The intelligence agent and the cinema spectator in cultural surveillance in Buenos Aires province (Argentina)

Abstract

The Intelligence Department of the Police of the Province of Buenos Aires (DIPPBA) carried out a secret practice of cinema surveillance throughout the second half of the 20th century. Its archive – declassified in 2003 – constitutes one of the most extensive archives of repression (Da Silva Catela, 2011) in Argentina. This collection has made it possible to learn how a discourse of political-ideological control over cinema, which included the presence of agents in theaters in different towns in the province, was shaped, sustained and reformulated. These files allow for the study  of how a particular type of spectatorial discourse was developed (different, among others, from cinephilia), which had the objective of evaluating the films exhibited and, at the same time, surveilling the other spectators. In the framework of an interdisciplinary proposal of Discourse Analysis, which also considers audience studies, this article analyzes how the DIPPBA discursive community drafts in the 60s an image of itself or ethos (Amossy, 2018; Maingueneau, 2009, 2013) to say the cinema that is identified with a stereotype of the spectator of common opinion. This self-image was reformulated in the 1980s into that of a distanced observer, and is forgotten in the 1990s, when the surveillance was concentrated on the reaction of spectators who could “alter public order.” For its part, the film audience is in the DIPPBA discourse both an object of surveillance and an argument to sustain or remove political and ideological suspicions about film activity.