Horacio Coppola’s short film deals with the construction of the Obelisco, a monument that has since become an iconic landmark of the city of Buenos Aires. His film shares aesthetic principles with the city symphony approach, as it portrays the construction of a monument in a spatial relation to the city of Buenos Aires and its inhabitants. The scaffolds on the obelisk, for instance, offers spectacular views of the urban landscape, while the obelisk itself can be seen from various places in the city.
One of Argentine’s leading modernist photographers of the interwar period, Coppola (1906–2012) specialized in urban photography. In 1936 he was commissioned to photograph Buenos Aires for the city’s 400th anniversary, and took the occasion to shoot a film, Así Nació El Obelisco, on his own initiative. The resulting images, especially his still photographs, including nocturnal street scenes and snapshots of urban life in the city center and its outskirts, are a unique record of Buenos Aires at that period.
In 1929, Coppola co-founded the first ciné-club in Buenos Aires, which screened avant-garde shorts, slapstick comedies, and European feature films such as Varieté (E. A. Dupont, 1925) and La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928), introducing innovative foreign films to Argentine audiences. In the early 1930s, he traveled to Europe, where he studied at the Bauhaus with photographer Walter Peterhans, developing his own avant-garde style. In Germany, he also met his wife, German photographer Grete Stern. The couple fled Germany and lived in Paris and London before leaving for Argentina in 1935. Familiar with the European avant-gardes and city-symphonies from his time at the Bauhaus, Coppola also had made some urban documentaries during his years in Europe such as Un Quai de la Seine (1934) and A Sunday in Hampstead Heath (1935). In 1933, together with Walter Auerbach, he also directed the experimental short Traum.
Eva Hielscher
further reading
Tell, Verónica, “Portraits of Places: Notes on Horacio Coppola’s Photography and Short Urban Films,” Special Issue on Modern Argentine Photography: Horacio Coppola and Grete Stern, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 24, 2 (2015): 153–71.
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