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La casa del ángel, released as The House of the Angel in the United Kingdom and End of Innocence in the United States, is a 1957 Argentine drama film directed by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson and starring Elsa Daniel and Lautaro Murúa. It is based on the homonymous 1954 novel by Torre Nilsson's wife, Beatriz Guido, who also co-adapted the films's screenplay. Set in the 1920s, it follows Ana—a fourteen-year-old girl that lives her coming-of-age with conflict due to her repressive upbringing—and her meeting with Pablo, a young politician that has challenged a fellow congressman to a duel to the death

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https://www.jstor.org/stable/492453

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42598767

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23287106

https://www.jstor.org/stable/43684216

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42598767

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24885188

Plot
The film begins with a prologue without specific time or defined space, in which Ana nervously serves coffee to her father and a man named Pablo after having dinner, an action she claims is indefinitely repeated every Friday. Through her voice-over narration, Ana expresses her dread for the man, suggesting his continued presence around the family is an annoyance to her.

The story then flashes back to the 1920s, as Ana remembers her time as an innocent, fourteen-year-old adolescent. She belongs to an affluent family and lives in Buenos Aires with her two older sisters—Julieta and Isabel—under the repressive upbringing of their mother Mrs. Castro, an overly strict Catholic woman, and their father Mr. Castro, an old-fashioned ruling class elite.

The opening of Ana's flashback takes place in the family's summer home in Adrogué, Buenos Aires Province, as she plays with her sisters and cousin Vicenta, who unveils to her facts about sex. After being urged by Vicenta to practice kissing on a statue, Ana impulsively kisses her cousin Julián instead and is surprised by her mother. As a result, Ana is sent back to Buenos Aires before the rest of the family, under the guardianship of her governess Nana, who constantly warnes the girl on the dangers of sin.

On the way to the city, Nana offers a ride to politician Pablo Aguirre, whose car broke down. Once Pablo gets out of the car, Nana reveals to Ana that he killed a man in a duel years ago. Ana's life in Buenos Aires is marked by the puritanism of her mother, who forces her children to bathe clothed. Arguing that her daughter is too young, Mrs. Castro moves Ana to a bedroom alone so that she does not hear her sisters' conversations, and prohibits her from interacting with boys, attending balls, or watching movies that she does not authorize.

Pablo is an up-and-coming congressman that is supported by Mr. Castro and his peers to look out for their interests at the Chamber of Deputies, where he delivers a speech in defense of free speech. After his address, he is confronted by congressman Esquivel from the opposition, who argues that when Pablo's father served as a minister in 1912, two newspapers were closed so that they did not disclose his unlawful enrichment. Amidst the controversy, Pablo challenges Esquivel to a duel to the death.

Mr. Castro invites Pablo to his house and offers to host the duel, in addition to inviting him to spend the night before there, since it is what his family used to do when hosting such affairs. While leaving the meeting, Pablo stumbles upon Ana and invites her to dance in the ball that is taking place downstairs. Ana initially refuses out of fear of her mother, but concurs at Pablo's insistence, who tells her that it could be the last dance of his life.

The night of the duel, Ana goes to Pablo's bedroom and wishes him luck by gifting him her rosary. They share a kiss that quickly turns into rape as he overpowers Ana. Back in her bed, Ana listens attentively to the duel taking place outside, wishing Pablo would die. After the shooting, Ana rushes outside and discovers to her horror that Pablo was victorious.

Following that night, the story comes out of the flashback into the present day again. Ana describes how after the night of the duel, Pablo became a friend of his father and a haunting presence in her life. She even sees Pablo when she goes out for a walk to remote parts of the city, making her doubt if both of them are ghosts. Ana says that Pablo and her should have died that night.

Cast



 * Elsa Daniel as Ana:
 * Lautaro Murúa as Pablo Aguirre: An idealistic young politician that campaigns against courruption and press censorship.
 * Berta Ortegosa as Mrs. Castro:
 * Guillermo Battaglia as Mr. Castro: A political leader with a a fondness for duels, who repeatedly cheats on his wife.
 * Bárbara Mujica as Vicenta:
 * Yordana Fain as Nana:

Background and production
Torre Nilsson met writer Beatriz Guido in April 1951, at the house of Ernesto Sábato and his wife Matilde. At that time, Guido was not yet a novelist, but an author of short stories, which were compiled in the books Regreso a los hilos (1947) and Estar en el mundo (1950).

Initially, the director proposed to Guido that she wrote a scene for his upcoming film, Días de odio (1954), based on Jorge Luis Borges' short story "Emma Zunz". According to Guido herself, when meeting with Torre Nilsson they initially planned to adapt her 1951 short story "El túnel", although the project did not prosper and it was finally filmed by León Klimovsky.

In 1954, Guido released her debut novel La casa del ángel to positive reception, becoming a bestseller and winning the prestigious Premio Emecé literary award. According to Guido, Torre Nilsson helped her edit the novel and talked about the book to film producer Atilio Menstati, with whom he had previously worked. In the beginning, the film adaption was going to be directed by Román Viñoly Barreto, while Ernesto Arancibia also expressed interest. Menstati, however, told Torre Nilsson that he should direct it as it was "right for him".

The sentimental and creative relationship between Guido and Torre Nilsson had a decisive impact on their respective careers. The filmmaker described his partnership with her: Beatriz coincides through her novels, of great imagination, perfectly with my universe. I feel like a contributor to her novels as much as she is a contributor to my films, beyond the simple plot. Together we invent situations, dialogues and characters, and the time comes when we no longer remember very well to whom that situation or dialogue belongs. Maybe mine are more "cerebral" and hers more "visual". Beatriz's universe has been incorporated into mine in a completely natural and continuous way, completing my previous work. The world of cinema has improved Beatriz as a novelist, giving her a greater visual richness and more truth in her stories. My cinematographic universe has been intensely enriched by her contribution of situations and characters.

The real "House of the Angel"—nicknamed after a sculpture of a winged woman located on its second floor—was the castle-like residence of politician Carlos Delcasse, located in Belgrano and built in 1900 by architect Carlos Nordmann, who designed several well-known buildings in Buenos Aires such as the Teatro Coliseo. His mansion was an important center of sports and political life in the neighborhood, and was the setting of several gun and saber duels, so it was also referred to as "the house of duels". Delcasse died in 1941 and the last inhabitant of the house was his daughter Carlota, who lent the property for Torre Nilsson to film there, with the shooting of La casa del ángel taking place in June and July 1956. Besides La casa del ángel, two more movies were filmed in the house: Torre Nilsson's Un guapo del 900 (1960) and Ricardo Wullicher's La casa de las sombras (1976), before being sold and demolished in 1977.

Guido was present during the film's shooting and her opinion was taken into account in regard to its lighting, scenery and art design.

https://books.google.com.ar/books?id=bfmpCAAAQBAJ&pg=PT313&dq=%22La+casa+del+%C3%A1ngel%22+%22Nilsson%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiCurf4nYLzAhWDrZUCHZtzDJw4MhDoAXoECAsQAg#v=onepage&q=%22La%20casa%20del%20%C3%A1ngel%22%20%22Nilsson%22&f=false

Style
Torre Nilsson's style was a local exponent of art house, "auteur cinema", considered by some to be related to the emerging French New Wave movement. However, critics Timothy Barnard and Peter Rist noted that the director had in fact little in common with the European "new waves", other than his "willingness to engage in radical formal experiments." Critics have noted influences from contemporary directors Alf Sjöberg, Ingmar Bergman, Karel Reisz, Lindsay Anderson, William Wyler and Luis García Berlanga. Several writers—including Richard Roud— have also pointed out similarities between Torre Nilsson and American filmmaker Orson Welles, like the use of "extreme and disorienting [camera] angles and movements", as well as their shared ability to create a "dense atmosphere through a baroque mise-en-scène and exaggerated camera and lighting effects," with "rigour and simplicity, avoiding any impression of clutter and superfluity."

Guido's influence as a screenplayer.

Torre Nilsson developed a unique aesthetic created to express Guido's literature. La casa del ángel has been considered the "most audacious expression" of this style, characterized by black-and-white cinematography that made use of "extreme shadows, high contrast, and spot lighting that often revealed only part of an actor's face."

broodinly lit https://archive.org/details/Continental_Film_Review_1964-10.good/page/n23/mode/2up?q=casa+del+angel

The film's style and mise-en-scène has been often described as "baroque".

Social criticism
La casa del ángel represents, both poetically and realistically, the corruption and hypocrisy of the Argentine upper, ruling class.

Although the critique of Argentina's bourgeois values is the central theme of Torre Nilsson's work with Guido, they ignored its external consequences to instead focus on the internal experiences of the characters.

La casa del ángel represents the "repressing world of the country's disappearing oligarchy", which was Guido's favoured theme of the period. As noted by Timothy Barnard, this world: "with its cruel sexuality and asphyxiating social conventions, always appeared perverse and macabre."

disappearing upper class oligarchy.

Ana's repressive household has been considered a metaphor for Argentina in the 1920s, where the story takes place.

The film examines the "cloying restrictions" of the main character's social class, creating an atmosphere of "prurience and moral decay".

https://books.google.com.ar/books?id=BdVqDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA78&dq=%22casa+del+angel%22+%22torre+nilsson%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwic0YK1uoDzAhVLppUCHXeUD7M4ChDoAXoECAEQAw#v=onepage&q=%22casa%20del%20angel%22%20%22torre%20nilsson%22&f=false

Womanhood
Unlike the work of other Argentine directors—like that of his father Torre Ríos—Torre Nilsson focused his films on the experiences of women, in the case of La casa del ángel, on Elsa Daniel's character. The actress played similar roles in Torre Nilsson and Guido's following films, portraying young women that face "harrowing situations of repellant male predatory behavior and entrapment." La casa del ángel introduced a new female prototype that differed from the established proposals of local cinema, that of a character "full of questions and owner of a mysterious world." Perfil's Mónica Martin defined this "new woman of Argentine cinema"—embodied by Daniel—as "beautiful, erotic and at the same time perverse", who "must be unaware of sex, but want it ardently."

Focusing on main character Ana, La casa del ángel deals with the "injustices inherent in gender roles". The themes explored in the film were introduced in Torre Nilsson's earlier film Graciela (1955), the first of a series of films that deal with the "corruption of adolescence by the adult world." The films La casa del ángel, La caída (1959) and La mano en la trampa (1961)—all of them co-written by Guido and starring Daniel—form what has been considered a trilogy. Critic Marcelo Leyrós defined it as a "trilogy of confinement", in which the female protagonists are "imprisoned" in their homes and prevented from accessing an outside, "forbidden world", especially that of sexuality. Although in Torre Nilsson's films female characters are constructed from their own point of view, they are distressed, and try to "transgress the norms imposed by their environment and suffer the consequences of such audacity."

The film has been considered a reflection of a change of time in relation to women's role in society, characterized by "self-confidence, artistic ambition, desire for independence, [and] awareness that different rules apply when it comes to gender." The construction of Daniel's character emphasizes her internal conflicts regarding the awakening of sexual desire. Throughout the film, she is regularly told that she is still too young to understand her intentions, while at the same time she is told she is too old to play with boys. Argentine critic Claudio España pointed out the scene in which Ana refuses to take part in the Eucharist as an example of Torre Nilsson's "aspiration to tell the story from the view-point of a real woman, in open opposition to the traditional 'male perspective' genre." He also felt that the director's "anxiety for making clear this new attitude was such that he emphasised the loss of Ana's virginity in Pablo's arms with the euphemistic fall of a picture frame from a shelf."

The film presents glimpses of the emerging 1920s "modern woman" through secondary female characters: Ana's sisters, who declare their dissatisfaction with bathing clothed; the French dressmaker, who points out that Ana should be allowed to dance like girls her age in Europe; and Pablo's girlfriend, who defies his sayings. In opposition, Ana's mother appears as a defender of the domestic life and chastity of women, warning her child: "You will never kiss a man before the Holy Sacrament of Matrimony authorizes it." Nana's character represents an "initiation figure" for the young girl, linked to the cultural consumption of literature and cinema. Pierced by the idea of sin, Mrs. Castro's morality contrasts with the youthful spirit of the "Roaring Twenties", which signaled a growing autonomy for women. These new models are put on the scene when Mrs. Castro and her children take a taxi after attending mass, having an altercation with the driver, who calls them "prudish" and compares them to nuns. According to CONICET researcher Julia Kratje, the ecclesiastical institution symbolizes the "obsession to preserve the sexual codes rooted in the oligarchic tradition."

Professor Peter H. Rist felt that Guido's "constant attack on the Argentine patriarchy and the subjective voice given to the female characters" was "well ahead of its time", and one of the least recognized aspects of her work. Although La casa del ángel focuses on the subjectivity of women, and Daniel's character does not identify with a conventional femininity, the film cannot be considered a feminist work, as it lacks the movement's "emancipatory impulse". Kratje felt that: "The field of visibility of La casa del ángel is built precisely in that uncertain, oblique area."

Release and reception
Torre Nilsson initially had difficulty releasing the film, with Francisco Lococo—an influential distributor—telling him that he "would not release it even if he was killed."

Cannes
La casa del ángel was screened at the newly established London Film Festival, as well as the 10th Cannes Film Festival, competing for the Palme d'Or prize. Still unknown in Europe, Torre Nilsson was assigned a small theatre away from the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès, the festival's main venue. The film's screening was only attended by around thirty people, although most were renowned film critics. It was received with acclaim, with applause reportedly lasting for five minutes at the end of the screening. "New Wave" critic Éric Rohmer considered it "the best film to have arrived from South America since the beginnings of cinema", while André Bazin described Torre Nilsson as the "revelation of the festival." As part of a broader coverage of Cannes, Variety critic Gene Moskowitz described La casa del ángel as a "natural for lingo spots and of possible appeal for specialized U.S. situations." Moskowitz felt the acting and technical aspects were "excellent", although he noted that: "The direction, arty at times, keeps interest but does not fully mark the dramatic poignance inherent in the tale." French critic Georges Sadoul and other representatives of Les Lettres Françaises listed it as one of the best ten films shown in France that year, as part of a survey carried out by magazine Cahiers du Cinéma.

Despite being received enthusiastically, the film received no awards at Cannes, although Daniel was recognized with a special mention for her performance. A reporter from Variety felt that La casa del ángel was "slighted" because it "unveiled a new, adroit director" in Torre Nilsson.

Buenos Aires
Following its Cannes screening in May, La casa del ángel premiered in Buenos Aires on July 11, 1957 and became the first Argentine film release of the year alongside Daniel Tinayre's La bestia humana, which premiered on the same day. At the time of the film's release, almost eight months had passed without the premiere of an Argentine film, something that had not happened since the 1930s. Although it "puzzled" local audiences, La casa del ángel was met with acclaim by Argentine film critics, with Daniel's performance being especially praised.

At the end of 1957, the film was given the Best Film prize by the newly created National Film Institute (Spanish: Instituto Nacional de Cinematografía; INC), with Argentina Sono Film receiving a financial award of 1.6 million peso moneda nacional. It also won awards for its director, story, cinematography and music.

U.S. and U.K.
La casa del ángel became Torre Nilsson's first film to receive a commercial release in the United States, distributed by Kingsley-International Pictures under the title End of Innocence in 1960. In the United Kingdom, it was released under the title The House of the Angel. Critical reception was generally positive upon the film's U.S. release. Film Quarterly's Thalia Selz praised Torre Nilsson as a "brilliant" director and described the film as a "beautifully structured, intricate series of ironies whose visual and verbal expressions run in a subtle, inexorable counterpoint from the first sequence to the last." The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther gave La casa del ángel a more lukewarm review, arguing that an average person will find it difficult to "get caught up" in the film, due to its "rather awkward movement" and its "improbable and outrageous" story. Nevertheless, he praised the acting and musical score, and commended Torre Nilsson for effectively conveying a "mordant and painful idea of the blindness and destructiveness of prudery, as well as a flickering suggestion of the irony of a rigid honor code." Writing for Esquire, Dwight Macdonald praised Daniel's performance and Torre Nilsson's "cinematic imagination", although he felt that his "directorial touch ... is a little heavy and the camera angles and photography often verge on the arty".

Impact
The film is considered a turning point in the history of Argentine cinema, as its positive reception in international festivals boosted the stagnant, national film industry, and returned it to world notice. Writing for Variety in 1961, Mario Trajtenberg described La casa del ángel as "yet Torre Nilsson's most fascinating film, a piece of inventiveness whose style has perhaps been further perfected, but whose depth and impact has not repeated itself in later films." With La casa del ángel and his following films El secuestrador (1958) and La caída (1960), Torre Nilsson became the first Argentine director to achieve international recognition, first in festivals and later in retrospectives. The film's success with European critics also benefited Guido, allowing her to release her novel internationally and be part of artistic delegations along with renowned figures such as Jeanne Moreau, Alain Resnais, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Vittorio De Sica.

The international prominence that Torre Nilsson acquired with La casa del ángel led to a "revival" in the national film industry, with the following years becoming a "time of febrile, often contentious, filmmaking activity throughout Argentina." La casa del ángel is said to have "revolutionized Argentine cinema", renovating the cinematographic language that until then dominated local film production. As a result of the film, the existence of a "new" Argentine cinema versus an "old" one became a hot topic of discussion, a question that until then did not exist. According to Catalina Dlugi and Rolando Gallego, La casa del ángel "inaugurated what many call a cult film period in [the country]."

La casa del ángel represented a "cultured and modern" trend among young filmmakers of the 1950s that was differentiated from an concurring movement that instead sought to document and denounce the social issues of Latin America, exemplified by Fernando Birri's Tire dié (1960). Militant filmmakers accused Torre Nilsson's work as "intellectual", "bourgeois" and "Europeanized". In his 1962 essay "Cinema and Underdevelopment" (Spanish: "Cine y subdesarrollo"), Birri criticized Torre Nilsson's films as inimical to his own argument that regional audiences needed a cinema that "brings them consciousness ... [and] disturbs, worries, shocks and weakens those who have a 'bad conscience'"; citing La casa del ángel as an example. Opposing Birri's claims, researcher Currie K. Thompson pointed out in 2014 that La casa del ángel seeks to "make viewers conscious of the links between political and social repression," and exposes "the corrupt nature of oligarchic rule."

The film's style was influential to the so-called "Generation of 60" (Spanish: "Generación del 60") wave of filmmakers, with Torre Nilsson being considered the "father" of the movement. Also known as "New Argentine Cinema" (Spanish "Nuevo Cine Argentino"), it emerged in the early 1960s and included directors such as Rodolfo Kuhn, David José Kohon, Manuel Antín and Enrique Dawi. Although they did not subscribe to a specific style, these young filmmakers shared the goal of "renewing" the local film scene by incorporating influences from European cinema, and their work often dealt with the existential concerns of the Argentine middle class.