Made in Joinville: Transnational Identitary Aesthetics in Carlos Gardel's Early Paramount Films

Abstract

The arrival of sound technologies in the cinema fundamentally changed film production and consumption. Fearing a potential loss in market share in foreign markets such as that of Latin America due to the inevitable premieres of talkies produced by national industries, Hollywood studios began devising strategies to exert and extend their hegemonic market position. Though an initial strategy centering on multilinguals failed, Paramount ultimately achieved success through the production in their studios in Joinville, France, of Spanish-language original features. Some of the most successful, both commercially and artistically, of these features are those films of Carlos Gardel. In this paper, I explore the ways in which the protagonists Gardel plays channel affective and identitary connections to cinematic geography in the three feature films he shot for Paramount in their Joinville studios: Las luces de Buenos Aires (The Lights of Buenos Aires, Adelqui Millar, 1931), ¡Esperáme!, (Wait for me!, Louis Gasnier, 1932), and Melodía de arrabal (Suburban Melody, Gasnier, 1932). I argue that the increasingly regional deterritorialization in these early Paramount films not only mediated but embodied by Gardel's protagonists suggests an attempt to create an ostensibly authentic and commercially viable transnational Hispanic cinema.

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