Did Los Tres Berretines Represent New Spatial Understandings of Buenos Aires?
Bruno (1997, p. 11) argues that this active geography of film is a form of fldnerie, “a ‘modern’ gaze that wanders through space, fully open to women.” The Flanner as well as the fldneuse wanders through film just as he or she would stroll through the city. Part of- yet apart from – the city, the flaneur actively experiences his journey, whether through the metropolis or film. Bruno further links film and the metropolis when she argues that, just as the flaneur is a product of modernity, film is “a product of the era of the metropolis, expressing an urban viewpoint from the very origin of its history” (p. 11).
This urban viewpoint, driven by the market concerns of production companies, affected the representation of space in early film as it especially addressed urban audiences. Feeding on the urban consciousness and unconscious, this metropolitan perspective, is evident in early Argentine film, especially the sound film. Unsurprisingly, the first words of Argentine sound film were “Buenos Aires” as sung by Azucena Maizani in the 1933 film Tango! Traversing the metropolis much like the flaneur, Los tres berretines reinvents spatial experiences of the city, leading the viewer through Buenos Aires on a siteseeing tour. The tone for how space is represented in the film is set by its title sequence; in this journey through typical spaces of porteno everyday life, the viewer is forced to bind together image (e.g. shots of moving through city streets) and sound (e.g. the urban symphony implied by the soundtrack and the images of city life) into a singular experience of travel. An active process of reception, this scene illustrates the experience of space in Los tres berretines. Buenos Aires is not only experienced in the film optically, as an object solely experienced through sight, but it is also experienced haptically, through touch and proprioception. Bruno points out that the experience of filmic space is not exclusively visual: it is felt through textures of space that the viewer experiences with all of their senses.
Actively engaging him or herself with the cartography of filmic space, the viewer feels textures of space that guide her reception of the film. Film is a medium of cultural production specially privileged to represent our spatial relationships as human beings. As Karen Lury commented in an interview with Doreen Massey in Screen (1999): “Precisely because of its mobility, its ability to travel, to make new juxtapositions, new cartographies (as Bruno puts it), and film has the potential powerfully to present this other aspect of our spatial world as well” (p. 232). It is therefore through the trope of mobility that it is argued here that Los tres berretines represents new spatial understandings of Buenos Aires.
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