Impertinent analogies. Voices, songs and technological artefacts in the revision of the 1970s in recent Argentine cinema

Abstract

 This paper offers a comparison between two Argentine films of 2017 that revisit the first seventies (that is, the years previous to the civic military coup) in a way that we find symptomatic of their political, cultural and cinematographic context: Sinfonía para Ana (Symphony for Ana, Ernesto Ardito and Virna Molina) and Desearás al hombre de tu hermana (Desire, Diego Kaplan). Beyond their obvious differences —the differences between an independent author’s film and a commercial one—, both films base their affective reconstruction of the seventies on the role of recorded voices and of some popular songs from that time. After a contextual introduction, we focus our analysis on these two components (voices and songs), connecting them with the mise-en-scène of the gaze (a gaze of desire or control) and the space (a markedly closed space) in order to show how, from these elements, sensuality and violence are tied in the new mnemonic versions of the seventies that these films offer. At the same time, we highlight the (tech)nostalgia associated with the visual recurrence of analog recording and reproduction devices, pointing out how such objects contribute to auratize that predigital era, projecting it as a “hot” time in history.