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Living in a social world, we experience feelings and react to others’ feelings as they appear to us. For instance, we have all smiled since we were babies. The first “genuine” social smile typically occurs sometime between weeks 6 and 8, as a response to recognizing someone very special: Mom or Dad (Kail, V., Robert & Cavanaugh, John C., 2019). We see, we are happy, we smile. We are born with the desire to be happy. Humankind has searched for different revelations of happiness, and this is how humour was born. From ancient times to the present day, humour has been an instrument of communication, a social behaviour that is an integral part of mass media and social interaction. Humour provides a reciprocal influence. It is a way to interpret information as well as a specific media that can be used to convey this information. What happens to the media once it is "infected" by humour? Does humour necessarily satisfy the need for entertainment? Can humour have a "serious face"? Is it true that "Humour is always a monopoly of the semi-literate" (McLuhan, 2016)? This essay will explore the above-mentioned topics from the perspective of the humour applied in motion pictures, during the interwar era. It will specifically discuss the genre of satire using as a case study the humour found in Latin America during that time as evidenced in the movie Tararira, the film of Benjamin Fondane produced by Falma Film in Buenos Aires in 1936.

Based on a testimony of the musician Marcel Mihalovici, the article first calls to mind Brancusi in Paris when Fundoianu / Fondane settles down there. In the French capital, the sculptor maintains the style of life of a “Danubian peasant”. He mistrusts the writers but realizes a drawing (portrait) of the young poet and philosopher. In turn, Fondane devotes to him the portrait “Constantin Brancusi” which is one of his best reviews, as the essay on Chagall and “Le faux traité d’esthétique”. He shows that the inspiration of the sculptor—as seen by Fondane—is not reducible to the materiality of the plastic art. Purified, it is a part of modern poetry, it creates a lexicon founding a new language, artisan skills, mathematics and religious expression.

The Readers’ International. A foreign literature policy in war times in Fondane’s essays. Between 1919 and 1922, B. Fondane engaged himself into a legitimisation enterprise, which grew into a unique form of reading internationalism. By radically stating the subjective nature of all ‘preferences’, the essayist could figure out the character of a reader free from all national determinations, able to cross the cultural limits as well as the prejudices on their actual hierarchy. Our essay proposes to examine this form of contingence and contact with foreign literatures, inspired, paradoxically, by the warlike imaginary of the First World War.