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Making Cinelandia: American Films and Mexican Film Culture before the Golden Age ‐ by Serna, Laura I.

2016; Wiley; Volume: 35; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/blar.12453

1470-9856

Luisela Alvaray,

Media, Journalism, and Communication History

Serna, Laura I. (2014) Making Cinelandia: American Films and Mexican Film Culture before the Golden Age, Duke University Press ( Durham, NC), xv + 336 pp. £65.00 hbk. Laura Isabel Serna utilises the phrase ‘making cinelandia’ to refer to the film culture generated around the consumption of American films by Mexican audiences on both sides of the border. It is a term that comprises the transnational interactions and exchanges, during the following two decades after the Mexican Revolution, through which Mexicans appropriated foreign cinematic texts and generated a distinct national film culture. In this way, she sets her research apart from other English-language investigations that have dealt with the same time period of Mexican film history which, to a large extent, have privileged the site of film production. The protagonists of Serna's story are, as she describes, ‘anonymous fans, exhibitors, municipal inspectors, reformers and journalists’. These are the people reacting and producing public discourses around cinema, which tended to be far from uniform and many times ambivalent and contradictory. However, it was around these subjects and around the activities connected to film-going that new ideas about what it meant to be modern in Mexico started to emerge. Many Mexicans embraced the values present in US films – such as new gendered constructions, forms of sexuality and class norms – to perform a fresh sense of independence, very much linked to the desire of ‘becoming modern’. Countering the notion of cultural imperialism, Serna contends that Mexicans' encounters with US films contributed in many ways to the affirmation of a new sense of the national. For instance, the promotional practices and the local live performances that accompanied film exhibitions were factors that localised film viewing and provided audiences with new ways of seeing. On the other hand, the reaction of Mexican governments and local organisations against Hollywood's stereotypes of Mexicans fortified a national imaginary that was already being negotiated through the post-revolutionary cultural policies. In the United States, discriminatory practices towards Mexican migrant communities only confirmed racialisation on the screen. Considering work done by Chicana/o studies scholars, Serna argues that cinema's exclusionary practices helped to shape a transnational Mexican audience. Bigotry became a common point of reference for Mexicans across the US-Mexico border and, consequently, was one of the factors that shaped a shared sense of national identity. The book is structured in two parts. The first one, ‘The Yanqui invasion’, traces the hold that American film companies had on the Mexican market during the 1920s, displacing European dominance before World War I. Despite the numeric majority of US films on Mexican screens, their values were engulfed in a strong post-revolutionary nation-building project. It also evidences how film theatres (modern spaces themselves) provided opportunities to experience modern forms of sociability on an off the screen. The Mexican government considered film exhibition a paramount national industry and used moviegoing for social and moral education. Finally it provides a glimpse into how fan culture and the popular press were spaces that served to negotiate consumer response and national identity vis-à-vis foreign films. The second part of the book, ‘Border Crossings’, examines the social anxieties and pressures that film-going exerted over Mexican women, including those whose fandom would take them to migrate north of the border. It also follows how the Mexican government regulated US films according to the public image of Mexico that the films portrayed. In this way, nationalist concerns, rather that moral ones, guided the hand of official censors. Finally, it deals with how discriminatory practices in the United States segregated Mexican migrants even at exhibition sites, reinforcing thus their ties to Mexico and Mexican film culture. Utilising extensive sources from libraries and archives both in Mexico and the United States, Serna meticulously recreates a cultural history of film viewing in ‘Greater Mexico’, one that has tended to be seldom analysed in canonic accounts of Mexican film history. Her work also forwards the analysis of the re-appropriation of Hollywood films by migrant and international audiences. Therefore, it is a contribution to the understanding of actual ways in which imaginary communities are formed. Grounding her statements on the abundant evidence collected, Serna avoids easy speculation and, contrarily, makes consistent claims about the role of cinema-going and film culture in the formation of Mexican vernacular modernity and the new sense of the national during the decades before the coming of sound. It is, indeed, a seminal book to comprehend Mexico's modern and national pathos, and why the Mexican film industry became the most important one in Latin American in the following decades.