ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the configuration of the imaginary city of Buenos Aires that is performed in the first Argentinian sound movies. These films recover lyrics, music, and topics set out in the poetics of the tango of the 1920s and adapt them to the cultural and commercial needs of the nascent film industry. The interaction between the poetics of the tango and sound film symbolically built a quite different urban geography from that shown in the silent film, establishing the city and its neighborhoods as sites of belonging and containment, of desire and longing, in which new citizens (many of them recent immigrants) found images of common identification.
