Queer Cinema

Abstract

First paragraph: It is ironic that the first narrative sound film ever to be produced in Argentina, Los tres berretines/The Three Amateurs (Enrique Susini, 1933) featured a gay secondary character, Pocholo. This character initiated a mode of representation that has long dominated the national screen, particularly in mainstream film-making, even until today. Pocholo became, metaphorically speaking, the long-standing currency for the on-screen ‘queer’: the mockingly-represented stereotypical effeminate man, deprived of real characterization or psychology, just a caricature that has no obvious meaningfulness for the main heterosexual characters or for the heteronormative resolution of the plot. The irony lies in the fact that this apparent plot ‘irrelevance’ is undermined by the very abiding recurrence of this ‘ridiculed gay man vignette’ through the decades. The insistence of this figure in Argentine cinema – used even, albeit for differently-targeted derogatory purposes, in two sequences of a political film as aesthetically radical as La hora de los hornos/The Hour of the Furnaces (Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, 1968) – must surely be telling us something about the country’s unacknowledged sexualized cultural history.