“An ambitious and accomplished book by a serious scholar who devoted a decade to the close reading of more than fifty films from different countries, thereby giving full sense to the term Latin American cinema. Starting with the silent era and finishing with the emergence of filmmaking by women directors, Paul Schroeder Rodríguez maps out an important artistic expression that is national, regional, and global at the same time.”- Jorge Ruffinelli, Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Stanford University

“A cogently written history eloquently illustrated with case examples of various films in each period.”- Tamara L. Falicov, author of The Cinematic Tango: Contemporary Argentine Film “Schroeder Rodríguez’s comparative framework is an important contribution to the study of Latin American cinema, global cinema, and Latin American history. Read against key discourses of modernity in Latin America and nascent and industrial histories of the cinema, the work reveals that Latin American cinema has always been part of global cinematic flows.”- Cristina Venegas, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez is Professor and Chair of the Spanish Department at Amherst College. The author of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea: The Dialectics of a Filmmaker, he has published extensively on Latin American cinema in leading academic journals.

Latin American Cinema

A Comparative History

By Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-28863-8

Contents

Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
Organization of the Book,
Latin America’s Multiple Modernities,
PART ONE. SILENT CINEMA,
1 Conventional Silent Cinema,
2 Avant-Garde Silent Cinema,
PART TWO. STUDIO CINEMA,
3 Transition to Sound,
4 Birth and Growth of an Industry,
5 Crisis and Decline of Studio Cinema,
PART THREE. NEOREALISM AND ART CINEMA,
6 Neorealism and Art Cinema,
PART FOUR. NEW LATIN AMERICAN CINEMA,
7 New Latin American Cinema’s Militant Phase,
8 New Latin American Cinema’s Neobaroque Phase,
PART FIVE. CONTEMPORARY CINEMA,
9 Collapse and Rebirth of an Industry,
10 Latin American Cinema in the Twenty-First Century,
Conclusion: A Triangulated Cinema,
Appendix: Discourses of Modernity in Latin America,
Notes,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

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,