Beneficent Cinema: State Formation, Elite Reproduction, and Silent Film in Uruguay, 1910s–1920s

Abstract

In her study of early cinema and modernity in Latin America, Ana López wrote: “Latin American modernity has been a global, intertextual experience, addressing impulses and models from abroad, in which every nation and region created, and creates, its own ways of playing with and at modernity.” Early Uruguayan cinema exemplifies this interaction of global phenomena with local realities and thus provides an instructive window onto some of the ways Latin Americans were “playing with and at modernity” in the early twentieth century. During that era, Uruguay emerged as Latin America’s first welfare state and a model of progressive reform in the region. The complexities of that transition are reflected in so-called cine de beneficencia (beneficent cinema), film made by and for social assistance organizations for fundraising and propaganda purposes. Film historian José Carlos Álvarez identifies beneficent cinema as “something that we think was purely Uruguayan, and specific to this era.”