Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

El niño de la calle y la ciudad fragmentada en la película Buenos Aires viceversa, de Alejandro Agresti

2011; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 79; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/hir.2011.0050

1553-0639

Sophie Dufays,

Latin American Literature Studies

The story of the homeless little orphan Bocha, which is integrated into the fragmented plot of the Argentinian film Buenos Aires viceversa (Alejandro Agresti 1996), emphasizes and reflects a vision that is peculiar to the media-drenched city, to modern cinematography, and to the street child’s character. This article proposes an analysis of the film focusing on the relationship between the different modalities of that vision and the social and aesthetic effects of urban fragmentation. In this way it examines to what extent the modern city can be seen as a “non-place” whose physical organization impacts on the narration, the editing, the plastic conception of the different shots, and the sound processing in the film. The article then focuses on the aesthetic tension that is revealed through the mise-en-scène of the child, and more particularly of his death: this last sequence makes the film a paradoxical “fragmented melodrama.”