Till death did us part: love and marriage in supernatural classic film in Argentina

Main Article Content

Alejandro Kelly Hopfenblatt

Comedy was one of the main genres in the embourgeoisement that Argentine cinema went through in the 1940s. This process proposed a sophisticated universe where young bourgeois men and women could carelessly and recklessly have romantic adventures, and untouchable social institutions such as marriage and work life could be questioned. This approach was made possible by resorting to narrative forms such as parody and farce, and recurring motifs like supernatural elements that displaced the action to unreal scenarios where social order could be mocked. Movies such as Cita en las estrellas (Carlos Schlieper, 1949) and El extraño caso de la mujer asesinada (Boris H. Hardy, 1949) articulated heavenly afterlife settings with critical stances about monogamy and eternal love, while, at the same time, presenting new female characters for the Argentine film screen.

Keywords
Argentinian cinema, comedy, supernatural, afterlife, monogamy.

Article Details

How to Cite
Kelly Hopfenblatt, Alejandro. “Till death did us part: love and marriage in supernatural classic film in Argentina”. Brumal. Revista de investigación sobre lo Fantástico, 2016, vol.VOL 4, no. 1, pp. 209-24, http://raco.cat/index.php/Brumal/article/view/310872.
Author Biography

Alejandro Kelly Hopfenblatt, Universidad de Buenos Aires/Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas

Licenciado en Artes y Profesor para Enseñanza Media y Superior en Artes por la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Buenos Aires. Becario doctoral del Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) y doctorando por la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (UBA) con un proyecto sobre la comedia burguesa del cine clásico argentino. Miembro del Centro de Investigación y Nuevos Estudios sobre Cine (CIyNE), perteneciente al Instituto de Historia del Arte Argentino y Latinoamericano (FFyL, UBA).