Narrative Strategy Of Prohibido

Di Tella has acknowledged that Prohibido marks a shift in his documentary style. In his first two feature-length films, his strategy was to include a multitude of accounts from witnesses to recent history. These witnesses also served as protagonists. As Clara Krieger notes, Di Tella “has always been fascinated by those telling the story,” yet he is always careful to maintain a certain level of objectivity: “he neither judges nor praises his characters.” Referring specifically to the narrative strategy he devised for Prohibido, Di Tella explains:

When I made Prohibido, I was at a point in my career when I was really fascinated by the idea of documentary storytelling as oral storytelling. I could spend hours listening to people tell stories
From the age of six until the age of fourteen, Andrés lived with his parents in exile, first in the United States and later in England. This break in the continuity of his childhood story caused him to miss out on seven years of TV that would have connected him to his peers. His film, therefore, becomes a search for the past from the present, in which a conversation with his father, well-known sociologist Torcuato Di Tella, becomes the pretext for filming. The important point here is that Andrés’s father is no ordinary interviewee. Both Torcuato and his son hail from a prominent industrialist family that founded the now-defunct Siam Di Tella empire: a company that manufactured appliances, automobiles, and other products starting in the early twentieth century. As a young man, Torcuato rejected the role his social class and family expected of him, and when his father, the patriarch (also named Torcuato) died, he felt free to pursue an academic career that would eventually lead to his exile. Today a cultural center and a university bear the name “Torcuato Di Tella”: remnants of another time, another Argentina, and of grandiose industrial
A radio and TV actress, she was already gravely ill when the first television broadcasts aired in 1952. Evita’s second-to-the-last public appearance was captured on TV; apparently Yankelevich watched the very first television broadcast from a hospital bed. He died just a few months before Evita.
Since its inception, television was, and still is, a powerful political tool. That’s why Di Tella overlays his nostalgia for a lost past (TV programs like La Nena [The Girl] or Biondi [hosted by José “Pepe” Biondi]) with television’s penchant for inculcating ideology or generating passive spectatorship to protect conservative interests.
Yet Di Tella’s documentary doesn’t offer its analysis primarily to lodge a protest, but rather to explore the phantasm-like losses that configure his identity. In that sense, his film powerfully suggests television’s pivotal role in shaping the popular imagination of his generation. In contrast, his father, Torcuato, quips that he never felt the same kind of attraction to the televised image. Echoing this idea, in a brief “family” scene, Torcuato falls asleep in front of the TV while he watches with his son Andrés and his grandson Rocco. Indeed, television’s allure is universal, but with marked