A journalistic noir: cinema and press in Con gusto a rabia (Ayala, 1965)

Abstract

After the 1955 coup d'état, Argentine public opinion was shaken by a series of political-police news dedicated to the emergence of armed youth groups of various ideological currents. The national film industry, along with the press, participated in the construction of this phenomenon and released a series of crime movies that had these groups at the center of their narratives. Framed in what the Heraldo del cinematografista defined as the trend of “journalistic cinema”, this audiovisual corpus elaborated its fictions from real cases widely known by the mass public due to their treatment in the national graphic press. This article argues that, through the use of certain codes of film noir, these films, together with the press, constructed the young guerrilla fighters as de-ideologized, violent and psychologically unstable individuals capable of generating terror in society. For this purpose, the film Con gusto a rabia by Fernando Ayala and its link with journalism will be analyzed. Released in 1965, this film was written by the then journalists Luis Pico Estrada, Sara Gallardo and Carlos Izcovich, and was based on the assault on the Policlínico Bancario carried out two years earlier by the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario Tacuara.