The figure of Astor Piazzolla belongs to a generation of brilliant Argentine musicians, and because of the origins of his talent for composition with tango roots but later with a strong identity of his own, he managed to overcome the conventional scenarios and suddenly his name appeared accompanying national film productions and then also in international ones.
In addition to his themes, some of them emblematic, which were heard incidentally in both Argentine and foreign works, he also stood out for his compositions written to order, but with the same creative substance as that of his records, an incursion that began in the late 1950s and has numerous memorable examples.
Piazzolla was able to make his scores as identifiable as those of the classic authors, as a frame of porteño anguish, of nostalgia, that allow to ask questions without answers, for example why Segio Renán did not resort to Piazzolla for his odd "La tregua", even though he chose Julián Plaza, also a bandoneon player, who knew how to make the "fuelle" cry with his melodies.
Piazzolla's cinematographic vein as a composer, according to the records, goes back to the end of the 1940s, when he was still very young when he was called to propose some chords for "Con los mismos colores" (1948), by Carlos Torres Ríos, with a libretto by sports journalist Ricardo Lorenzo "Borocotó", a fiction related to players of the River Plate club.
No matter how much one searches in the soundtrack of the poor quality copy that survives on YouTube, it is difficult to recognize Piazzolla's music in the incidental -and orchestrated- style of the classic Argentine cinema of the time, some foreign themes, such as the title song and the popular "Vamos a Belén", and only recently does his authorship appear in "Igual que las golondrinas" with his octet.
After that first incursion in a minor product destined to put on stage renowned players such as Alfredo Distefano or Mario Boyé, followed "Bólidos de acero" (1950), by the same Torres Ríos in duo with Borocotó, this time a story centered on a young man who with the tenacity of the great "tuercas" of those times becomes a champion in automobile racing.
"El cielo en las manos" (1950), follows the same routine as the two previous ones, hello and goodbye to the cinema for Enrique de Thomas, a story driven by the actor Homero Cárpena who, not by chance, also wrote the lyrics of the song that bears the title and whose music is by Piazzolla, still tied to the style that he would begin to leave aside in the middle of that decade.
The same happened with "Stella Maris" (1953), this time directed by Cárpena, incidental music underscoring some epic moments with social undertones in the life and struggle for their hard work of a group of fishermen, which do not elude melodrama and framing borrowed from the Soviet cinema of several decades ago and other Hollywood epics.
It was not until Enrique Cahen Salaberry's "Sucedió en Buenos Aires" (1954) that he began to show the porteño stamp that would mark all his later work. In the long sequence of titles with a Buenos Aires still adjusted to the architecture of the early twentieth century, his music begins to be the protagonist along with the cab driver who is the axis of the story.
A key point is "Los tallos amargos" (1956), by a very young Fernando Ayala who begins to cut his personality. The story of a mediocre journalist who sets up a correspondence journalism agency with a stranger from Eastern Europe, a previous step to develop a plot of the best "black series", allowed him to become a new Piazzolla.
Many more titles will follow - "Marta Ferrari", "Operación Atlántida", "Historia de una carta", "Violencia en la ciudad", "Una viuda difícil", "Dos basuras"- until "Sábado a la noche, cine", again with Ayala, a new portrayal of Buenos Aires customs and habits in several intertwined episodes, where in its trailer -and in the titles-, music was (is) the protagonist.
In the midst of the already imposed Generation of the 60's, Piazzolla advanced with his personal work and his recognizable style so criticized by the orthodox tangueros, but so well appreciated even by the followers of Blue Note jazz and its local versions such as Gato Barbieri or Lalo Schiffrin, and at the same time he made incursions with directors who liked to break with the molds.
This is what happened with director Vlasta Lah, a pioneer among women behind the cameras in the Río de la Plata, who in 1960 said "here I am" with "Las furias", with Mecha Ortiz and Olga Zubarry, where after 42 minutes a musical dance number bursts in, where you can already hear that "new" Piazolla porteño, who can be identified with a few notes of an inclaudicable bellows.
"Paula Cautiva", once again with Ayala, this time with an unavoidable political background underlined by Beatriz Guido (author of the story "La usurpadora"), followed by "Las locas del conventillo" (1966), by the same director and label (Aries), a tango story set in La Boca, with Alberto de Mendoza, Analía Gadé and Concha Velasco, with songs sung by Jorge Sobral.
Also with Ayala he wrote the music for the film version of "La fiaca" (1969), a successful play by Ricardo Talesnik, which went from the stages of San Telmo to the movies with the same cast and a story of a typical office worker, which preceded "Breve cielo" (1969), by David José Kohon, about an innocent young man who falls in love with a sweet prostitute in only 24 hours.
In the unmissable film starring Alberto Fernández de Rosa and Ana María Picchio, Piazzolla made "Tango para una ciudad" with his Quinteto Nuevo Tango, also composed of Fernando Suárez Paz on violin, Pablo Ziegler on piano, Oscar López Ruiz on guitar and Héctor Console on bass, a song that accompanies the titles.
"Con alma y vida" (1970), also by Kohon, with a book by Norberto Aroldi, who is also a central figure, takes the story of the passionate love between a delinquent and a prostitute, played by María Aurelia Bisuti and after that moment, during the crisis before the military coup of 1976, Piazzolla went on a European tour, and with it several projects of different formats were born.
Two are cut, one is "Llueve sobre Santiago" (1975), by Chilean Helvio Soto, which reconstructs the military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende, and it is precisely for the scene of the forced takeover of the Palacio de la Moneda that the director resorts to a very porteño Piazzolla, who seems to anticipate the coup that would take place in his own country a year later, in 1976.
Shortly after for Jeanne Moreau as director, he offered his song "Soledad" for the singular "Lumière" (1976) and a year later at the request of his friend Kohon, he would return to Argentine cinema with the tragic "¿Qué es el otoño?" (1977), with Alfredo Alcón as an architect humiliated for being talented in the mediocracy so recognizable and so usual in critical times.
An old director of the national cinema but based in Brazil since the 50's, Carlos Hugo Christensen summoned him to put music to "La intrusa" (1979), according to a controversial adaptation of Jorge Luis Borges' story, with a curious gaucho triangle -two brothers and a woman- in Uruguayana, and almost immediately for another important literary adaptation.
It was "El infierno tan temido" (1980), by Raúl de la Torre according to the original by the Uruguayan Juan Carlos Onetti, set in Buenos Aires, where a turf journalist meets by chance an actress of the independent theater with whom he falls in love without knowing that he may be caught in her psychopathic and deadly web with the remembered Alberto de Mendoza and the odd Graciela Borges.
With Christensen he tried his luck again with "¿Somos?" (1980), which takes as its axis the transgressive universe of Recoleta nightclubs in front of the cemetery and in parallel he collaborated with David Lipzyck in the soundtrack of "Volver" (1980), a story of return to the country, which meant the return of Héctor Alterio, in a film that from the titles resorts to his distinctive seal.
After a return to European cinema with "Henry IV" (1984), Marco Bellocchio's version of Shakespeare's play, the epilogue of Piazzola's relationship with cinema can be written in three episodes, the first one "Cuarteles de invierno" (1984), which takes the dramatic story of a boxer according to Osvaldo Soriano's narrative, directed by Lautaro Murúa.
Undoubtedly, his last three films (the third released after his death in December 1992) were directed by Fernando "Pino" Solanas: "Tangos: El exilio de Gardel" (1985), takes with music, song and dance, as well as some magical realism, the story of exiles during the Proceso, which includes the ghosts of San Martín and Carlos Gardel.
In this Parisian adventure, Solanas turned to Piazzolla for the music that serves for memorable scenes danced on and under the bridges of the Seine, while for the songs, also danced, he counted on José Luis Castiñeira de Dios for his four-hand composition, resulting in one of the most precise syntheses of what exile means.
"Tanguedia", a synthesis of tango-tragedy-comedy synthesized who had already reached the podium as an acclaimed filmmaker almost two decades earlier for having shared with Octavio Getino the political documentary "La hora de los hornos" (1969). This time, the story focuses on a group of artists exiled during the civil-military dictatorship who dream of an ad-hoc musical.
The second was "Sur" (1988), also with the help of Solanas (who, it is important to remember, had begun his career as a musician, pianist, in advertising films), a short title for an immense film that recreates, from fantastic fiction, the end of the last civil-military dictatorship with the return to democracy according to the story of Floreal, a political prisoner, finally released.
The farewell was with the soundtrack of "El viaje" (1992), the story of Martín, who at the age of 17 lives in Tierra del Fuego and decides to travel (initiatory journey) on a bicycle following his father's clues, a path on which he will discover the subjugation, poverty and dreams of a whole continent, which he shared with Solanas himself and also with the Brazilian Egberto Gismonti.
"El viaje" was released on April 30, 1992, and Piazzolla "went on a trip" two months later, on July 4, leaving a legacy not only for tango but for scores that were so well known to be exploited by cinema, even as a frame for paintings that can be appreciated for their narrative force but also for what is heard beyond the voices. That is music.
SOURCE: Télam