A Gaze Turned Towards Europe: Modernity and Tradition in the Work of Horacio Coppola

Abstract

The period of avant-garde movements in the 1920s marks the beginning of a singular moment, in which, for the first time, one can speak of a certain parallelism between modernity in the visual arts--above all painting and photography--and filmic modernity. This is also, aside from cinema´s earliest years, the phase where one most often encounters photographers who are simultaneously dedicated to or experimenting with the seventh art. The still images and films of these new artists should not be studied in isolation, but must be inserted in the broader context of their indisputably intermedial works. Furthermore, this is perhaps the last period in the history of cinema that demands a historiographic approach that necessarily links the two media. In this essay, I analyze the emergence during the interwar years of a series of artistic movements that introduced, in film and photography, an innovative and novel gaze towards the reality of their time. Although the majority of these avant-garde movements arose in Europe, their influence had a much wider scope, including in Latin America, where they confronted and eventually displaced the first wave of modernism. I analyze how the new ideas introduced by these innovative movements were adopted and reformulated in the Argentine context in the specific work of an artist who to some extent introduced visual modernism in this country´s photography and cinema: Horacio Coppola.