initiative of the Buenos Aires aristocracy, and premiered at the prestigious Teatro Colón with the attendance of President Victorino de la Plaza. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, European film production retreated, which resulted in an abundance of Argentine production in the following years. As noted by Mahieu, during this time Argentine cinema "tends to abandon its character of empirical adventure, to become an entertainment industry. New distributors appeared, and in 1914 Pampa Film was founded, which produced several films."
Before the arrival of sound films, Argentina experienced a "golden age" of silent films and led their production in Spanish, with more than 100 feature films being made between 1915 and 1924, equal to the combined total of those made in Mexico and Spain. During the first three decades of the 20th century, more than 200 silent feature films were produced in the country, in addition to a large number of documentaries, newsreels and shorter fictional works. The release of the 1915 film Nobleza gaucha—a project by Humberto Cairo, Eduardo Martínez de la Pera and Ernesto Gunche—was a turning point in Argentine film history, opening new artistic and economic paths. Nicknamed "the goldmine" by distributors and exhibitors, Nobleza gaucha was an unexpected massive commercial success which remained in theaters for more than two decades,and was also released in Spain and several Latin American countries. The artistic and commercial possibilities that the success of this film signaled translated into a growth of film activity in the country, with new producers and directors following its path; however, none were able to reach the initial success of Nobleza gaucha. Martínez de la Pera and Gunche followed with the release of Hasta después de muerta (1916), Brenda (1921), Fausto (1922) and La casa de los cuervos (1923). Another notable production of the era was Juan Sin Ropa (1919), produced by a partnership between the prestigious actors Camila and Héctor Quiroga and the French filmmakers Paul Capellani and Georges Benoît. This period is also significant for the emergence of the country's first woman filmmakers, the production of numerous newsreels and documentaries, and the first animated feature films in cinema history by Quirino Cristiani. Reflecting on the Argentine silent era, Peña wrote:
In the early 1920s, Argentine silent cinema entered a crisis caused, on the one hand, by the recovery of European industry after the end of the war and, on the other hand, by the ascent of Hollywood cinema to a position of unparalleled international dominance. Leopoldo Torres Ríos, a future filmmaker and one of the country's first film critics, denounced this situation in 1922: "When they show an Argentine production, they do it as if it were alms. Those same gentlemen endure daily the cinematographic detritus sent from the East to the West and our public, on their immense, broad backs, carries it without a protest." The 1920s was marked by the activity of four main directors: José A. Ferreyra, Nelo Cosimi, Edmo Cominetti and Julio Irigoyen. In this decade, the first model of tango-based films was systematized, despite the absence of sound, with titles including Milonguita (José Bustamante y Ballivián, 1922), La cieguita de la avenida Alvear (Julio Irigoyen, 1924), La borrachera del tango (Edmo Cominetti, 1928) and La vendedora de Harrods (Francisco Defilippis Novoa, 1921). These silent films laid the groundwork for the tango melodramas that defined the Argentine cinema of the early classical period in the following decade.
The most complete form of the silent "tango melodrama" model was the work of José A. Ferreyra, who began his career in the mid-1910s and stands out as the most important Argentine filmmaker of the 1920s, and would continue to be a central figure during the transition to sound and later in the classical-industrial period. Considered a precursor of neorealism, Ferreyra's influential style was characterized by its profoundly local identity, with characters and situations linked to the world of tango lyrics and the urban working classes of Buenos Aires, in whose streets he filmed with low resources and often starring non-actors. Many of Ferreyra's titles point to a connection with the mythology of the city and its music: La muchacha del arrabal (1922), Buenos Aires, ciudad de ensueño (1922), Mi último tango (1925), El organito de la tarde (1925), Muchachita de Chiclana (1926), La vuelta al bulín (1926) and Perdón, viejita (1927), among others. Some of these films were based on specific tangos while others inspired the composition of new tangos, and also incorporated other elements of popular culture such as sainete and serial novels. As noted by film historian Jorge Miguel Couselo: "In Ferreyra, also a sporadic lyricist, the identification with tango is total. His adherence to Buenos Aires, to the most needy and suffering face of Buenos Aires, is a porteñismo of soul, temperament and habit, synonymous with tango. The subject matter of his films is tango, an eager search to discover the dramatizable facets of the city song, its habitat, its types, its conflicts, its symbolic candor, its accessible tragedy."
Around 1929, the inventor Alfredo Murúa—founder of Sociedad Impresora de Discos Electrofónicos (SIDE)—became a partner of the Ariel production company, and produced the short film Mosaico criollo, with his own sound-on-disc system. Mosaico criollo, the first instalment of an intended series, is not a spoken film but rather a filmed "musical revue". Murúa was responsible for the sound of most of the Argentine sound films made between 1931 and 1933, always using the sound-on-disc technique. The most important was Muñequitas porteñas (1931) by Ferreyra, for its pioneering use of spoken dialogue, although there were several others that used it partially, such as Amanecer de una raza (1931) by Cominetti, El cantar de mi ciudad (1930) by Ferreyra or La vía de oro (1931) by Cominetti; or that used sound to record only music and sound effects, among them ¡Adiós Argentina! (1930) by Mario Parpagnoli, La canción del gaucho (1930) by Ferreyra or Dios y la patria (1931) by Cosimi. It also happened that originally silent films were re-released with new sound added, as in the case of Nobleza Gaucha and Perdón, viejita, among others. As noted by Fernando Martín Peña: "In this sense, the transition [from silent to sound films] was complex and very similar to that which had just taken place in the United States and Europe."
As in other countries, the arrival of sound films put in check the international dominance of American cinema due to the language barrier, leaving a market available. This situation was analogous to the one that occurred during World War I, when the European film crisis benefited Argentine producers. Hollywood tried to deal with these difficulties with attempts at dubbing that ended up failing and also with various forms of subtitling, although this still required technical development and also excluded illiterate audiences. Eventually, the U.S. industry reacted by making little accepted Spanish-language versions of its most important productions, although they found the greatest success once they began to make produce original Spanish-language films made to showcase Latin American stars. Among them, the 1931–1935 films made by Paramount Pictures starring Carlos Gardel stood out, and became a major influence on the emergence of an Argentine sound film industry. Before being hired by Paramount, Gardel—the most popular performer in the history of tango—had starred in a series of short films using optical sound between 1930 and 1931, which were directed by Eduardo Morera and produced by Federico Valle. The first of Gardel's feature films produced by Paramount was Luces de Buenos Aires, released in September 1931 to great success. By this time optical sound had demonstrated its advantage over disc systems, so the equipment was progressively replaced in a process that lasted throughout 1932.
Despite being foreign productions, Gardel's films may be considered as part of the history of Argentine cinema, as they were conceived by the singer himself together with other Argentine artists (like his lyricist Alfredo Le Pera or revue producer Manuel Romero), and their model corresponded to that of the tango dramas directed by Ferreyra during the silent era, resulting in a strong Argentine identity. In addition, their great commercial success demonstrated the commercial viability of a cinema of Argentine identity for the incipient local producers that would inaugurate the Golden Age period in 1933. Paradoxically, Hollywood's attempt to dominate the local market would soon result in the birth of the national industry, which would take Gardel's films as a model to be replicated. According to Peña, the success of Gardel's films was "in fact the success of Ferreyra's and Torres Ríos' ideas taken up by a popular idol and legitimized for the local culture because of their 'foreign' condition". In an interview, Argentine film historian Clara Kriger felt that: "... we [Argentine film historians] always say 'in 1933 the industry was born in Argentina', and the truth is that I would say that until Gardel appeared in films, Argentine cinema practically did not exist on billboards; very little Argentine cinema was being seen. Gardel is what gives Argentine cinema that strength on the billboards." Another aspect little mentioned by historians is that the last four Paramount productions with Gardel were in fact the singer and Le Pera's own productions that the studio agreed to finance, with full property rights for both creators after a first period of commercial exploitation.
The year 1933 meant the beginning of an industrial organization in Argentine cinema due to the emergence of Argentina Sono Film and Lumiton——the first optical sound film studios in Latin America. and the almost simultaneous release of their first productions ¡Tango! and Los tres berretines, respectively, the first feature films with optical sound in Argentine cinema. According to Matthew B. Karush, the "growth of Argentine cinema resulted from the efforts of small entrepreneurs who proved adept at catering to local tastes", citing Angel Mentasti—founder of Argentina Sono Film—as a typical example. Inspired by the Hollywood model, Mentasti introduced serial industrial production to local filmmaking, and his plan consisted of "[forming] a company on the basis of three films and not release the first until the second had started and the third was announced." The project was born after Luis Moglia Barth contacted Mentasti with the idea of producing a film entirely starring the popular performers of revue theater, tango and radio. The duo secured financing from two different capitalists, which inspired them to create the company Argentina Sono Film and undertake serial production to give them a better chance of negotiating with distributors. The musical ¡Tango! premiered on 27 April 1933 and attracted audiences for its select cast of popular performers, including Luis Sandrini, Azucena Maizani, Mercedes Simone, Libertad Lamarque, Pepe Arias and Tita Merello, among others. While Tango! was being released, Argentina Sono Film was shooting its second film, Dancing (1933), which had little repercussion, while the great success of the third film, Riachuelo (1934), allowed the economic viability of the studio.
Lumiton was founded by César José Guerrico, Enrique Telémaco Susini, Miguel Mugica and Luis Romero Carranza, a group of well-off entrepreneurs who had been responsible for introducing radio to the country in 1920. The group had traveled to Hollywood in 1931, where they studied the novelty of optical sound films and decided to bring the new technology to Argentina. After purchasing a complete film equipment at Bell & Howell in Chicago, they returned to Buenos Aires and began building a studio in Munro, Buenos Aires Province, replicating the sound stages they had seen in Hollywood. Thanks to the financial backing of its founding partners, Lumiton became a pioneer in the industrial and autonomous conceptualization of production. The company brought in experienced technicians (including cinematographer John Alton) and opened its first film gallery in December 1932, beginning production with an adaptation of the successful play Los tres berretines. Released on 19 May 1933, the film's credits do not name the director, screenwriter or technical staff. Although ¡Tango! is often considered the first success of classical Argentine cinema, research on the box offices of the time indicates that Los tres berretines had an even greater impact on audiences. In both films, Sandrini plays an awkward, stuttering comic archetype that he had previously consecrated in the theatrical version of Los tres beretines. With some variations, Sandrini played this character in the rest of his films of the decade, which established him as a star of humorous cinema in the Spanish-speaking world during the 1930s and early 1940s.
The joint success of ¡Tango! and Los tres berretines confirmed the existence of a growing demand and led to the simultaneous appearance of several production companies eager to take advantage of the opportunity. The growth of the industry was reflected in the increase in production, from 6 films released in 1933 to 14 in 1935, half of which were directorial debuts. Among them were Manuel Romero, Mario Soffici, Daniel Tinayre, Luis Saslavsky and Alberto de Zavalía, who opened new perspectives to Argentine cinema. One of the companies that emerged during this period was Río de la Plata, founded by musician Francisco Canaro in 1934 with a modest studio located in downtown Buenos Aires. Its first production was Ídolos de la radio—directed by Eduardo Morera—which sought to attract audiences with a star-studded cast of radio personalities, including singers (including the only film performance of tango star Ada Falcon), comedians, orchestras and announcers. Another company was Productora Argentina de Filmes (PAF), which supported the entry into Argentine cinema of French filmmaker Daniel Tinayre, whose debut film was Bajo la Santa Federación (1935). Luis Saslavsky and Alberto de Zavalía presented in 1935 their first films, Crimen a las tres and Escala en la ciudad, respectively, which were produced with family money disguised under the name of the Sifal production company. Manuel Romero, impresario of popular theater, joined Lumiton after the economic failure of the company's second film Ayer y hoy (1934) and brought it a new box-office success with Noches de Buenos Aires (1935). Romero would become one of the most prolific directors of classic Argentine cinema, known for the speed with which he shot and released his films, most of them with Lumiton.
In addition to new production companies, the demand for Argentine films prompted the emergence of independent productions, that is, those that were made outside the studios. However, Peña notes that the term "independent" for these films is actually a misnomer, as "this classification loses sight, for example, of the fact that in the early years of sound, Argentina Sono Film itself was not really a 'big studio' and could have disappeared like many other production companies of those years", and that "all ventures lacking significant financial backing (as only Lumiton had) were intensely dependent on commercial success and in this sense the mode of production remained, as in the silent period, atomized, adventurous, fragile." Alton temporarily stepped away from Lumiton to make his own film, El hijo de papá (1933) starring Sandrini, which was such a failure that it caused the latter to set the film's negatives on fire. Moglia Barth also decided to try independent production, moving away from Mentasti to make Picaflor (1935), although the following year he returned to Argentina Sono Film. Also in 1933, the film El linyera directed by Enrique Larreta was released, which is considered more of a filmed theatrical piece than a cinematographic work. The director who had the greatest success in independent filmmaking was Ferreyra, with three films released between 1934 and 1935: Calles de Buenos Aires, Puente Alsina and Mañana es domingo, all of them made with "very few resources but recovering the poetics of his best silent period."
The new industry quickly gained traction and grew steadily over the next decade, despite the fact that Hollywood continued to have a vastly superior advantage over local producers. The Argentine film studios were very small compared to powerful companies such as Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Bros., Twentieth Century-Fox, Columbia, Universal and United Artists, all of which had offices in Buenos Aires and other cities in the country by 1935. Lacking the bargaining strength of foreign companies, Argentine producers couldn't secure a distribution system guaranteeing a share of gross receipts, thus resorting to flat fee sales. According to Karush, "the steady growth of the domestic film industry in such adverse conditions reveals that filmmakers had tapped a powerful demand for Argentine sound films." Despite financial challenges, Argentine studios did have some specific competitive advantages, including the country's long tradition of popular theater, especially the short comic plays called sainetes; by offering similar entertainment at a more affordable admission price, local filmmakers could attract an audience that already existed. Additionally, a significant portion of this audience either couldn't or didn't prefer to read subtitles that accompanied English-language films. The gradual consolidation of the film industry impacted other areas of the broader entertainment industry, as the interplay between cinema, radio, and music led to a unified commercial approach, supported by specialized publications, fostering a star system reminiscent of Hollywood but tailored to Argentina. According to Octavio Getino, the rapid growth of the nascent Argentine film industry was made possible by several factors, which include: the preceding industrial, technical, and commercial experience that, albeit limited, was unparalleled in Latin America; the temporary inabiliy of the United States to retain Spanish-speaking audiences with their films; the popular style and themes of Argentine cinema, which were much more in tune with those of other Latin American countries; and the composition of the primary audience of Argentine cinema, comprising large groups of urban workers, either recently migrated from the country's interior or originating from European immigration.
The industrialization process was accompanied by standardization in production, going from 6 films released in 1933 to 14 in 1935, 30 in 1937, 41 in 1938, and an average of 50 films per year in the following four years. Following Lumiton, the second company to have its own studios and an industrial production plan was Alfredo Murúa's SIDE, which began producing films at the end of 1935. Between 1936 and 1938, José A. Ferreyra directed for SIDE a trilogy of tango films starring Libertad Lamarque, inspired by Gardel's films. The first of these films was Ayúdame a vivir (1936), which marked a key moment in the economic history of Argentine cinema, since it "contributed enormously to its popularity throughout Latin America and was the key that finished opening the continental markets in which it expanded the most during its golden age." Followed by Besos brujos (1937) and La ley que olvidaron (1938), Lamarque's films with Ferreyra were the first productions of the incipient Argentine industry to conquer the international Spanish-speaking market. As noted by Karush, they were "international hits and paved the way for other Argentine productions, allowing Argentina's studios to dominate the Latin American market until they were overtaken by the Mexican film industry in the mid-1940s." By the end of 1936, the Argentine film industry "was sufficiently profitable that distributors and exhibitors, who had traditionally been hostile to it and later became hostile again, decided to become more actively involved in production." The initiator of this was the successful distributor of European films Adolfo Z. Wilson, who formed the company Porteña Films and built his own studios with the initial intent to rent them to other production companies. The following year, the distributor Julio Joly and the owner of movie theater chains Clemente Lococo joined the company, which was renamed Establecimientos Filmadores Argentinos (EFA).
The year 1937 meant a great acceleration for the progress of Argentine cinema; as noted by Domingo Di Núbila, it was the "year in which four of the new directors (Soffici, Saslavsky, Romero and Amadori) made great progress; in which the casts were enriched with the incorporation of Enrique Muiño, Elías Alippi, Ángel Magaña, Florencio Parravicini, Hugo del Carril, Mecha Ortiz, León Zárate, Orestes Caviglia, Luis Arata, José Olarra, Camila Quiroga, Enrique Santos Discépolo, Santiago Gómez Cou and others, all coming from the theater and most of them with distant links to silent films; and in which interest in Argentine films became so strong that 30 were released, with Argentina Sono Film (with eight), Lumiton (four) and SIDE (four) among the most important production companies." By 1937, there were 9 film studios and 30 production companies in Buenos Aires. One of these was Baires Film, which was born within the Crítica newspaper, inspired by the William Randolph Hearst model. Founder Eduardo Bedoya appointed Daniel Tinayre as his main advisor and he supervised the construction of Baires' studios in Don Torcuato, Greater Buenos Aires. Therefore, its first production, Tinayre's Mateo (1937), had to be filmed at Lumiton, and Baires would concentrate on the construction of its studios until it produced another film.
Unlike companies such as Lumiton and Baires, which advanced in the construction of studies before being sure of the economic dynamics of the business, Argentina Sono Film was "more prudent and only grew to the extent of its real possibilities." In 1937, the company built its own studios and produced eight films. After the success of Riachuelo, Mentasti brought in Arturo S. Mom, who directed films such as Monte criollo (1935), Loco lindo (1936), and Palemo (1937). Moglia Barth returned to Argentina Sono Film after his failure with Picaflor, directing films such as Amalia (1936), ¡Goal! (1936), Melgarejo (1937), Melodías porteñas (1937), and La casa de Quirós (1938), which inaugurated the long trend of Argentine cinema in adapting foreign works. Also in 1936, Argentina Sono Film released the successful Puerto Nuevo, which marked the directorial debut of Luis César Amadori (co-credited with Mario Soffici), who would develop an extensive and successful career throughout the classical period.
The year 1938 continued to break production records after the previous year's developments increased the demand for Argentine films in the country and throughout the Spanish-speaking world. In response to the expanding market, the industry intensified its production pace, imported new studio equipment, upgraded laboratories and brought in new filmmakers. That year, 16 new directors debuted, most of them coming from the theater, including Orestes Caviglia, Elías Isaac Alippi, Ivo Pelay, Ernesto Vilches, Edmundo Guibourg and Miguel Coronatto Paz, among others. Manuel Romero emerged as the most prolific filmmaker of the period, strengthening Lumiton with the release of six films between March 1937 and March 1938, including important titles like Los muchachos de antes no usaban gomina, Tres anclados en París and La rubia del camino. Although the initial idea was that EFA would not produce, in 1938 it released its first film, La vuelta al nido, directed by Leopoldo Torres Ríos. Although it was a commercial failure, Torres Ríos' film was years later revalued as misunderstood by the commercial spirit of its time and a precursor of modern cinema, for its intimate and reflective style and for the naturalist performances of José Gola and Amelia Bence.
Soffici was an important filmmaker of this period and directed for Argentina Sono Film El alma del bandoneón (1935), La barra mendocina (1935), Cadetes de San Martín (1937)—with which he experienced censorship for the first time after an army refusal to his original script—and Viento norte (1937). In 1938, which was a transitional year for Argentina Sono Film, Soffici released social films such as Kilometro 111 (1938), El viejo doctor (1939) and Héroes sin fama (1940), which gave him greater prestige. However, Soffici's most celebrated film, Prisioneros de la tierra (1939), was released under another production company: Pampa Film. Founded by Olegario Ferrando in 1936, the company's first film was La fuga (1937) by Luis Saslavsky, who also directed Nace un amor (1938), films which sought to distance themselves from the popular cinema of Ferreyra and Romero. Saslavsky also brought Alberto de Zavalía to the company, who directed the successful Los caranchos de la Florida (1938). Pampa Film also hired Enrique de Rosas and Enrique de Rosas (Jr.), who directed a series of commercial failures. The company managed an improvement the following year with Prisioneros de la tierra, which was hailed as a classic practically from its release.
In 1939, Argentina became the world's leading producer of Spanish-language films, with a new record of 50 feature films being made, and had consolidated industrial production, an expanding market and its own system of stars, genres and popular authors. According to Di Núbila: "Argentine cinema was never able to boast as proudly as in this year. It owed its fantastic artistic, industrial, commercial, financial and exporting development to no one else but itself. It was in tune with the collective unconscious. The public was its judge and its banker. It freely chose its themes and its casts. (...) Everything it achieved in 1939 was due to its own vigor. Without any kind of aid or protection he faced the best year Hollywood ever had in its history". In this year, Laboratorios Alex acquired the first flatbed editor in Argentina, and the new system would be progressively adopted by the industry in the following years. Also in 1939, the construction of the new Estudios San Miguel in Bella Vista, Greater Buenos Aires, was finished and began production, becoming the largest studios that the country has ever had.
The new prosperity of Argentine cinema brought about a strong change in the themes and atmospheres that had characterized it until then, appealing to middle-class audiences' taste for aspirational themes and wealthy settings. The major representative of this trend at Lumiton was Francisco Mugica, who directed the successful and influential Así es la vida (1939) and Los martes, orquídeas (1941), while at Argentina Sono Film it was Luis César Amadori, who manufactured successful star vehicles for Pepe Arias, Libertad Lamarque, Luis Sandrini, Hugo del Carril, Niní Marshall and Mirtha Legrand. For its part, EFA cast all the biggest stars of the era by offering them more money than any other production company. The studio's main director was Luis Bayón Herrera, who imitated Manuel Romero's model of making low-cost, fast-production, star-driven films. Examples include Cándida (1939), Los celos de Cándida (1940) y Cándida millonaria (1941), all of them starring Marshall playing her popular comic character. Also at EFA, director Carlos Schlieper had the first important period of his career, with a more refined style than Bayón Herrera. At the end of the 1930s, with Soffici's departure from the company, Argentina Sono Film incorporated Saslavsky and Alberto de Zavalía, who stood out for introducing a more cultured and refined take on commercial filmmaking with titles such as Puerta cerrada (1939), El loco Serenata (1939) and Historia de una noche (1941) in the former, and La vida de Carlos Gardel (1939) in the latter. The sophistication of these two directors in Argentina Sono Film had its counterpart in Lumiton with the incorporation of Carlos Hugo Christensen, who directed films such as Los chicos crecen (1942), Safo, historia de una pasión (1943) and La pequeña señora de Pérez (1944).
The year 1941 was of great progress for the Argentine film industry, despite some conflicts between exhibitors that began to monopolize domestic distribution. Several laboratories were modernized, such as Laboratorios Cristiani and Tecnofilm, incorporating automatic film processors, optical printers, a microcinema for dailies, among other innovations. But the most notable advance was that of the Alex Laboratories following the knowledge acquired by Connio Santini and Alfredo Rosiano in their chemistry university studies in the U.S. This allowed Alex to achieve remarkable impeccability in the quality of their black and white films, and they even began to experiment with the possibility of color. Gradually in the following years, Alex absorbed practically all the work of the Argentine professional film industry. In 1941, the Argentine Academy of Cinematography Arts and Sciences was created, which was inspired by the U.S. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, included some of the most prominent names in the industry, and presented its own annual awards ceremony. The first film to receive the academy's Best Picture award was Los martes, orquídeas, while Saslavsky received Best Director for Historia de una noche, with Delia Garcés in Veinte años y una noche and Enrique Muiño in El cura gaucho receiving Best Actress and Actor, respectively.
Also in 1941, Artistas Argentinos Asociados (English: "Associated Argentine Artists"; AAA) was established, a production company founded by director Lucas Demare, actors Elías Alippi, Ángel Magaña, Enrique Muiño and Francisco Petrone, and producer Enrique Faustín; while directors Homero Manzi and Ulyses Petit de Murat, assistant director Hugo Fregonese and actor René Mugica also took part informally, among others. According to Peña, they were united by the desire to "take the risks that other companies avoided in order to obtain a cinema of artistic quality that would also be commercial." In 1942, AAA released La guerra gaucha, with direction by Demare and screenplay by Manzi and Petit de Murat. According to Di Núbila, it was the highest-grossing Argentine film in history and represented the peak of the Golden Age. The early 1940s also saw a brief reappearance of Baires studios, which released a series of box office bombs and soon halted production amid legal disputes. On the other hand, Pampa Film continued its line of nationalist-themed films after Prisioneros de la tierra with titles such as Adelqui Migliar's La carga de los valientes (1940) and La quinta calumnia (1941), and the great success of Demare's El cura gaucho (1941), a biopic of Priest Brochero that was "inserted in the context of a strong discussion on the identity of Argentine cinema." However, in subsequent years the studio made a series of costly but unprofitable productions that would eventually lead to its dissolution.
The Argentine film industry would soon be increasingly affected by World War II, which had broken out in 1939. Several European immigrants who escaped the war joined the Argentine film industry, like musician George Andreani and Paul Misraki, screenwriter Jacques Rémy, and director Pierre Chenal, who found success with the films Todo un hombre (1943), El muerto falta a la cita (1944), Se abre el abismo (1945) and Viaje sin regreso (1946). Some Argentine films of the period even made reference to the world conflict, although most of them in an allusive way, such as Jewish exile James Bauer's Explosivo 008 (1940), Saslavsky's Ceniza al viento (1942), Múgica's La guerra la gano yo (1943), Carlos Borcosque's La verdadera victoria (1943), Alberto de Zavalía's Concierto de almas (1942) and El fin de la noche (1944), Bayón Herrera's Los dos rivales (1944). When World War II began, the magazine Cine argentino conducted anonymous interviews with industry figures regarding the impact that the world conflict could have and, although several had optimistic views, others anticipated the problems that the industry would soon face, like the following interviewee:
In the context of the war, Argentina's success in the Latin American film industry posed a challenge for American policymakers. Argentina's policy of neutrality, under President Ramón Castillo, was influenced by factors such as the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930, which led to high U.S. tariffs on Argentine imports, fostering anti-American sentiment. This was further exacerbated by the Lend-Lease Act of 1941, where the U.S. provided arms to Argentina's regional rival, Brazil. Despite some right-wing nationalists' pro-Nazi inclinations, Argentina's neutral stance was initially supported by Britain, which relied on Argentine food imports and feared that abandoning neutrality would disrupt trade. However, Argentina's refusal to join the Pan-American alliance and its occasional censorship of Hollywood films at the behest of Germany and Spain fueled U.S. suspicions about South American Fascism and led the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA) to counteract by promoting Mexican films over Argentine ones. The U.S. bolstered the Mexican film industry with investment, loans, equipment, and technical assistance, while restricting the export of raw film stock to Argentina, which resulted in severe shortages for national studios and forced them to rely on the more expensive black market. Consequently, Argentine film production plummeted from 56 films in 1942 to only 36 in 1943, while Mexican production rose from 49 to 67 in the same period. By the end of the war, Mexico had firmly supplanted Argentina as the leading producer of Spanish-language films in Latin America, with a significant increase in production. The boycott was beneficial for North American investors who had heavily invested in the Mexican film industry, ensuring that political and commercial interests were closely aligned.
The decline experienced by the Argentine industry compared to the Mexican industry is not attributed only to U.S. intervention, but also to a series of defects in its commercial management. The success of national cinema did not favor the industrial production sector so much as it did the commercial sector, that is, distributors and exhibitors. As noted by José Agustín Mahieu, the growth of the industry "did not translate commercially into parallel income for production. With a suicidal improvisation, the directors of the industry delivered their films at a fixed price, so that the major profits produced by the eventual public successes remained in the hands of the distributors. The invested capital was thus subjected to limited, short-term plans." In 1942, director Luis Saslavsky denounced the industry's mismanagement in the specialized journal Heraldo del Cinematografista: "The films that are lovingly and neatly finished in the laboratories, are then mistreated, neglected... The business leaders of our industry are the children who have been left behind and have not grown up with us. They, the businessmen, have systematized a policy of incomprehensible exploitation. Touched by the urgency of realization, they have not yet achieved the serenity of judgment that should reign in any commercial operation. We live in a perpetual auction of balances. Films are auctioned in heterogeneous piles." The cinema of Mexico, on the other hand, had begun to adopt a more favorable long-term policy for its development, through direct state management of production, distribution and exhibition companies, unlike the free market that reigned in Argentine cinema. For example, since 1942 the country had the National Film Bank (Spanish: Banco Nacional Cinematográfico), which helped finance the productions.
Throughout the 1930s, the Argentine state had remained largely on the sidelines of the development of the film industry. This situation began to change with the overthrow of President Castillo in a 1943 military coup. By ushering in a nationalist government that rejected liberal economic principles, the coup laid the groundwork for the state to protect the Argentine film industry. The new military government created the Undersecretariat of Information and Press of the Presidency, which included a General Directorate of Public Shows with three divisions: Cinema, Theater and Control. As noted by Peña: "As happened in subsequent legislation, the law creating this Undersecretariat begins by guaranteeing "the dignity of the right to free expression of ideas" but goes on to detail the various mechanisms it foresees for not doing so. The agency regulated the production of news programs, the content of which became closely dependent on state policy, although it had not previously been characterized as confrontational either." After the end of World War II, the United States still maintained its raw film stock restrictions on Argentina. Faced with a shortage of raw film stock, studios attempted negotiations with domestic theater chains for improved terms; when these negotiations faltered, the matter was escalated to Juan Domingo Perón's Secretariat of Labor and Welfare. In response, Perón issued a decree favoring the studios, instituting a percentage rental system and mandating a quota of Argentine films to be shown in theaters. This decree, with slight modifications, would significantly shape the film industry following Perón's presidential election in 1946.
A 1947 law mandated that domestic films constitute 25% of screen time in first-run porteño theaters and 40 percent elsewhere in the country. Simultaneously, the Banco de Crédito Industrial initiated financing options for domestic film producers, while producers also received a substantial subsidy funded by a minor fee added to ticket prices. Through the implementation of this law, the established legal and official parameters for the development of the Argentine film industry were set. Although these measures didn't restore international sales, they successfully revitalized film production levels: in 1950, the industry released fifty-six films, finally reaching the peak it had attained in 1942. Peña noted that, "although it was highly questioned after the 1955 coup, no subsequent legislation to date has been able to improve its advantages or avoid its disadvantages. Argentina was not the only country in the world that had to design public policies to preserve its cinema, as almost all European countries had to do the same to try to limit the advance of American cinema in the immediate post-war years.
According to Karush, due to limited capitalization and the idiosyncrasies of Argentina's protectionist framework, there was a tendency to produce low-budget films. These films, reliant on subsidies, were assured screen time irrespective of their quality. The Peronist government actively pursued a moralizing and nationalistic agenda in the domestic cinema. Films deemed to be "of national interest" were granted privileged access to government credit, and the government centralized the distribution of raw film stock, favoring specific producers. By 1949, with the appointment of Raúl Alejandro Apold, former press chief for Argentina Sono Film, as the undersecretary of information and press, the regime had effectively shaped a film industry where every artistic decision fell under political control. According to Clara Kriger, a researcher on the little-frequented subject of cinema and Peronism, there "was no written decalogue and there was no prior censorship", although "everyone knew that there were things that could not be said" and, in any case, what could happen was that the authorities would not give credit to certain screenplays. It was a tacit but existing censorship, which occurred not only for political but also for religious or other reasons.
Lumiton, which had been the country's first film studio, was also the first to succumb to the production crisis and was sold in 1949.
In 1955, Perón was overthrown after a coup d'état that called itself the Revolución Libertadora, which installed a military dictatorship. In this new context, several exiled artists, such as Francisco Petrone and María Rosa Gallo, return to Argentina, while others, such as Libertad Lamarque and Carlos Hugo Christensen, remain abroad. At the same time, figures such as Luis César Amadori and Zully Moreno go into exile, and Hugo del Carril faces reprisals for his links with Peronism. The new government eliminates film subsidies, frees the commercialization of virgin film and dissolves Peronist film policies, without offering clear alternatives. This aggravated conflicts within the sector, where divisions arose between producers and directors. By 1956, the economic measures introduced by the new dictatorship triggered a crisis that the film industry was unable to overcome, as major production companies closed, sold their studios, and much of their film archives were dispersed or lost. Mahieu noted that on April 13 of that year, the "agreement for social aid and film promotion" expired and exhibitors refused to renew it, which led to a total halt in film production. The only releases corresponded to films made the previous year. Nevertheless, the end of the industrial era of Argentine cinema was in fact foreseeable: before the coup, most of the "big studios" had already closed or stopped production, and the few that remained were still afloat thanks to state support. Most films were made, as in the silent and early sound films, through isolated projects, where production companies were created to make one or two films, but these productions could not be considered "independent" because they only existed due to state support and did not represent a real alternative to the industrial model. They were, in essence, products that imitated the industry, but lacked a real industrial infrastructure, and featured a variety of companies instead of the few that existed previously.
The period from 1957 to 1960 has been considered by the main historiography of Argentine cinema as one of passage between classical and modern cinema, often without going deeper into those conceptions. A possible periodization of the period is the one proposed by film historian Mariano Calistro in 1984, which covers even more years (1957 to 1968). Some writers consider the premiere of Leopoldo Torre Nilsson's La casa del ángel in 1957 as a turning point in Argentine cinema, marking the beginning of a new stage with a different proposal both in style and conception. That same year, the government enacted Decree Law 62/57, with measures to promote national cinematography as an industry, art and means of dissemination. This law also established the creation of the National Institute of Cinematography, in charge of replacing the General Directorate of Shows, and of regulating several aspects of film production and exhibition. This new context led to the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers in the early 1960s, who opposed "commercial" cinema and experimented with unconventional cinematic techniques. The new trend, initially known as New Argentine Cinema (Spanish: "nuevo cine argentino") and later as the Generation of '60 (Spanish: "Generación del '60"), was not a unified movement and included a series of directors who made their feature film debut around 1960, including Enrique Dawi with Río abajo (1960), Simón Feldman with El negoción (1959) and Los de la mesa diez (1960), David Kohon with Prisioneros de una noche (1962) and Tres veces Ana (1961), José Martínez Suárez with El crack (1960), Dino Minniti with Tiernas ilusiones (1961), René Mugica with El centroforward murió al amanecer (1961), and Lautaro Murúa with Shunko (1960) and Alias Gardelito (1961).
Generally speaking, the Argentine cinema of the 1930s was characterized by a deliberate effort to portray the working classes, which, in turn, emerged as its main consumers. The first Argentine sound cinema was strongly linked to the theater, which was reflected in their staging and acting style. As noted by Karush: "Domestic filmmakers benefited from the long tradition of popular theater in Argentina, particularly the short comic plays known as sainetes; by providing comparable entertainment at a lower admission price, they could capture an already existing audience." In early classical films like ¡Tango!, Radio bar or Por buen camino, the "actors speak, move and gesticulate as if they were on a theatrical stage. The camera was limited to capturing those gestures and attitudes (which today seem excessive or exaggerated), often in fixed general shots, so that the actors could move without risk of going out of frame." Some critics, such as Domingo Di Núbila, identified these "narrative weaknesses" in terms of "backwardness" in relation to the cinema of other countries. On the other hand, writer Mario Berard suggests that it was actually a moment of "creative freedom", in which filmmakers "made use of the impunity of the 'no one knows' to freely appropriate the resources of the new medium. On the contrary, in the 40s and 50s, filmmakers submitted to the canons of the industry, giving rise to a homogeneous and strongly structured mode of representation." According to Ricardo García Oliveri, the directors of the early sound period "have in common the intuition, the enthusiasm and the sense of the popular. These directors generally come from the middle class and they all coincide, at this stage, in a naive cinema, considered ordinary by the upper classes and hardly costumbrist by the aesthetes, but with virtues that are not harmed by its eminently local content."
Unlike Hollywood cinema, Argentine industrial cinema was slow to structure its production in the well-defined matrices of film genres. Peña noted that, although in terms of production the Argentine industry wanted to resemble that of the US and France, it "owes less to these other cinematographies than to its strong links with tango, radio or revue, forms of popular art from which many of its main performers, directors and screenwriters came. These roots not only conditioned a certain aesthetic in a particular way, but also the configuration of the various genres, which are almost always hybrids." Gardel's success with Paramount was also extremely influential, as it showed Argentine filmmakers that by focusing on local authenticity, settings, and dialects, they could effectively compete with Hollywood, taking advantage of actors "who were often recognizable to filmgoers from their previous careers in theater and radio". The first defined genre of Argentine cinema consisted of a "sentimental narrative structure originated in the tango", which has been called the "tango melodrama" (Spanish: melodrama tanguero). This style had its antecedents in the silent films of the 1920s, especially in the work of José A. Ferreyra, focused on portraying the world and characters associated with tango, a genre linked to the lower-class neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. According to Karush, Argentine classical cinema, and national mass culture of the 1930s as a whole, was most significantly influenced by melodrama. This cultural mode not only shaped the aesthetic of media content but also reflected a society starkly divided by class. Local producers, while adopting styles from the United States, often portrayed an Argentina where class divides were insurmountable, even with hard work. Argentine films promoted consumerist dreams but simultaneously critiqued the moral failings of the wealthy. The authenticity of cultural products was tied to their roots in the lower-class neighborhoods, emphasizing a narrative of class struggle. Tango, a key element of this period's culture, often told tales of moral corruption and downfall linked to the opulence of the rich, contrasting with the purity and solidarity of the poor. Melodrama's conventions were not just limited to cinema; they permeated radio, poetry, theater, and even circus performances, highlighting emotional excess and a clear division between the rich and the poor. This portrayal of Argentina as a rigidly stratified society was a stark contrast to the more nuanced, fluid class interactions in Buenos Aires neighborhoods of the time.
Aside from tango-based films, film scholars, notably Ana Laura Lusnich, have also identified another important genre of the classical era of Argentine cinema, the so-called drama social-folclórico (English: "social-folkloric drama"), a local variant of the epic film that was prevalent between 1933 and 1956. The social-folkloric drama emerged as a distinctive style that weaved together influences from established cinematic traditions and local artistic expressions, such as literature, theater, and visual arts. It is defined by straightforward narratives that progress through a defined temporal and spatial journey, featuring protagonists whose lives are deeply intertwined with their social surroundings. The visual and auditory elements are crafted to heighten the storytelling and emotional impact, while the narrative structure often incorporates framed tales that create a unified whole. This model frequently delves into cultural tensions like civilization versus barbarism and rural versus urban life, reflecting broader societal themes. Within this framework, two main variants stand out: biographical films, which portray either historical figures or popular heroes, and historical dramas, encompassing stories of independence struggles, social and economic conflicts, or romantic intrigues, showcasing the versatility of this cinematic approach. Examples include biographical films such as Su mejor alumno (1944) and Santos Vega vuelve (1947); films set during the Independence era such as Viento norte (1937), La guerra gaucha (1942) and Pámpa bárbara (1945); and films focused on socioeconomic conflict such as Kilómetro 111 (1938), Prisioneros de la tierra (1939), El cura gaucho (1941) and Las aguas bajan turbias (1952), among others.
The premiere on July 19, 1939, of Así es la vida, directed by Francisco Mugica and produced by Lumiton, marked a turning point for the themes, stars, directors, and representation universes in Argentine cinema. For the first time, the ascending middle class and the bourgeoisie emerged as protagonists who elicited empathy and identification from the audience, in contrast to previous cinema that criticized and portrayed the upper classes as villains. Unlike the ruling clases depicted in Manuel Romero's films, associated with the imagery of an elite land-owning oligarchy, the protagonists of Así es la vida belong to an industrial and professional bourgeoisie, something that promoted ideas of social ascent and appealed to the middle classes, through its celebration of hard work and family unity. The film did not target differentiated audiences but encompassed both lower and middle to upper-class sectors, allowing identification for the latter while also shaping specific imaginations and aspirations; by integrating modernity into the national reality, it reconciled both factors through the exaltation of the family as a point of balance.
The box-office and critical success of Así es la vida led to the proliferation of films that sought to imitate its style, such as Alberto de Zavalía's Dama de compañía, Luis Bayón Herrera's Mi fortuna por un nieto and Mugica's Medio millón por una mujer, all of them premiering in 1940. However, none of these productions managed to replicate the success of Así es la vida, and debates persisted in the specialized press regarding the need to renew Argentine cinema without alienating the working classes. These debates and problems seemed to be settled with the premiere of Mugica's Los martes, orquídeas on June 4, 1941, which was a success with both audiences and critics, and even had a Hollywood remake the following year, titled You Were Never Lovelier. The film opened the doors to a new style that would enjoy great success during the 1940s: that of the so-called bourgeois comedy (Spanish: comedia burguesa). In particular, Los martes, orquídeas was the initiator and main exponent of the so-called cine de ingenuas (which may be translated to "ingénue cinema" or "cinema of naive women"), the first dominant model adopted by the bourgeois comedy in Argentine cinema. The cine de ingenuas introduced new themes, scenarios and imagery for the local film industry, largely thanks to the incorporation of teenage girl debutantes in leading roles. The new genre was based on the already internationally known "ingénue" type, defined as a "beautiful, pure, generous and virginal adolescent girl, who has not yet come into contact with the world." In Italy, it had its greatest exponent with the so-called Telefoni Bianchi films (Italian for "white telephones"), while Hollywood actress Deanna Durbin became a paradigmatic example of international presence. Beyond the central figure of the ingénue, the innovation of the cine de ingenuas was to radically alter the development of stories and imaginaries in local cinema, as the 1930s trend of criticizing the upper classes was abandoned in favor of depicting them as an idyllic space, where the bourgeois family served as a moral beacon for tradition in the face of the dangers of modernity.
The premiere of Los martes, orquídeas, was followed by other productions that introduced young female actresses, including Nury Montsé in Canción de cuna (1941), Nelly Hering in Secuestro sensacional!!! (1942) or Mariana Martí in Dieciséis años (1943). One of the main strategies in the search for new attractions were the contests promoted by magazines or companies, from which the main figures of the genre emerged: Mirtha Legrand (a main reference point after her debut in Los martes, orquídeas) and María Duval, the two actresses who most frequently embodied the ingénue role under the process of typecasting and were also incorporated into the star system. Unlike these two, the other actresses who were pigeonholed as ingenuas took part of films with more varied narrative and ideological proposals. Within the cine de ingenuas, Duval became the main star associated with the "family comedy" genre, starring in titles such as Cada hogar, un mundo (1942), Su primer baile (1942) and Casi un sueño (1943); while Legrand was the leading figure in romantic comedy, starring in titles written specifically for her ingénue figure, such as El viaje (1942), Claro de luna (1942) or Adolescencia (1942). Although it has often been underestimated by historians, the cine de ingenuas was a genre of great relevance in Argentine cinema between 1941 and 1945, reaching 20% of national film production in 1942. However, it soon declined due to several factors, such as the increasing age of the genre's stars, the overexploitation of the same themes, and its evasion of the modern world at a time of transition for Argentine society. In response to this, the developers of the genre decided to turn to urban melodramas with a central sexual component, or to zany comedies with modern rather than naive girls. The pioneer in this sense was Carlos Hugo Christensen, with titles such as Safo, historia de una pasión (1943), 16 años (1943) and La pequeña señora de Pérez (1944).
The exhaustion of the comedia de ingenuas model around 1945 gave way to the second model of bourgeois comedy in Argentine cinema, the so-called cine de fiesta (literally "party cinema"), which was characterized by its celebration of urban life and focus on young, bourgeois couples who revel in leisure and entertainment while defying traditional social expectations. This subgenre signified a marked departure from the earlier cine de ingenuas, not only through its thematic content but also in its stylistic approach to filmmaking. The narrative and thematic elements of the cine de fiesta explicitly challenged the established norms of romantic love, the sanctity of monogamy, and the rigidity of social institutions. Instead, it celebrated a more liberated, joyful existence marked by the exuberance of youth and the excitement of modernity. The directors Schlieper and Christensen were central to this genre. Their work captured a society in flux during the mid-20th century in Argentina—a time of significant social mobility, the rise of the middle class, and the political upheaval with the advent of Peronism in 1945. This period was also marked by a surge in consumer culture and urban modernization, where comfort and access to entertainment became not just luxuries but necessities of a modern lifestyle. The cine de fiesta thus provided a cinematic mirror to these societal shifts, showcasing a world where the pursuit of pleasure and immediate gratification was celebrated. Initially, the genre was critiqued for its perceived superficiality or triviality. However, over time, there has been a reevaluation of the cine de fiesta's contribution to the evolution of comedy in Argentine cinema and connection to the screwball comedies of Hollywood, yet with unique influences from directors like Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch. Some examples of party films include Christensen's Adán y la serpiente (1946) and Con el diablo en el cuerpo (1947), and Schlieper's Arroz con leche (1950), Cuando besa mi marido (1950), Esposa último modelo (1950) and Cosas de mujer (1951), all of them theatrical adaptations.
As the 1940s progressed, especially following the end of World War II, the style of Argentine cinema became increasingly "internationalist" as a strategy to gain markets. This was reflected in an increasing interest in adapting foreign literary works, the disuse of Argentine Spanish and the elimination of other local or costumbrist references. According to Peña, a "part of the industry developed, then, on the strange conviction that in order to grow it had to avoid, as a guilt, the authenticity with which it had managed to open international markets." Peña further noted that the "tendency of Argentine cinema to adapt foreign authors and works began timidly at the end of the 1930s and grew stronger until it reached delirious extremes ten years later. The obvious cultural affinities made the approach to Spanish or even Italian works more or less logical, but regardless of the geographical origin of the material, the problem was rather the criterion of the producers when choosing and conceiving their adaptation." Examples of this trend include Saraceni's Los tres mosqueteros (1946), Soffici's El pecado de Julia (1946), Schlieper's Madame Bovary (1947), and Saslavsky's Historia de una mala mujer (1948), among others. The purported elimination of Argentine identity that characterized the last stage of classic Argentine cinema was harshly evaluated by traditional Argentine historiography. Mahieu described the period as the "rise of the falsely international, hybrid cinema, the pink comedy, the hollow melodrama", although he commended the "isolated exceptions" of Pelota de trapo (1948), El crimen de Oribe (1950), Días de odio (1954) and Las aguas bajan turbias (1952).
Continuing the pattern that emerged in the early 1940s, Argentine cinema of the Peronist era predominantly focused on the comedy genre. Although there were no explicitly propagandistic narrative films, elements of the official Peronist discourse were reflected in the contents of the cinema of the time. According to researcher Valeria Manzano, the Peronist government especially favored—through credits and awards—highly moral films, which exalted values such as solidarity, the maintenance of family unity, and patriotism, and pointed out binary oppositions that were typical of the Peronist public discourse, such as "people-oligarchy" or "luxury-austerity". Manzano recognizes several elements of Peronist morality in the films of the period: "the preservation of the constituted home, class solidarity and the honoring of work as a value essentially involved in the 'march' of society as a whole." The new class of the industrial "nouveau riche" was brought to the screen, contrasting them with "old money" industrialists. In a parodic tone, these "new industrialists" are presented as oscillating, on the one hand, between the excessive luxury of their newly acquired wealth and, on the other, the imitation of old social patterns. As noted by the author:
On the other hand, Manzano focuses on the type of comedies starring Niní Marshall and Luis Sandrini, in which conflicts are resolved by tapping into a kind of "popular common sense". These films often tell stories of low-skilled workers who dream of climbing a bit higher on the social ladder to a comfortable middle-class. In these productions, there's a recurring theme of accepting class differences, especially in Manuel Romero films like Navidad de los pobres (1947). Manzano writes: "The class society of Peronism coexists in the universe of the comedies: the classes share a code and a conflict, the relationships are friendly and pleasant, but the assigned places are never, ever subverted." The other discursive axis that runs through the comedies of the period is a type of work ethic that is opposed to "corruption" and "idleness". Manzano cites the films of comedy actor Pepe Arias as an example, in which his character "usually begins by dreaming of being able to escape the harshness of work and takes on a thousand characters to achieve it."
Between the late 1940s and the 1950s, film noir (Spanish: cine negro) also emerged as one of the main genres in Argentine cinema with the work of directors such as Daniel Tinayre, Carlos Hugo Christensen, Hugo del Carril, Hugo Fregonese, Don Napy and Román Viñoly Barreto, among others.
Shortly after the emergence of the Argentine film industry, the first historiographic proposals on national cinema appeared, although in a very fragmentary manner and only in specialized magazines. In the mid-1940s, there was a publishing boom in the United States and Europe of books on film history, which ignored burgeoning Latin American industries such as Argentina's, beyond a few brief mentions. An exception was the publication in 1944 of the Spanish version of The Cinema To-day by Douglas Arthur Spencer and Hubert D. Waley, whose translator Francisco Madrid included an epilogue focused on Argentina, becoming the earliest antecedent of the study of Argentine classical cinema. The first proper book dedicated to the history of Argentine cinema was journalist Domingo Di Núbila's Historia del cine argentino, published between 1959 and 1960. Di Núbila's work emerged at a time in which the idea of writing the history of the different regional cinemas arose in Latin America, inspired by the growing publishing of books focused on the history and making of cinema in general. Around the same time, histories of national cinema were published in Brazil by Alex Viany and in Mexico by Emilio García Riera; together with Di Núbila's, these pioneering works "laid the foundations of an imaginary about what classical cinema was in the region and what it should have been." These works were the first to deal with the history of cinema in the Latin American context, and it is fitting that they emerged in the only three countries that had managed to develop a local industry. In addition, García Riera's book on Mexican cinema had the novelty of being the first to historicize cinema from the Latin American academic framework.
Di Núbila's book—which introduced the concept of the "Golden Age"— became a foundational work and an unavoidable point of reference for Argentine film studies of the classical period, established concepts and assessments that were highly influential in the following decades, although questioned and reinterpreted from the late 20th century onwards. His book was published in a context of great uncertainty for local cinema, in which classical forms were disappearing and new modernizing forms were beginning to emerge. In this context, he advocated a less regulated industry that would be revitalized through the laws of supply and demand. In order to propose the new objectives that Argentine cinema should adopt in the following years, Di Núbila necessarily established a narrative of the past. His book revolves around a selection of releases that he distinguishes by their popularity, technical elements, or his own personal tastes. For Di Núbila, the problems of Argentine cinema revolved around four central elements: lack of investment to update technology, mismanagement of the business, an inadequate relationship between industry and state, and the weakening of authentically national themes and narrative forms. Another important element of Di Núbila's text is that it highlights national elements in local cinema, especially those linked to popular or urban traditions (such as tango), in order to demonstrate an independence with respect to film histories linked to traditional countries. Although it allowed to establish its own parameters to analyze Argentine cinema, this perspective had the counterpart of excluding it from comparisons with the cinema of other Latin American countries and the rest of the world.
In 1966, José Agustín Mahieu published Breve historia del cine argentino which, in addition to Di Núbila's book, became a foundational reference text for subsequent historical studies of Argentine classical cinema. Like Di Núbila, Mahieu proposed a history of Argentine cinema in evolutionary terms and with a focus on the opposition between the national and the foreign. Both authors gave special value to the films of the 1930s for their "authentically Argentine" themes and undervalued those of the 1940s for having fewer local references. In the case of Mahieu's work, there is a defense of the new cinema that was emerging in the 1960s, considering the classical-industrial period (in particular the 1940s) as a lower step and modern cinema as a final stage of maturity. This approach had a great impact and longevity in the historiography of Argentine and Latin American cinema. A few years after Mahieu's book, the left-wing collective Grupo Cine Liberación, formed by Octavio Getino and Fernando "Pino" Solanas, elaborated its famous manifesto "Towards a Third Cinema" (1969), which strongly condemned classical-industrial films. In the 1970s, books were published by Estela Dos Santos (who again focused on the mimicry between classic Argentine cinema and Hollywood), Getino and Solanas (maintaining their views of the late 1960s), and Abel Posadas, who distanced himself from the positions of his time for his criticism of the validity of Di Núbila's work, the rescue of traditionally underrated films and directors of the classical period, and his opposition to leftist intellectuals.
In the 1980s, the historiography of Argentine cinema was renewed with the appearance of new works that broadened the analysis by focusing on Latin America as a whole, at a time when the conceptualization of Latin American cinema was in vogue, focused on the region's political cinema. As noted by Kriger, the texts that "had the greatest impact on the incipient group of Argentine scholars and researchers [were those which] based their hypotheses on the dependency theory—a consideration in terms of core-periphery of the functioning of the productive structures and of the aesthetic results obtained." The most important books of this trend were O cinema na América Latina (1985) by Paulo Antonio Paranaguá and Historia del cine latinoamericano (1987) by Peter Schumann. Although useful for the analysis of modern cinema, these approaches concentrated on the aspects in common in the cinema of the different countries of the region, giving very little presence to classical cinema. As noted by Soledad Pardo: "The position was very clear: in the face of a classical cinema considered conservative and heir to foreign forms that were always harmful, modern cinema burst in with its revolutionary and authentically Latin American vocation. The immediate consequence of the disqualification of [Argentine classical cinema] was the lack of interest and, therefore, the scarcity of exhaustive studies on it."
The great turning point in classical Argentine film studies came in the 1990s, when many new scholarship on Argentine cinema began to appear, and although the classical period did not appear as the most studied, the texts still multiplied exponentially. These new texts avoided the stance of classical historiography, which viewed the history of Argentine cinema as a succession of notable films and events. They also introduced semiotic or structuralist tools to the analysis of films, which until then had been based on summarizing their plots. The publication in 1992 of the book Cine argentino. La otra historia, compiled by Sergio Wolf, was pivotal and inaugurated this new renovating stage, with texts deliberately questioning the traditional narratives of Argentine cinema. The studies from this period were characterized by not being all-encompassing but rather by focusing on specific themes selected based on different theoretical or methodological criteria. With the arrival of the 21st century came the publication of Cine argentino, industria y clasicismo (2000), a comprehensive two-volume work edited by Claudio España. This influential collective research delved deeply into the classic era of Argentine film production from 1933 to 1956.
Since the early 2000s, studies on classical Argentine cinema have undergone a significant transformation, as the longstanding disregard or indifference toward this era gradually faded and gave way to renewed academic interest from scholars from university backgrounds, who have approached it with an unprecedented level of theoretical and methodological rigor. These texts demonstrate different levels of focus on specific topics from the period, emphasizing the importance of introducing new questions and perspectives that were overlooked in traditional accounts, rather than simply rewriting the classical past. Examples include Horacio Campodónico's political-economic analysis (2005), Ana Laura Lusnich's study of the "social-folkloric drama" genre (2005), and Adrián Melo's research on LGBT representations in Argentine cinema (2009). The fields of cultural studies and transnational studies further enriched the exploration of classic Argentine cinema. In the realm of the former, Matthew Karush published a book in 2012 that examined classical Argentine cinema as part of the "mass cultural commodities", understanding the convergence of media industries as a phenomenon of meaning within the films themselves. Transnational studies, on the other hand, opened up new problems in the comparative study of the Argentine classical era with that of other countries, notably Mexico. Most recently, several historians identified with the New Cinema History movement—which analyzes cinema as a social phenomenon—have carried out innovative studies on the audiences and filmgoing experiences of classic Argentine cinema, aspects until then unexplored by national film scholarship.
Unlike most countries, Argentina has not adopted public policies that preserve the national film heritage, which has been a long-standing claim by the film-related community. This has led to the loss of a large amount of material and to the fact that of many films only a single copy survives in a poor condition, even some that are considered among the most important in Argentine cinema by critics and specialists. Many films survive but through incomplete copies, missing scenes, entire acts or musical numbers. From the beginning, the film industry was built around continuous production, with little interest in retaining material already released. As noted by Martín Miguel Pereira, "... industry produces material goods that, to a greater or lesser extent, are perishable. From canned sardines to a refrigerator, all products will be discarded and replaced or renewed at a certain point in time, once they are consumed or until they have exhausted their function. As astonishing as it may be to think of this procedure for what we now consider a work of art, cinema fulfilled the same cycle, with its specificities. A film was produced, distributed, consumed (exhibited) and then, if it could continue to yield revenues in an eventual retrospective exhibition or, by the 1960s, if it could be sold to television for reruns, it was kept."
Between the late 1930s and mid-1940s, there were some first measures for the conservation of film material, although they were interested in the documentary record rather than fiction films. In 1949, the nonprofit cinematheque Fundación Cinemateca Argentina was created as a result of the merging of two film clubs, with the objective of preserving and disseminating of cinema. The relationship between the Fundación Cinemateca Argentina and the state and its financial support is complex and spans decades. In the early 1990s, the Argentine government subsidized the Fundación Cinemateca Argentina, funding the purchase of its current building in Constitución and acquiring around 400 national films from the U.S. to prevent their disposal due to the video boom. Further acquisitions of Argentine films abroad occurred between 1996 and 1997. Legal issues have kept around 300 films in the National Autonomous University of Mexico's cinematheque since 2002, unable to return. Senator Luis Falcó from Río Negro attempted in 2006 to legislate their duty-free import, but his proposal failed, and he died the following year. The initiative lapsed in 2008, leaving 700 Argentine films (of an estimated 3,000) still abroad.
The law that created the National Institute of Cinematography in 1957, decreed by the military government after the overthrow of Perón, provided for the creation of the National Cinematheque, where producers reportedly had to deliver a copy of every film made with credit or subsidy from the organization. Nevertheless, these film copies were of poor quality, either being the initial, worst "A copy" or ones heavily used in national screenings, representing the only surviving copy in most cases. Additionally, many have been lost overseas or through careless lending. In 1968, a new law established that films of special interest should be given a copy to the General Archive of the Nation, in addition to that of the new National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts (INCAA). The law also ordered the creation of a National Cinematheque dependent on the INCAA, which casts doubts as to whether what was stipulated in 1957 was ever fulfilled, and made its prerogatives explicit, making it perhaps the first action of the state in terms of film preservation. In addition, in 1971 the Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken was created, which among its functions includes the conservation of a large film archive and is administered by the government of the city of Buenos Aires. Currently located in La Boca, the museum exhibits a large number of objects, artifacts and audiovisual material from the history of Argentine cinema, including the Golden Age. The abandoned Lumiton studios in Munro were rescued from demolition in the 1990s and converted into a museum run by the municipality of Vicente López, with a permanent collection of Lumiton's history, a screening room, and an extensive archive.
In the 1990s, Fernando "Pino" Solanas presented a national law for the creation of the Cinematheque and Archive of the National Image (Spanish: Cinemateca y Archivo de la Imagen Nacional, CINAIN), in order to unify all the scattered and poorly preserved national film heritage in a single place. After being approved by the National Congress and then vetoed by President Carlos Menem, the law was finally approved in 1999, although it was not regulated until 2010. Since then, no government has ensured that the CINAIN began to operate under the terms established by law or to fulfill the functions that correspond to it, and the demand for the need of a National Cinematheque continues to be reiterated by the country's film community. According to a research conducted by filmmaker Hernán Gaffet and film collectors Fernando Martín Peña and Octavio Fabiano, 50% of national sound films have been lost forever. In addition to the INCAA film archive (which is different from the CINAIN), the General Archive of the Nation and the Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken, there are also films in other public organizations such as the Televisión Pública and the National Library; storage conditions vary by institution, but none prioritize preservation, restoration, and dissemination, often due to prohibitively high costs. There are also several private collections of various kinds, although they cannot afford the costs of their proper conservation. The most important of these collectors is Peña, who is also a popular film historian and communicator, individually undertaking the safeguarding of a large part of the surviving Argentine cinema at the same time that he continues the demand for a National Cinematheque.
Several films from the classical period have been listed among the best in the history of Argentine cinema. The Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken carried out polls to determine the greatest Argentine films of all time in the years 1977, 1984, 1991 and 2000. The results of the 2000 poll can be found in the 4th issue of La mirada cautiva, the museum's magazine, which also included the top 10 from the 1977 and 1984 polls. In the 1977 list, 8 of the top 10 results were films released before 1957, including Prisioneros de la tierra (1st place), La guerra gaucha (3rd place), Así es la vida (4th place), La vuelta al nido (5th place), Las aguas bajan turbias (6th place), La dama duende (7th place), Malambo (8th place) and Fuera de la ley (10th place). In the 1984 list, Prisioneros de la tierra was again selected as the greatest film of Argentine cinema, although only three other pre-1957 films reached the top 10: La guerra gaucha, Las aguas bajan turbias and Los isleros. Due to the coincidences in the number of votes, the top 100 list of the 2000 poll resulted in 43 positions comprising 101 films, of which 29 were released before 1957; these are:
In 2022, the film magazines La vida útil, Taipei and La tierra quema carried out a new top 100 list inspired by the previous ones, which was presented at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival. Due to the coincidences in the number of votes, the total list includes 812 titles and 62 ranking positions, while the "top 100" includes places from 1 to 52 and comprises 103 films. For the first time, no pre-1960s film appeared in the top 10, and classical-era films were among those that decreased the most compared to the previous poll. The fact that more than a third of the list corresponds to films released in 2000 onwards has been interpreted as a consequence of the absence of conservation policies for the country's film heritage. As such, the results of the 2022 poll fueled the long-standing claim for the need for a national cinematheque. The films prior to 1957 that made ir to the top 100 of 2022 were:
In 2000, American Cinematographer—the magazine of the American Society of Cinematographers—listed Los tallos amargos (1956) as one of the "50 Best Photographed Films of All-Time", the work of cinematographer Ricardo Younis. In 2022, the Spanish magazine Fotogramas included Los tres berretines (1933), Los martes, orquídeas (1941) and Dios se lo pague (1947) in its list of the "20 best Argentine films in history".
Unlike the silent era, there were no female directors during the classical period, as industry leaders firmly prevented their emergence; and the first sound film directed by a woman did not come until 1960 with Vlasta Lah's Las furias.