Tango and film are contemporaneous. They were born and grew up together. There is no silent tango, but there is early, wordless tango, in which music and dance are the sole means of expression. The year 1903 is the primordial moment in the history of both forms: Ángel Villoldo composes El Choclo, and Edwin S. Porter lenses the first narrative film, The Great Train Robbery.
Alma de Bohemio - Roberto Firpo
In the theaters of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, tango and film merge. While the silent images unfold on the screen in black and white, orchestras play tangos from the loge or the pit. Ojos Negros by Vicente Greco mirrors the gloom of Nosferatu, while Robert Firpo's Alma de Bohemio sets the mood for the feverish chariot action of Ben-Hur. The spectators are cinephiles who come to see films with tango accompaniment or music lovers who come to hear tango with a film backdrop. The latter bunch follows the music. When Julio de Caro and his band, or Ángel D'Agostino and his, or Vardaro and Pugliese with their sextet change venues, the fans go with them. They don't care what film is playing; they just want to hear their favorite orchestra.
Beginning in 1925 there are attempts to synchronize recorded music with motion pictures. At the point in the screenplay where a singer is supposed to perform a tango, the real thing is played on a Gramophone. The rest of the scenes pass in silence. During showings of Adiós, Argentina, for example, silence reigns until the moment that Libertad Lamarque sings the title song. For the rest of the show, not a peep.
Some years later there’s an attempt to merge sound and vision for the length of a whole film. This approach is a total bust: when the film breaks, as happens all the time, the voice and music keep going. The film is spliced together and they get it rolling again, but there's no way to catch up with the runaway soundtrack. The audience has to endure this incoherence for the remainder of the show.
[The Vitaphone sound film system (1926). Engineer E. B. Craft (l.) holds the phonograph record that carries the sound.]
The last years of the decade see the invention of the Movietone sound system, which puts an optical soundtrack on the same reel as the picture. Some filmmakers, Chaplin among them, think the new technology signals the death of cinematic art; they cling to the silent form. They are soon proven wrong.
Carlos Gardel is one of the first to foresee that sound will triumph and that the cinema will be the popular art of the century. When the first sound cameras arrive in Argentina, he makes ten short films of tangos framed by brief dialogues. Appearing with Gardel—singing, playing, acting—are his guitarists Aguilar, Barbieri y Riverol, bandleader Francisco Canaro, the poet and lyricist Enrique Santos Discépolo.
The year is 1930. It is clear to Gardel that cinema is the medium that will make him an international star. By '31 he's already in Paris shooting Luces de Buenos Aires at the studios of Joinville-le-Pont. From then until his premature death in 1935 he spends more of his life in the studio than he does on the stage.
[From Tango, 1933. El Cachafaz is front and center at the start of the clip.]
In the year 1933, tango and film were conjoined in a film titled simply, Tango. It features the best singers of the era: Azucena Maizani, Mercedes Simone, Tita Merello, Alberto Gómez, and Libertad Lamarque accompanied by the orchestras of Juan de Dios Filiberto, Osvaldo Fresedo, Pedro Maffia, Juan D'Arienzo, and Edgardo Donato. Amidst the hurly-burly of dancers from the conventillos (cheap boarding houses) and peringundines (disreputable “dance academies”) appears the elegant silhouette of El Cachafaz. This quintessential tango moment is projected worldwide. From then on, theaters all over America and Europe demand films featuring tango.
Tango becomes a measure of cinematic value. A film succeeds or fails based on its tango content. No one cares about the plot any more; only the music matters. In the film Ídolos de la Radio, the Argentine producers offer little more than a parade of tangueros taking turns at a microphone, and this formula strikes a nerve. Some of the greats who were missing from the earlier film are included now: Ignacio Corsini, Dorita Davis, Canaro. From the thirties on every tango singer aspires to this new path. Those with acting talent succeed while those without are consigned to the stage or withdraw to the closed world of clubs and cabarets.
From Musica y poesía del tango, pp. 161-163, by Antonio Pau (Editorial Trotta, Madrid, 2001). Copyright © 2001 by Antonio Pau Pedrón. English version by Michael Krugman, Copyright © 2013.
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