Cinema in Latin America

j o h n k i n g 12 Cinema in Latin America Dazzled by so many marvellous inventions, the people of Macondo did not know where their amazement began . They became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theatre . for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortunes tears of affliction had been shed would appear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one.1 In this passage from the novel Cien anos˜ de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), Gabriel García Marquez´ depicts the impact of ‘modernity’ on the previously isolated town of Macondo. New technologies of light, speed and sound – ‘so many marvellous inventions’ – are brought in on what is described as an ‘innocent’ yellow train, though this innocence is revealed to have more sinister implications as the imperial powers, in the form of the banana company, soon arrive and take charge of the region. A local merchant offers the first movie projection in town, with films and equipment bought in from outside: the very technology of cinema, its cost and sophistication, is seen to reflect and exacerbate the unequal development between ‘peripheral’ places like Macondo and the metropolitan centres. The new audiences would gradually learn the conventions of documentary and narrative cinema, but the immediate impact of the medium was thrilling, ‘dazzling’, ‘amazing’. The people of Macondo have an immediate empathy with filmic melodrama – and melodrama would be one of the main structuring forces of Latin American cinema – but find the developing ‘star’ system, with celebrated actors in different roles, somewhat less believable. Cinema, which Macondo’s mayor calls ‘a machine of illusions’, is here seen as a most powerful form of entertainment, instruction but also obfuscation. Films Cinema in Latin America 283 mainly come from abroad, although local merchants like Crespi, would realize that they could sometimes increase their prosperity not just as importers and distributors, but also as producers of films. Such adven- turers, who would seek to develop national and regional projects, to tell individual and collective stories in a market that would soon become dominated by Hollywood, people the history of more than one hundred years of cinema in Latin America. The silent era Within very few months of the first projections of the Lumiere` brothers in Paris in December 1895, Lumiere’s` cameramen had found their way by boat and rail to the major capital cities of Latin America. By August 1896, C. F. Bon Bernard and Gabriel Veyre were already showing the president of Mexico, Porfirio Díaz, the new moving images and were filming the president and his family and entourage. From there the rail networks could take agents to outlying cities and provinces: screenings were reported all over Mexico by early 1898. One of the most successful films projected was Meli´ es’s` Arrivee´ d’un train and local cameramen throughout the region would soon be taking pictures of their own trains arriving at different mainline stations, one of a number of defining, foundational, images that melded progress, movement, technology and invention. A traveller to Brazil wrote in 1917: ‘Sandwiched in between business, art, press, politics, are the omnipresent and irrepressible moving picture theatres, which here in Rio de Janeiro, as in every South American city and town from the top of the Andes to Patagonian Punto Arenas, give evidence by their number and popularity of the picture age in which we live.’2 Cinemas gradually replaced the more itinerant forms of exhibition, where a cameraman would set up his own tent as viewing area, or else project at vaudeville shows, in the carpas or tent theatres that flourished in working-class districts. What was the viewing on offer? This consisted almost exclusively of foreign films, from the early newsreels and actualites´ , to the narrative cinema of French and Italian melodrama that dominated world markets up to the 1910s. From the mid-1910s, once the disputes of the Patents War had been resolved in the American film industry, and taking advantage of the near paralysis of European production in the First World War, Hollywood successfully invaded and took over world markets. US films could achieve such dominance because they generally covered costs in the home market, which contained about half of the world’s movie theatres, and could thus be sold cheaply abroad. 284 Companion to Modern Latin American Culture The stars and the exotic locations of Hollywood films soon appeared in photo-journals and fan magazines all over Latin America. If we agree with Mexican critic Carlos Monsivais´ that Latin American audiences went to the cinema not just to dream, but also to learn how to behave and think in modern ways, in a secular world, then the early, and still dominant, teacher was Hollywood.3 The space for the growth of Latin American cinema in this period would be found in newsreels and documentaries, covering areas of local public and private life that international cinema would not be much concerned with: regional themes, sporting competitions, military parades. They reflected the self-images of different societies, especially the world of the aristocracy: its fashions and power and its ease in the developing cities and in impressive rural landscapes. The cinema played a key role in imagining and depicting the ‘modern’ nation, as the many documentaries throughout the region celebrating the Centenary of Independence from Spain in 1910 would attest. Only in very exceptional circumstances would foreign newsmen or cameramen become interested in filming in Latin America. One notable exception was during the Mexican Revolution, 1911–17, when US journalists and film crews vied to enlist in the armed struggle and follow the armies of the revolutionary generals. Pancho Villa became the first major star of the screen by signing an exclusive contract with Mutual Film Corporation for $25,000. This sum guaranteed that Villa would try to give the cameramen optimum filming conditions by fighting and scheduling executions in daylight wherever possible, and by agreeing to rerun battles if satisfactory images had not been obtained in the heat and dust of the battle. The US interest in the Revolution, however, should not be seen to overshadow the pioneering work done by Mexican cameramen during this time. Some of the best local cineastes, Salvador Toscano, the Alva brothers and Enrique Rosas, to name the most prominent, captured images of the revolutionary struggle. In other countries, newsworthy events also attracted the film maker. In Brazil, for example, there were a number of reconstructions of notable stories, sensational crimes (Os estranguladores [The Stranglers], directed by Antonio Leal in 1908) or more quirky tales such as O comprador de ratas ([The Rat Buyer], produced by Antonio Leal, 1908) where a government attempt to overcome disease by offering to buy dead rats leads to the local population in Rio breeding rats to sell to the government.4 In 1918 Enrique Rosas made El automobil´ gris [The Grey Car], reconstructing the Cinema in Latin America 285 daring robberies of a gang that had operated in Mexico City in 1915. Rosas had earlier filmed the executions of several of the gang members. The documentary style that had dominated in Mexico in the revolutionary period was combined with the conventions of early Hollywood gangster movies – including a number of impressive car chases – to great effect. The telling of ‘national’ tales, or the adaptation of literary classics would form the basis of the first, albeit rudimentary, attempts at narrative cinema. In Argentina, Mario Gallo made a number of short features around key events of Argentine Independence (La Revolucion´ de Mayo [The May Revolution], 1909; El fusilamiento de Dorrego [The Shooting of Dorrego], 1910), while Humberto Cairo, in Nobleza gaucha [Gaucho Nobility] (1915) would take up the symbol of the gaucho, the Argentine plainsman. As other chapters in this volume explain, the gaucho had developed throughout the nineteenth century as a literary symbol and as a protagonist of popular theatre, and was, by the 1910s, being transformed from an outsider into the main representative of the ‘soul’ of the Argentine nation, a figure that predated the mass immigration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The gaucho figure also illustrates how local cinema was developing by incorporating different culture traditions, in this case literature and theatre melodrama. Another story, the very stuff of melodrama, would tell of the difficult negotiations between traditional values and modernity. In the lyrics of tango, a dance that also became a song form in the 1910s, a (usually male) protagonist is often stranded in the world of modernity, singing nostalgically of the folks back home: his mother, his friends and his local neighbourhood, the barrio, which is the site of homespun wisdom. By contrast, an ingenu(e)´ is propelled into this modern world, often falling into the snares of corruption and prosti- tution. Even before the advent of sound, film makers such as Jose´ ‘El Negro’ Ferreyra would set a number of films in the arrabales or outskirts of Buenos Aires, one of the main sites of tango, and could on occasion persuade live orchestras to accompany the film. One film, La muchacha del arrabal [The Girl from the Arrabal ] (1922), led to the recording of a notable tango of the same name, revealing once more the interpene- tration of different areas of the culture industry as sound recordings and the growth of radio were helping to consolidate and reflect popular tastes. The film heritage of Latin America in the silent era has been almost completely lost through neglect, indifference or lack of resources, which 286 Companion to Modern Latin American Culture have been compounded by disasters of fire and flooding hitting key archives in, for example, Mexico City and Buenos Aires.

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