Juan sin Ropa (1919)

Directed by

Héctor Quiroga, Georges Benoît

Genre

silent film

Country

Argentina

Runtime

35 min

Rating

7.5 of 10 from 2 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A silent melodrama from Argentina, this film is mostly lost today. It was made during a period when Argentina produced quality cinema with famous stage actors and foreign directors.

lostmelodramatichistoricaltheatricalpatrioticold-fashionedserious

What happens

Juan Sin Ropa (lit. 'Juan Without Clothes') is a 1919 mostly lost Argentine silent melodrama film directed by Georges Benoît and starring Camila Quiroga, Héctor G. Quiroga, José de Ángel, Julio Escarsela and Alfredo Carrizo. It was produced during a brief flourishing period of silent films in Argentina in the second half of the 1910s, when the country became one of the most important producers in Latin American cinema and a leader in the Spanish-speaking world. In this context, Juan Sin Ropa was part of a trend that relied on considerable investment in renowned theatrical actors, successful playwrights and experienced foreign directors to produce a "quality cinema", comparable to the big U.S. productions but with national themes. It was the only film released by Quiroga-Benoît Film, a production company formed by Camila and Héctor G. Quiroga—a prestigious acting couple in Argentine theater—along with Benoît, a French photographer then active in the U.S. film industry. The film had its commercial premiere in Buenos Aires on 3 June 1919 at the theaters Teatro Grand Splendid (today the iconic bookshop El Ateneo) and Teatro Palace, both of them owned by businessman Max Glücksmann. The film was also sold for its screening in other countries such as Chile, the United States, France and Spain, among others. Juan Sin Ropa tells the story of Juan Ponce, a rural laborer who travels to the city and is employed in a meat-packing plant, where he later leads a strike that culminates in violent repression. As such, the film has been traditionally misidentified as a depiction of the Tragic Week (Spanish: Semana Trágica) of January 1919, a violent repression of workers' strikes in Buenos Aires during the presidency of Hipólito Yrigoyen that ended in the massacre of hundreds of people. However, film historian Héctor Kohen found in 1994 that Juan Sin Ropa was finished before the onset of the Tragic Week, so the film could not have been inspired by the events. Juan Sin Ropa is regarded as one of the most important films of the silent period of Argentine cinema. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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