ABSTRACT
All major textbook accounts of Latin American cinema omit any mention of Argentinean fi lmmaker Emilio Vieyra.1 For that matter, historians of Argentine cinema rarely bring up his name.2 The latter exclusion is more surprising if we consider the longevity of Vieyra’s career (forty-fi ve years) and the wide-ranging eclecticism of his fi lmography, ranging from detective thrillers, superagent fi lms, westerns, and action pictures to comedies, road movies, political dramas, and women-in-prison fi lms. Furthermore, several of his fi lms earned large sums of money and a few circulated outside of Argentina. A case in point would be the three musicals starring pop sensation Sandro: Quiero llenarme de tí/IWant to Be Full of You (1969), La vida continúa/Life Goes On (1969), and Gitano/Gypsy (1970); this triptych made Vieyra rich and Sandro a huge star all over Latin America.3 After a hiatus of nearly ten years, Vieyra completed his last feature, Cargo de conciencia/Guilty Conscience (2005), a self-fi nanced project, at the age of eighty-four. Given his lengthy and successful career, it is legitimate to wonder why Vieyra has been excluded from the canonic histories of Argentine cinema.
