Struggles for Recognition: Melodrama and Visibility in Latin American Silent Film

Abstract

Hollywood's growing influence in Latin America in the early twentieth century coincided and intermingled with an expanding US economic and military presence in the region. Yet at the same time, a nascent silent film industry challenged US hegemony and made visible the diverse political, cultural, and social characteristics of the region. Juan Sebastián Ospina León's Struggles for Recognition: Melodrama and Visibility in Latin American Silent Film is an ambitious, South-to-North hemispheric look at the intersections of silent cinema, melodrama, and modernity in the 1910s and 1920s. In addition to representing a significant contribution to the still-understudied topic of early cinema in Latin America, Struggles for Recognition enriches our understanding of modernity, gender, and political culture in places as distinct as Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico during this era.Researching silent film presents significant challenges in terms of sources and compels scholars to grapple with the techniques and politics of film preservation and restoration. Many of these early films have been fully or partially lost, while others have been reconstructed in ways that may not have been fully faithful to the originals. Contemporary film magazines provide insight into how films were promoted and received and on the way that local film production, distribution, and promotion were structured. We learn, for example, that the early Argentine film business favored films of US origin, while their Colombian counterparts' orientation and connections meant that European (especially Italian) films were the dominant fare in early cinema there. Finally, surviving print materials related to a film's production may speak to what the film looked like or how it was made.Following an introduction discussing the main themes and elaborating the links between melodrama and Latin America's “multiple modernities,” the first chapter sets the stage for silent cinema during the Great War era, with an emphasis on Argentina and Colombia. The pair of chapters that follow, which focus on these two countries respectively, are the strongest of the book. We are first introduced to “cinedrama porteño,” with roots in the melodrama of Argentine tango and sainete and typically set in popular locales like the conventillo, the cabaret, and the department store. In keeping with melodramatic templates, a good deal of attention is given to the strivings, debasement, and exploitation of workingwomen (including prostitutes). In contrast and reflecting the “Conservative Hegemony” that marked Colombian politics during this era as well as a very different relationship with the United States, the chapter on Colombian silents provides a fascinating discussion of breakout films in which Catholicism and local elites were visible in abundance and of a film industry that was more anti–United States than Argentina's.The next pair of chapters look at examples of silent cinema in Orizaba, Mexico, and two films made in or focused on the United States. The Mexican films, centered on subjects such as a train robbery and drug abuse, reflected the disruptions of the Mexican Revolution and a shared border with the United States, presenting a very different kind of melodramatic subject matter. The Mexico chapter also devotes some attention to the important topic of film restoration and reconstruction and the challenges of the silent film archive. This is an important and relevant discussion, but the link with wider themes of melodrama and modernity is not so clearly delineated. In the final chapter we are introduced to Charge of the Gauchos (Una nueva y gloriosa nación), a 1928 film written and produced in the United States by a Spanish Argentine filmmaker, a less-than-successful effort to rework a gaucho-centered tale of Argentina's history for US tastes. The chapter also discusses Garras de oro (1926), a Colombian film so highly critical of the US role in wresting the Panamanian isthmus from Colombia that the US government sought to squelch its circulation in the region.For all its notable strengths in research and analysis, it is noteworthy that a book with a thematic focus on visibilities and invisibilities in Latin American silent cinema has very little to say about representations of race and ethnicity in the films discussed. There is a brief analysis of Orientalism as it is deployed in the Mexican film El puño de hierro (1927) and some mention of the ways that Latin American silent cinema partly developed in reaction against racist depictions of Mexicans in Hollywood cinema. But one wonders, for example, to what degree whiteness was one of the visible dimensions of civilized respectability that many of these films sought to portray. All in all, however, this is a solid and enlightening piece of scholarship that makes an important contribution to film studies and the history of twentieth-century Latin America more broadly.