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Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 506–511, 2006 Vino todo el pueblo : Notes on Monsiváis, Mexican Movies and Movie-Going ANDREA NOBLE University of Durham, UK My title takes its cue from Carlos Monsiváis ’ s essay, ‘ Vino todo el pueblo y no cupo en la pantalla (Notas sobre el público del cine mexicano) ’ ( Monsiváis and Bonfi l, 1994), which was abridged and translated by John King as ‘ All the People Came and Did Not Fit Onto the Screen ’ ( Paranaguá, 1995). Like many Anglo-American scholars of Mexican cultural studies, over the years, I have found myself returning repeatedly to Monsiváis ’ s work in general and, in my work on Mexican cinema, to his extensive writings on this medium. Allusive and aphoristic, focused on the minutiae of everyday life, as Linda Egan notes (2001: 36), Monsiváis ’ s work bears comparison with that of Walter Benjamin. For those in search of an empirically-grounded account of Mexican social and cultural real- ity, erected on the scaffolding of a ‘ proper ’ scholarly apparatus, Monsiváis falls short of the mark. For those prepared to run with the ambiguities and subjectivism inherent in the position of the eye witness, to work with suggestion and evocation in the form of the witty subtitle or the bullet-pointed note, Monsiváis has much to offer. Indeed, the pithy and dense title, ‘ Vino todo el pueblo y no cupo en la pantalla ’ , with its multiple resonances, is richly emblematic of the thrust of Monsiváis ’ s writings. On one level, its playful hyperbole – not just some, but all the people came – conjures up the packed movie theatres of the 1940s at the height of the so-called Golden Age of Mexican cinema – roughly from 1939 to 1955 – with audiences eager to see themselves refl ected on the screen. At the same time, it neatly signals the importance of the cinema ’ s function as a cultural mediator that hinges on a dynamic relationship between the screen and the spectator. The cinematic experience promoted spectatorial identifi cations with a repertoire of new and traditional images associated with lo mexicano , where the national infl ections of spectatorship are underlined by the word ‘ pueblo ’ . In what follows, Monsiváis ’ s essay – and particularly its title – are the starting point for my own brief notes on how the work of the cultural commentator provides an insight into Mexico, its movies, their spectators, and what it might mean both to ‘ fi t ’ and ‘ not fi t ’ onto the screen. All the People Came … Who were all the people? In a classic and often cited vignette from the literature of the Mexican revolution (in fact Monsiváis himself cites it at length), in El águila y la © The Author 2006 Journal compilation © 2006 Society for Latin American Studies. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 506 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Vino todo el pueblo: Notes on Monsiváis, Mexican Movies and Movie-Going serpiente (1928) Martín Luis Guzmán recalls an early audience of the moving image. The scene involves a group of revolutionary soldiers at the Convention of Aguascali- entes in 1914, who have gathered to view a newsreel projected onto a makeshift screen. Chronicling the historical events that were unfolding around the assembled revolution- aries and focusing particularly on the leading fi gures of those events, in the newsreel one revolutionary caudillo in particular, Constitutionalist leader Venustiano Carranza, elicits a memorable reaction: Don Venustiano, por supuesto, era el personaje que más a menudo volvía a la pantalla. Sus apariciones, más y más frecuentes, habían venido haciéndose, como debía esperarse, más y más ingratas para el público convencionista. De los siseos mezclados con aplauso en las primeras veces en que se le vio, se fue pasando a los siseos francos; luego, al escándalo. (Guzmán, 1928: 353) Having arrived late to the packed venue, for lack of space Guzmán and his two companions are forced to watch the newsreel from behind the curtain that serves as a screen. The newsreel is, however, cut short abruptly, for the makeshift auditorium degenerates into pandemonium: Y de ese modo, de etapa en etapa, se alcanzó al fi n, al proyectarse la escena en que se veía a Carranza entrando a caballo en la ciudad de México, una especie de batahola de infi erno que culminó en dos disparos. Ambos proyectiles atravesaron el telón, exactamente en el lugar donde se dibujaba el pecho del Primer Jefe, y vinieron a incrustarse en la pared, una a medio metro por encima de Lucio Blanco, y el otro, más cerca aún entre la cabeza de Domínguez y la mía. (Guzmán, 1928: 353) Although the moving image arrived in Mexico shortly after its invention in 1895, with President Porfi rio Díaz a privileged early spectator and star attraction of the early moving image, the unruly bunch shooting at the makeshift screen evolved into the pueblo , the subject of Monsiváis ’ s essay, that in time learned to distinguish between what was on that screen and real life, fl ocking to the movies in the 1940s. The 1910 revolution may have been riven with factional strife and lacking a coherent ideological agenda, but its undisputed achievements were two-fold. Porfi rio Díaz was deposed and, thanks to unprecedented levels of mass mobilisation, the pueblo was born, not as an elite, bourgeois concept, but as a popular construct em- bodied in the people. As is well known, even as the revolution gave rise to new popular forces that entered the national arena, it also engendered an authoritarian political culture and party of state – eventually to be named the Partido Revolucio- nario Institucional – through which the new ruling elites sought to harness the masses to the strongly centralist project of creating a nation-state. In the process, the masses needed to be educated, secularised, and to learn to identify with the concept of the ‘ nation ’ , whose manifestations, in turn, had to refl ect the masses back to themselves. © The Author 2006. Journal compilation © 2006 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 25, No. 4 507 Andrea Noble The forces of capitalist modernisation made themselves felt in the aftermath of the revolution with the vertiginous changes that began to transform lived human ex- perience. The fabric of traditional life had been violently ripped asunder during the armed struggle; after the confl ict, these changes continued apace with mass migration, as Mexico made the transition from a predominantly rural to urban entity. It is esti- mated, for example, that Mexico City increased by nearly 500 per cent between 1920 and 1950 ( Levi, 2001: 334 ). Those who fl ocked to the cities not only had to learn to adapt to different social mores and customs that came with loosened family bonds, which wrought changes particularly in the sphere of gender relations. They also en- countered the accelerated speed of modern life as trams and automobiles replaced non-mechanised modes of transport, cityscapes were transformed and movie theatres took the place of carpas [big tops] as the most popular spaces of entertainment. Learning to Fit on the Screen For Monsiváis, as for many commentators on the medium, in the early twentieth cen- tury the cinema was a prime emblem and crucible of modernity and the processes of modernisation. On the one hand, it embodied the latest and ever-evolving technology, with fi lms produced on an industrial scale for mass consumption. On the other, it was where one went to learn how to be modern. If the cinema was intimately bound up with modernity and the processes of modernisation and had overtly didactic qualities, in Mexico as in the rest of Latin America, those involved in the incipient national industries in the fi rst instance looked north to Hollywood for instruction. That this was the case, is made apparent in a wonderful quotation by Mexican actress Andrea Palma, whose role in Arcady Boytler ’ s classic brothel melodrama La mujer del puerto (1933) was modelled on Marlene Dietrich, whom she had observed at close quarters during a spell working in California: En Hollywood, yo llegaba a las nueve, me sentaba en el set y miraba todo para que no se me fuera detalle. Eso sí. Cuando regresé sabía más que nadie: de pestañas postizas, de caminar, de los ángulos correctos. A Marlene le ponían un espejo enfrente de la escena para poderse observar y lo mismo hice yo cuando llegué a México … Aquello fue más que una escuela para mí. (De la Vega, 1992: 128 ) Palma ’ s mimicry of Dietrich serves as an apt metaphor for Mexico – Hollywood relations in the early years of the twentieth century. Mexican cinema ’ s refl ection and refraction of Hollywood are central to an understanding of its development and indeed the development of Latin American cinema more generally. Or, as Monsiváis puts it: Para que las fórmulas del cine norteamericano puedan asimilarse y “ nacionalizarse ” , el requisito previo es el avasallamiento. En América Latina el público se deslumbra con los Monstruos Sagrados, las escenografías, la técnica de Hollywood. El close-up es el inicio mistifi cado de la reivindicación © The Author 2006. Journal compilation © 2006 Society for Latin American Studies 508 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 25, No. 4 Vino todo el pueblo: Notes on Monsiváis, Mexican Movies and Movie-Going femenina, y las Diosas de la Pantalla son por así decirlo apariciones en un sentido muy próximo al del misticismo. Las actrices de los años treintas ubican sin difi cultades a sus role-models, y verbigracia, Andrea Palma, que en Hollywood hacía sombreros, en México se propone emular a Marlene Dietrich, y rediseña su rostro para volverlo misterioso y distante.

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