As in most other cities, Buenos Aires harbored distinctive street fellows alienated from the rest of us. My parents lived on the corner of Avenida Córdoba, and my blue bedroom had a precious, modest balcony facing Uruguay Street. As soon as I was able to hold a camera in my hands, I did what many other teens with filmmaking ambitions did: I filmed the eccentrics, the homeless. They were different, the other side of the equation. They were what we were not and lived outside of the box. The Revolution was going to change all that, but it never did. The street people maintained what could be described as a cordial relationship with everyone else. I guess those who didn’t were probably sent to a sanitarium and kept off the streets.
In the 8mm footage I’m sharing, a handful of the most familiar characters from those first urban safaris stand out. The first I knew as “El Petiso.” He was a short man, around forty years old. I always perceived him as the black sheep of a well-off family from Barrio Norte, though I never knew for sure. El Petiso was polite and walked briskly, as if he always had something important to do. He spoke to himself, and his speech was refined.
Another neighborhood character was "The Woman Who Drew." She spent her days at Plaza de la República, in front of the Obelisk, drawing on imaginary paper. She kept her head wrapped in cloths, in an Oriental manner. I never saw her standing or walking—she was always immersed in her world of lines.
There were also women sitting on park benches. I thought they might have Asian features, with faces marked by weariness. I now believe they probably came from the provinces and, once in Buenos Aires, became alienated and lost. I thought, and still think, that alcohol takes a terrible toll.
The last one to appear in the reel is “El Flaco,” a tall man who used to hassle tourists for change. He wasn’t a bad person, but his habit of approaching people on the street made him annoying. He was arrested more than once, and at some point, he just disappeared.
One shot I find particularly interesting—perhaps because of its oddity—is the chimney of the incinerator in a residential building. The smog in Buenos Aires was extremely dense before incinerators were finally outlawed. I believe these archives offer a good, partial sense of the atmosphere in Buenos Aires during a period when the locos lindos I remember were part of the human landscape.
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