Queer Cinema (original) (raw)

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.