The Night Folds: Culpable (Hugo del Carril, 1960), a Baroque Noir

Abstract

This article offers an analysis of Culpable (1960), directed by Hugo Del Carril, as a film noir within the context of Argentine cinema produced between the late 1950s and the early 1960s. In that context, a few film productions emerged that revealed a break with the previous classical language. This study approaches the film through a semantic–syntactic–pragmatic analysis of the genre (Altman), in connection with theories of film noir (Borde and Chaumeton, Grob, Schrader, etc.) and melodrama (Brooks). I also propose that the formal procedures observed in the work recall the aesthetic proposals of Baroque art (Sarduy, Wölfflin, etc.), in contrast to the idea of Mannerism (Requena, Hauser), which is often used to conceptualize that transitional period. In this sense, I will examine how Del Carril’s film, in its baroque qualities, does not abandon the matrix of the genre, while at the same time it renews certain motifs that characterized the crime genre in Argentine cinema during the Peronist governments (1946–1955).