Telepolis

La Antena is a beautifully crafted fairy tale that plays with the technical limitations of yesteryear's movies and uses this idea for telling the story of oppressed people, who are robbed of their speech. The strong symbolism, the rich scenes and the believable characters make a lasting impression on the viewer and make for memorable scenes, even though the plot isn't the strongest aspect of the movie.

Overall 7/10 Full review on movie-discourse.blogspot.de

La Antena, an audacious film by Argentine director Esteban Sapir, succeeds both as a reinvention of the silent movie genre and a gripping cautionary tale. The setting is a city in thrall to mindless television, its people deprived of the power of speech except for a solitary and mysterious screen presence known simply as The Voice. In a bid to cement their grip on power the marvellously villainous duo of television mogul Mr. TV and mad scientist Dr. Y set out to kidnap The Voice and turn her unique talent towards their own dastardly ends. It is up to a young family and The Voice's nameless, eyeless son to stop this evil scheme. The result is a roller coaster of a story that is bewildering on occasion but never less than engrossing.

This is a silent movie that wears many of its influences on its sleeve; the overt references to silent movie greats such as George Melies and Fritz Lang will be readily apparent to anyone with a passing familiarity of their work. But more subtle references and symbolism lie behind such tributes. I particularly like the fact that Mr. TV and his henchman drive around in typical 1930s gangster cars, drawn from the decade when the silent movie era died away and a very different industry began to emerge.

La Antena mines the clichéd plot devices and theatrical over-acting common to so many silent films, albeit in a very knowing and humorous way. It is the astonishing visual style of La Antena that really sets it apart from the movies that it pays homage to. From the hypnotic TV logo to the menacing hilltop transmission station, this film abounds with dazzling visual inventiveness that is the rival of a Studio Ghibli animation – and all this using real actors and handmade sets.

Moreover, though the style is often intentionally corny and theatrical, this is still an unsettling, provocative and emotional picture. The use of religious symbolism throughout La Antena lends added resonance to the struggle between the TV Empire and the waning power of words. At the same time, many of the most powerful images are original ones, including the hypnotic swirl of the television sets and the nightmarish TV food factory.

I hate to end this review on a sour note, but I feel that the English-language release of La Antena is let down by the subtitles. The original Spanish subtitles are used to great effect, with much playing around with words on screen. However, the English-language subtitles that accompany the original dialogue are frustratingly incomplete, with omissions and mistakes at times leaving the viewer to piece things together for themselves. La Antena is nevertheless a striking piece of cinema; a visually breathtaking experience that displays great energy and humour whilst narrating a powerful cautionary tale.

Stunning! One of the most visually fascinating films. It's almost like Georges Méliès took a time machine to the 70's, dropped acid, stole a Stanley Kubrick script, and channeled Spielberg, Burton, and Wes Anderson into this dream like un-reality. The cinematography and editing are mastered in the perfect sense of cinema, paying great homage to filmmakers of the 20's and 30's. The production design, costumes, and the use of the dialogue subtitles are extremely creative and visually relevant to the story, and the practical effects complete the surreal dream world. But what really holds this movie together, like a comforting blanket during a weird dream, is the score. Complementing every shot, action, emotion, and visual cue. Visual storytelling at its finest!

This is a beautiful film to look at. Surreal and kitsch, its many homages were maybe a little too obvious - yes, Lang, Melies, even Chaplin. This allegory on Argentinian and German fascism initially buried the real story beneath its look - that of a complex animated commercial. However, as the film progressed, it soon become obvious to me the symbolism of the scars on the family's hands (stigmata), the blind boy who could talk and would save the city / world (Jesus Christ), the boy's single mother (Mary), the young girl (Mary Magdalene), and ultimately the boy on the Star of David, reflected a world in which religion / Judaism / Jesus Christ, vanquished the evils of fascism / Satan.

So maybe a little heavy on the symbolism and allegory, ideas of religion saving the world or prophets dying to save us from our sins are all a little lazy. As many directors have shown, revealing religion for the corrupt and superstitious organisations they really are, can make a much more satisfactory cinema experience; see Bunuel / Fellini / Bergman.

LA ANTENA (Esteban Sapir - Argentina 2005).

A completely unique take on silent cinema in this fairy-tale like story by Esteban Sapir, beautifully shot in black-and-white and practically without dialog, "La Antena" is a feast for the eye and a must for lovers of German expressionist cinema, with most of the nods to the works of Fritz Lang and Friedrich Murnau.

'The City without a Voice', 'La Ciudad sin Voz', is ruled by Mr. TV. He has taken the inhabitants voices and is in total control of all spoken words and images, forcing everyone to eat his own brand of TV-food. Mr TV is not just a monopolist, he is the personification of evil and totalitarianism, even the swastika appears as a symbol a number of times. He secretly works on a hypnotizing device to control all the citizens minds through his television broadcasts. For this purpose, he kidnaps the only one left with The Voice, a beautiful singer, but a TV repairman witnesses the kidnapping and flees to an old TV antenna in the mountains in order to halt Mr. TV's evil plans.

The production design is stunning with beautiful sets and imagery. Although shot primarily with the basic language of silent cinema, Esteban Sapir also adds a number of fresh techniques of his own, like a combination of typographic and animation techniques. Everyone talks with each other through text balloons (usually floating near their mouths), the louder they talk, the larger the characters. The texts themselves can be pushed away or crushed. In the opening sequence, we see a book, titled "La Antena", that opens and a city of paper rises from the pages. There are hardly any references to Argentina. It's constantly snowing, which gives the film a very un-Argeninian feel, while the surreal setting suggests any large city in the Northen hemisphere, with only some of the songs revealing the film's Argentinian background.

The pace is swift and there is so much happening on screen, it's hard to keep track of the film's surreal narrative. Not only breathtakingly beautiful to look at, we're also given a few messages about media monopolies, corruption and totalitarianism, but they are breezily packaged. One of the most original films I've seen in years. A delight.

The film was shown as the opening film at the IFF Rotterdam 2007.

Camera Obscura --- 9/10