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Making Cinelandia: American Films and Mexican Film Culture before the Golden Age

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2874899

1527-1900

Charles V. Heath,

Media, Journalism, and Communication History

Laura Isabel Serna's stated intention in Making Cinelandia is not to analyze film texts and production but to examine the silent-era workings of exhibition and the social practices of moviegoing in both Mexico and Mexican migrant communities in the United States. Besides, many of the titles discussed in the present work are extremely rare, if not lost. Serna, assistant professor of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California, overcomes the dearth of extant films by presenting the reader with fascinating extrafilmic materials from both Mexican and US film culture in the 1920s. Making Cinelandia transports its reader to new physical spaces and reveals a material culture perhaps as interesting as the rare or lost films themselves.The consolidation of North American control of the Mexican film market in the wake of the armed revolution (ca. 1917) was characterized as yet another “yanqui invasion.” Serna describes the early film studios' flexibility and adaptations in pursuit of specialized global audiences, as she does in a case study of United Artists in Mexico and the studio's interactions with its representatives there. Though the attitudes of the North American players were sometimes racist and paternalist, and in spite of nationalist sentiments and cultural concerns, by the 1920s film exhibition in Mexico had become a legitimate and profitable business, not only for the “invaders” but also for some Mexicans. The radicalization of the Mexican film exhibition workforce, expressed in a new postrevolutionary language, is but one surprising example of Serna's extrafilmic discourse.Arresting images and detailed descriptions draw the reader into the physical spaces of cinema, some quite refined, others more haphazardly constructed, such as a molina de maiz that screened films in Oaxaca. Serna argues that in urban settings, the physical sites of cinema performed the “symbolic labor” of drawing together the disparate elements of Mexican society, though not by any means in an egalitarian arrangement (p. 58). The press and the revolutionary government celebrated the spaces as workshops where acceptable behaviors such as dressing appropriately, sitting still, and paying attention were learned. Source materials from Mexico City's Department of Public Diversions demonstrate that in movie houses the government attempted “to discipline and modernize Mexico's heterogeneous and often uncooperative public” (p. 73). The socialist government of the 1920s even went so far as to characterize poor cinema design in places like the Salon Rojo as a “means by which the interests of capital ‘defraud[ed] the public’ ” (p. 82).Concerns about female sexuality, consumption habits, and new mores are part and parcel of early cinema history. Serna examines the friction between Hollywood's new model of femininity and the demands of the (conservative and patriarchal) Mexican postrevolutionary state, and she poignantly rescues icons Colleen Moore and Honoria Suárez in an examination of la pelona (Mexico's version of the flapper). Faced with such concerns, along with growing outcries over racist portrayals of Mexicans on film, US film studios and the Mexican government, Serna argues, collaborated in order to not jeopardize box office receipts by provoking the wrath of conservatives or censors. However, the power and influence of the box office, coupled with the North American audiences' lack of objections to stereotypical Mexican characters, conspired to inhibit the creation of less offensive representations. Serna recovers the voices of Mexican diplomats abroad (voices deserving greater exposition in the historiography): some who decried unfair, racist representations, and others who lobbied and advocated on behalf of the film industry. Serna correctly identifies the contradictory, ambivalent, and hypocritical nature of censors, filmmakers, and the ostensible guardians of morality during cinema's early history.In her examination of extrafilmic texts, Serna's gifts as researcher and analyst shine. Discussions of rare literary, print, and fan culture artifacts fill the work. One such artifact is a series of essays entitled El mundo de las sombras:El cine por fuera y por dentro (The world of shadows: The cinema inside and out) by Mexican writer and cinema enthusiast Carlos Noriega Hope, which provided early film buffs in Mexico with a behind-the-scenes look at the film industry while also advancing a specific Mexican spectatorship. Crowning Serna's work is the rich and perceptive analysis of Los Angeles–based cinema columnist Gabriel Navarro's serialized novel of the tragedy that befalls a young Mexican girl with Hollywood dreams, La ciudad de irás y no volverás (The city of no return). At hand is an interesting and well-written text, an effective transnational history suitable for the Latin Americanist or film scholar, the graduate student of either field, and, one hopes, the wider world of film buffs.