Abstract

VARELA, Mirta. The State Reproduces the Children’s Fantasy Soñemos by Luis César Amadori, Argentina, 1951. Palabra Clave [online]. 2019, vol.22, n.4, e2249. ISSN 0122-8285.  https://doi.org/10.5294/pacla.2019.22.4.9.

During the early administrations of Juan Domingo Perón (1946-1952), the Press and Dissemination Secretariat made films to praise projects promoted by the Government. As part of this communication policy, Luis César Amadori directed the medium-length film Soñemos (1951) that shows the facilities of Ciudad Infantil, a children’s home inaugurated by the Eva Perón Foundation in 1948. This paper intends to describe and analyze the aesthetic choices of this film, based on the hypothesis that the main features of state communication in the period are condensed in this audiovisual piece, due to the scale-down used for presenting this miniature society. From the methodological point of view, we focused on two rhetorical features, understood as a formal correlative of ideological features: miniaturization and imitation. The article concludes that scale-down made it possible to materialize an urban utopia but also showed its limits: a temporary boundary for the containment of children and a spatial one for the city whose production sources were excluded. Furthermore, imitation is outlined as an aesthetic preference of the poor represented by Peronism. It was about giving them the same luxury that the rich enjoyed and not a new lifestyle, as the avant-garde proposed. Both the autonomy of geopolitical blocs proposed by Peronism and the ability to reproduce this model in the future remain unresolved.

Keywords : History of cinema; mass communication; political communication; propaganda; imagination; childhood.

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