"There's a death bonding us": A sangre fría and the origins of argentine noir

Abstract

In the following pages, we examine how A sangre fría (1947) by Daniel Tinayre laid the foundations of Argentine film noir, as the result of a gradual process of incorporating noir elements into the Argentine context. We begin by exploring the cinematic production from 1941 to 1945 in order to highlight how Argentine cinema—primarily melodramatic in orientation—adopted and reinterpreted the patterns of American film noir and French poetic realism in relation to local traditions. The work of Saslavsky, Tinayre, and Chenal, as well as technicians such as John Alton, is emphasized for their role in shaping a distinctive noir aesthetic and narrative marked by fatalism, moral ambiguity, and expressionist mise-en-scène. Finally, we argue that Argentine film noir is best understood as a hybrid discourse, emerging from the tensions between the cosmopolitanism of its agents, internal critiques of the cultural industry, and the construction of national identity as reflected in film criticism.