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Melodrama at the Margins: Poverty, Politics, and Profits in ‘Golden Age’ Venezuelan Cinema

2017; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 112; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mlr.2017.0058

2222-4319

South Asian Cinema and Culture

Tracing the 'Golden Age' collaborations between Mexican, Argentine and Venezuelan film studios, this article analyses La Balandra Isabel llegó esta tarde (Carlos Hugo Christensen, 1949) and Caín adolescente (Román Chalbaud, 1959) as the fruits of early efforts to establish a film industry in Caracas.Bookending the 1948-1958 military dictatorship, each film mediates local anxieties surrounding urbanization within the framework of melodrama that was predominant in 1940s Latin American cinema.Focusing on the film's distinct mediations of intersections between race, class and gender, I argue that La Balandra Isabel and Caín adolescente negotiate the rise of the popular according to the conflicting ideologies that shaped their production in Venezuela. Melodrama at the Margins:Poverty, Politics and Profits in 'Golden Age' Venezuelan CinemaIn recent years, scholars of Latin American cinema have revisited the so-called 'Golden Age' of melodrama, used to denote the boom of cinematic production between the 1930s and 50s, as a previously underestimated site of transnational contact among filmmakers, actors and consumers.Against understandings of Golden Age productions as 'imitative of Hollywood, unrealistic, alienating and sentimental', 1 made in isolation from an emerging global filmic industry, more recent research has suggested the international collaborations that took place during the Golden Age between studios in Mexico, the US and, to a lesser extent, Argentina, laid the ground for future cross-border alliances that would bridge the Río Grande and draw mass audiences from across the region. 2This, in turn, contributed to a complex and dynamic cinematic movement, notwithstanding charges of simplistic plot lines and moralistic judgements, that signalled the emergence of massproduced culture in the context of modernisation.Although highly valuable in evaluating the origins of a multinational industry driven by efforts to universalise cinematic production and maximise its appeal among a growing body of spectators, this focus unintentionally obscures some of the post-War collaborative work undertaken in areas lacking structural and financial support for local filmmakers, where ambitious interregional productions were not always mediated by Hollywood studios.One such location is Venezuela, where, in the 1940s and 50s, aspiring entrepreneurs and 1 Ana María López, '"Tears and Desire": Women and Melodrama in the "Old" Mexican Cinema' in Mediating Two