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

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 revolutionaries 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 embodied 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 forces of capitalist modernisation made themselves felt in the aftermath of the revolution with the vertiginous changes that began to transform lived human experience. 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 encountered 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 century 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. ( Monsiváis, 2000: 56 )

If a host of Mexican actors, directors, cinematographers and scriptwriters learnt their craft in the USA (to name but a few of the most famous: Dolores del Río, Emilio Fernández and Gabriel Figueroa), their ‘ nationalised formulae’ , combined with Hol- lywood products themselves, in turn provided induction into the mysteries of modernity for Mexican cinema-goers. Accounts of the practice of early consumption of the moving image suggest that Mexicans of all classes and ethnic afﬁ liations embraced the new technology with bedazzled excitement. What is more, this new form of entertainment displayed certain, limited, democratising tendencies that were unprecedented in the sphere of Mexican cultural consumption which, prior to the advent of the moving image, was organised along starkly classist lines. Where the Church had been one of the few public spaces in which different sectors of society would have encountered one another in their leisure time, the cinema presented a new point of contact in this in- tensely hierarchical society. Aurelio de los Reyes invokes an early audience scenario that reveals that cinema-going was a practice that initially at least, not only cut across class divisions, but also ethnic and gender boundaries:

El sueño invadía a todas las clases sociales y no era extraño ver en los cinematógrafos a señoras de vaporosa ‘ toilette’ , elevado sombrero de plumas, guantes y abanico, sentadas al lado de una señora con trenza suelta o de columpio, rebozo de bolita y criatura en los brazos. En los cinematógrafos la sociedad se mezclaba democráticamente. ( De los Reyes, 1993: 91 )

Even as the Church had previously provided a space of encounter for the different classes, sexes and ethnic groups, the practice of cinema-going enjoyed an equivocal relationship with this colonial institution: it represented both a rupture and a continu- ity. Monsiváis captures this fundamental ambiguity in a subsection of the ‘ Vino todo el pueblo ’ essay signiﬁ cantly titled ‘ Los templos del celuloide’ :

Es sólo entretenimiento, se dice, pero en todas partes el cine es un agente extraordinario de la secularización. [ …] Fomentador de su propia cultura, el cine seculariza, sólo para diseminar un nuevo tipo de Milagros, la psicología de sus espectadores (maravillas ya no computables por rezos o estampas piadosas, sino por murmullos en la oscuridad y fotos de Las Estrellas com- pradas al salir del espectáculo.) (Monsiváis and Bonﬁ l, 1994: 74 )

Both the images that played out on the screen and the kinds of practices associated with the ritual outing to the cinema were devoted to the new religion of progress

associated with capitalist modernisation. For the recent migrant to the metropolis, family melodramas such as Nosotros los pobres (dir. Ismael Rodríguez, 1948), starring the immensely popular Pedro Infante, offered an opportunity to identify with the trials and tribulations resulting from life in the urban environment and its new patterns of existence and social and sexual behaviours. Or, as Monsiváis puts it in the title of another essay in A través del espejo , this time specifi cally on melodrama: ‘ Se sufre, pero se aprende’ . At the same time, cinema-going, in these transitional years, offered the kind of communal experience that albeit momentarily (three fi lms for a peso that lasted fi ve hours) substituted for that which had been left behind, ‘ el sentido de la intimidad dentro de la multitud, la pertenencia al todo del que se es una porción di- vertida y relajienta’ ( Monsiváis, 1990: 36). But if both the medium and the messages were new, the (now moving) image played a time-honoured role. During the colonial period, the painted sacred image had served to colonise and Christianise the gaze of Spain’ s newly acquired indigenous subjects, mediating across the chasms of culture, religion and language; in the face of the high illiteracy rate of post-revolutionary Mex- ico, the cinema performed a similar function. If, during the colonial period, converting to Christianity offered the promise of redemption in the afterlife, converting to the dream of progress through belief in the miracles of modernity – whatever the sacrifi ces – potentially offered redemption in the here and now (or at least later).

Not Fitting Onto the Screen

What then might it mean not to fi t onto the screen? The period known as the Golden Age of Mexican cinema was more than a simple Golden Age of production. To be sure, fi lm production increased signifi cantly throughout the 1940s, rising from 38 features in 1941, to 82 in 1945, and reaching a record 123 in 1950. It was also a mythical moment of cinematic consumption: a moment at which ‘ all the people’ – or at least more than before or since – went to the movies and, in so doing, participated in the everyday rituals of belonging to the modernising nation. This was undeniably a novel phenomenon. For the fi rst time in the history of the cinema, spectators were able to enjoy a reasonably sustained, regular repertoire of fi lms in their own language, featuring local songs and music, dealing with issues specifi c to national cultural iden- tity, which were embodied by a range of stars that were fast becoming household names. Cinema mediated the effects of modernity by providing its audiences with models of modern values with which to identify and which were, moreover, refl ected in the urban landscapes, technologies and patterns of consumption that played out on the screen. But modernity was much more than an image on a screen. In addition to what fi lms showed, a key facet of cinema ’s mediation of modernity resided in the way it opened up hitherto ‘ unperceived modes of sensory perception and experience’ ( Hansen, 2000: 344). That is, modernity was also registered in the shifts that occurred in modes of experiencing the world visually. Thus one crude measure of that which changed in the early twentieth century would be to compare the early revolutionary audience of the moving image sketched by Guzmán with its mid-century counterpart. The

© The Author 2006. Journal compilation © 2006 Society for Latin American Studies 510 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 25, No. 4 Vino todo el pueblo: Notes on Monsiváis, Mexican Movies and Movie-Going

revolutionaries, it will be recalled, issued hisses followed by gunshots at the appear- ance of Venustiano Carranza on screen in 1914. Meanwhile, ‘ Mexicans in the 1950s had not completely settled on proper movie house etiquette: one fan magazine reported on a 1956 controversy over whether or not to applaud’ (Rubenstein, 2001: 217). That audiences in the 1950s debated whether to applaud at the screen rather than shoot at it as their revolutionary predecessors had done is, then, one indicator of the shifts in sensory perception that had taken place. It is an interpretation of modernity understood not in terms of changes in attitudes and behaviours, nor in terms of the visible signs of progress such as the bustling metropolitan centres, nor the dark nocturnal centres of the brothel-cabarets. Modernity is both what all the people saw, but also importantly how they saw. It both ﬁ ts onto and exceeds the screen of representation.

References

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