"The Eternaut": Bruno Stagnaro reveals the secrets of our beloved deadly snowfall

One of the great charms of the story of El Eternauta , believes filmmaker Bruno Stagnaro , has to do with "recognizing us," and by "us," he means Argentines. The characters, the streets, the dialogues, the landscapes all refer to a local identity narrated in a code seemingly distant from the national literary tradition of science fiction. In a chat with Revista Ñ, Stagnaro , who read the comic written by Héctor Oesterheld and illustrated by Francisco Solano López as a child, confesses that he always desired, longed, aspired—why not?—to adapt the story originally published in 1957 in Hora Cero magazine. He messed with a sacred cow because the text seemed unsuitable and because there had already been some unsuccessful attempts to do so (hindered by the tug-of-war between some heirs of the rights). However, here it is: the first six episodes of the series El Eternauta , the big new streaming product of the year, brought to you by Netflix (an audiovisual giant that has no qualms when it comes to adapting sacred stories like One Hundred Years of Solitude or Pedro Páramo ).

In a new milestone in his career, Stagnaro , a 51-year-old from Buenos Aires, this time portrayed a Buenos Aires very different from the one he had already portrayed in the film Pizza, Beer, Weed , his 1998 debut with Adrián Caetano, or in the series Okupas . In both cases, he represented a marginality that placed him in a style of so-called "dirty realism" within the new Argentine cinematic narratives. The marginality of El Eternauta isn't such, because it comes from another edge, but the story has always served, from its publication to the present, as a "metaphor for the times," regardless of the era. And yes, it works these days too.

–It's inevitable to look for similarities and differences. How did you work on the adaptation?

–I had very fond memories of El Eternauta , because it was a read I really enjoyed. When I reread it with an eye toward “how to adapt it,” I began to find certain things that made the adaptation more complex. I always say that for me, the fact that it initially came out as a three-page weekly comic greatly influenced the story, and that gave it a certain dynamic, a certain structure that requires something to happen every three pages to sustain interest. It worked well within that language, but later, when it was translated into a longer version, I felt it was starting to become a bit mechanistic. I intended to maintain the atmosphere and the heart of the story, but sacrificing certain things that we felt would be complicated for today's viewers in the translation. Added to that, much of the charm of El Eternauta has to do with recognizing ourselves, the streets, our identity, the feeling that you're reading something in a code completely foreign to us, like science fiction, with a familiar language.

–Is this the great Argentine science fiction story?

–I understand so. It's certainly the most well-known. The character is absolutely iconic. There's something about the reason she's so deeply rooted in Argentine culture, in addition to her initial impact and how that connects with our own history, that makes her a unique piece.

–Is it a story that works metaphorically or symbolically in any era, even now?

–The most interesting thing about it, precisely, is the multiplicity of readings it proposes. I don't agree with this impulse to try to guide people toward a single reading, because I feel that, regardless of ideological issues, it narrows the reader's experience, and layers of interpretation are lost.

–That's quite typical of science fiction. I think they're stories that take place in worlds very different from our own. But somehow they always end up speaking to the reality in which they occur. And of course, at that point, I feel that, in a very random way, because a lot of time has passed since its publication, it ends up falling at a time when that's a possible, valid, and necessary reading.

–Why adapt it to the present?

–We made a lot of decisions. A very important factor that the work had at the time it was written was precisely that closeness to the space in which it took place. Beyond the additional technical difficulties involved in taking it to the past, there's something about that city that no longer exists. That thing of dialoguing with your own city and feeling like this invasion is happening on the corner of your neighborhood... we felt that if we kept it in that time, it would dilute a bit and become a story that, of course, is very good, but it was a story of an invasion in a city that was no longer ours. Humbly, when I read it, I began to feel that there were some internal contradictions between the conceptual approach and how the story unfolded. Another decision was that Salvo would have to go out and find his daughter, which doesn't happen in the comic. But we felt that, within this idea of ​​"the collective hero" and "no one saves himself alone," somehow, in the protagonist's family, we could see the immensity of the tragedy that surrounds him. Whatever it is, it's a story where basically a lot of people die.

–In the original, almost everyone dies.

–And yet, as the story unfolds, Salvo and his family are a single cell that remains unscathed almost until the end. At one point, there was a kind of narrative thread that we thought was interesting to question, as if to make the tragedy bite him deeply, in addition to other, equally important but more technical issues. Reading the comic, you tend to believe everything because the language is more flexible, requiring less verisimilitude. But I started to wonder why Salvo rushes off so quickly to find resources in a city full of them. From today's viewer, the verisimilitude of that urgency began to bother me, and I felt the need to construct a more realistic verisimilitude. From my perspective, having to adapt it no longer as a fascinated reader, there were a lot of factors that began to bother me, like how to sustain something throughout the story, how to ensure that verisimilitude doesn't start to creak or begin to have internal conflicts.

–Analog also saves you at some point, doesn't it?

–That's part of the adaptation's approach, bringing it into the present day. While I felt this was the right decision to recapture this sense of the viewer living within the story's surroundings, something I felt was wrong with having to coexist with the technology of the present. So, we found this narrative device so that, in a way, the artifacts from the era in which the original Eternaut took place would be brought into the story, and in some way, the landscape that begins to be constructed strongly evokes that 1950s atmosphere.

–Beyond the story, a major factor in this narrative is the settings, the apocalyptic urban landscapes, the weather, the color.

–They're fundamental, both the presence of the city and recognizing those spaces, as well as the advertisements and the things written on the walls. I tried to put a lot of emphasis on that, with some difficulty because of what it entails to maintain the advertising you see. It's a double-edged sword, because on a legal level it's a battle to sustain the advertising, and then, when you finally achieve it, everyone starts to think it was a joke. It's kind of ungrateful, but at the same time, advertising is part of the moment in which we consume it. Leaving that encapsulated within the story seemed good to me. But there's always a game going on with the graphic advertisements that remain. I remember one by Cinzano on Puente Pacífico. I remember a Frondizi graffiti on a wall. It was a deliberate intention on their part to encapsulate that city within the story, and I imagine it must have been very crazy for people at that time. The coincidence between seeing those advertisements and those posters and seeing the story and walking down the street and seeing the same graffiti there.

– El Eternauta is quite different in your audiovisual production.

–It's different, but I've always been interested in the semi-apocalyptic register. And obviously also in the register of the city as the protagonist. In fact, for me, making El Eternauta was a dream deeply rooted in my prehistory, I'd say in my childhood. After making Okupas, I had a project for a dystopian story in Buenos Aires. But it didn't happen. So, while it may seem strange, the truth is that I was always somewhat hovering around this narrative area.

–Do you think it will motivate younger people to read the original?

–I think so, because it seems to me that El Eternauta is a very well-known but very little-read work. Even among those who criticize me, I see that they haven't read it. We're at a time when talking about it is very easy, but actually doing it wasn't so easy.