THE AERIAL

THE AERIAL (La antena, original Spanish title). Esteban Sapir, director, script.[1] Argentina: LadobleA (sic, production) / Pachamama Cine (Argentine distribution), 2007; see IMDb for details of distribution.[2]

From the IMDb user review by Robert Woodward, "A reinvention of the silent movie and a powerful cautionary tale":

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.

Discussed by Alfredo Suppia and Lúcio Reis Filho, in "Feature 101: Draft for a Critical History of Argentine Science Fiction Cinema," SFRA Review #297 (Summer 2011): pp. 23-29.[[3]] Like the IMDb reviewer, Suppia and Filho call attention to THE AERIAL's allusions to METROPOLIS and Georges Méliès’s "Georges Méliès’s Journey to the Moon (La Voyage dans la Lune, 1904)[...] as well as to the avant-garde cinema of Marcel Duchamp (Anémic Cinema, 1926) and Dziga Vertov (The Man with the Movie Camera, 1929). Mr. TV’s company logo in La Antena recalls the spirals of Duchamp’s Anémic Cinema. The idea of people having their vital energy drained by television also refers to a relatively recent and less known Czech production, Jan Sverak’s Akumulátor 1 (1994)" (p. 25).

RDE, finishing, 7Ap21