Central time rituals: sacralizing Gardel in television tributes

Abstract

The article analyzes the ways in which television tributes foster the sacred character that the figure of the famous tango singer Carlos Gardel holds for the porteños (inhabitants of Buenos Aires). It is suggested that these television rituals, issued every year on the anniversary of his death, reinforce the idea of Gardel as a national icon, making it independent of its relationship with any specific audience or of the support of the entertainment industry. They reinforce his unique and indisputable status and grant him a sacred character, sustaining an unquestioned and traditionalizing attitude towards his person. By means of the repeated projection of segments of movies in which Gardel sings, in the deck of a ship, tangos that dramatize the longing for a return to Buenos Aires, and of fragments of television newsreels in which his corpse is brought back in a similar vessel, they contribute to the intensification of the experience and emotion of the viewers. Finally, through the careful biographical selection operated through the discourses about his life outside the movies and the pictures that illustrate it, the tributes minimize the distance between the “real” Gardel and the characters he plays while singing in his movies, thus reinforcing the links between the viewers and the singer himself, beyond the characters he performs. In this way, television tributes constitute true rituals that reproduce and intensify the sacralization of the singer’s figure.