Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building: National Sentiments, Transnational Realities, 1897–1940

Abstract

Naida García-Crespo's superb study of the confluence of early Puerto Rican cinema and the development of nationalism should interest a wide set of readers in the history of early cinema, Puerto Rican and Caribbean studies, and Latin American intellectual discourse during the early twentieth century. It provides both an excellent historiography of silent and sound films produced on the island before World War II and a treatise on how the idea of the Puerto Rican nation emerged as a “mediation among contradictory discourses” of nativist nationalism and cross-cultural, transnational, and colonial exchanges (p. 170).In her attempt to create something solid out of the otherwise spectral, García-Crespo faced two daunting challenges. On the one hand, only one feature film produced in Puerto Rico before 1940 still exists today—the 1934 Romance Tropical, which García-Crespo informs us is preserved in the University of California, Los Angeles, film archive (p. 177n2). On the other, the study of a national cinema usually implies the existence of an actual nation and an actual state; Puerto Rico, of course, transitioned from a colony of Spain to one of the United States during the period under review and remains today, in García-Crespo's term, a “stateless nation” (p. 9).She was able to overcome the first of these challenges thanks to a solid methodological grounding in the study of early film. Through an exhaustive study of archival and published primary sources—including movie scripts, newspaper and magazine reviews, business documents, government records, and ancestry work—García-Crespo re-creates both the narrative plotlines of several films and the institutional history of the nascent film industry in Puerto Rico. Following a recent trend in early film studies that considers distribution networks, viewership, and exhibition practices to be as important to the development of national cinema as auteurship and film production, she demonstrates that even notable failures produced long-term benefits to the Puerto Rican film industry. Both the Tropical Film Company (based in Ponce between 1916 and 1917) and Porto Rico Photoplays (which built a film studio in the Hato Rey neighborhood of San Juan in the early 1920s) reveal the kinds of transnational partnerships at the heart of Puerto Rican culture.Despite key differences, both of these short-lived production companies symbolize the creative use of transnational analysis that García-Crespo employs to overcome the second challenge mentioned above. The Tropical Film Company, which was founded by Rafael Colorado D'Assoy (a Spanish-born entrepreneur who first came to the island as a Spanish soldier in the Cuban-Spanish-American War of 1898) and Nemesio Canales and Luis Lloréns Torres (two elite intellectuals known for their involvement in the nationalist independence movement), deployed cinema as a Progressive Era tool of education and reform. In contrast, Porto Rico Photoplays was a business venture between the American filmmaker F. Eugene Farnsworth (who later became a leader of the Maine chapter of the Ku Klux Klan) and local elites such as San Juan businessman Enrique González Beltrán that sought to attract US capital and talent to the island. Although the Tropical Film Company also had commercial aims, it produced a wide array of narrative and documentary films such as Los funerales de Muñoz Rivera (1916). Porto Rico Photoplays produced just one film, a derivative romance with antimiscegenation themes called Tropical Love (1921).For each example, García-Crespo argues that we cannot read history backwards to see the birth of the Puerto Rican independista movement in the films of the Tropical Film Company or simply condemn the colonial commercialism of Porto Rico Photoplays. Rather, each exemplifies how under colonial contexts “the national and the transnational become so intricately connected . . . that delineation between the two becomes impossible” (p. 8). Each, she argues, demonstrates how ideas about the nation “emanated from both rejecting and embracing different transnational discourses about the island's image and place in the world” (p. 172).The book moves chronologically forward from the first film screenings in Latin America and the Caribbean in the late 1890s to the creation of the New Deal–inspired Division of Community Education (DIVEDCO) by the insular Puerto Rican government in the 1940s. Delightful stories about early Puerto Rican filmmaking (too many to detail here) are matched by astute analyses of how gendered and elite visions of the nation are at the root of both early cinema and the early nationalist project on the island.Readers of the Hispanic American Historical Review, however, might come away wishing that García-Crespo had expanded her analysis through more explicit comparisons with cinematic and nationalistic developments in other parts of Latin America. Despite its somewhat inward-looking approach (common in Puerto Rican studies), the book makes a substantial contribution to the study of early Puerto Rican cinema and culture. Serving as a counterweight to traditional national histories of early cinema, it would make a great addition to syllabi in global film courses as well.