Allegories of Authenticity in the Argentine Cinema of the 1910s

Argentine filmmakers of the 1910s enjoyed an economic and political autonomy that would soon be lost due to the development of a cinema industry and growing political pressures. They did not necessarily identify with the project of state consolidation, and were able to contest, mostly through allegorical reconfigurations of national identity, the conservative nationalism of the Argentine Centenario and the version of the rural universe it used to legitimize state violence against popular movements. In Nobleza gaucha (1915) a new populist alliance is formed between gaucho and immigrant, while in Juan sin ropa (1919) a gaucho migrates to the city and joins the proletariat, forming a lineage that transfers the symbolic value of the gaucho to the proletariat. El último malón (1918), for its part, attempts to document the causes of the “last” indigenous uprising, articulating the danger to the nation that the modernizing project generated by marginalizing certain sectors of the national population.