Short Film: A Common Place (2010)
A Common Place
2010
11 minutes
Director & Editor: Jennie Gubner
Cameras: Jennie Gubner & Natalia Marcantoni
A Common Place is the first of four short films that I made as part of my Doctoral dissertation on neighborhood tango music scenes in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is a short film about Roberto's bar, the most legendary bar in the Almagro neighborhood of Buenos Aires where my research is centered. Roberto's bar was my point of entry into tango culture in Buenos Aires in 2005, a place I spent many nights learning about tango as a participatory music tradition and about the importance of small bars as places of cultural transmission for tango knowledge. This bar, in becoming a gathering space for many young people --both Argentine and not-- has played a significant role in the revitalization of tango as a genre of urban popular music in Buenos Aires over the past two decades.
I filmed this short with a friend of mine, Natalia Marcantoni, a local photographer and camerographer for the city's public access television station. The film was shot in July of 2010 over the course of a few nights in Roberto's bar as well as a few interviews in nearby bars in the Almagro neighborhood. My goal was to evoke a sense of the bar, the intimacy and belonging that people feel there, and the important relationships that are built within the bar between younger and older musicians.