Modernity at the Movies

During the early years of the twentieth century, the cinema offered urbanites the world over a key venue for engaging with modernity. In Latin America as elsewhere, the new technology thrilled audiences, spurring the emergence of local film industries. After World War I, Hollywood studios, backed by the US government, gained dominance over foreign markets, turning the cinema into a powerful vector of US cultural influence abroad. Scholars have examined early Latin American film industries in some detail, focusing particular attention on questions of genre and national identity. With her new book, Camila Gatica Mizala joins a smaller subset of scholars, including Laura Isabel Serna, Juan Sebastián Ospina León, and Sarah Ann Wells, who have charted the emergence of filmgoing cultures in Latin America. Focusing on Santiago and Buenos Aires from 1915 to 1945, Gatica Mizala generally downplays the usual turning points in most accounts of the period: the transition from silent film to sound as well as the advent of a major film industry in Argentina. Instead, she examines how theater owners, distributors, state regulators, and critics catered to the desire of santiaguinos and porteños to experience modernity at the movies.Gatica Mizala's study is based almost entirely on the large corpus of specialized cinema magazines that emerged in both cities. She mines these magazines both as sources of information about the movie business and as purveyors of ideas about the cinema. Along the way, she produces a host of novel insights about the specific, often very material concerns raised by the emergence of the cinema as a major pastime for a broad range of society.Each of the book's five chapters explores a particular aspect of moviegoers’ encounter with modernity. Chapter 1 examines cinema architecture, revealing how a satisfyingly modern experience at the movies required not just elegant architecture but also proper ventilation, heating, seats, and projection systems. In chapter 2, Gatica Mizala offers a close study of film pricing, charting debates over the relative advisability of cheap or expensive tickets as well as the evolution of practices like double bills. Chapter 3 is a study of the evolving regimes of film censorship in the two cities, and chapter 4 provides an account of what she calls the “social aspect” of the cinema—namely, the behaviors indulged in by patrons once the lights dimmed. The final chapter examines debates over translated subtitles and dubbing. Here, she reveals that nationalist concerns over language predated the transition to sound; even in the silent era, local observers worried over the quality and pedigree of the Spanish translations of intertitles.Modernity at the Movies will be an extremely useful contribution for film scholars and cultural historians of early twentieth-century Chile and Argentina. Through close reading of the film magazines and impressive attention to detail, Gatica Mizala uncovers many issues and debates that have not previously drawn scholarly attention. These include such practical concerns as the regular decline of filmgoing in the summer when movie theaters became too hot to sit in comfortably, the struggle to avoid desynchronization in the early years of sound technology, controversial local regulations regarding cinema closing time, the dangerous presence in theaters of men seeking to seduce women, and many, many others. It is not an exaggeration to say that there are such revelations on almost every page.The book's larger arguments are less successful. The claim that modernity was at stake in these debates over the movie business is convincing but not surprising. Gatica Mizala intends her dual-sited case study to be both transnational and comparative. Overall, though, she stresses the commonalities between Santiago and Buenos Aires. She mentions the key differences in size and ethnic composition as well as the fact that Argentina had a large domestic film industry whereas Chile did not, but she emphasizes that both cities developed very similar film discourses. In places, her comparative lens leads her to discuss the cities as if they each had a singular film culture and to give short shrift to internal distinctions of class and gender. For example, she discusses the crucial distinction between downtown movie “palaces” and less expensive neighborhood theaters, but she does not offer anything like a systematic account of how different classes experienced the movies (p. 37). Likewise, she describes how some magazines catered specifically to female readers and how censors in both countries worried about the vulnerabilities of women, but she stops well short of an analysis of the gendered dynamics of moviegoing. Notwithstanding these shortcomings, the book will be of interest to scholars in the field and will undoubtedly suggest many avenues for future research

Art · Art history · Humanities · Modernity · Movie theater · Political science · Cinema and Media Studies · Cinema History and Criticism · Law · Photographic and Visual Arts