Movement and Projection in the Slaughterhouse of the Argentine Cinema: Martín Fierro (1923) by Alfredo Quesada.

In 1923, after producing the adaptation of his brother Josué’s best-selling novel La vendedora de Harrods (1919), Alfredo Quesada made his directorial debut with the film Martín Fierro. It was based on the poem by José Hernández (1872 and 1879), which had been canonized shortly before. Although the film is now lost, this essay aims to examine its reception through different publications of the time and to place it within the framework of a film field that in the beginning of the 1920’s was already autonomously constituted. In particular, this work focuses on the interdependence of two fundamental demands of the field: the requests for movement and projection, defined according to Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Michel Frodon, respectively. Considering this link, the goal is to understand the reasons why Quesada’s movie was considered a failure and to infer the conditions that could determine the fate of Argentine films both locally and in the global market of culture.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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