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Latin American Cinema

A Comparative History

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Conventional Silent Cinema

A CINEMA BY AND FOR CRIOLLOS

Latin American silent cinema was a cinema by and for criollos. The term criollo comes from the Portuguese crioulo, which was first applied in the fifteenth century to Portuguese peoples born in Africa, and soon afterward to African slaves born in Brazil. In Spanish America, the earliest use of criollo kept its root meaning (from criar, which means "to raise") but was applied first to Africans born in the Americas, and only afterward to Spaniards born there as well. By the seventeenth century, the term's meaning in Spanish had narrowed to refer only to the descendants of Spaniards in the Americas, but after independence it broadened to refer to a Eurocentric understanding of national histories and identities. In effect, by the middle of the nineteenth century, criollo was widely used as a stand-in for national hegemonic cultures throughout Spanish America. In Brazil, on the other hand, crioulo devolved, among other things, into a racial slur for descendants of Africans, while the French term créole came to refer to the African-inflected cultures and languages that emerged throughout the Francophone Caribbean Basin.

Given the confusion that can arise from the polysemy of criollo and its cognates, I will limit my use of the term to refer to Europeanized cultures throughout Latin America, including Brazil. Such use is widely accepted to this day in music, where criollo is applied to local variants of European forms popular throughout the nineteenth century, for example the Peruvian vals or the Puerto Rican danza. In theater, criollo is also widely used to describe dramas that use Spanish or Portuguese forms, such as the sainete or the autos sacramentales, but are infused with local inflections of language, gesture, costume, and customs. Finally, in literature, the term was in wide circulation during the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth to describe a heterogeneous body of regionalist narratives that combined elements of realism, naturalism, costumbrismo, and romanticism, and that set the action in very local, usually rural, contexts. The best-known example of such usage is the literature of the gaucho in Argentina and Uruguay. At the dawn of cinema, then, a criollo sensibility in Latin America did not negate non-European cultures or their role in the construction of the national imaginary, but rather grafted them (to use José Martí's organic metaphor) into a privileged, Eurocentric trunk. In the silent cinema of Latin America, then, a criollo aesthetic is one whose visual language and narrative structures are metropolitan but whose atmospheres, concerns, and characters are local, national, or regional.

The silent period in Latin American cinema coincided with the height of the region's export-import growth and its political expression, oligarchic liberalism (1870–1930). This was a period of exponential economic growth and political stability, when Latin America's economic and political elites belonged to the same socioeconomic group: a Europeanized, criollo oligarchy that became fabulously wealthy by exporting raw materials such as beef, wheat, coffee, sugar, tobacco, henequen, copper, nitrates, rubber, and bananas, and in turn imported manufactured goods such as textiles, machines, and luxury items. At a basic level, then, film in Latin America began as another imported manufactured good, for not only were the cameras and film stock produced in Europe and the United States, but the first to film and screen moving pictures in the region were representatives of the Lumière and Edison companies.

Silent cinema in Latin America was not defined, however, by national oligarchies but by middle- and upper-middle-class politicians and businesspeople who set out to maximize film's huge potential for profits and propaganda. In particular, professional politicians were responsible for financing the official national and regional newsreels that thrived into the 1950s, while the criollo petit-bourgeoisie that emerged to support the expanding export economies adapted to cinema the artisanal and mercantile business model it was already familiar with. From this perspective, then, Latin American narrative silent cinema was predominantly a cinema made by an emerging criollo bourgeoisie using a small-Conventional scale, artisanal approach to production, distribution, and exhibition, and espousing a Eurocentric worldview with correspondingly Europeanized aesthetics. This sensibility applied to national filmmakers as well as to European itinerant and immigrant filmmakers who played a leading role in the development of silent cinema in Latin America. Thus, the Italian Pedro Sambarino was active in Bolivia and Peru filming and/or directing features with criollo themes, while another Italian, Gilberto Rossi, had a successful career in Brazil as a producer of official newsreels (Rossi Actualidades, 1921–31) and as a producer for José Medina, the most commercially successful silent feature director in São Paulo.

The criollo sensibility of the time was not only Eurocentric but also thoroughly patriarchal. This explains why all of the films of the period are androcentric and oftentimes misogynistic, and why, outside of acting, only two women ventured into film production and direction, and only after stints as actresses: Carmen Santos in Brazil and Mimí Derba in Mexico. Finally, in terms of political economy, criollos during the first decades of the twentieth century believed wholeheartedly in Positivism. This aspect of criollo ideology, however, would be shaken by the Mexican Revolution and especially by the world economic collapse of 1929, and helps to explain the qualitative difference between silent cinema and subsequent studio cinema in Latin America.

Significantly, two of the major social players of the previous century — the landed elite and the rural proletariat — did not leave their mark on silent cinema: the landed elite because they considered film a lowbrow form of entertainment, and the rural masses because they lacked the resources to make films. However, the third key social actor during the nineteenth century — the Catholic Church — did get involved with filmmaking during the silent period, and its participation is particularly evident in the regional cycles of the second half of the 1920s.

The class origins of these early producers and filmmakers may explain why there are only a handful of filmic narratives told from the perspective of the growing urban working classes: for example Juan sin ropa (Juan Without Clothes; Georges Benoît and Héctor Quiroga, Argentina, 1919), about the government repression of the anarchist insurrection in Buenos Aires in 1919, an event known as "The Tragic Week"; A Vida de João Cândido (The Life of João Cândido; dir. unknown, Brazil, 1912), about the Chibata Revolt, a 1910 mutiny led by a black corporal aboard a Brazilian navy ship; and the silent films of José Agustín Ferreyra, which grew out of and reflected life in the working-class suburbs south of Buenos Aires.

PERIODIZATION

Our knowledge of the early cinema in Latin America is literally full of silences. To begin with, many films have burned through spontaneous combustion or on purpose, whether as a form of censorship or to recycle them as combs. Many others have been forgotten, and only sometimes rediscovered in a dusty basement or trunk. Other silences persist beyond the silent cinema period, imposed by a market and distribution system that privileges North-to-South consumption at the expense of South-to-North and South-to-South exchanges. Notwithstanding these limitations, we can still make some broad claims about early Latin American cinema, beginning with the general observation that silent film production developed in three distinct stages: (1) actualities (roughly 1897–1907), proto-narrative cinema (1908–15), and feature narrative cinema (1915–30). Actualities consisted of one or at most two reels (at one to fifteen minutes per reel) of unstaged events, with little editing and narration, and hardly any thought to mise-en-scène. This was followed by a period (1908–15) of short- and medium-length films that sought to attract larger and more differentiated audiences with entertainment in various forms: reconstructed crimes, comedies, skits, plays, filmed songs (with live or recorded accompaniment), and literary adaptations, among others. These films are not so much cinematographic as theatrical, in that there is little use of filmic devices such as close-ups, crosscutting, or subjective points of view. Instead, cameras tend to remain in place, as one would in a theater, while the acting and mise-en-scène also reveal a strong theatrical influence. Finally, beginning in 1915 and lasting for a few years beyond the introduction of sound, silent cinema acquired the outlines of today's films, sans sound: Aristotelian narrative form, feature lengths of sixty to ninety minutes (in a few cases surpassing two hours), and the elaboration of genres and techniques that were first developed during the previous period of proto-narrative cinema.

Significantly, this periodization mirrors the evolution of silent film in Europe and North America, evidence that Latin American cinema was a triangulated practice from its very beginnings, the result of what Paulo Antonio Paranaguá calls Latin America's "permanent tripolar circulation" with Europe and the United States. This tripolar circulation has never been one of free-flowing exchanges of influences and products between equals, but more like an active process of triangulation whereby Latin American filmmakers navigate a global cinematic landscape from a position of marginality. The best-known application of triangulation is in the surveying of land, whereby angles and distances on the ground are measured to accurately plot positions on a map. In this book, however, I will use triangulation in a way that is closer to how it is understood and practiced in the sport of orienteering, where the objective is to physically reach as many points marked on a map as possible, using only a map and a compass. Here, triangulation is the process of locating one's position when at least two prominent landmarks are visible. The more landmarks and the farther apart they are, the better, as this increases the chances of accurately plotting one's location on the map and ultimately one's chances of navigating toward the desired objective.

Like orienteers, Latin American filmmakers have always been adventurous spirits who seek out audiences, financing, and success as artists and businesspeople by navigating a cinematic landscape whose three most prominent referents, at the level of visual and narrative practices, are European cinema, Hollywood cinema, and Latin American documentary practices. The weight that any of these three reference points carries in a filmmaker's calculations varies according to specifics such as the filmmaker's interests and objectives, historical circumstances, the country or region of production, and audiences' knowledge of said referents, among others. But what is relatively stable is the simultaneous presence of all three referents, to a greater or lesser degree, throughout the silent period, and indeed throughout the history of Latin American cinema. Therefore, when speaking of triangulation in this context, I refer to a filmmaker's self-positioning (metaphorically speaking) somewhere in between these three prominent referents, and in response to the factors just outlined. Individually, the resultant films will be visibly closer to one of these three referents than to the others, but as a group, the characterizing feature of Latin American cinema, regardless of this or that particular film's aesthetic proximity to any one referent, is the incorporation (to a greater or lesser degree) of elements from all three referents. A singular benefit of comparing Latin American filmmakers to orienteers is that it overcomes the tendency to reduce Latin American cinema to watered-down versions or reflections of foreign models, and instead reveals Latin American filmmakers as active constructors of their own representations who adjusted their sights as the contours of the cinematic and ideological landscape shifted over time. From this perspective, the question is not whether Latin American filmmakers adopt and adapt global as well as local models and practices, but how they do so and for what purposes.

ACTUALITIES (1897–1907)

For its first ten years, film in Latin America did not evolve beyond vistas (literally, "views"). These were very short actualities of mostly unedited shots of unstaged action that sought to present rather than represent, and show rather than narrate. These vistas were shot with early movie cameras that were lightweight and relatively inexpensive, which allowed for a lot of experimentation by artists not yet beholden to any overdetermination in their choice of genre, acting style, or sometimes even subject matter. In effect, what characterizes early Latin American silent cinema is how transparently it reflects the air of self-sufficiency of the early pioneers, as if they were looking at themselves and liked what they saw. The titles of that first decade speak for themselves: Un célebre especialista sacando muelas en el Gran Hotel Europa (A Celebrated Specialist Pulling Molars at the Gran Hotel Europa; Guillermo and Manuel Trujillo Durán, Venezuela, 1897), Carrera de bicicletas en el velódromo de Arroyo Seco (Bicycle Race at the Arroyo Seco Cycle Track; Félix Oliver, Uruguay, 1898), or Fiestas presidenciales en Mérida (Presidential Festivities in Mérida; Enrique Rosas, Mexico, 1906). The fascination with technology and movement that explains the production and reception of films such as L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat; Auguste and Louis Lumière, France, 1895) also explains the production and reception of these earliest nonnarrative films in Latin America. As in many a Lumière film, the important thing was to astonish an impressionable audience by recording movement in what amounted to moving photographs: sports events, people leaving a factory or a church, national leaders in official functions and travels (fig. 1.1), and panning shots of the vast rural landscapes of the interior.

Shortly thereafter, actualities evolved into newsreels and short entertainments in the form of songs, in which case audiences would see a performer on-screen and hear the song either from a live person or a phonograph recording, and attractions, a form of actualities that were staged and edited for effect. The production and exhibition of these early one-reelers was usually done by the same person, oftentimes an itinerant European who in many cases also imported and exhibited films from Europe and to a lesser extent from the United States. As Paranaguá has noted, the introduction of film in Latin American is a story of mimetism (especially of the Lumière model) and of who did what first.

TRANSITION (1908–15)

The emergence around 1908 of profitable short- and medium-length spectacles is linked to the creation of large, stable, and differentiated audiences. This is the period, for example, when the first permanent "movie palaces" were built in major cities such as Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Mexico City, and Havana, and when the marketing of films through radio and newspapers became an industry. It is also the period when exhibition expanded beyond urban centers to include rural areas, a development that would have repercussions in the representation of the dichotomy between city and countryside. In terms of production, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico experienced what some historians retrospectively call the belle époque, or golden age, of their respective silent film histories. In Brazil, for example, production went from an average of twelve films (mostly documentaries) per year until 1907, to suddenly an average of 169 films (again, mostly documentaries) per year between 1908 and 1911. Similar bursts of production occurred in Argentina between 1916 and 1919, and in Mexico between 1918 and 1923, a delay that can be attributed to the disruption in production caused by the Revolution. In terms of aesthetics, the term belle époque is also a fitting qualifier of the films of this period, as they often emulate what Giorgio Bertellini calls, in reference to the extremely popular Italian films of the time, a "symbolist film culture that relied on melodramatic acting styles, archaic settings, decadent mise-en-scène, and liberty-style art decorations."

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Excerpted from Latin American Cinema by Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez. Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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