The Golden Age of Argentine cinema (Spanish: Época de Oro or Edad de Oro del cine argentino),[2][3] sometimes known interchangeably as the broader classical or classical-industrial period (Spanish: período clásico-industrial),[4][5] is an era in the history of the cinema of Argentina that began in the 1930s and lasted until the 1940s or 1950s, depending on the definition,[note 1] during which national film production underwent a process of industrialization and standardization that involved the emergence of mass production, the establishment of the studio, genre and star systems, and the adoption of the institutional mode of representation (MRI) that was mainly—though not exclusively—spread by Hollywood,[5][14] quickly becoming one of the most popular film industries across Latin America and the Spanish-speaking world.

[33] The creation of the National Film Institute in 1957 and the innovative work of figures such as Leopoldo Torre Nilsson gave rise to a new wave of filmmakers in the 1960s,[34] who opposed "commercial" cinema and experimented with new cinematic techniques.

[60] The most complete form of the silent "tango melodrama" model was the work of José A. Ferreyra,[27] who began his career in the mid-1910s and stands out as the most important Argentine filmmaker of the 1920s,[61] and would continue to be a central figure during the transition to sound and later in the classical-industrial period.

[57] Considered a precursor of neorealism, Ferreyra's influential style was characterized by its profoundly local identity, with characters and situations linked to the world of tango lyrics and the urban working classes of Buenos Aires, in whose streets he filmed with low resources and often starring non-actors.

[68] According to Matthew B. Karush, the "growth of Argentine cinema resulted from the efforts of small entrepreneurs who proved adept at catering to local tastes", citing Angel Mentasti—founder of Argentina Sono Film—as a typical example.

premiered on 27 April 1933 and attracted audiences for its select cast of popular performers, including Luis Sandrini, Azucena Maizani, Mercedes Simone, Libertad Lamarque, Pepe Arias and Tita Merello, among others.

[80] Luis Saslavsky and Alberto de Zavalía presented in 1935 their first films, Crimen a las tres and Escala en la ciudad, respectively, which were produced with family money disguised under the name of the Sifal production company.

[83] The director who had the greatest success in independent filmmaking was Ferreyra, with three films released between 1934 and 1935: Calles de Buenos Aires, Puente Alsina and Mañana es domingo, all of them made with "very few resources but recovering the poetics of his best silent period.

[69] The Argentine film studios were very small compared to powerful companies such as Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Bros., Twentieth Century-Fox, Columbia, Universal and United Artists, all of which had offices in Buenos Aires and other cities in the country by 1935.

"[69] Despite financial challenges, Argentine studios did have some specific competitive advantages, including the country's long tradition of popular theater, especially the short comic plays called sainetes; by offering similar entertainment at a more affordable admission price, local filmmakers could attract an audience that already existed.

[96][97] Soffici was an important filmmaker of this period and directed for Argentina Sono Film El alma del bandoneón (1935), La barra mendocina (1935), Cadetes de San Martín (1937)—with which he experienced censorship for the first time after an army refusal to his original script—and Viento norte (1937).

[133] Some writers consider the premiere of Leopoldo Torre Nilsson's La casa del ángel in 1957 as a turning point in Argentine cinema, marking the beginning of a new stage with a different proposal both in style and conception.

[135] As noted by Karush: "Domestic filmmakers benefited from the long tradition of popular theater in Argentina, particularly the short comic plays known as sainetes; by providing comparable entertainment at a lower admission price, they could capture an already existing audience.

[138] Peña noted that, although in terms of production the Argentine industry wanted to resemble that of the US and France, it "owes less to these other cinematographies than to its strong links with tango, radio or revue, forms of popular art from which many of its main performers, directors and screenwriters came.

"[10] Gardel's success with Paramount was also extremely influential, as it showed Argentine filmmakers that by focusing on local authenticity, settings, and dialects, they could effectively compete with Hollywood, taking advantage of actors "who were often recognizable to filmgoers from their previous careers in theater and radio".

The premiere on July 19, 1939, of Así es la vida, directed by Francisco Mugica and produced by Lumiton, marked a turning point for the themes, stars, directors, and representation universes in Argentine cinema.

[24] Unlike the ruling clases depicted in Manuel Romero's films, associated with the imagery of an elite land-owning oligarchy, the protagonists of Así es la vida belong to an industrial and professional bourgeoisie, something that promoted ideas of social ascent and appealed to the middle classes, through its celebration of hard work and family unity.

[24] The film did not target differentiated audiences but encompassed both lower and middle to upper-class sectors, allowing identification for the latter while also shaping specific imaginations and aspirations; by integrating modernity into the national reality, it reconciled both factors through the exaltation of the family as a point of balance.

[24] Beyond the central figure of the ingénue, the innovation of the cine de ingenuas was to radically alter the development of stories and imaginaries in local cinema, as the 1930s trend of criticizing the upper classes was abandoned in favor of depicting them as an idyllic space, where the bourgeois family served as a moral beacon for tradition in the face of the dangers of modernity.

[146] For Di Núbila, the problems of Argentine cinema revolved around four central elements: lack of investment to update technology, mismanagement of the business, an inadequate relationship between industry and state, and the weakening of authentically national themes and narrative forms.

[146] In 1966, José Agustín Mahieu published Breve historia del cine argentino which, in addition to Di Núbila's book, became a foundational reference text for subsequent historical studies of Argentine classical cinema.

[4] A few years after Mahieu's book, the left-wing collective Grupo Cine Liberación, formed by Octavio Getino and Fernando "Pino" Solanas, elaborated its famous manifesto "Towards a Third Cinema" (1969), which strongly condemned classical-industrial films.

[4][146] As noted by Kriger, the texts that "had the greatest impact on the incipient group of Argentine scholars and researchers [were those which] based their hypotheses on the dependency theory—a consideration in terms of core-periphery of the functioning of the productive structures and of the aesthetic results obtained.

[4] Since the early 2000s, studies on classical Argentine cinema have undergone a significant transformation, as the longstanding disregard or indifference toward this era gradually faded and gave way to renewed academic interest from scholars from university backgrounds, who have approached it with an unprecedented level of theoretical and methodological rigor.

[146] Examples include Horacio Campodónico's political-economic analysis (2005), Ana Laura Lusnich's study of the "social-folkloric drama" genre (2005), and Adrián Melo's research on LGBT representations in Argentine cinema (2009).

In the realm of the former, Matthew Karush published a book in 2012 that examined classical Argentine cinema as part of the "mass cultural commodities", understanding the convergence of media industries as a phenomenon of meaning within the films themselves.

[149] In the early 1990s, the Argentine government subsidized the Fundación Cinemateca Argentina, funding the purchase of its current building in Constitución and acquiring around 400 national films from the U.S. to prevent their disposal due to the video boom.

[149] The law also ordered the creation of a National Cinematheque dependent on the INCAA, which casts doubts as to whether what was stipulated in 1957 was ever fulfilled, and made its prerogatives explicit, making it perhaps the first action of the state in terms of film preservation.

[154] The most important of these collectors is Peña, who is also a popular film historian and communicator, individually undertaking the safeguarding of a large part of the surviving Argentine cinema at the same time that he continues the demand for a National Cinematheque.

[166] Unlike the silent era, there were no female directors during the classical period, as industry leaders firmly prevented their emergence; and the first sound film directed by a woman did not come until 1960 with Vlasta Lah's Las furias.