El Ultimo Aplauso
Post date: May 4, 2014 2:41:10 AM
The film El Ultimo Aplauso was made in 2009 and directed by German Kral. German was born in Buenos Aires in 1968, studied film in Germany and has worked both in Europe and Argentina.
You can see a trailer and the entire film in Youtube links below.
Here's some excerpts from an excellent review on the film that I found at: Tangocommuter1.blogspot.co.nz...
"It's in Spanish without subtitles, but subtitles don't matter so much as a lot of the film is music. It looks great throughout. Bar El Chino in the Pompeya It's about Bar El Chino in the Pompeya barrio of Buenos Aires which was started by El Chino Garcia's father, an immigrant from Spain, as a bar and grocery.
El Chino grew up passionate about tango, and a singer, so under his direction the groceries disappeared, and the bar became known as a restaurant bar, with music several nights a week. Kral began filming there in the late 1990s. El Chino died in 2001, but his vivacious, gregarious, open-hearted personality lives on in the early footage, included in the film.
The film shows another side of tango. It's not the tango of dance halls and recording studios, the tango we hear at milongas, the product of highly trained arrangers, band leaders and musicians,tango controlled by the music industry. This is live music made by a couple of performers for an audience, tango sung to a guitar – which I think is how most tangos began, as a guitar or piano score with lyrics.
This isn't tango for dance halls, but it's tango at its most popular level since the music has always been more widely popular than the dance. When the dance lost popularity and the orquestas were no longer financially viable, I assume people still sang these songs, listened to them with a singer and guitar, whistled them in the streets. The dance, and to a lesser extent the music, has achieved world-wide popularity, but what I hear in this film is the basis of the music, outside the star system of singers and musicians."
You can read the rest of the review here: Tangocommuter1.blogspot.co.nz.
Here's the trailer...
and the entire film...
Enjoy!