Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature

1. Testimony from the Nazi Camps French Women’s Voices Margaret-Anne Hutton 2. Modern Confessional Writing New Critical Essays Edited by Jo Gill 3. Cold War Literature Writing the Global Conflict Andrew Hammond 4. Modernism and the Crisis of Sovereignty Andrew John Miller 5. Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity The Figure of the Map in Contemporary Theory and Fiction Peta Mitchell 6. Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption Eating the Avant-Garde Michel Delville 7. Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema Jason Borge

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

Jason Borge

New York London

First published 2008 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2008 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Borge, Jason, 1965– Latin American writers and the rise of Hollywood cinema / by Jason Borge. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-415-96478-4 1. Motion pictures, American—Latin America. 2. Motion pictures—Latin America. 3. Latin American literature—Film and video adaptations. I. Title. PN1993.5.U65B655 2008 791.450973'0941—dc22 2007050929 ISBN 0-203-89441-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-96478-4 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-89441-3 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-96478-4 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-89441-5 (ebk)

To my parents, Ralph and Martha Borge. To my colleagues and students at Vanderbilt University. To Sonia.

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

1

The Lettered City of Angels

2

Ex Machina: Hollywood, Latin America and the Cinematic Imaginary

18

3

Celluloid Border: Mexican Revisions of Early Hollywood

48

4

Tropic of Chaplin: Latin American Intellectuals and the Little Tramp

73

5

6

1

Hollywood Chronicles: Latin American Journalism and the Early Talkies

106

Imperial Magic: Walt Disney in Latin America, 1930–1945

139

Notes Bibliography Index

169 195 205

Acknowledgments

Portions of this book have appeared previously under the following titles, and are reproduced here by permission of the journals indicated: “Hollywood Revisions: Cinematic Imaginary in Quiroga and Monteiro Lobato.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. Vol. 10, No. 3 (2001). “The Lettered Clown: Chaplin and the Latin American Avant-Garde.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. Vol. 42, No. 2 (2008). “Olympio Guilherme: Hollywood Actor, Auteur and Author.” Luso-Brazilian Review Vol. 44, No. 1 (2007). Copyright 2007 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. “Disney in the Vanguard: Latin American Writers and Fantasia.” Hispanic Journal Vol. 25, Nos. 1–2 (2004). Copyright Hispanic Journal.

1

The Lettered City of Angels

Nicolás Olivari showed up at the swanky branch offices of the Yankee fi lm studios needing information, cooperation and fi nally assistance in order to adequately delve into the subject at hand. He left with his professional, moral and national pride painfully scarred. Nicolás Olivari, The Wounded Cardshark: Cinematic Sketches [El hombre de la baraja y la puñalada: estampas cinematográficas] 1311

In this postscript to The Wounded Cardshark (1933), an odd collection of fictional chronicles depicting imaginary encounters with distant fi lm stars, the Argentine writer Nicolás Olivari expresses his bitter disenchantment with a U.S. fi lm industry that he clearly reveres. His frustration toward Hollywood centers not on the thwarted attempt to fulfill his professional obligations as a “dignified” journalist by gathering supplementary fi rsthand material for his book, but rather on Hollywood’s callous treatment of Latin Americans like himself when they attempt to cross the daunting threshold between local film consumption and international fi lm production. The passage reveals Olivari’s deep discomfort with his own emotional dependence as an intellectual movie fan—the main reason, of course, for his seeking the “assistance” of the studios in the fi rst place. His anxiety is so extreme, in fact, that he feels compelled to break with the book’s fi rstperson narrative to distance himself from the indignity he suffers, signaling the author’s self-estrangement at the very moment he is born as a historical subject outside of the realm of film fantasy. The scene exemplifies the deep ambivalence many Latin America writers felt for popular cinema in the decisive early decades of Hollywood’s ascent, a time when a vague apprehension of underlying despotism was often unable to wrest lettered cinephiles from the allure of the industry, even those like Olivari “painfully” aware of the inherent paradoxes of their taste for Hollywood films and celebrities. The mixed sentiments of The Wounded Cardshark illustrate a point made by William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, who have noted that the emergence of modern mass media in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represented for Latin Americans not just the increasing exploitation of peripheral nations and

2

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

individuals (particularly those of the lower social classes), but also unprecedented access to new urban modalities and cultural forms. The new media of fi lm, recorded music and radio, therefore, were “not mere conveyors of messages but meeting points of often contradictory ways of remembering and interpreting” (9). Given its distinct association with foreign capital, however, the cinema’s mediative function proved especially challenging. For Latin American novelists, poets and journalists of the early twentieth century, the U.S. fi lm industry constituted a contentious sign of confl ict and partial reconciliation between aesthetics and politics. On one hand, the “Seventh Art” was emblematic of the technological progress and formal modernism to which many Latin American intellectuals aspired, especially those immersed in avant-garde projects ostensibly at war with the elitist conventions of the literary establishment. Yet Hollywood’s sudden arrival as the international fi lm capital placed writers like Nicolás Olivari in a bind, eager as they were to emulate a medium dominated by a nation posing not just a symbolic affront to Latin American cultural and linguistic autonomy, but also a tangible threat to the region’s geopolitical sovereignty. Despite the shape-shifting quality Hollywood would soon come to assume in the regional imaginary, early writing about the fi lm industry was thus marked by debates that went beyond questions of cultural imperialism or hegemony to include the widespread fear of what Antonio Gramsci calls dominio. Although the complex circuitry of U.S. culture comprised a growing challenge to the region, the Collusus of the North presented a more immediate concern for Latin American intellectuals, one that for a time trumped the ideological intricacies of “informal empire.” 2 Until the 1930s, when the demands of the Great Depression and later the Second World War compelled the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to rewrite the nation’s Latin American policy, an implicit threat of violent coercion lurked behind the United States’ expanding web of influence in the region. Hollywood, whose association with the U.S. was as intractable as its link to mass culture, therefore could not easily be represented by Latin American writers as innocent—or even independent—of the industry’s national origins. Though often softened by the lexicon of “engagement,” “encounters,” and “contact zones,” recent studies of U.S. cultural imperialism in the early twentieth century have tended to insinuate a one-sided narrative of domination aimed at the world at large instead of an ominously asymmetrical but multivalent system of cultural exchange. 3 Ricardo Salvatore’s account of the representational “machinery” of empire, for example, focuses on the generation and imposition of “texts” by the United States in Latin America, rather than their re-elaboration by local subjects. Such cultural histories, though invaluable, primarily focus on how cultural imperialism is “written” at home rather than how it is “read,” mediated and contested abroad.4 Local responses to U.S. informal empire are inherently factious, since often they are mediated by cultural elites whose political alliances

The Lettered City of Angels 3 and ideological convictions prevent them from serving as willing participants in what Salvatore calls the imperial “enterprise of knowledge.” For Raymond Williams, an important precondition of the hegemonic is the self-identification of the subordinate group with hegemonic forms (118). According to Gramsci, hegemony elicits the “spontaneous” consent of the masses on the basis of the dominant group’s prestige. 5 In this view, intellectuals serve as mediating functionaries between institutional structures of power and subordinate groups, and as such share characteristics in common with both groups. Intellectuals are, in other words, the “deputies” of hegemony whose subaltern function both allies them to power and also relegates them to a position of subordination (306). Applied to U.S. informal empire in Latin America, such a defi nition offers an accurate description of the interaction between official channels and informal agents, including U.S. intellectuals. Yet many Latin American letrados during the fi rst two decades of the twentieth century, indignant at what they perceived as the illegitimacy of North America’s power and influence in the region, refused to serve as friendly, complicit mediators between the United States and the Latin American public. In the two decades leading up to Hollywood’s arrival, much Latin American intellectual discourse sought to contest U.S. imperialism and its main rhetorical support, Pan-Americanism. The War of 1898, instrumental in ushering the United States into the family of world powers, at the same time severely damaged the nation’s cultural prestige in Latin America. Such a loss of symbolic authority was exacerbated when it became clear that the war in Cuba was not an isolated event but rather the fi rst big step in an increasingly aggressive hemispheric policy, particularly in the Caribbean and Central America. The decline in the United States’ cultural currency in the region was inversely proportional to the nation’s rise to international prominence: The more the U.S. threatened the political and economic sovereignty of Latin American nations, the more Latin American intellectuals felt compelled to denounce yanqui power as a symptom of the North’s cultural and moral weakness rather than a sign of intrinsic vigor. In the waning years of the nineteenth century, several writers were already casting a wary and resentful eye toward the United States. In his book The American Illusion [A Ilusão Americana] (1893), the embittered Brazilian monarchist Eduardo Prado rejects the First Republic’s wide-eyed embrace of U.S. commerce and politics, writing a blistering challenge to what he sees as a naive notion of a Latin America–friendly United States. 6 The Argentine writer Paúl Groussac, meanwhile, offers a searing frontal assault on what he construes as the cult of technology, speed and grandiosity in his book of travel chronicles From the Riverplate to Niagara [Del Plata al Niágara] (1894), in which the same vast architectural dimensions and engineering feats that had so impressed earlier travelers, such as Domingo Sarmiento, are portrayed as awe-inspiring monsters of modernity. Even more ominously than Prado and Groussac, José Martí’s essays and chronicles from the same period

4

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

incisively preview the coming events: instead of a democratic model to be emulated, the United States was emerging as a “clever caudillo,” a sordid, rapacious nation that generally viewed Latin America with ignorance and disdain (“Nuestra América” 166). During the fi rst few decades of the twentieth century, criticism of the U.S. became more pointed and widespread. José Enrique Rodó’s seminal essay Ariel (1900), with its heady mix of literary metaphor and cultural analysis, is remarkable for its novel attempt to invert the cultural power ratio between Latin and “Anglo” America, a maneuver Nicola Miller has identified as one of ressentiment, that is, an incredible claim of cultural and ethnic superiority based on an “apprehension” of inferiority (177–78). In Rubén Darío’s “To Roosevelt” [A Roosevelt] (1904), the Nicaraguan poet recasts Walt Whitman, whom he had praised as “el gran viejo” in an eponymous poem from the second edition of Azul (1890), as an ominous figure emblematic of foundational tyranny, the seed of hubric power that made Theodore Roosevelt’s actions in Panama possible: The imperious quality originally attributed to the Yankee poet rematerializes in someone resembling an actual emperor. After witnessing U.S. interventionism in the Caribbean and Central America, Manuel Ugarte, in such landmark works as The Future of Spanish America [El porvenir de la América española] (1910), places the brunt of the blame on Latin Americans themselves for not being sufficiently vigilant of North American designs on the hemisphere. Ugarte’s influential writings concern themselves more with political strategies than cultural ones, and they read today more like practical manuals of self-defense than treatises of self-defi nition. Yet Ugarte’s writing is notable for its attempt to disentangle imperial confl icts from the realm of arielista essentialism, and for clearly implicating Latin American elites as complicit in the crimes codified by the Roosevelt Corollary. The measured language and logic of Ugarte’s work stands in contrast to much anti-imperialist literature of the period. Its counterpoint in content and tone can be found in Colombian José María Vargas Vila’s Up Against Barbarians [Ante los bárbaros] (1918), at once a poetic rhapsody on the beleaguered heroism of Latin American culture and a fierce critique of a rapacious North America threatening to sully such purity. Penned by one of Latin America’s most popular writers of the time, the book surely offers the most sustained and vociferous condemnation of U.S. imperialism in the history of Latin American letters, demonizing the United States in apocalyptic terms at the very height of interventionism in Central America and the Caribbean. Vargas Vila’s tome—which might be best described as a “poem of combat” in the same spirit as Darío’s “To Roosevelt”—at times glistens with modernista metaphor and Whitmanesque anaphora, while at other moments resembling a polemical essay, a manifesto, a political history and even a sermon. The Colombian writer ferociously attacks all Latin Americans who would either advocate protectorate status for their nations or support any

The Lettered City of Angels 5 form of hemispheric solidarity that does not specifically exclude the United States, a country he views as culturally and linguistically incompatible with Latin America, inferior in every way except in the arena of brute strength. Faced with what he sees as an imminent threat of U.S. invasion as well as the cultural threat posed by North Americans (whom he describes at one point as gorillas who fling their own excrement at the statues of the gods), Vargas Vila takes refuge in the written word as an essential form of selfdefense against yanqui barbarism. Silence, for the Colombian writer, is the equivalent of cultural suicide. “The marvel of the Word breaks at dawn like the sun, casting its splendor on life;/Tyrrany’s name is Silence;/Liberty’s name is Speech” (36).7 By equating silence with tyranny, Vargas Vila privileges the verbal grace of Latin America over the sheer mute force of the United States. Those Latin Americans who fail to use their gift of language, he intones, are committing a crime of omission by allying themselves with their “dumb” oppressors through their own silence. Geographical terrain, in Vargas Vila’s pessimistic vision, is already all but lost, leaving Latin Americans the locus of language as their only foothold in the hemisphere. Curiously, there is one word that Vargas Vila does not use in excoriating his yanqui oppressors, and it is “empire.” Latin American writers of the nineteenth century were still accustomed to—and close enough in time to remember—the power and administrative machinery of a traditional monarchy to which they owed a language and distinct cultural heritage. For Vargas Vila and his contemporaries, the United States at the end of nineteenth century had once and for all usurped the distant authority of a European crown, replacing it with a model almost as geographically remote as Spain and Portugal but devoid of the symbolic legitimacy the lettered elite was used to administering through its “order of signs,” as Ángel Rama underscores in The Lettered City [La ciudad letrada] (41). If lettered criollos had enjoyed a stake in the impasse between the distant power of the Crown and its largely illiterate subjects, it was as interpreters. The combination of the United States’ relative geographical proximity and cultural exoticism, however, symbolically jeopardized letrados’ customary mediating power. In short, Latin American intellectuals had to contend with four main challenges during the so-called neocolonial rule of the United States (1898–1930), conditions to which they had not been subjected on such a large scale in previous regimes, either colonial or republican: (1) a language barrier; (2) an Anglo tradition that generally valued what Rodó disdainfully calls “nivelación mesocrática” over cultural refinement and rigid social hierarchies, creating what seemed like an environment hostile to traditional intellectuals; (3) an “empire” that did not act like a traditional empire, favoring temporary occupation, intervention and other forms of coercion over open-ended direct rule; and (4), perhaps most significantly, a regime that denied letrados reciprocal power and political representation—a reciprocity (however paltry) to which intellectuals would have been accustomed under Spanish or Portuguese rule, caudillismo or liberal democracy.

6

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

Even if writers like Rodó, Darío, Ugarte and Vargas Vila saw their main function as one of loyalty to “authentic” ethnic and linguistic models and national power bases, their vehement condemnation of U.S. cultural and political models constitutes an act of insubordination in the face of the de facto rule of the United States. Ugarte, for example, perhaps the most formidable of the anti-imperialist critics of the period, highlights his own defiance by implicating other Latin American elites as complicit in crimes of intervention. Such effrontery is an indication that the United States exercised its newfound power more—or at least more visibly—through political than civil society. If hegemonic forces in U.S./Latin American cultural relations were ultimately more enduring than simple imperial impositions, the anxiety of dominio was ever present. Writing about the post–Cold War United States in the context of empire, Edward Said justifies his use of the term hegemony by calling the U.S. strategies of global domination “not a question of a directly imposed regime of conformity” but rather “a system of pressures and constraints by which the whole cultural corpus retains its essentially imperial identity and its direction” (323). Yet even hegemony with an “imperial identity” does not fully describe the extent to which the Northern Colossus cast its shadow over Latin America in the first few decades of the twentieth century. As the U.S. imposed its will on the hemisphere, many of the region’s renegade “deputies” mediated the encounter with open hostility. For Latin American intellectuals of the period, in short, the United States ruled less as an insidious agent of influence than as an invading despot. It was amid such a discursive landscape riddled by anti-imperialism that Hollywood made its grand entrance. Amy Kaplan has noted that the spectacle of early U.S. war fi lms helped pave the way for imperialism by celebrating and also “enacting” North American power through the camera’s globetrotting mobility (150). Yet the early cinema performed much more than just war and empire for Latin American audiences, especially intellectuals. The meteoric rise of the U.S. fi lm industry beginning in 1915 challenged letrados to fi nd ways to validate the cinema as an emblem of modernity without falling into a reverent state that would allow them to ratify the aggressively commercial uses of fi lm proposed by the U.S. fi lm industry. Although Ángel Rama does not once mention the cinema in his discussion of modernizing influences on the Lettered City (preferring instead to foreground the ripples made by national popular forms such as the tango, the corrido and popular theater), he skillfully delineates the shift of intellectual patronage in the early twentieth century from the state apparatus to the marketplace of newspapers, magazines and emerging publishing houses (120–21). Accustomed to their roles as political arbiters, traditional letrados of the time would have found it less complicated to focus on the threat of foreign government entities like the United States than on the burgeoning matrix of the international culture industry, especially since intellectuals themselves were growing increasingly dependent on the marketplace for their livelihood. In short, to borrow from Michael Hardt

The Lettered City of Angels 7 and Antonio Negri’s useful distinction between the concepts of imperialism and “Empire,” letrados generally found a traditionally imperialist nation-state (the United States) a simpler target than the “new global form of sovereignty” of Empire whose “decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule” depended less on fi xed boundaries and identities (Empire xii). In the early twentith century, the shift described by Hardt and Negri from imperialism to Empire at fi rst went largely unnoticed in Latin America, since the forces unleashed by the new media of the culture industry were still in their infancy and nationalism was on the rise in the region. Consequently, Latin American intellectuals’ reaction to the Hollywood “invasion” was not initially marked by the same urgency that characterized so much anti-imperialist literature. Since the U.S. fi lm industry did not apparently form a part of the Northern nation’s state apparatus, fears of domination could not so readily be parlayed into narratives of conquest, resistance and ressentiment. At the same time, the initial absence of spoken language in the silent era allowed many viewers to receive film as though it were a medium devoid of national or linguistic specificity. Such confusion was short-lived, in part because of the ways fi lms were publicized. In an indispensable study of early popular cinema, Richard deCordova notes that during the pre-Hollywood era, studios often repressed the names of film actors—in part because, it was thought, such publicity would destroy the cinematic illusion, but also because companies like Biograph did not wish actors to upstage “product” identification and loyalty (77–80). Such a practice produced an air of secrecy that went far in explaining the rise of film journalism during the second decade of the century: to learn about the carefully concealed identities, and later, private lives of the leading fi lm actors, film fans literate in English increasingly turned to such publications as Motion Picture Magazine and Photoplay. When studios learned they too could regulate information about actors to sell their fi lms, “picture personalities” gave way to what we now call movie stars. Thus it was through the interdiscursivity of fi lm journalism, studio publicity and the movies themselves that “star discourse” was born. Latin America, however, would have to wait another decade for film journal/fan magazine hybrids that approached the impact and circulation of Photoplay. Such a delay can be explained in large part by Latin American intellectuals’ ambivalent relationship with modernity. Gramsci writes that the elaboration of a new stratum of intellectuals depends not on the inert “eloquence” of traditional artists, philosophers and men-of-letters, but rather on the exercise of intellectual activity by any group within a given social context. As a number of critics have pointed out, from Ángel Rama to Jesús Martín-Barbero and Beatriz Sarlo, the perpetual crisis of Latin American intellectuals is related to its place and functionality in the public sphere. Since the publication of Habermas’s seminal work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, a number of scholars (including Habermas himself in later writing) have expressed the need to expand the

8

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

scope of the public sphere to include what some have called the “plebeian” public sphere. Such re-elaborations of the concept have become particularly germane since the advent of media (such as television and the Internet) that have created the space for alternative mediating agencies at fi rst overlooked in public sphere theory. Bourgeois intellectuals, however, saw their traditional sphere of influence eroded early on in the twentieth century. This was especially true in Latin America. With the arrival of fi lm, traditional letrados had to choose between staying mute on the subject of the new medium—thereby allowing the emerging stratum of popular journalists to monopolize the mediating discourse of fi lm criticism—or throwing epistemological caution to the wind and engaging with the cinema themselves. The question was a serious one. The unique immediacy of popular fi lm lay in its unprecedented ability to employ a mostly nonverbal medium to resemanticize cultural forms like the circus, the music hall and the folletín and communicate more or less directly with the mass audiences. In such a way the cinema threatened to bypass the hegemony of the bourgeois public sphere altogether, in essence employing an ideographic strategy used centuries earlier by sovereign rulers to display their dominion over their subjects, what Habermas has termed a publicity of representation (7). At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, Latin American intellectuals still derived a great deal of mediating power from the printed word, exercising what Néstor García Canclini has called “Gutenbergian cultural politics” to moderate the public sphere through books, pamphlets and periodicals on the behalf of the unlettered “virtual citizens” of the region (Consumers and Citizens [Consumidores y ciudadanos] 22). Traditional intellectuals thus held a somewhat tighter grip on the public sphere than their European and North American counterparts, where, especially in the United States, popular writing had already engineered a partial takeover of print journalism by the middle of the nineteenth century.8 In the early days of Hollywood, Latin American intellectuals who deigned to take popular fi lm seriously were anomalies. Part of this reluctance can be attributed to the lingering hegemony of the letrados. In an invaluable study, Julio Ramos has suggested that “literary authority” increased in fi n-de-siècle Latin American newspapers, as writers used the modern forum of print journalism paradoxically to criticize modernity and emerging mass culture (104). Early twentith-century Latin American intellectuals, however, were generally more comfortable limiting their cultural criticism to the established arts than engaging a medium yet to establish itself as worthy of serious critical attention. The relatively high register of the region’s journalistic practices helps to explain the initial dearth of film fan journals of the sort that had already taken hold in the United States. Jesús Martín-Barbero argues that elites’ resistance to cinema was directly related to what he calls the “secret complicity between cinema and its public,” an encounter in which the traditional mediating function

The Lettered City of Angels 9 of intellectuals was rendered irrelevant by the working classes’ powerful, iconic fascination with the fi lm star. This “new type of mediation between spectator and myth” had two main planes of articulation: the screen text and the printed word (160). Martín-Barbero’s insight is undeniable yet somewhat broadly stated. The movie press of which he writes in fact came in at least four different guises: studio publicity, invariably featuring photos of the stars; light reporting on the actors’ private lives, including regular gossip and scandal columns; serious essays, reviews or chronicles; and literature, whether novels, stories or poems.9 Latin American publishers’ initial reluctance to “stoop to the demotic” (to borrow Terry Eagleton’s phrase) and dedicate books and print space to the last two types left them particularly susceptible to the fi rst two (After Theory 69). The distinction is important, as Latin American literature and criticism in the early twentieth century were most often local (or in some cases regional) mediations, whereas the last sort of publicity comprised little more than an extension of the studio system. Habermas remarks that newspapers lost their place of privilege as mediators of intellectual discourse when news and editorial content became interdependent with advertising, in essence making print journalism the gate through which private commercial interests “invaded” the public sphere (185). In the case of Latin America, it was not only local private citizens who were flooding the “rational-critical debate” so prized by Habermas, however, but more commonly foreign corporations like the Hollywood studios, whose local advertising constituted a crucial support in the strategy of vertical integration (production, distribution, exhibition) used to dominate the global fi lm market. In the absence of a dedicated corps of fi lm critics, U.S. studio publicity—with its readymade press releases, glamour photos, and coveted advertising dollars—often monopolized the space customarily accorded to cultural journalism. In an important sense, Hollywood initially mediated itself in Latin America. It was not until the 1920s and 1930s that fi lm-fan journals like as Cinearte (Brazil), Cinema (Cuba), Ecran (Chile) and Cine Mundial (New York) appeared in force, magazines that offered the incongruous combination of serious criticism, star gossip and publicity photos capable of appealing to a relatively wide audience of Latin American readers while remaining profitable enough to survive. Yet Latin American film journalism appeared nonetheless in an assortment of daily newspapers, cultural supplements and magazines throughout the region. Such texts, ranging from minor, anonymous reviews to in-depth essays, played a crucial role in interpolating Hollywood production to Latin American audiences. Indeed, Latin American intellectuals could hardly have intervened in literary mediations of Hollywood without the initial institutional supports of such far-flung publications as Atlántida, El Universal, Caras y Caretas and Social. Over time, the complex of newspapers, magazines and fan journals enlisted the talents of more and more intellectuals of different stripes. Important early

10

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

work by Alfonso Reyes, Horacio Quiroga and others not only lent prestige to the cinema but also to film criticism as a discursive practice as intellectually valid as music or theater criticism. By the end of the 1920s, most Latin American avant-garde journals (e.g. Martín Fierro, Amauta, Klaxon, Revista de avance, Contemporáneos) had incorporated film reviews and essays into their tables of contents, and in many cases cinematic fiction and poetry as well. Film had arrived. Journalistic discourse, therefore, was highly instrumental in gaining the cinema intellectual currency in the 1920s. In a sense, film only entered the sphere of Latin American letters by virtue of a disjuncture in intellectual discourse. As a number of scholars have observed, the dissolution of traditional forms of patronage around the turn of the twentieth century compelled writers—even those of the elite—to seek remuneration through alternative means like commercial book publishing, magazines and newspapers. At the same time, the shake-up begot a new stratum of writers from the middle and lower-middle classes, many of whom had little or no higher education. Such a sea change in the Republic of Letters led to what Nicolau Sevcenko—writing about the Brazilian Belle Époque—has termed a fragmentação da intelectualidade, in which the traditional, canonized letrados competed, at times bitterly, with an emerging professional class of writers whose social status, race, gender and/or lack of university credentials kept them out of the “club” but not necessarily out of the literary marketplace (Literatura como Missão 117). By answering to the mandates of the mass public instead of the literary establishment, however, the new corps of intellectuals was able to sidestep Rama’s “city of protocols” and eventually change the rules of the game. By the late 1920s, even old-school intellectuals like Afrânio Peixoto and Manuel Ugarte felt compelled to publicly acknowledge their conditional appreciation for the Seventh Art.10 Perhaps no writer sums up the new climate better than César Vallejo, who in a 1927 article comments ironically: “Does the cinema exist? Fire! Fire! These days the question is a burning one, to which few dare respond negatively” (“Vanguard Religions” [Religiones de vanguardia] 70). In hindsight, considering the extent to which film culture had permeated European and North American literary circles by the 1930s, it is hardly surprising that cinema should have drawn Latin American intellectuals into its fold. Ultimately, though, it was not the medium per se that presented literatos and journalists with such a golden opportunity, but rather the ways in which the film industry manufactured celebrity. The primary interface between Hollywood and Latin American spectators (lettered and nonlettered alike) was the film star. Yet the dissemination of movie icons throughout the region would have been virtually impossible without the intervention of the print media. While the aperture of film celebrity doubled as a point of entry for U.S. hegemony and a mechanism of cultural citizenship for Latin American audiences, the intertextuality of the star system—one that depended heavily on the printed word—also afforded Latin American writers the chance to reassert their relevance in the rapidly

The Lettered City of Angels 11 modernizing public sphere by mediating both hegemonic and subaltern uses of early Hollywood. It is surely one of Latin American literary history’s great injustices that the new players on the field during the 1920s—vanguardistas like Vallejo— largely ignored the crucial modernizing function exercised by pioneering figures such as Alfonso Reyes, Horacio Quiroga, Lima Barreto and Monteiro Lobato. It was thanks to such older writers that the cinema had begun to receive a measure of acceptance the vanguardistas generally took for granted—though under their own conditions and for their own purposes. With one foot still planted in the literary conventions of the previous century, yet deeply affected by the spirit of their times, the motley assortment of mostly middle-age writers were semi-outsiders to both the literary establishment that came before them and the vanguard revolution that followed. Their very marginality, however, afforded them a measure of freedom to confront the problematic sign of Hollywood without sullying their “art” by engaging the messiness of mass culture head on (which would have been a dangerous endeavor for traditional intellectuals) or jeopardizing their revolutionary status by appearing to privilege an ideologically suspect cultural practice associated with the United States (which would have been a risky move for many vanguardistas). Determined to use popular literature as way to redeploy film narrative, literatos like Quiroga, Monteiro Lobato and the Peruvian Clemente Palma, themselves intoxicated by fi lm celebrity, were spurred on by a reading public that unapologetically adored Hollywood silent pictures. In the second chapter of this book, “Ex Machina: Hollywood, Latin America and the Cinematic Imaginary,” I argue that Hollywood owed much of its early appeal among such writers to the emergence of a politically fraught technological imaginary, for which popular cinema served both as a model of formal expression and also a source of thematic exploration. If many Latin American intellectuals of the period saw Hollywood as a site of mechanical reproduction, artifice and vulgarity, popular fi lm also furnished writers with a creative blueprint. As ambivalent as they are eccentric, Quiroga’s seminal Hollywood stories, Monteiro Lobato’s polemical allegory The Clash of the Races [O Choque das Raças], and particularly Clemente Palma’s science fiction novel XYZ articulate of revenge fantasies on the very fi lm industry by which they were inspired. These groundbreaking works contested the perceived technical wizardry of the nascent fi lm industry by foregrounding fiction’s own creative ingenuity, thus using the familiar weapon of literature to stage Latin American mastery of Yankee technological acumen and the alluring dangers of modern mass culture. In Chapter Three, “Celluloid Border: Mexican Revisions of Early Hollywood,” I argue that the unique body of Hollywood writing from Mexico is inseparable from the nation’s physical and symbolic proximity to Hollywood. An integral yet beleaguered part of the fi lm industry from its advent, Mexican actors, technicians and laborers were central to Hollywood’s rapid

12

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

ascent as the international fi lm capital. So too were Mexican journalists and novelists, whose “revisions” of Hollywood began almost as soon as the fi lm industry emerged. In a series of pathbreaking essays and chronicles, Alfonso Reyes and Martín Luis Guzmán proclaimed the advent of Hollywood as an event of paradigmatic significance. Less renowned writers like Carlos Noriega Hope and Julián González were among the fi rst in Latin America to give narrative voice to the vibrant subculture of Latin American travelers and émigrés so integral to the silent industry, lending fictional form to the anti-imperialist sentiment common in national fi lm criticism of the time. Both writers used the novel to reclaim, transfigure and expatriate “Latin lover” stereotypes, thus defying the silent fi lm market’s demand for what could be called attenuated otherness. The Mexican avant-garde’s use of Hollywood as a literary trope, meanwhile, was demonstrated by Jaime Torres Bodet’s 1933 novel Day Star [Estrella de día], in which a bourgeois chilango rechannels his erudition to lure a Mexican Hollywood actress back home. Like Noriega Hope and González, Torres Bodet fights Hollywood’s longstanding abuses of mexicanidad by mounting a counterstrategy of symbolic conquest and cultural reaffi rmation. In my fourth chapter, “Tropic Of Chaplin: Latin American Intellectuals and the Little Tramp,” I examine the region’s obsession with Charles Chaplin, arguing that the nearly unanimous acclaim and diverse literary appropriations of the English-born star were symptomatic of the way many Latin American writers struggled to reconcile the artfulness and popularity of fi lm, aesthetics and politics. Defiantly chivalric in spite of his poverty, Chaplin’s screen persona the Little Tramp reminded many early twentiethcentury Latin Americans of themselves: pathetic, resourceful and raggedly elegant. The Tramp was especially seductive for Latin American intellectuals of the avant-garde, who tended to see the Hollywood actor as a symbol of bohemian radicalism at the margins of modernity. Writers like the Peruvian Xavier Abril and the Cuban Luis Felipe González exuberantly linked Chaplin to models of latinidad. Other writers like José Carlos Mariátegui and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, mindful of the need for contextual analysis and suspicious of aestheticist praise of Hollywood, focused on the connection between Chaplin, the Latin American proletariat, and popular forms such as the circus and music hall traditions. In the end, however, lettered fans of all stripes revealed the limits of their political engagement by canonizing Chaplin as a universal “artist” with unlimited local application, in spite of the film celebrity’s inevitable implication in industry designs. In the following chapter, “Hollywood Chronicles: Latin American Journalists and the Early Talkies,” I concentrate on the dawn of the sound era, a period when many Latin American actors and writers found themselves either written off by the industry or relegated to participating in low-budget Spanish versions of Hollywood films. Out of this maelstrom of displacement and linguistic anxiety, however, came a number of fascinating accounts. It is perhaps fitting that the chronicle—a shape shifter of genres combining the

The Lettered City of Angels 13 narrative license of literature with the popular register and critical function of journalistic discourse—served as a key medium of expression during the peak of early Hollywood’s symbolic advance on the region. The work of the Brazilian Olympio Guilherme, the Argentine Israel Chas de Cruz and the Chilean Vera Zouroff comprised a revealing counterpoint to most contemporaneous Latin American writing about the film capital. Straddling the space between objectivity and subjectivity, identity politics and commodity fetishism, these Hollywood cronistas demystified the industry even as they exploited their readers’ fascination with the stars. Finally, in Chapter Six, “Imperial Magic: Walt Disney in Latin America, 1930–1945,” I focus on another paradigmatic figure in early Hollywood. Before falling into disfavor with Latin American intellectuals in the second half of the twentieth century, I argue, Disney had developed into a near messianic figure in the region, particularly after the 1940 release of Fantasia. Seducing writers like Alejo Carpentier and Mário de Andrade with its formal innovation, the fi lm struck many intellectuals as a realization of vanguard ideals of fi lm’s “magical” difference from other creative media. Such enthusiasm reached its zenith in a remarkable book of poems (Poems for Walt Disney [Poemas a Walt Disney]) by the Cuban writer Guillermo Villarronda. By the mid 1940s, with the release of the “Latin American” fi lms Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros, which formed part of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy, Disney’s ideological thrust and massive popularity began to belie the progressive stance favored by most Latin American writers of a decade earlier. Consequently, I contend, one cannot completely overlook the complacency and tunnel vision shown by many Latin American intellectuals of the time (including journalists) who plainly advocated Disney’s mining of Latin American materia prima in the name of hemispheric solidarity and aesthetic modernism. Although the Hollywood sign cannot be totally separated from the symbolic template of the United States as a whole, least of all during a period when nationalist and imperialist preoccupations left their imprint on so much Latin American literary discourse, the fi lm capital should also be read outside of its unavoidable national implications. In the fi rst place, Hollywood is not merely the metaphorical site to which it is commonly reduced, but also a toponym referring to a specific neighborhood (initially a suburb) of Los Angeles. Hollywood thus lies both outside history and fi rmly within it. In recent years, Los Angeles has served as the raw material for a number of theories about urban spationality. For Jean Baudrillard, the city epitomizes a “hyperreality” full of artifice and simulation, fictiveness and “mythic banality” (America 95), qualities that have led Peter Brooker and others to use the playful term “simcity.” Mike Davis, in his book City of Quartz (1990), observes that since the early twentieth century Los Angeles “has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism” (18).

14

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

Other theorists—most notably Edward Soja—have endeavored to go beyond dualisms of utopia/dystopia or real/imagined sites to describe the complexities of urban spatiality in more flexible and inclusive terms. Drawing extensively from Foucault’s notion of heterotopia and especially Henri Lefebvre’s conception of social space, Soja’s theorizes a “trialectics of spatiality” in which Lefebre’s espace perçu (perceived or physical space) and espace conçu (conceived or mental space) interact with a Thirdspace—a “lived-in” ideological site of power both distinct from and (paradoxically) inclusive of physical and mental space. Sojas formulation is useful in capturing the ways written narrative about Hollywood describes and imagines—often simultaneously—the urban landscape of Los Angeles. At the same time, what he calls the “counterspatial” potentialities of Los Angeles are perhaps most fully exploited in fiction written by foreign immigrants and visitors. Invariably rendered as much more than a subset of Los Angeles (or California, or the United States), Hollywood typically strikes such outsiders either as an intensification of the city and society that surrounds it, or as a perversion of U.S. culture generally. In either case, Tinseltown commonly assumes the properties of a supremely anti-intellectual site, becoming, as Mike Davis describes it, “the literalized Mahogany: city of seduction and defeat, the antipode to critical intelligence” (18). What happened, then, when the Lettered City fi rst met the City of Angels? On one hand, many Latin Americans writers shared with their North American contemporaries a moth-to-the-flame fascination with Hollywood as a symbolic center of rapid success and seductive artifice.11 Even migrants and travelers from within the United States viewed early Hollywood as “off the map” in terms of national norms and conventions. The otherness of the Film Mecca, however, tended to be even more pronounced in Hollywood literature from non-U.S. writers of the period.12 If Tinseltown made strangers of all writers regardless of their place of origin, Latin American Hollywood fiction nevertheless distinguished itself in a number of crucial ways. Written at a time when the “Latin lover” had become a bankable stock figure in U.S. popular fi lm, Latin American fiction set in Hollywood tended to foreground to an unusual degree issues of ethnicity, eroticism and sexual conquest, central themes in the narratives of Quiroga, Lobato and Clemente Palma (from Chapter Two) as well as the early Mexican Hollywood novel (Chapter Three). For the protagonists of these works, success—when it comes at all—is gained by self-exploitation, deception, or both. In Quiroga’s long story “Miss Dorothy Phillips, My Wife” [Miss Dorothy Phillips, mi esposa], the main character manipulates to his advantage the mechanisms of star discourse and “Latin” stereotypes, forging a fanciful relationship with a U.S. film actress and at the same time foregrounding the artifice common to both cinema and literature. Unlike Quiroga, Carlos Noriega Hope, Julián González and the Brazilian Olympio Guilherme lived and worked in Hollywood, therefore it is not surprising that their fiction should depend less on imaginative tropes than

The Lettered City of Angels 15 eyewitness descriptions. In the work of these writers, Latin American characters undergo on-location subjectivation through a brutal tug-of-war with the star system in which seductive North American and northern European actresses once again play a central part. The verisimilitude of these novels, however, is deceiving. To return to Soja’s terminology, the need to account for simultaneous approaches to Hollywood fiction increases when the writing subject is marginalized by virtue of his ethnic or national origins—at times turning ostensibly “close encounters” into works of pure fantasy. Even more so than European writers and actors, Latin Americans of the 1920s and 1930s were manifestly othered by the dominant social norms of Hollywood, consistently cast in an exoticist light to the commercial advantage of a successful few and the detriment of the aspiring many. It is from such a confl ictive espace vécu that the “social” or ideological component of spatiality comes to the fore (Thirdspace 60–68). Such a fictive recourse, moreover, is not limited to the novel, but also characterizes the Hollywood chronicles of Vera Zouroff and Israel Chas de Cruz. Although these cronistas ostensibly engage the uncharted terrain of the “real” Hollywood, their work ultimately eschews disinterested perception in favor of explicit, and Latin American, partiality—a maneuver that requires them to stitch their own (gendered) ethnicity into the fabric of their chronicles. The majority of Latin American writers of the early twentieth century lacked either the interest, the vocational pretext or—perhaps most commonly of all—the fi nancial means to embark on pilgrimages to the Film Mecca. For such writers, Hollywood was an almost purely conceived space assembled on the foundations of film journalism, advertising and spectatorship. Such a dependence on star discourse focused, naturally, on the stars. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that the “conceived” literary texts tend to concentrate not on the specifics of Hollywood fi lm narrative or the vagaries of the studio system so much as the celebrity of the actors and directors whose image extended beyond the silver screen. One of the fi rst critics to write of the extratextual components of the Hollywood fi lm star is Walter Benjamin, who argues that the “aura” of the live fi lm actor is lost through the reproductive processes of the fi lm medium. The industry compensates for such a loss, Benjamin writes, by “artificially” building up aura through the long arm of studio publicity (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” 231). Since the 1970s, a number of studies have reassessed the textual/extratextual binary cited by Benjamin, arguing instead that the star system is configured intertextually by circuits of discourse such as advertising, trade magazines and of course the movies themselves. In his book Picture Personalities, as I have already mentioned, Richard deCordova underscores the crucial mediating function played by the popular press during the rise of cinema. P. David Marshall, in his work Celebrity and Power, brings the focus of the star system back to the fi lmaudience axis at the same time that he expands the concept of the star to

16

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

include not just fi lm actors but a whole value-saturated system of representation, a system he calls celebrity. Specifically, Marshall argues that the celebrity functions as a “channeling” device, a conduit “for the negotiation of cultural space and position for the entire culture” (49). Far from being the focus of a cult based on the “phony spell of a commodity,” as Benjamin writes, the celebrity for Marshall is a dynamic site of social convergence. The celebrity sign proves crucial in the Latin American writers’ early elaborations of Hollywood. Marshall’s stress on the celebrity/audience interface, as well articulated as it is, ultimately downplays the intertextuality of star discourse that so indelibly marks early Hollywood, where the star-audience relationship was interpolated chiefly by the printed word.13 Literary mediation of the fi lm industry, meanwhile, implied a double negotiation. If early Latin American movie audiences helped to construct celebrity through their participation as fi lm consumers, as readers of literature and fi lm journalism, they depended on writers’ interventions. Through literature, in other words, Hollywood was served twice cooked. Monteiro Lobato and Clemente Palma summoned early Hollywood stars like John Barrymore and Greta Garbo, relocating them in Latin American settings where they could symbolically interact with local characters; in his novel Day Star, Jaime Torres Bodet made similar use of his character Piedad Santelmo, who bears a close resemblance to Dolores del Río. These writers imaginatively shortened the physical distance normally separating their reader-fans from the U.S. fi lm industry, while at the same time partaking in the feast of celebrity by fashioning characters in their own image—marginal letrados from the emergent middle class—able to demonstrate their symbolic conquest of the fi lm apparatus and studio “machinery” as well as the stars themselves. In their literary treatment of Charlie Chaplin and Walt Disney, meanwhile, writers like Xavier Abril, Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Guillermo Villarronda downplayed the materiality of Hollywood to focus almost exclusively on the textual appeal of the fi lms. In the case of Chaplin, both the actor/fi lmmaker’s off screen persona and the Little Tramp were imagined to transcend the ideological shackles of the movie industry. In similar fashion, Latin American intellectuals reserved Disney a privileged space apart from Hollywood conventions of live-action narrative fi lm. What makes Disney’s case particularly interesting, moreover, is that his name—and visage, through the wide dissemination of ideographic studio publicity and film journalism—managed to monopolize the negotiating space of celebrity previously accorded almost entirely to film actors. In an important way, both Chaplin and Disney were able to capture the imagination of Latin American writers by virtue of their status as proto-auteurs—figures whose relatively autonomous control over their productions seduced even progressive intellectuals by erecting a mythology of independent agency and populist solidarity amid the rampant commercialization of Hollywood, thus insulating the two towering figures from accusations of either media manipulation or market pandering.

The Lettered City of Angels 17 Borrowing from Edgar Morin’s landmark study Stars [Les Stars] (1957), Jesús Martín-Barbero signals as a crucial point of access to modernity what Morin calls the embourgeoisement of the working class audiences through their identification with the fi lm star. The popular fi lm industry combined the quickly advancing technology of the mass media with already advanced structures of capital to translate traditional popular culture into something approaching bourgeois respectability. “Hegemony,” writes Martín-Barbero, “asserted itself through the masses’ access to the emotional functionality of bourgeois subjectivity.”14 The ultimate source of such empowerment (“afianzamiento”) was the star (160). Seen in such a way, Hollywood emerged as an interstitial mechanism through which cultural citizenship was acquired for the price of a movie ticket. Although, overall, Martín-Barbero seems to favor such a “purchase” as a fair deal for the working classes, he also suggests that the aperture of celebrity served as a point of entry for U.S. cultural hegemony. To his credit, Martín-Barbero is one of the few scholars to have drawn an explicit connection between the United States’ domination of the film industry with the nation’s precocious development of a popular press, calling them evidence not only of a “universalizing grammar” of mass media production first mastered by the U.S. private sector (156–58), but also the by-products of an “imperial vocation,” thanks to the geopolitical rise of the United States during the same period (154). In fact, with the advent of Hollywood, the print and film media entered into a mutually beneficial relationship through which the press reasserted its relevance as publicity (in the Habermasian sense), and the silent film industry was able to articulate its message more fully, thus “speaking” to more than just a popular audience. This last point is especially relevant in the case of Latin America, where intellectuals, with few exceptions, after initially endeavoring to repress cinema’s popular pedigree, later sought to render the medium less vulgar by stressing film narrative’s common ground with literature. The gradual acceptance of social movements by some intellectual circles of the late 1920s and 1930s helped to loosen literatos’ resistance to the conventions of popular cinema, seeing in selected films and fi lmmakers a kindred intervention on behalf of the poor and the downtrodden. By the early 1940s, Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, which for many intellectuals fi nally delivered on the promise of Pan-Americanism, further eroded Latin American writers’ will to censure Hollywood as an agent of cultural degradation or imperialist ideology. Spirited engagement yielded to self-deceptive entanglement: what had begun as ambivalent interventions and subversive fables slowly mutated into star-struck encomia.

2

Ex Machina Hollywood, Latin America and the Cinematic Imaginary

In the prologue to his 1909 collection Cinematograph: Rio Chronicles [Cinematógrafo: Crônicas cariocas], the Brazilian writer João do Rio [Paulo Barreto] declares cinema the fi rst and only medium of expression that “reproduces the integral polymorphism of life.” Since the camera is really an extension of our sensory perception, do Rio writes, fi lm comes closest to reproducing the perceptions of the human “machine” (x). If other Latin American writers of the nickelodeon era typically see cinema as a mysterious source of magic, the Brazilian cronista skirts the larger question of the “means” of fi lm technology by likening humans themselves to the apparatus, rendering fi lm a kind of prosthetic device of mundane and practical value. Though virtually unread outside of Brazil, do Rio’s precocious assessment of cinema closely parallels the Futurists’ reverence for fi lm. In his 1914 “Manifesto of the Seventh Art,” Ricciotto Canudo praises fi lm’s ability to unite individuals of “whatever historic, geographic, ethnic or ethical” environment in a shared aesthetic experience, proclaiming the cinema an “art of total synthesis [ . . . ] born of the Machine and of Sentiment” (15–17). Although their similarities are remarkable, it would be a mistake to equate early cine-crônicas like do Rio’s with European avant-garde projects by the likes of Marinetti and Canudo, fi rst because Latin American writers of the fi rst two decades of the twentieth century lacked a collective ideological platform from which to formulate unified theories about mass culture, fi lm and technology; and second because their disparate, peripheral sites of enunciation separated these writers geographically and symbolically from the principal centers of early fi lm production: Europe and North America. Less than a decade after do Rio’s observations on the medium, by which time the pendulum of the international fi lm industry had swung toward the United States, Latin America’s sense of marginality to the fi lm metropolis was cemented. What made the shift in power particularly hard to absorb was the United States’ dual role as “dream factory”—a producer of immensely popular silent fi lms seemingly indifferent to upholding the aesthetic standards of fi lm-art—and also as a neo-imperialist power whose hold over the region during the fi rst half of the century was frequently

Ex Machina 19 punctuated by periods of covert and overt military intervention. The studio system’s adherence to capitalist principles and strategic alliance with the U.S. government should have been particularly unsavory for Latin American avant-gardists. The studios’ “vertical integration,” after all, severely debilitated local and national networks of distribution and exhibition in the late 1910s and 1920s, while its productions repeatedly distorted Latin American historical themes, social customs, and ethnic and sexual identities for pecuniary gain. Nevertheless, it took the vast majority of vanguardistas more than a decade to engage politically with the fi lm metropolis in any significant way. Straddling the divide between commercialism and cosmopolitanism, bourgeois sentiment and technical innovation, the Hollywood sign was simultaneously repugnant and alluring to writers set on overturning the cultural establishment. In a recent study, Rodolfo Mata has argued that the “ambiguity” of early twentieth century science and technology pulled Latin American vanguards in different directions. On one hand, a modernizing and competitive impulse drew cosmopolitanistas into an anxious embrace of the modern apparatus, as is readily apparent in the constant invocation of the fi lm medium, jazz, cars, planes and trains in such early 1920s journals as Prisma (Argentina) and Klaxon (Brazil). Many radical reformists, meanwhile, felt simultaneously seduced by the potentially liberating effect of technological progress and menaced by its unavoidable implication in bourgeois market strategies threatening to endanger local and national “vernacular” cultures (Mata 19–20). Vicky Unruh has pointed to Alejo Carpentier’s ballet The Miracle of Anaquillé [El milagro de Anaquillé] (1927) as an example of a vanguardist work that openly engages with mass technology and its consequences for Latin American cultures. By staging an encounter between Afro-Cuban characters and a North American tourist wielding a film camera, Carpentier exposes the “mimetic lies” and “cursory falsifications shaping modernity’s portrayal of others” (Unruh 65). Yet Carpentier also reveals both the representational power of the fi lm medium as well as local subjects’ ability to forge responses to such power by means of their own creative vernacular (66). Carpentier’s ballet (which would remain unproduced until the triumph of the Cuban Revolution) dramatizes the deep complexities of the fi rst encounters between the Latin America and the U.S. fi lm industry. Yet his text is an anomaly. Caught between a rock and a hard place, most vanguardistas initially responded to the challenge of Hollywood by attempting to wrest popular cinematic technique from its ideological matrix. Given its formal dependence on fi lm, Jorge Schwartz has argued, early work by Oswald de Andrade and Vicente Huidobro constitutes “veritable textual cinematography” [uma verdadeira cinematografia textual]” (66). Despite occasional references to popular fi lm, however, most notably in Klaxon’s manifesto and Huidobro’s novel Cagliostro, neither writer exhibits the kind of ideological engagement with the popular cinema one might have

20

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

expected from practitioners of “textual cinematography.” As a general rule, it was left to writers outside the circle of young revolutionaries to risk handling the infernal machine of the international fi lm industry. The ambiguous allure of Hollywood among Latin American intellectuals fi rst received serious literary and critical treatment in the seminal stories and essays of Horacio Quiroga. Along with an equally groundbreaking series of articles by Mexican writers Alfonso Reyes and Martín Luis Guzmán (which I discuss in Chapter Three), Quiroga’s essays and stories from the end of the 1910s constitute a path-breaking critical engagement with the U.S. film industry. In his audacious fictional work, Quiroga takes advantage of Hollywood’s geographical remoteness to imagine Latin American characters in intimate, improbable interaction with silent movie stars. Yet if the Uruguayan-born writer gives his readers Hollywood fantasies, they assume the form of revenge fantasies laced with generous doses of bitter irony and subversion. Quiroga’s most important work on the subject is his long story, “Miss Dorothy Phillips, My Wife” [Miss Dorothy Phillips, mi esposa], in which the narrator-protagonist Guillermo Grant apparently wins over Hollywood by cleverly exploiting his own Latin charm, pedaling common stereotypes to achieve his goals, in the process proving himself an illusionist every bit as masterful as Tinseltown itself. Through such work, I would like to propose, Quiroga proves himself a writer of great political relevance to his times. In spite of its lack of overt polemics, Quiroga’s Hollywood literature challenges the contemporaneous anti-imperialist work of such writers as Manual Ugarte and José Vasconcelos by elaborating—and not just advocating—the resistance of Latin American subjects to North American cultural domination. The peculiar strength and durability of nineteenth century philosophical currents among Latin American intellectuals was both a cause and a symptom of Latin America’s particularly contentious relationship with science and technology. The earliest Latin American responses to fi lm, such as those of João do Rio, reveal a reverence for the new technology and artistry that the cinema promises to deliver, exemplifying a typical modernista stance toward science: one of both awe and mystification. Latin American intellectuals’ pious application of positivism sowed the seeds for anti-scientivistic rebellion at the same time, paradoxically, that it marked the generation with a mystical reverence for modern technology. Cinema, as it turns out, proved a site of reconciliation between what Matei Calinescu has termed “bourgeois” and “cultural” modernity (41–42). Popular fi lm, in short, was a product of capitalist ingenuity that nevertheless held high potential for hosting anti-bourgeois aesthetic practices—a potential initially under-exploited by Latin American avant-gardists. The link between technological wonder and the cinematic apparatus is revealingly developed in two novels from the late 1920s and early 1930s in which science fiction and fantasy blend bizarrely with Hollywood. Clemente Palma, son of the nineteenth century Peruvian author Ricardo Palma,

Ex Machina 21 brings a late modernista sensibility to his unusual novel XYZ, a narrative whose mad-scientist protagonist populates his own private Latin American island with movie-star doubles. The Brazilian writer Monteiro Lobato, meanwhile, similarly equates fi lm with North American technology in his novel The Clash of the Races [A Choque das Raças], while at the same time giving literary form to positivism’s infamous epilogue in Latin America— eugenics—through an embedded narrative “screened” in a future United States wracked by racial strife. Early Hollywood could not help to hold a certain ambivalent fascination as an emblem of the U.S.’s newfound political and especially economic might, particularly for those Latin American writers whose estrangement from avant-garde currents permitted them to embrace U.S. mass culture without jeopardizing the frequently confi ning political stances of the avantgardes. Latin American intellectuals had long seen the United States as a nation particularly adept at practical ingenuity and technological knowhow. Hollywood’s domination of the fi lm industry beginning in World War I was, in effect, an emphatic reminder of the nation’s increasing command both of international markets and the fi lm medium, as well as Latin America’s role as a bit player in world cinema. For many intellectuals of the time, the written word was the best feasible way to contest U.S. popular fi lm’s rapid ascendance. If North Americans were often seen as the primary agents of cinematic Zeitgeist and commercial savoir-faire, Quiroga, Lobato and Clemente Palma’s fictional work shows that Latin American writers of the 1920s and 1930s were still able to reserve for themselves the rights to a symbolic vindication of literary authority over the technological apparatus and the new brand of mass culture it delivered. They did so by exploiting the subversive potential of science fiction and fantasy.

HORACIO QUIROGA AND THE HOLLYWOOD DREAM Horacio Quiroga’s early engagement with the cinema is the direct consequence both of his unique cinephilia and also his status as a mesocratic intellectual and journalist compelled by economic necessity to write for revistas de actualididades whose mass audience also happened to be movie-mad. Such an avid interest in fi lm needs to be read in light of a broader fascination with popular science and technology shared by Quiroga with many of his readers. As Beatriz Sarlo describes in The Technical Imagination [La imaginación técnica], her study on the modern Zeitgeist in Argentina, technological progress by the 1920s had become a fi xture in Buenos Aires newspapers like Crítica and El Mundo, which strove to indulge their readers’ fascination with inventions, gadgets, and the inner workings of radio and fi lm by dedicating increasingly more print space to didactic and speculative articles on a whole range of scientific topics. For the mass public, such dissemination of technical know-how—which Sarlo calls

22

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

an “apprenticeship”—emblemized the “unknown but appetizing” allure of market-driven modernity in which Argentines ardently wished to participate (71). The material and symbolic source of such knowledge, however, often lay beyond the nation’s borders, particularly in the United States. As both a consumer and also a producer of popular journalism, Quiroga was not immune to the technological craze of his times, and in fact enthusiastically partook in the wave of amateur activity seizing the River Plate region. The writer’s quixotic passion for gadgetry and technological experiments was matched by a literary fascination with mechanical ingenuity expressed in such stories as “The Orange Distillers” [Los destiladores de naranja] and “The Charcoal Makers” [Los fabricantes de carbón], in which primitivos de la técnica much like Quiroga himself battle unsuccessfully against their own material and technical limitations (Sarlo 30–31). As a new medium of expression, film inevitably drew comparisons to the theater and other arts, especially as narrative-driven feature films replaced the short-reel “cinema of attractions” during the second decade of the century. In Latin America, discourse about early popular film could never completely duck the shadow of social class. For traditional intellectuals of the first two decades of the twentieth century, the film medium avoided being a menace to the status quo in so far as the cinema, stripped of its popular garb, was granted aesthetic stature as an art form. Quiroga, by contrast, could safely assume that his readership included a large number of essentially middlebrow cinephiles like himself, people for whom the cinematic sign was not inherently stigmatized by its mass appeal. It should hardly come as a surprise, therefore, that in his first articles on the cinema, Quiroga assumes an anti-intellectual pose to validate his audience’s interest in the subject. Through the popular forum of such Buenos Aires magazines as Caras y Caretas, El Hogar and Atlántida, he bemoans the debilitating elitism of the Republic of Letters. In his essay “Intellectuals and the Cinema” [Los intelectuales y el cine], Quiroga points out that most Latin American letrados unjustly ignored the cinema, a criticism raised earlier by João do Rio. Using an unnamed text from the French journal Clarté as a point of departure, Quiroga shreds the notion that film is simply “art for maids.” Acknowledging that the silent film industry produces a great number of movies lacking in artistry, Quiroga argues that the same could be said of the theater or the novel of the period. Furthermore, Quiroga blames the reigning melodrama of the screen on theater—which, he points out, is precisely the “higher” art form most of his fellow intellectuals deem a model to which film should aspire. “The cinema can credit itself for the true, honest and fresh power that it possesses,” he contends. “The bad that remains, either punishing us by its departure from form or provoking our laughter through its conventionality, comes from the legitimate patrimony of the theater, which [the cinema] inherited and still cannot shed” (63–64).1 The “true, honest and fresh power” to which Quiroga refers is further addressed in another essay, “Current Topic: Love and Shadows” [Tema de

Ex Machina 23 actualidad—El amor y la sombra], fi rst published in Atlántida in 1922. For Quiroga, the silent movie theater is above all a locus amoris whose hushed darkness serves as a conduit for illusory passion. “The most wretched movie theater has seen itself turned into a mysterious, voiceless, silent sanctuary [in which a] wave of affection [ . . . ] arises from the screen and engulfs every seat” (94–95). 2 The cinema thus acts as an inconspicuous go-between where “the sentiments and passions on the screen are transferred to the spectators’ souls as if through a void—the complicitous shadows, in short, that poets tell us about (61).”3 Quiroga was able to deflect any categorical denials of film’s intrinsic value, in short, not by rejecting aesthetic analysis of the cinema per se, but rather by re-routing and broadening such assessments. Instead of simply condemning film’s sentimental figures out of hand, Quiroga argues, traditional intellectuals should recognize that these tropes are derived in large part from the theatrical conventions they themselves celebrate as artistic. For the cinema to shed such characteristics would, he implies, require a shift away from what the traditional letrados view as high art, as opposed to popular entertainment. At the same time, the technological characteristics of the medium and film spectatorship form the basis of the cinema’s unique impact on the audience, not by aping the mimetic function endorsed by most of his contemporaries, but rather by pursuing something altogether new. Quiroga’s preoccupation with film does not end with his reviews and critical essays. In a number of short stories—“The Vampire” [El vampiro], “The Puritan” [El puritano],” “The Spectre” [El espectro] and “Miss Dorothy Phillips, My Wife”—the cinema plays a prominent role thematically and also serves as a formal device through which Quiroga questions the artifice of both fi lm and literature. Inevitably, Hollywood movie stars are confused with “real” fictional characters and the medium of fi lm seen as a source of immortality. In “The Vampire,” for example, the narrator and another character combine efforts to develop technology that captures from the screen the esprit of an unnamed female movie star—who in turn sucks the life out of her creators. In “The Puritan,” a ghost of a dead film star continues to haunt a married man with whom the ghost, while alive, had shared an unconsummated love. The puritanical protagonist eventually kills himself as he watches his love object’s likeness on screen, the two of them sinfully rejoined in the afterlife. “The Spectre” tells another story of a marital affair that can only be truly satisfied by the artifice of cinema: the narrator befriends a Hollywood movie star and his wife, for whom he harbors unspoken love and desire; when the husband dies, the affair is “witnessed” by the dead husband’s cinematic image, leading to an ambiguous climax in which the narrator apparently dies by his own hand. As Sarlo has shown, Quiroga’s movie stories are at once “technological fantasies” concerned with the fi lm medium and also erotic fantasies that employ Hollywood as a means to fulfi llment. In Quiroga’s odd fictional universe, the narration operates “as if it were possible that fi lm, technically,

24 Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema could realize spectators’ (or protagonists’) fantasy: [that cinema] be confused with life, that the passions of the filmed scene carry on to reality” (The Technical Imagination 28).4 Such is certainly the case with Guillermo Grant, the narrator of “Miss Dorothy Phillips, My Wife.” First published serially in 1919 in the pulp magazine La Novela del Día, the long story begins with an exposition of Grant’s past love life, which has resulted in two failed engagements by age thirty-one. Reasoning that there is no way to predict if or how a woman to whom he is engaged may change once he marries her, Grant resolves to choose his new marriage partner based on two criteria only: that she be young, and that she possess beautiful eyes (165). He sets his sights accordingly on a select group of female silent movie stars, a list of “candidates” out of which he ultimately “selects” Dorothy Phillips. Concocting a scheme by which he might introduce himself to the star, the Buenos Aires civil servant disguises himself as a South American millionaire and embarks for the United States. Once there, Grant apparently makes the contacts necessary for a Hollywood introduction, woos Phillips with his manifest devotion to her, lies about his wealth, and fi nally gets her to agree to marry him after confessing that in fact he has no money at all. At this point, the narrator withdraws from the diegesis and confesses to the reader that the whole story up to this point has been a dream. Mary Louise Pratt has used the concept of “autoethnographic expression” to describe the colonized subject’s willing internalization of hegemonic forms “in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms” (Imperial Eyes 7). Transcending the demeaning or passive role prescribed by conventional notions of the colonized, the cryptically contestatory discourse suggested by Pratt finds repeated expression in Quiroga’s Hollywood. From the opening lines of “Miss Dorothy Phillips,” Guillermo Grant identifies himself as a regional stereotype: “I belong to a group of poor devils who, night after night, step out of the cinema in love with a star. [ . . . ] I am thirty-one years old, tall, slender and swarthy—as befitting a South American meant for export” (161). 5 By his own account, therefore, Grant epitomizes not just a typical South American but also a marketable one. Quiroga’s character thus seeks subjectivation through an encounter with Hollywood and its cast of yanqui characters; but he also strategically objectifies himself in the process, packaging his own body in a way he thinks will make an impression on his dream-beloved and the film industry where she lives and works. The rest of “Miss Dorothy Phillips” repeats a pattern of half-successful poses, forgeries and capitulations. Anticipating the need to overwhelm his dream-spouse with wealth, devotion and gallantry, Grant does not consider it enough merely to dress himself up in the clothes of a suave South American aristocrat: “Such simulation is easy, but does not suffice. I need also to embellish my name with some kind of position of responsibility in the artistic realm, something a mid-level civil servant does not generally possess” (167).6 His decision to pose as a glamour-magazine editor leads him to a local publisher, who dryly mocks Grant’s collection of publicity photos

Ex Machina 25 and illustrations—full of images of Dorothy Phillips, naturally—as unlikely to sell well. The publisher’s derision matters little to Grant, who with his ten copies is not thinking of profit. Grant’s motivation is to appear idly wealthy and gratuitously artistic, in order later to seduce Dorothy Phillips. Grant’s copycatting is echoed metaphorically by the materiality of the printing press, whose primitive means of duplication previews film’s “reproductive” power. At the same time, Grant’s publication of a limitededition fan magazine invokes “star discourse” intertextuality, proclaimed in recent years by such theorists as Richard Dyer, Richard deCordova and Jesús Martín-Barbero as essential to the construction of early film celebrity (a topic I cover at greater length in Chapter One). As today, the popularity of fi lm journalism during the silent era was in most instances inseparable from box-office revenue. If fan magazines were dominated by the logic of the marketplace, however, Grant’s objectives are not primarily pecuniary, even if they are informed by a performance of inherited fortune and indifference to fi nancial gain. By granting his main character the means to manufacture his star through fan publicity—an activity dominated at the time by the far-reaching propaganda machine of the Hollywood studios—Quiroga pays homage to the centrality of popular journalism to his own literary production, while also foreshadowing the fantasy of Latin American authority that will occupy the rest of his story. Once Quiroga’s narrative moves to Hollywood, the copy motif shifts from the printing press to the fi lm industry, where an aura of replication is everywhere to be found. During a fi lm shoot, Grant observes that the sets, props and costumes represent simulcra of actual locales, while the fi lm apparatus replicates theatrical movements of the actors meant to simulate real emotions. Grant himself, meanwhile, mentally rehearses the fi lming of his own movie in which he and Phillips will be the stars, lending an ersatz semblance even to the porteño’s apparently sincere seduction of the actress. Here we begin to see more clearly how Quiroga’s story echoes the formal properties of the film medium and spectatorship. Walter Benjamin has argued that that the advent of the fi lm medium shifted the audience’s perspective from identification with the actor to identification with the camera (228). Christian Metz would later describe in more detail the phenomenon Benjamin identifies, calling it the fi lm spectator’s projective vision. For Metz, however, projective vision is but one of a chain of processes through which the fi lm signifier is constituted, at the center of which sits the audience. The spectator “[duplicates] the projector, which itself duplicates the camera, and he is also the sensitive surface duplicating the screen, which itself duplicates the fi lm-strip [ . . . ].” In such a way the “constitution of the signifier in the cinema depends on a series of mirroreffects organized in a chain, and not on a single reduplication” (805). As the protagonist of his own narrative, Grant similarly multitasks as spectator, actor and director, camera and screen. The elaboration of Quiroga’s movie-consumed narrator, like Metz’s cine-subject, depends on “a series of

26

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

mirror-effects organized in a chain,” as Grant relies on a multilayered web of duplication and artifice in order to realize his ambitions—amorous and professional—within the context of the embedded narrative. One of the main realms of specular artifice in “Miss Dorothy Phillips” is fi lm acting. Grant attributes the supposed superiority of Hollywood pictures in part to the absence of affectation in North American performance—an affectation he views as a defi ning characteristic of Latin Americans (177). The supposed lack of mannered pretense by U.S. actors belies the atmosphere of technology-laden artifice endemic to Hollywood—a paradox signaled by Grant on a number of occasions. Yet, according to the narrator, the very concept of sincerity as elaborated by North Americans is contradictory. After his description of a silent fi lm shoot, Grant distinguishes Latin American from North American film acting styles: “[The Latin concept of fi lm] hinges entirely on affectation, while [among U.S. actors] one very often fi nds the divine condition that reigns supreme in works of art, as in letters of love: sincerity” (177).7 Whereas both Latin American and North American cinema are marked by artificiality, in other words, what separates yanqui from Latin approaches to fi lm acting is precisely the verisimilitude of the former’s artifice. For Grant, the extreme purity of North American dissimulation renders its film a “truer” art form than the inflated affectation of Latin American cinema. U.S. actors are not the only pretenders of Quiroga’s story. Though he denies any double-dealing to Phillips, Grant himself strikes a number of impersonating poses, dressing himself up in the clothes of success, securing movie contacts on the basis of his claims of inherited wealth, and shamelessly assuming the role of the Latin lover in order to conquer Hollywood and Dorothy (181). The Argentine bureaucrat’s performances meet with partial success. Grant is triumphant as Phillips’ suitor for the same reason he claims that North Americans make better actors: he artfully disguises his deceit. Later in the narrative, however, we discover that his attempt at aristocratic imposture has failed (192). While Grant’s amorous wiles may have beguiled Phillips, his affectations of wealth have been obvious to everyone around him in Hollywood, supporting the narrator’s earlier hypothesis that South Americans show shrewdness only “when it comes to skirts” [si se trata de una falda] (176). Quiroga’s ultimate revelation of Grant’s dream-hoax therefore comes as a kind of vindication—proof that a Latin American is capable of something more than garish affectation or telegraphed deception. If Grant remains the same middle-class office manager from Buenos Aires he was at the beginning of the story, he can take comfort in his ability to simulate the pleasures he has sought. His skill as a confabulator, in short, has managed to conquer even the formidable “dream-factory” of Hollywood. The story’s strange denouement sheds light on a passage earlier in the narrative that ultimately proves to be something of a foreshadowing. Speaking of himself as Latin seducer, Grant proclaims, “So you see, it is I who direct the

Ex Machina 27 operation, and I who put myself up for sale, with my Latin accent and my millions” (176).8 Quiroga’s protagonist thus positions himself not only as a spectator of a “movie” he himself has made, but also as the storyteller one diegesis removed from the cinema: the originator and overlord of the embedded narrative as well as the framework that encases it. Taking the politics of “Miss Dorothy Phillips” once step further, one can see that the depiction of strong and nuanced North American characters pays considerable dividends for Quiroga. By staging a conquest of a seemingly unattainable Hollywood star, Grant renders Phillips more human and also less formidable—a strong and idiosyncratic woman nonetheless vulnerable to Grant’s charms, and as such a credible adversary still vulnerable to his designs. To have represented Phillips and the other North Americans he encounters as merely the hollow shells of their screen personalities would have lessened Grant’s main feat: the symbolic seduction of Hollywood. Portraying the North Americans as excessively monolithic, on the other hand, would have endangered the strength of his illusion, which hinges on its credibility. By selling a fantasy in which he artfully and successfully seduces both the object of his desire (Phillips) and the object of his narrative discourse (the reader), Grant emerges twice victorious. At the end of “Miss Dorothy Phillips” Guillermo Grant can comfort himself with the knowledge of having defeated the North Americans at their own game by telling his sentimental story in a cinematic way. The fi lm-like technique of the story poses a novel act of mimesis in which the “sincere artifice” of the Hollywood movie star is represented by the simulated camera-eye of the narrator. In Quiroga’s fictional appropriation of the medium, the narrator simultaneously projects, watches and stars in an imaginary fi lm of his own making. In more than one way, then, the story is a subversive tribute to early Hollywood film narrative. Beatriz Sarlo rightly points out that Quiroga’s cinematic stories “re-arm” the sentimental imaginary of the folletín, as “the modern invention par excellence becomes a condition for the possibility of an exaltedly Romantic narrative imagination [ . . . ]” (The Technical Imagination 27).9 While Sarlo is correct in identifying the transformative effects of Quiroga’s cinematic construction—the writer’s resemantization of popular literature through its exposure to filmic technique—she stops short of elaborating on her own insight: Quiroga does not merely borrow formally (from the medium) or thematically (by populating his narrative with movie actors) but also re-elaborates the industry’s sentimental tropes in such a convoluted manner that they work against the unambiguous logic of popular Hollywood narrative. It would be an exaggeration to assert that Quiroga’s Hollywood stories offer an explicitly contestatory mode of discourse in the spirit of contemporaneous anti-imperialist representations of the United States. Patrolling the prosaic margins of the Republic of Letters, Guillermo Grant is not the sort of prototype who would have been championed either by the early twentieth century literary establishment or the young lions of the emerging

28

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

avant-garde. Unsystematically and perhaps unwittingly, however, Quiroga uses the cinema to blueprint a counterhegemonic paradigm for Latin American cultural production. While Grant looks to “complete himself” in the metropolis, the center to which he gravitates is not Paris, London or even New York: it is Los Angeles. Quiroga’s film-obsessed protagonist thus seeks an eccentric North American model through which to re-invent himself— a pursuit based less on simple opposition or emulation than integration and appropriation. If the Uruguayan writer plunders Hollywood to highlight the degrees of separation between North and South, he also adopts a cinematic, melodramatic style identified in explicit terms with the United States, borrowing from the enemy in order to produce a new original.

YANKEE PROJECTIONS: MONTEIRO LOBATO Despite the precociousness of his regard for popular film, Quiroga was generally dismissed as irrelevant by the younger generation of River Plate avantgardists. Borges, in particular, seemed to have held Quiroga in quiet disdain, later calling his deceased predecessor mediocre and overrated (Dámaso Martínez 1300). As Emir Rodríguez Monegal has pointed out, meanwhile, the vanguard journal Martín Fierro refused to review Quiroga’s collection The Exiled Ones [Los desterrados], even though the journal’s own film criticism, emphasizing the vitality of Hollywood cinema, bore the stamp of the pariah’s influence (“Tensiones existenciales, trayectoria” 20). Given his largely unfounded reputation as a critic of Brazilian Modernismo, José Bento Monteiro Lobato may seem an even more unlikely source of literary subversion than Quiroga. Like his Uruguayan contemporary, Monteiro Lobato throughout his career enjoyed substantial commercial success as a literary author and maintained broad ties with journalism as a cronista, polemicist and editor. To an even greater extent than the author of “Miss Dorothy Phillips,” moreover, Lobato approached writing fundamentally as a business. The inheritor of a rural fazenda, Lobato shrewdly invested his small fortune, gradually buying out some of the same publications to which he had contributed as a journalist and short story writer during the fi rst two decades of the century. Founder of a number of journals and presses in the 1920s, Lobato literally bought himself the ability to advocate for cultural and social progress—at a time when such progress was increasingly at odds with the principles of capital—by acquiring the means of literary and journalistic discourse. In her recent study on Brazilian writer-journalists, Cristiane Costa argues that Lobato was the first public intellectual in the nation’s history to openly treat book publishing as a marketplace and literature as a business. In spite of the aggressively “mercantilist” tendencies Lobato sometimes showed as an editor, publisher and literary promoter—indeed, partly because of such tendencies—Costa views Lobato’s overall influence on the national publishing industry as one of necessary modernization (71).

Ex Machina 29 As a literary author, Lobato was regarded in the 1920s more as a voice of idiosyncratic conservatism than vanguard experimentation, and more inclined to write children’s fiction than manifestos. Lobato shared with Quiroga, however, a deep fascination with U.S. culture, and in particular the cinema. His fascination with fi lm was one he shared with Brazilian Modernists, though in Lobato’s fiction, fi lm was to play more a thematic than a formal role. The aesthetic climate of Brazil in the 1920s, as Flora Süssekind demonstrates in her book Cinematograph of Words [Cinematógrafo das Letras], was such that the proliferation of technological machinery in the large urban metropolis impacted intellectuals of all stripes. As a result, Süssekind writes, “it is not a matter of studying simply how literature represents technology, but also how, by appropriating means characteristic of photography, fi lm and advertising, literary technique itself is transformed” (15).10 Two of Brazil’s most renowned vanguard writers, Oswald and Mário de Andrade, often employed fi lmic techniques in their literary narrative. Oswald’s novel Sentimental Memoirs of João Miramar [Memórias sentimentais de João Miramar] (1924) is frequently cited as one such work, as are Mário’s Macunaíma, Antônio de Alcântara Machado’s Pathé-Baby (1926) and Patrícia Galvão’s Industrial Park [Parque Industrial] (1933). Alceu Amoroso Lima writes in 1925 that the modern Zeitgeist demands that art seek out new media of expression: “Everything the Modernist poets have searched in vain to convey by poetic means will probably fi nd much more vital and adequate expression on the movie screen [ . . . ], that infi nite assemblage of reality, which allows for unprecented combinations of forms over space and time” (1,010–11).11 Amoroso’s main argument differs little from early observations by Canudo, and in fact draws heavily from French cinéma pur theories of the 1920s, in particular the notion that fi lm’s potential is essentially oniric—“the artistic expression verging on the world of dreams” [a expressão artística limítrofe do mundo do sonho] (1,011). The Brazilian Modernist critic is at his most original when he speculates that one of fi lm’s potential by-products is the improvement of the other arts. The cinema, he writes, “makes the other arts healthier by re-routing currents within them that have exceeded their means of expression and, for this reason, corrupted their constitution” (1,011).12 Yet Amoroso Lima, like many Latin American vanguardists, also treats popular fi lm epitomized by Hollywood, with suspicion, if not outright disdain. As a banal extension of popular theater, trapped in a “circus phase,” mainstream cinema for Amoroso is an artistic dead-end (1,011). Amoroso’s view of the film industry is largely shared by his Modernist colleagues, out of whom only Galvão develops popular cinema thematically to any great extent: Industrial Park features Hollywood as an arch-capitalist, mass culture backdrop implicated in the poverty and political naïveté of some of the novel’s working class female characters. Despite contributing a fair amount of fi lm criticism in newspapers and journals such as Klaxon, other Brazilian avant-garde

30

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

writers generally avoid using Hollywood as a central thematic feature of their fictional or poetic work.13 In spite of his infamous, and largely misunderstood, criticism of the foundational cultural event “The Week of Modern Art” [A Semana de Arte Moderno] (1922), Monteiro Lobato was highly instrumental in supporting early Modernismo though his journal Revista do Brasil, saving special praise for the efforts of Oswald de Andrade to keep futurism in Brazil from being “crystallized into a school” and thus turned into an end unto itself instead of “a simple means of combat” (“Our Dualism” [O nosso dualismo] 120).14 Liberated by the respectful distance the Modernistas tended to grant him, no doubt spurred by his relatively advanced age and growing alienation from the cutting edge of Brazilian literary expression, Monteiro Lobato went to great lengths to incorporate elements of U.S. popular film and technological progress into his work from the 1920s. Lobato’s fascination with the technological ethos of the United States was demonstrated in his study How Henry Ford is Regarded in Brazil (1926), a series of essays fi rst written for the newspaper O Jornal then subsequently compiled and published in English translation. Besides showing Lobato’s strange fi xation on Ford as a heroic emblem of the instrumental uses of technology and the capitalist workplace (Lobato had already translated two of Ford’s books into Portuguese), the fact that Lobato sought an English-speaking readership for his reverent tribute bespoke a desire to expand the horizons of his intellectual influence beyond South America. Though How Henry Ford is Regarded in Brazil was not widely distributed, Lobato was able to commute the book’s topicality and his reputation as a Ford advocate into a job as a commercial attaché in Washington and New York, where he would spend the next four years of his life.15 First published as a folhetim in the Rio newspaper A Manhã shortly before Lobato embarked on his trip to the United States, the 1926 novel The Clash of the Races, or The Black President: An American Novel from the Year 2228 [O Choque das Raças ou O Presidente Negro: Romance Americano do Ano de 2228], gives odd literary form to Lobato’s reverence for modern science and technology, as well as his ambivalence about U.S. political culture and domination of the fi lm medium. The Clash of the Races ambitiously tells a story of ethnicity, cinema and eugenics in twentieth century Brazil and twenty-third century North America. From the beginning of the book’s lengthy frame narrative, the United States is equated with scientific progress and pragmatic thought—hardly surprising in light of Lobato’s nonfictional prose, his longstanding reverence for Ford, and his previous fictional work, including children’s fiction.16 It is therefore fitting that the young protagonist, Ayrton Lobo, yearns for “the machine that could change my social situation. A Ford” [a máquina que me mudaria de situação social. Um Ford] (16).17 Once he buys his new car and drives it around town, the class-envious Lobo accordingly becomes “drunk” with compensatory speed and power (16).

Ex Machina 31 The ultimate icon of U.S. progress and technology delivers Lobo into the hands of the inventor Benson and his daughter Jane. At the same time that Benson adopts Lobo as a kind of surrogate son, Benson soon becomes for the narrator a saintly father figure—a refi ned man of wisdom, kindness and scientific genius. In one passage Benson is compared to Christ (63); in another he is likened to a sort of democratic god (58). The fact that the brilliant professor is also of North American descent is no coincidence, as he closely resembles a fictional representation of Ford, whom Lobato describes in a letter to a friend as “the Jesus Christ of industry” [o Jesus Cristo da industria] (A Barca de Gleyre 301). The celebrated automaker, Jane tells Lobo, personifies the “organic idealism” of the United States, which she distinguishes from the “utopian idealism” Brazilians had inherited from the French—an idealism that spelt disaster for Latin Americans because it was “infeasible, contrary to human nature” [irrealizavel, contrário á natureza humana]” (108). By contrast, North American idealism is “organic” because it draws from nature rather than working against it. “[Ford] dreams,” Jane says, “but he dreams tomorrow’s reality” [[Ford] sonha, mas sonha a realidade de amanhã] (109–10).18 Henry Ford and Jane’s father share a pragmatic knack for harnessing nature’s power and reproducing it through technological means, although they “dream tomorrow’s reality” in two very different ways. Benson is the inventor of a machine he calls the porviroscópio, a kind of cinematic crystal ball that artificially anticipates and hastens the natural chain of pre-determined events that make up evolution by projecting a virtual simulation of the future (60). Monteiro Lobato likens the images of the porviroscópio to those of a motion picture that mimetically represents future rather than past events: “In the crystal ball, the current lost its concentrated form and was made visible like a fi lm projection, reproducing moments of the future with a precision [that the future itself] will one day have” (70).19 Yet Benson’s machine also suffers from certain cinematic limitations. “We remain fi xed in the position of an immobile spectator,” Jane describes. “We only see and hear what happens within reach of our eyes and ears” (70).20 When Benson dies suddenly, the machine and its technology are lost forever. Yet the artistry of “screening” the future is not compromised by the demise of the apparatus, as written narrative simply takes its place: Lobo, according to Jane, will transcribe the “story” she tells and thus write a “book that critics will judge as fiction, even if it is little more than simply the truth of the future” (84). 21 After Benson’s death, in other words, the “recorded” future will remain narratable only through literature. Based on her memory of the porviroscópio’s projections, the authority of Jane’s words is essentially that of a fi lm spectator. The “fi lm” she chooses to recount, appropriately, centers on the very country that epitomizes modern technology and cinematic expression. If The Clash of the Races represents the foreigners of the frame narrative as masters of nature (Benson, after all, simulates human evolution through his machine), then

32

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

the same holds true for the North Americans of the novel’s embedded narrative, who in suppressing natural selection practice eugenics to extremes. As Jane explains, the United States government of the twenty-third century has passed a series of laws that promote the sterilization of all mentally or physically handicapped persons, criminals, and any other individuals deemed inferior or undesirable. As if that were not enough, U.S. citizens of the year 2228 are subject to strict regulations regarding procreation, involving government consent and testing. In effect, potential parents must demonstrate their mental and physical fitness to the “Department of Artificial Selection” before they are free to bear children (212). Despite the ominous tones of such descriptions, Jane insists that the official U.S. policy of eugenic control has produced a nation of beautiful, intelligent and healthy citizens. Indeed, she sees eugenics as the fl ipside of Yankee efficiency, the former resolving all the nation’s moral shortcomings, the latter all its material problems (148). The fi nal outcome of the novel’s embedded narrative, a racial “cleansing” in which black citizens are tricked into sterilizing themselves, belies the tidiness of Jane’s assertions. The political disenchantment of blacks and women in the novel echoes the racist and sexist foundations upon which eugenics was, in fact, predicated, particularly in the contentious climate of the 1920s. Whether in fiction or expository writing, eugenics in Latin America often functioned as a discursive mode through which the region’s relative position in the family of nations was debated and negotiated. Through eugenics, as Nancy Lys Stephan has observed, gender and race in early twentieth century Latin America were linked to the intricate political maze of national identity (105). Lobato forcefully expressed his own views on the subject in a series of texts written in 1918 and collected later under the title A Vital Problem [Problema vital]. In these essays, he claims that hygiene rather than racial “predisposition” is responsible for most of Brazil’s social ills. The “caipira” (a mixed-race country hick) is a man “in a latent state” who lives in squalor because he suffers from viruses and parasites brought upon him by ignorance; or, as Lobato puts it, “The caipira isn’t this way [habitually], he is this way [right now]” [O caipira não ‘é’ assim. ‘Está’ assim] (Mr. Slang e o Brasil e Problema Vital 285). If Lobato is unwavering in his argument, he once again cannot resist making overly stark comparisons between Brazil and the United States, invoking the commonplace of his hemispheric neighbor’s hygienic efficiency by contrasting the misery of a typical Brazilian rural setting with the limpid vitality of a corresponding U.S. small town. 22 Yet it is Lobato’s fictionalization of the same “problem,” the story Jeca Tatuzinho, that ultimately reached the widest audience. Building on a character he had introduced in his collection Urupês, Lobato presents readers with a sequel in which the lowly caipira Jeca Tatú receives a visit from a city doctor, is told of the maladies from which he suffers, and applies the doctor’s suggestions to both himself and his family. By changing his

Ex Machina 33 hygienic habits, Jeca sees an increase in his energy, work ethic, and productivity, ultimately learning English and buying a Ford truck in which to carry pigs to the marketplace. First published in the 1920s as propaganda by the Brazilian pharmaceutical industry, the story turned the “American dream” into a highly successful motivational narrative for impoverished residents of hard-to-reach corners of the nation. Silviano Santiago has declared, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that Jeca Tatuzinho, given its hundreds of millions of readers, “should be at the top of the bestseller list of Brazilian bestsellers” (“Monteiro Lobato today—semi-colon” 6–7). The overwhelming dissemination of the pamphlet underscores Lobato’s peculiar genius at mobilizing commercial interests through the popular press to pursue polemical and didactic ends, in effect converting what Jürgen Habermas has seen as a threat to the public sphere into an ally (a point I discuss at greater length in Chapter One). The advertising, popular journalism and Hollywood fi lms of the period, so instrumental in disseminating images of material progress and affluence, invariably featured light-skinned models and actors. In Jeca Tatuzinho, therefore, the United States serves as a metonymy of both modernity and racial purity, as Jeca aspires to bourgeois North American standards of material comfort but also whiteness as well. Throughout The Clash of the Races, similarly, swarthy Lobo clearly grapples with feelings of racial inferiority. When he contemplates making love to Jane, he stops short, reminding himself, that “[o]ne born to be a [lowly] employee of Sá, Pato & Cia can never become the husband of Professor Benson’s daughter!” (244). 23 Lobo’s feelings of inadequacy come to the fore when he attempts to write a novel based on Jane’s recollection. Jane criticizes his fi rst draft for being stylistically pedantic—an assessment that resembles her disparagement of Jim Roy (the black president of the novel’s embedded narrative) when he tries to make himself over as an “artificial white man.” Lobo’s response manages to be both self-effacing and slightly defensive. “My natural way of being is not charming, Miss Jane,” Lobo confesses. “Rather, it is coarse, rude, artless, naïve” (271). 24 Throughout most of The Clash of the Races, Lobo represents himself as inferior to Prof. Benson and Jane in terms of social class and innate mental aptitude. Both father and daughter invariably appear in sole possession of knowledge just beyond the grasp of the arriviste Lobo, who mostly plays the part of apprentice. As the only characters of the novel capable of inventing and operating the porviroscópio, Benson and Jane have mastered what Martin Heidegger refers to as the modern “means of technology,” though not the “revealing” essence of technology, what Heidegger calls techne. 25 It is only by putting Jane’s oral record of the future “screenings” into writing, thus earning her respect with his artistry, that Lobo is able to bridge the distance that separates them. Lobo may lack the savoir-faire of the Yankee technologists, yet his ability to capture in words the events seen through the porviroscópio suggests that the young Brazilian is a master of techne itself.

34

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By endowing his narrator with the ability to redivert technology through a literary text, Lobato returns the technological to its poetic origins, restoring transparency to a process obscured by the modern apparatus. By so clearly associating Lobo’s command of techne with his nationality—just as he has equated Benson’s dominion of technological means with his North American pedigree—Lobato creates a potent niche for Brazilian cultural agency.26 The leitmotif of cinema, meanwhile, present during the earlier descriptions of the porviroscópio that has “recorded” future events, returns as the embedded narrative draws to a close. Disturbed by the outcome of the story he has heard, and frustrated by Jane’s austerity, Lobo storms out of the offices of his employer Sá, Pato & Cia and seeks refuge in a movie theater, where he sees a John Barrymore film and imagines he is giving Jane the kind of kiss he sees the hero give the heroine, “a Shakespearean kiss, a force-of-nature kiss” [[u]m beijo shakespireano, um beijo-força-danatureza] (249). In the last chapter of The Clash of the Races, the book Lobo has written with Jane is sealed with just such an embrace. Having received Jane’s stamp of approval, the former apprentice fi nally works up the courage to play the part of the leading man, transforming Benson’s daughter from mentor to movie star: “I flung myself at her, as one who fl ings himself at life itself, and crushed her lips with the endless kiss of John Barrymore. And like the lightning bolt that ignites the incombustible tree trunk, my kiss brought out of Professor Benson’s frigid daughter the passionate woman I had dreamt about” (274). 27 The melodramatic spectacle of the embrace softens the civilizing influence of Jane and her father, as Lobo brings Jane down to a demotic sphere by dressing their kiss in the popular fashion of Hollywood. Jesús MartínBarbero has remarked that the “rhetoric of excess” so central to melodrama is ultimately redemptive: “Judged as degrading by cultivated minds, this excess nevertheless contains a victory over repression, over a certain ‘economy’ of order, that of savings and retention” (131). 28 Lobo’s embrace therefore serves as a metaphor for the miscegenation that the pragmatic, cultivated Jane has explicitly criticized. Yet even after their “excessive” kiss, the young scribe places himself below the Anglo purity of Jane, confiding that, “in your blue eyes I saw with such vividness the purity of your soul that right away I regretted my impetuosity, the offspring of ignorance” (273). 29 Regrets notwithstanding, just as Jane has “awoken” the writer in Lobo, Lobo liberates the lover in Jane, coaxing from her the kind of passion—and the kind of woman—that heretofore has existed solely in his “ignorant,” cinematic imagination. Upon arriving in New York, Monteiro Lobato was so certain that The Clash of the Races was destined to be an international best seller that he planned to create his own publishing house with which to launch an English version of the book, thus “making all of us, the editors and the edited, [as] rich [as Ford]” (A Barca de Gleyre II 300). Yet his Tupy Publishing Company was fi nally aborted when Lobato’s investments took a

Ex Machina 35 big fi nancial hit in the 1929 stock market crash, and his book’s disturbing projections of a dystopian United States failed to attract a commercial U.S. publisher (Costa 78). Lobato’s Yankee misfortunes, curiously, did not seem to put a dent in his buoyant opinion of the United States. In a revealing chapter of his book of travel chronicles, America: the United States in 1929 [America: Os Estados Unidos de 1929], published several years after The Clash of the Races—with his calamitous four years in the United States behind him—Lobato likens a Manhattan movie theater to a cathedral, its orderly crowds an indication of an “American institution more respected than the very God of the Bible” (117). Hearing an organist playing as he enters the theater, Lobato wonders how to describe “that richness of sound, unprecedented in the world” and concludes that the organ is no mere musical instrument but rather “the art of the devil, magic” (120–21). Continuing a pattern present throughout his work of the late 1920s, Lobato seizes on the episode to criticize the “abundant inaptitude” of his own country and of the “Latin race” in general (117). More centrally, he uses the site of popular fi lm consumption as a point of departure for his thoughts on the beneficial “Dionysian” qualities of U.S. mass culture, characterizing North American arts as products of “the irresistable impulse of human genius that thrives in this land free of all hindrances” (122). 30 For Lobato the cronista, North American culture was a necessary “destructive” force that disposed of European decadence the way the Vandals once razed the crumbling Roman Empire—a fortuitous act, Lobato contends, that cleared the path for the even greater achievements of the European Renaissance (122). Lobato saw U.S. popular forms such as film as enchanting yet ultimately brutal instruments that sowed the seeds for new art even as they leveled the old. In Lobato’s world, cinematic expression, like writing, was inextricably tied to the marketplace. In this sense, the Brazilian’s vision was resolutely out of step with the literary avant-gardes, since he did not even pretend to object to bourgeois capitalism’s disregard for autonomous artistic expression. Writing about the great stock market crash of December 1929, Lobato looked for signs of fortitude and even wisdom in the freefall of the U.S. economy. “The ‘Bear’” he writes, “performs a lovely function [by] reviving the market” (270). 31 Despite the fact that he had been mauled by the most ferocious bear market in modern history, Lobato found in the very danger of the nation’s cultural and fi nancial institutions—an apprehension evident in much Latin American criticism of the U.S. of the early twentieth century, from Rodó and Darío to Manuel Ugarte—a positive source of renewal as well. As Lobato biographer Edgard Cavalheiro remarks, “Lobato’s enthusiasm for America is so intense that it overlooks small setbacks, simply refusing to take them into account” (293). 32 In fact, Lobato suffered more than just “small setbacks” during his stay in the northern metropolis. In the end, his spellbinding encounter with the wealth, vitality and seductive modernity of the United States blinded him to the nation’s underlying imbalances and infi rmities—the “dark side”

36

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

of modern technological progress given such odd allegorical expression in The Clash of the Races.

CLONING THE ENEMY: CLEMENTE PALMA’S XYZ The popular conventions at the heart of both “Miss Dorothy Phillips, My Wife” and The Clash of the Races betray their debt not just to the film medium, but also specifically to the sentimental narrative strategies of Hollywood. With their ample use of sudden reversals of fortune and “rhetoric of excess,” both writers splice commercial cinematic (melodramatic) tropes into the fabric of modern tales. Journalists with intimate ties to the popular press whose short fiction bears the influence both of the silent pictures and the folletín, Quiroga and Monteiro Lobato, like the U.S. silent film industry, employ modern techniques to reconvert traditional forms. More than any other Latin American literary text of the period, however, Clemente Palma’s 1934 science fiction novel XYZ fuses fear and envy of Yankee ingenuity with a fierce condemnation of the Hollywood star system. Like Quiroga’s Guillermo Grant, the novel’s North American protagonist Rolland Poe is the “director” of his own creations, an inventor whose experiments in artificial reproduction lead him to clone a number of Hollywood fi lm stars with whom he populates an uninhabited island off the coast of South America. If Palma’s protagonist is also a galán, he is a learned and aristocratic one, a conflation of Grant and Lobato’s Benson in whom a fanatical reverence for science competes with erotic impulses and North American pragmatism clashes with latinidad. 33 In Palma’s hands, Hollywood thematics are given center stage. Although the novel superficially bears a resemblance to some contemporary classics of the genre—in particular H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1897) and Villiers de L’Isle Adam’s L’Eve future (1886)—XYZ uniquely blends science fiction and late modernista conventions with Latin American anxieties about the mechanical reproduction, standardization and savage capitalism epitomized by U.S. mass culture. Like Quiroga and Lobato, Clemente Palma during the 1920s and 1930s stood in stark, sometimes defiant contrast to the various vanguard alliances in his midst. As a literary critic for such periodicals as Prisma and Variedades, Palma often leveled damning assessments of what he perceived as the shameless trendiness of the avant-gardes—indeed, in this sense, he was an even stauncher critic than either Quiroga or Lobato. What is particularly interesting is not his opposition to the radicalism of certain younger writers, however, but his reasoning: As Marcel Velázquez Castro points out, Palma criticizes the vanguardistas not for their radical novelty but rather for what he sees as their backwardness (162). In his fictional work, however, Palma betrays an atavistic reflex typical of Spanish American modernismo in which alchemy is seen as a privileged forebear of the

Ex Machina 37 technological. In his work prior to XYZ, vampires and other supernatural phenomena abound, leading critics such as Gabriela Mora to label his fiction “Gothic modernismo” [modernista gótica] (121). In XYZ, the morbid atmosphere of his early stories yields to a lighter touch in which, nevertheless, the backdrop of sorcery is never too far off. John F. Moffitt dates the poetic resurrection of alchemy in Western art to the popularity of Éliphas Levi’s writings in 1860s France, though its new value to artists and intellectuals was not material but rather one of “transmutative symbolism” in which the alchemist’s quest for unity was seen as analogous to the artist’s goals as well (Moffitt 38–39).In Latin America, such regard for the occult bespeaks an explicit reaction to the scientivistic cult of positivism. As Octavio Paz tells it, positivism in Latin America was never devoid of the religiosity it ostensibly sought to efface. It was, Paz writes, ultimately a system more of belief than scientific method, although the dryness of its dogmatism denied poets and artists of Rubén Darío’s generation the sanctified aura of previous systems of faith (Los hijos del limo 128–30). For the modernistas, as for the symbolists, nostalgia for metaphysics brought the arcane science of the alchemist back to relevance. Among late modernista and vanguard works, Vicente Huidobro’s novel Cagliostro, which tells the story of an eighteenth-century Italian alchemist, demonstrates the persistence of the occult among writers of the 1920s and 1930s, and also underscores a common association between metaphysics and the “magic” of cinema. The novel, written originally as a screenplay in the 1920s then later converted to fiction, retains the moniker “novela-fi lm”—a rather common strategy employed by a number of Latin American writers of the period (including Monteiro Lobato, who gave his 1921 novella The Blacks [Os negros] the subtitle “cine-Romantic novel” [novela cine-romántica]). Although Huidobro’s work does employ a number of fi lmic techniques—fade outs, jump cuts, and so on—Cagliostro is ultimately a rather conventional treatment of the celebrated mago’s life. In the novel’s prologue, Huidobro stresses the cinematographic style of his prose, yet his most suggestive statement concerns the content of the novel, not its form. Defending his use of fantastical material, the Chilean writer takes the opportunity to denounce the sophistry of positivism (“those false men of science of the generation of thirty or forty years ago”34) and accept the plausibility of the occult, drawing a parallel between the miracle of metaphysics and modern mass technology: Why should one suppose it impossible that alchemists of other times manufactured gold? Why should we fi nd this so extraordinary? Aren’t we surrounded by the extraordinary? Isn’t it just as extraordinary to play a record on a gramophone, or that a little metal disc or celluloid can reproduce the human voice? And wireless telegrams? And television? (23) 35

38

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

Instead of denying a place for scientific method and production in modern society, relegating alchemy to a site of escapist nostalgia, Huidobro underscores the currency of metaphysics as a spiritual map of modernity. Clemente Palma’s Rolland Poe similarly emphasizes the wonder of science and technology as a fulfi llment of the occult rather than its antithesis. “The horizons are expanding,” he says, “to the extent that knowledge of the laws of biology has advanced and the innermost secrets of nature have been revealed, as man plumbs the depths of the den of mysteries that once seemed fathomless” (26–27). 36 The word “den” [antro] appears again sometime later in the text, when the narrator Billy describes Poe’s laboratory. A hidden door, he writes, leads to the “den of the nigromancer, a vast room of approximately fi fty square meters that received natural light through thick curved glass covering a large part of the vaulted dome” (39). 37 Though the narrator invariably describes Poe’s work as that of a thorough and methodical modern scientist, the air of occult secrecy that envelops his friend’s workspace, along with the strangeness of his experiments, inevitably provokes such allusions to sorcery. Poe’s inscrutable abilities provoke comparisons to witchcraft even among his own creations—the “andrógenas” or doubles of Hollywood fi lm actresses Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Jeannette Macdonald, Norma Shearer and Joan Bennett. At one point, Crawford’s double justifies her suspicion of foul play by calling Poe “half wiseman and half sorcerer” [medio sabio y medio brujo] (163). Although Poe attempts to explain to the doubles just how they came to inhabit his island (dubbed “Rollandia” by the narrator), the cloned leading ladies understand the story only in conventional fi lm narrative terms and criticize it accordingly for lacking verisimilitude. Undeterred, Poe resolves to dress up his far-fetched account in the guise of an Arabian Nights–like allegory, thus lending it the prestige of an “Oriental story” (109). The use of such embedded narrative, without actually revealing to the women the mystery of their own origins, serves to accentuate the Hollywood doubles’ sense that their host is in fact a sorcerer, since they naturally identify him with the story’s protagonist Firuz, whose “magical mirror” liberates a group of spellbound sisters. A shrewd manipulator when he needs to be, Rolland Poe capitalizes on the andrógenas’ fear of his powers to keep them within the confi nes of the mansion. To make sure the utmost secrecy and security are maintained on his island, the scientist goes to great lengths to prevent any staff employee from revealing the existence of the clones upon returning to the United States. His main strategy consists of hiring men who are either deaf-mutes or illiterate blacks, servants “incapable” of revealing his experiments (60). To further ensure their obliviousness to any strange incidents they might witness, Poe keeps his staff sated with food and liquor, encouraging them to stay as drunk as possible while they are not working (61). Although Poe’s racist remarks about the ignorance and “rude nature” of his black servants indicate a fear of exposing his clone-subjects’ chastity to anyone

Ex Machina 39 but himself, he assures Billy that the servants pose no real threat since, as he says, “they [take] me for a sorcerer” (104). On the other hand, Poe does not hesitate to frighten his guests into submission by telling them the servants are in fact Maori cannibals (106). He thus pits the perceived superstition of his male servants against the hysteria of his movie-star clones, ensuring that both sides hold him in reverence and fear. Poe’s reputation as a quasi-magician is bolstered by his own declamations on science. As he sees it, modern science as conventionally practiced in the early twentieth century suffers from myopic overspecialization and lacks the overarching unity that characterizes metaphysics and poetry. “The modern, fragmentary tendency of scientific thought,” Poe tells Billy, “increasingly excludes the luminous intuitions of the imagination, and the advance of knowledge submerges us in the corners of the macrocosm” (95). 38 The only solution, in other words, is to “complete” science with the wisdom of poetry and the occult so as to avoid the “exhaustion of mystery through unconnected partialities” (96). Poe views radium—the source of his cloning experiments—as an indestructible “substratum” of all vital energy and hence a pure substance of divine wholeness, bringing to hard science the “macrocosmic” elegance of the alchemist (96–97). If Rolland Poe is equal parts artist, mago and scientist, he is also—significantly—a North American aristocrat. His personal wealth and playboy personality put him in contact with none other than Douglas Fairbanks, through whom he becomes acquainted with the female stars he will later clone. Both he and his friend Billy make a number of references to Poe’s money, and both routinely travel by yacht and Rolls Royce (47). Poe arranges for Billy (who is an architect) to build him a sumptuous mansion befitting a gentleman of means. Once he has established himself in his abode and populated his island with his Hollywood “offspring,” Poe uses his refi ned charm to keep his artificial women in toe. Yet on at least one occasion his social class and nationality work against him: after hearing the story of Firuz and the Magical Mirror, Joan Crawford’s double criticizes the narrative’s fantastical nature as incongruous, since “it comes off as mockery or stupidity coming from the mouth of a civilized Yankee” (128). 39 Later in the novel, when MGM director Lewis Stone, who has found out about the existence of Poe’s island and exploits, embarks with cast and crew on a bizarre pirate voyage to Rollandia to abduct the doubles, Poe initially eludes their grasp by falsely offering his word of honor, “as the North American gentleman that I am” (208). Yet the “gentleman” ultimately loses the battle for possession of his cloned actresses, since MGM proves more adept at capitalizing on his scientific discovery than Poe does at keeping his secret, even using a legal pretext—that Poe has enslaved his glamorous re-creations—to justify their invasion of his island and abduction of the “socias” (191). Poe proves too old-fashioned and idealistic to overcome the shrewd venality of the Hollywood establishment. At the heart of his battle with Hollywood, however, is the question of the functionality of science. For

40

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

Poe, cloning technology offers the promise of a utopian space. Echoing a common motif in science fiction, what Raymond Williams has called a “willed transformation” of natural laws, Poe seeks primarily to create a likeness (physical as well as psychological) of real human beings. Hence, his goals are largely mimetic: it is the power to emulate God and thus defy mortality that interests him more than any social benefits of his discovery. Although the gallant inventor recognizes the potentially revolutionary application of cloning, his overriding fear of compromising his work through public exposure compels him to work in secrecy (41). In fact, Poe scarcely knows what to do with his andrógenas besides wine and dine them in his island mansion and, occasionally, sleep with them (a point I shall return to later). The Hollywood studio system, on other hand, proves solely interested in commercial applications of Rolland Poe’s novum. If, according to Williams, a willed transformation involves social agency, then Hollywood views Poe’s cloning discovery as a prelude to a mode of “technological transformation” in which agency’s importance diminishes or disappears entirely (“Utopia and Science Fiction” 2). In a sense, Poe and MGM represent two sides of the same North American coin: the former, like Monteiro’s single-minded Yankee inventor in The Clash of the Races, is a throwback to the nineteenth century image of the brilliant applied scientist, sufficiently aristocratic or bohemian to be immune to the bourgeois temptations of the market. The fi lm industry, by contrast, turns its back on the virtues of knowledge, method and idealistic pursuit, using its marketing genius to exploit science for commercial gain. Palma’s novel thus traces a changing of the guard from scientific agency to instrumentality. Rolland Poe, as his surname suggests (in the novel he is said to be a direct descendent of Edgar Allen Poe), finds his inspiration in the mores and metaphysics of the nineteenth century. One of the Peruvian writer’s most important models is Villiers de l’Ile Adam’s character Thomas Edison, who in L’Eve Future creates for a friend a clone of his lover, using the process to correct the woman’s moral flaws. The novel has recently been lauded by a number of critics as a groundbreaking exploration of the ideological bases and social consequences of cloning. As Darko Suvin puts it, “Hadaly, the ‘future Eve,’ is both the logical end-product of bourgeois reification or standardization [ . . . ] and a rich countercreation named after the Ideal” (168). Suvin also identifies another important undercurrent in Villiers’ fiction, misogyny, which fi nds its way into Palma’s novel as well. As Mary Anne Doane has noted, science fiction routinely uses and abuses women as a way of displacing anxiety about the novum’s practical consequences, or more specifically, “the conjunction of technology and the feminine is the object of fascination and desire but also of anxiety.” Doane also calls Villiers’ Hadaly “the fi rst embodiment of the cinematic woman,” given that Edison, creator of an artificial woman in the novel, is regarded in history as one of the inventors of the fi lm apparatus (119). Yet it is in XYZ

Ex Machina 41 that “the conjunction of technology and the feminine” clearly and explicitly occurs within the site of cinema. Rolland Poe’s cloned movie stars repeatedly make reference to fi lmic qualities of their existence on the inventor’s South American island. Greta Garbo, Poe’s fi rst fully formed andrógena and also his fi rst clone-lover (Jeanette Macdonald is his second), typifies the artificial women’s grateful bewilderment when she tells her creator, “I thank you for the hospitality you offer me, and eagerly await the explanation to be furnished by the script of this quite strange fi lm” (68).40 On a number of occasions, it appears Poe values the company of the women he has begotten more than the science used to create them. In theory, he places his profession above his personal life, assuring Billy that his interest in “miss Greta” was “essentially scientific” (67). His resolve, however, begins to soften at the hands of the faux Garbo’s blunt seductiveness. Poe claims his feelings to be a practical extension of his intellect, attributing his actions to serious intention rather than frivolous accident: “If by an act of will I awoke my animal instincts, it was also by an act of will, suggested by cerebral rather than visceral needs, that I resolved to make love to my creation” (81–2).41 As their relationship approaches the moment of consummation, Poe blames his weakness for Greta on his need for rest and relaxation brought on by the arduous demands of his work, thus their affair for him constitutes “a calming emotional refuge from my scientific worries and experimental efforts” and “an artificial love” (83).42 In spite of such disclaimers, the inventor experiences genuine affection and passion for his fi rst artificial lover. Yet it is Poe’s relationship with Jeanette Macdonald’s double that ultimately reveals the extent to which science proves a pretext for love, and not the other way around. The scientist’s preference for Jeanette over her cloned colleagues is predicated in part on what he perceives as her social superiority—“her delicate physique whose distinguished, chaste movements [make] her beauty more aristocratic”— compared to the “delicious and picaresque” frivolity of her companions (134).43 While Poe’s attraction to Jeannette also hinges on her uniquely intuitive intelligence, in particular her curiosity about the mystery of her origins, it seems also to depend on her fear and obedience of her master. When Poe suspects Jeannette of withholding her true thoughts about him, he warns her, “Don’t forget that I am something of a sorcerer” [No olvide que yo soy algo brujo] (136). Whatever spell Poe holds over Jeannette ultimately yields to his passion for her, which he characterizes as deeper than his feelings for the other andrógenas and thus impossible to suppress. The yanqui inventor expresses his power explicitly in terms of his authority over the island and its inhabitants—an authority only a “goddess” like Jeannette is capable of vanquishing. As he tells Billy: I forget all the cold and scientific facts I know about these stupendous creations, these artificial duplications of human beings, as soon as I find

42

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema myself before this divine poupée—yes, old pal, divine, because only her divinity has succeeded in rendering me helpless, making me forget about the masterfulness of the plan, this disconcerting phenomenon of humanity’s marginal remnants of which I am the sole author (140).44

While Jeannette’s “divinity” makes Rolland forget about his authority over her as creator and guardian, it is difficult to separate her condition of “marginal” clone from her intimate association with real-life fi lm actresses. The deification of early Hollywood stars was no mere accident. Greta Garbo, after all, was publicized by MGM as the “Divine,” an epithet repeated by countless newspaper reviewers and fan magazines internationally, including Spanish-language publications like Cine Mundial, Cinema and Ecran.45 Through the intertexual dynamics of star discourse, in other words, the individual identities of exotic stars like Garbo assumed superhuman proportions. Hollywood studios had a stake in putting actors on pedestals. As Paul McDonald stresses in his study on Hollywood celebrity, the “personal monopoly” of a star’s constructed image translated directly into economic value (109). Walter Benjamin offers a slightly different explanation, contending that the Golden Age star system was compensating for the diminishment of “aura” inherent in the reproductive means of fi lm technology: “Film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the ‘personality’ outside the studio” (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” 742). XYZ fleshes out mass culture’s mechanical reproduction by using the speculative tools of science fiction to apply it to the stars themselves. Poe’s marooned Hollywood doubles, condemned as they are to short, shallow lives marked by confusion and amnesia, can be read as analogous to the ways in which the fi lm medium itself “detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition” (Benjamin 734). As reproductions, the andrógenas are secondary entities, though the “artificial build-up” of the fi lm studios applies as much to them as it does to their prototypes. Seen in such a way, Jeanette’s movie-star aura compensates for her “marginal” status as a replica. The novel’s reproduction motif continues after word gets out about the existence of the island-bound clones. Interestingly, the story is leaked to the press by the one character in the novel given a Spanish surname. A Californian son of immigrants, Dick Vargas fi nds himself working on Poe’s island only when he is mistaken for a deaf mute and hence thought incapable of revealing the island’s secrets. Later, having abandoned the island and working as an extra in Hollywood, Vargas divulges the existence and whereabouts of the andrógenas to MGM studio executives. As MGM speculates about the method used to duplicate the movie stars, a theory emerges that the women are in fact carbon-copy look-alikes rather than artificial creations. The studio reasons that standards of beauty subconsciously emulated by female fans worldwide would make it hard

Ex Machina 43 to distinguish the cloned celebrities from fans, imitations from imitators (195). As in “Miss Dorothy Phillips, My Wife,” the popular press plays an important role in XYZ as an unreliable mediator between rumor and reality: once the andrógenas have been whisked away to California, the press exaggerates the story beyond recognition, inventing a biography for Poe and exoticizing the circumstances of the abduction, thus exploiting “the naïve weakness for the fantastic and the marvelous shared by audiences all over the world, particularly in North America” (219).46 The spectacle of the cloning is fi nally, grotesquely, staged in Hollywood in a fi lm-theatre hybrid where alchemy meets science and fact meets fiction. Scenes of the staged kidnapping of the stars are interspersed with overdone theatrical sketches, as documentary footage of the stars meeting their clones for the fi rst time leads up to their actual appearance on stage. The end-result is a pastiche that further embellishes the tabloid spectacle that precedes it (225). The show features a highly fanciful recreation of the Rollandia. Instead of the stately mansion and modern scientist, the crowd beholds a performance generously sprinkled with fantastical elements; Poe himself has been turned into a caricature of sensationalized alchemy, “a wizard with as much Neptune in him as an aging, out-dated Merlin” (225).47 As master of ceremonies, MGM’s Lewis Stone waxes utopian about the significance of the event, declaring that the doubles “showed that they had the same superior qualities as the originals, opening a new era for the U.S. fi lm industry and cinematic art” (229).48 When an incognito Rolland Poe reveals his identity, however, he denounces the spectacle as a venal charade. Just before he takes his own life, the inventor publicly inveighs against his studio nemesis. Yet he does not spare either himself or his beloved creations from judgment, castigating himself as a “self-proclaimed Yankee God [auto-Dios yankee]” and declaring, “those women created by science [ . . . ] are ungrateful and frivolous even in the artificial state” (237).49 With Poe’s demise comes a revelation as well. In the novel’s epilogue, the scientist is revealed to have been mortally ill, having been “infected” (in fact, poisoned by radium) through sexual contact with his favorite clones, thus “through love, radium took its revenge using Eros as its accomplice” (245). 50 It would be easy to interpret the story’s denouement as allegorical: the “radioactive” core of the fi lm industry inherent in both Poe’s world and Lewis Stone’s can be trafficked only at the expense of one’s soul. Such a view, moreover, is not inconsistent with the traditional use of the double particularly prevalent in gothic literature, as discussed exhaustively by Otto Rank in his classic study on the subject. Yet the presence of the cinema as both formal and thematic anchor only deepens the problematics of the double. If we accept that Poe’s suicide complies with one of Rank’s conditions—that the protagonist kills himself in a vain attempt to eliminate his doppelgänger—then we can only conclude that the double here has evolved beyond its gothic prototype. No longer a mere mimetic representation of the tortured protagonist, the double has, as it were, become Hollywood

44

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

itself. By shooting himself and thus dying along with the technology he has begotten (the “socias” have been programmed to die at the same moment as their inventor), Rolland Poe commits “double” suicide. If his reproductive powers mirror those of Hollywood, a fact underscored by MGM’s theft of his prized creations, then he hopes to put an end to the base, prosaic side of his own personality—attributes he associates with Stone and the Hollywood studio system. 51 In a revealing analysis of the technological imaginary, Andreas Huyssen points to the essential “bipolarity” of technology’s role in bourgeois society since the late nineteenth century, caught between the “aestheticization of technics” on one hand, and the “horror of technics” on the other. 52 XYZ’s finale captures both experiences simultaneously, as Poe’s elegant ingenuity (in many ways a personification of the late Romantic aestheticization of the technological mentioned by Huyssen) is celebrated even as it proves poisonous: the object of beauty begotten through technological means seduces and mortally disfigures its inventor. Hollywood, as I have already suggested, lies symbolically at the intersection of technology and mass culture. According to Huyssen, the persistent gendering of mass culture as feminine in modernist works is derived from a debasement of both women and the “masses” at the hands of the rational bourgeois order (47–53). Seen in such a light, Quiroga’s characterization of the literary establishment’s early depiction of cinema as “art for maids” seems especially on the mark. The irony, of course, is that Quiroga in his fictional work himself makes an actress (Dorothy Phillips) the cover girl for a film industry characterized by its unique ability to fabricate. Palma takes such an association one step further, relegating Poe’s simulacra—borne of technology and mass culture—to a role of lethal concubines. That Clemente Palma should choose live theater as the site of the novel’s climax, meanwhile, is interesting on a number of levels. In one sense, it suggests that the metaphorical consequences of Poe’s backwardlooking science are a relocation of the cinema to its popular theatrical past. Indeed, the theater-fi lm pastiche in many ways represents a highpriced circus act—one disgruntled audience member even calls the event a “clown routine” [payasada] (226)—or, perhaps more accurately, a vaudeville show in which various media are used to shock and entertain. Vaudeville and dance hall, as a number of fi lm theorists and historians have pointed out, are among fi lm’s key predecessors (a point to which I return in Chapter Three). The same holds true for the popular press, through which fi lm audiences had received a preparation for Hollywood’s folletinesque narrative, and which maintained a share of power through its “star discourse” interventions. 53 The fact that Palma integrates both popular theater and journalism into MGM’s clone spectacle constitutes an oblique commentary on early fi lm history. The show’s high-bourgeois spectators, meanwhile, who have paid top dollar to witness on stage the live encounter between fi lm idols and their clones, cannot help but be “embarrassed” by the lowbrow staging of artifice.

Ex Machina 45 Yet it is not only the novel’s climactic scene that captures the flavor of early fi lm. As Gabriela Mora points out in her study on Clemente Palma, the entire novel is rife with the thematics of reproduction; she cites for example the embedded story of Firuz and the Magic Mirror as a retelling of the clones’ miraculous existence. At the same time, Palma’s story often resembles a Hollywood film script in its use of melodramatic flourishes, extravagant fortunes and adventures, as well as the generous use of exotic settings (Mora 171–72). Yet melodrama is not the only way in which Palma’s narrative draws parallels with popular fi lm. The evolution of his Hollywood doubles from “homunculi” to andrógenas, the latter of greater verisimilitude and duration than the former, mirrors Hollywood’s development from primitive silent fi lm industry to the increasing technical sophistication of the 1930s, as well as the evolution of the star system away from male European lovers such as Valentino and Maurice Chevalier to the female stars of the early sound era. The implosion of both technological artifice and high-culture aspirations in the fi nal scene, therefore, betrays Hollywood’s backward-looking gaze. It also explodes the myth of permanence: in spite of its mastery of reproductive technology, Hollywood (like its doppelgänger, Rolland Poe) is anything but eternal. In XYZ’s epilogue, the narrator Billy receives posthumous instructions from Poe to turn the inventor’s strange tale into a book. Poe’s fi nal request, however, comes with a prediction. The story that Billy has just recounted, Poe prophecies, “will be taken for the extravagant fantasy of a backward Jules Verne or Wells” (247). 54 The metafictional echoes of the comment tell us, among other things, what we already knew: Clemente Palma has self-consciously borrowed from the Anglo-European tradition of science fiction. The fact that the Peruvian writer’s revision of Verne and Wells is deemed “backward,” on the other hand, points ironically to the subalterity of the novel’s modern, New World canvass. On one hand, Palma suggests, the narrative has been written by a Latin American and set in part on a Latin American island. At the same time, most of its main characters are North American and the story’s novum a product of Yankee technology; moreover, the looming presence of Hollywood marks the novel with the “lowly” connotation and melodramatic structure of popular fi lm narrative. Monteiro Lobato and Quiroga’s incorporation of Hollywood conventionality and fi lmic technique into science fiction and fantastical narrative likewise alludes to both authors’ cultural debt to the United States. Yet there is more than one margin at work in the fiction of Quiroga, Lobato and Palma. All three writers’ uneasy exile from avant-garde movements made them understandably eager to demonstrate their nationalist credentials as well as their stylistic and thematic innovation. Their freedom from vanguard alliances allowed them to engage U.S. mass culture as an object of paradigmatic significance, and not just as a cosmopolitan backdrop used to lend modern texture to their prose. Such full engagement was something

46

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

the majority of Latin American vanguardistas eschewed, perhaps out of fear of attacks from their peers for including any explicit treatment of the United States, even though many of these same writers, when it suited their needs, appropriated filmic technique unavoidably conjoined with popular cinema. Featuring Hollywood so centrally was quite a different gambit. What makes Quiroga, Lobato and Palma’s work so remarkable is not so much the fact that they treat the U.S. fi lm industry so unabashedly, but rather that they do so in such deceptively complex ways. Lobato privileges Ayrton Lobo’s capacity to refashion the porviroscópio’s camera eye in much the same manner as Quiroga gives Guillermo Grant the ability to create his own Hollywood fi lm—through writing. Both characters remain outside the realm of technology and mass production to which the North Americans, by contrast, are seen as central. In Palma’s novel, the mechanism of Latin American narrative mastery is bypassed altogether, leaving North American characters free to exploit one another, as it were. Even if the “aestheticization of technics” proves elusive, the yanquis of all three novels possess an inscrutable ability to master the scientific and entrepreneurial knowledge at the heart of cinema—hardly surprising at a time when Latin American nations still lacked the capital, infrastructure and productive know-how to assemble national industries capable of competing economically or symbolically with Hollywood. In Quiroga and Lobato’s work, a Latin American protagonist penetrates the enlightened sphere of North Americans and learns his lesson from a gringa possessing not just physical beauty but also a technological acumen that he lacks. In exchange, each South American gives his sweetheart a lesson in love, ultimately melting her heart of ice, benefitting from her intellectually before conquering her physically. Although XYZ does not feature such an explicit game of South/North seduction, the character of Rolland Poe ultimately serves as a stand-in. As a refined gentleman with courtly yet beguiling manners, he plays the part of the 1920s Latin Lover—a role driven home by the exoticism of his island domain. Yet Palma never identifies Poe as anything but a genteel North American who happens to possess the means with which to buy himself a South American island-laboratory. In the end, even if we concede to Poe a certain honorary latinidad, his modern-day sorcery ultimately loses out to the long arm of the film industry. Significantly, the only fully developed character with a Spanish surname is the novel’s traitor figure, Dick Vargas. Neither the daring protagonist of Quiroga’s fiction, nor the gallant upstart of Lobato’s, Palma’s Vargas is a humbler, less heroic creation: a supporting character and passive observer of Hollywood whose marginality is underscored by his role as a film extra. By largely writing Latin Americans out of the scenario, Palma implicitly concedes that local literary fantasies are unable to compete with the high-tech magic of Hollywood. Quiroga and Lobato’s work, on the other hand, represents an important departure from the discursive tactics of Latin American anti-imperialist

Ex Machina 47 intellectuals of the period. The stereotypes of both narratives are dialogized by their very structure. By framing Hollywood with a dream and revealing it is as such in the story’s denouement, Quiroga undermines the authenticity of his own narrator’s rendering of the film metropolis, including his depictions of North American characters. Lobato, meanwhile, balances the main confl ict of his embedded narrative (race war in a future North America) by ultimately pairing off the main characters of the frame narrative, the projection of a segregationist United States mitigated as Jane softens and crosses the color line. If Guillermo Grant and Ayrton Lobo end up still outside of the field of film production, reduced to writing about the movies, it attests to the unequal footing with the United States on which Latin America found itself in the 1920s. Their fantasies do not, however, concede any superiority in the realm of artistic expression. On the contrary: by granting themselves the power to assimilate U.S. popular fi lm though written narrative, Quiroga and Lobato—like movie critics—give themselves the fi nal word.

3

Celluloid Border Mexican Revisions of Early Hollywood

In his study Mexico as Seen by the Foreign Cinema [México visto por el cine extranjero], Emilio García Riera traces the fi rst large-scale representation of Mexico on film to the spate of short-reel Westerns at the end of the fi rst decade of the twentieth century. The unique landscape and architecture of the U.S. Southwest, García Riera writes, lent itself to the production of early Westerns and at the same time shaped the Western as a genre with distinctly Mexican attributes. In the making of such fi lms, Mexican and Mexican-American labor was essential. The open nature of the U.S.Mexico borderlands provided U.S. and European fi lmmakers with a constant flow of on-location film sets complete with extras—“vaqueros and cowboys, Mexican bandits and gringos, Mexican rural police and [Texas] rangers, Yaqui indians and Apaches, rancheros and cattlemen”—character types that appeared regularly in the popular fi lms of Bronco Billy, Tom Mix and William S. Hart, three pioneers of the early Western (21).1 The free flow of human capital in southern California particularly benefited directors like D. W. Griffith, who began to base their productions in the region. One of Griffith’s favorite themes was the Mexican and Spanish heritage of California, epitomized by his 1910 adaptation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s famous nineteenth century novel Ramona; starring Mary Pickford, the fi lm helped to crystallize the borderlands as a site of kindred otherness. As García Riera notes, “more than any other state bordering with Mexico, California gave the fi rst U.S. film industry settings with the double advantage of being at once exotic and their own” (36). 2 Such an overlap between Mexico and the United States, the familiar and the exotic, benefited more than just U.S. audiences. In a seminal essay, “The United States, Mexico and Machismo” [Estados Unidos, México y el Machismo], Américo Paredes argues that the birth of Hollywood was marked by a symbiotic cultural relationship between the United States and Mexico based on a nostalgic transfigurement of the past. The early Western consecrated a frontier culture that had, by the beginning of the twentieth century, nearly disappeared. If visual grammar of the Western frontier borrowed extensively from Mexico iconography, Paredes writes, revolutionary Mexico in turn borrowed back from the United States “with interest,” a reappropriation

Celluloid Border

49

of the Old West reflected in the dress and attitude of revolutionary forces, especially in the north of Mexico. “The vaquero returns transformed into a cowboy—a gunman and the most macho of machos” (82).3 In such a strangely familiar context, U.S. fi lmmakers began to construct what would become the most prevalent early stereotypes for Mexicans: the dangerous “greaser” and the innocent señorita. As Margarita de Orellana has noted, the severity and tone of these stereotypes depended somewhat on the racial bias of directors as well as the shifting expectations of North American audiences. Such an ethos was in a period of transition due largely to the coincidence of the Mexican Revolution, which provoked both fear and admiration in the U.S. public. On one hand, the Mexican revolutionary was easily equated to the hero of silent Westerns. Not only did Tom Mix’s pictures feature heroic Mexican characters during the revolution, Mix himself apparently volunteered for Pancho Villa’s forces, a film-meetsreality collaboration later fictionalized by U.S. author Clifford Irving in his novel Tom Mix and Pancho Villa (García Riera 25). In many other cases, however, the fi lm image of the Mexican suffered during the Revolution. Both García Riera and Orellana point to the symptomatic change in Bronco Billy westerns before and after the outbreak of war in Mexico. Whereas the loyal, “Hispanic” aspects of Old Mexico were emphasized in prerevolutionary fi lms like A Mexican’s Gratitude (1909) and The Mexican’s Faith (1910), by the middle of the next decade Bronco Billy was fighting treacherous Mexicans in Bronco Billy and the Greaser (1914) (García Riera 23; Orellana 10). For Orellana, early Hollywood films betray an expansionist desire to colonize the “dark and confusing” savagery of the “virgin desert” of the borderlands (9). Such a conquest, however, was articulated by the selective exoticization of Mexico. As Orellana suggests, the representation of Mexican women as “beautiful señoritas” reveals a nuanced dynamic of engagement that José Limón has identified as an “erotics” of the borderlands (4). By casting the Mexican woman as a white criolla instead of a mestiza or Indian, early Hollywood was making her fit for exotic consumption by white U.S. males and at the same time placing her “above” the Mexican male; in short, the señorita appears “as picturesque as the greaser but not as deprecated” (Orellana 13). As Ana M. López observes, what we witness in these early Hollywood depictions of Mexicans is more construction than representation. Hollywood in effect “coproduced” ethnic stereotypes by assuming the role of ethnographer, creating ethnics and minorities and “[providing] its audience with an experience of them” (“Are All Latins from Manhattan?” 68). The symbolic abuse of mexicanidad inherent in such ethnographic exercises inevitably led to a diplomatic crisis between the U.S. and Mexico beginning under Carranza in the late 1910s and culminating during the Calles administration in the 1920s. Protesting particularly offensive fi lms such as Paramount’s Her Husband’s Trademark (1922), the Mexican government demanded that several Hollywood studios desist from presenting negative

50

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

stereotypes of Mexicans. The eventual resolution of the confl ict—the large studios, under pressure not only from Mexico but increasingly from other foreign governments as well, agreed to withdraw certain particularly offensive fi lms—did not, however, put an end to “Latin” stereotypes in Hollywood. As Aurelio de los Reyes writes, “Following the tangle over the denigrating fi lms, Mexico was the winner in the short term; the loser in the long term, also Mexico; because Goliath accepted David’s conditions while tightening his grip on him” (195).4 The fact that Hollywood actually entered into negotiations and nominally caved in to the demands of the Mexican public, however, demonstrated the strategic importance of the Latin American market for Hollywood, and in particular the key role played by Mexico. Subsequent literature from the decade reveals just how sensitive many Latin Americans of the 1920s were to what Frances R. Aparicio and Susan Chávez-Silverman have called the “hegemonic tropicalizations” of Latin American landscapes, customs and peoples by Hollywood (8). Gabriela Mistral, in Mexico to promote José Vasconcelos’s national literacy and education campaign, was exposed to the controversies provoked by the release of Her Husband’s Trademark and other such fi lms. Mistral argues in an insightful 1926 article fi rst published in El Universal that Hollywood’s stereotypical representations of Mexicans had both dire consequences and sinister intent. “They look for despicable features, and before a Mexican is allowed to act, the spectator already hates him based on his appearance” (“La película enemiga” 6). 5 Recognizing the profit motive behind the use of stereotypes, Mistral rightly sees the potential insidiousness of Hollywood hegemony, arguing, “this propaganda of the fi rst order damages [Mexico] more than any fleet of ships in Veracruz, or oil scandal” (6).6 She concludes her remarks in a particularly suggestive manner: “The cinema today is a kind of universal syllabary by which we read the world, [while] the world is learning to disdain a nation, week by week” (7).7 By likening Hollywood cinema to the despotic author of a global textbook, Mistral set the stage for a series of polemical articles published in response to the arrival of sound, an event debated in magazines and newspapers all over Latin America. Of the many articles written on the subject at the time, perhaps the most strident in its defense of Mexican cultural sovereignty is Alfonso Junco’s “Cinema and the Peaceful Invasion” [El cinematógrafo y la invasión pacífica], fi rst published in El Universal in 1929. Junco, a conservative polemicist, historian and essayist perhaps best known for his series of editorials in defense of what he saw as beleaguered Catholic values (also published in El Universal), throws the full weight of his invective against the United States, whose “fantastic influence [ . . . ] spills beyond its borders and inundates every continent, imposing its norms, tastes and manners through a multi-pronged expansion (cinematic, linguistic, musical, etc.) that never fails to penetrate its target with the greatest of ease, guided by a shrewd hand full of dollars.”8 Like Reyes and

Celluloid Border

51

Mistral, Junco recognizes the unprecedented power of cinema to reach— and teach—nearly all walks of Mexican society. Like the Chilean writer, moreover, Junco paternalistically treats Mexicans as essentially passive and practically unable to stem Hollywood’s rapid encroachment: Weak, disorganized and with the Collosus knocking at the door, we need to stand up with an exceptionally intelligent effort—vast, persistent, radical—to defend ourselves against this peaceful invasion that is quickly distorting our genuine characteristics, deforming our essential being, impoverishing our inner substance and could end up supplanting our personality as a nation, yankifying us to such an extent that we become merely an extension of the United States. (95)9 Junco’s combative stance draws from a century’s worth of Mexican ressentiment toward the United States, one that fi nds its foremost Mexican proponents in Lorenzo de Zavala (in the nineteenth century) and José Vasconcelos (in the early twentieth). Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Junco’s article, however, is his confusion of symbolic and geographical practices of engagement. His well-founded fear of Hollywood as the hegemonic figurehead of “a multi-pronged expansion” is equated with California’s geographical proximity (“with the Collosus knocking at the door”). In any event, Junco, like many of his compatriots, rightly locates Mexico in the fi rst line of defense against a perceived cultural assault on Latin American traditions and normative values. Anti-imperialism, however, was not the only lens through which Mexican writers viewed the U.S. fi lm industry. Starting in 1915, Alfonso Reyes and Martín Luis Guzmán penned a seminal series of essays about fi lm and the creation of Hollywood. First appearing under the joint pseudonym “Fósforo,” the texts reveal an unusual degree of foresight and maturity in their attempt to locate cinema among the arts, popular culture and society in general. Indeed—along with Horacio Quiroga—Reyes and Guzmán were among the fi rst Latin American writers to lead early film criticism beyond its former boundaries of pious praise, elitist amusement or moralistic dismissal. The two Mexican writers seriously question fi lm’s aesthetic value without reaching either contemptuous or overly optimistic conclusions about the new medium’s power and value. At the same time, they avoid the temptation to condemn the Seventh Art on moral grounds, while still acknowledging its vast popular appeal. In one particularly remarkable chronicle fi rst published in the Spanish newspaper El Imparcial, Alfonso Reyes compares the roughshod encampments of the film studios to Biblical settlements: “The system that governs us comes from the Semitic tent [la tienda semítica] and from the trenches will come tablets [tablas] of unsuspected virtues” (Frente a la pantalla 42).10 Despite his ironical tone, Reyes recognizes that the foundation of Hollywood constituted a radical break in which the dominion of signs had

52

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

begun to shift from book to film, even if the “dialectal” environment of the studio system was not yet at the level of refi nement that it would one day reach. Though he calls his article “a moral investigation,” Reyes’s text in fact poses an ironical meditation on the moral outrage proclaimed by many Latin American journalists confronting the supposed lasciviousness of the upstart fi lm community. In his idiosyncratic style, Reyes explains such behavior by comparing Hollywood to a community of migrants or pilgrims. “A wandering people,” he writes, “end up forging a concept of good and evil that does not always coincide with the concept and good and evil held by sedentary peoples” (41).11 Reyes was not the only Latin American to see the writing on the wall. The other half of “Fósforo” focuses on what he sees as the unrivaled mobility of the silent fi lm medium. “The absence of the word,” Martín Luis Guzmán writes, “lends film an indefi nite capacity for cosmopolitanism.”12 Yet for Guzmán the cinema “travels” not just by delivering exotic spectacles to local audiences, but also by disseminating the particular style and sensitivity of each national industry among “good” spectators—and “almost everyone,” he writes, is a good spectator (54). Guzmán also examines the aesthetic relationship between film and the other arts in social rather than phenomenological terms, thus separating himself from earlier modernista fi lm critics like José Juan Tablada who tended to equate the cinema with modern magic (a topic I explore in Chapter Six). Far from describing fi lm as an unprecedented cultural form that transcends all others through the mimetic wizardry of technology, Guzmán lucidly identifies the antecedents of cinema’s “aesthetic of action” in popular forms such as the folletín, underscoring the medium’s potential for egalitarian reform (55–6). The peculiar force of Reyes and Guzmán’s prophetic essays comes from their figurative site of enunciation: the two Mexican writers in effect describe ground zero of cinematic mass production during Hollywood’s infancy. The transfer of power from books to cinema of which Reyes writes was not merely symbolic, because the increasing centralization of the U.S. industry was accompanied by an oligarchic studio system that would soon control the exportation, distribution and local exhibition of Hollywood fi lms worldwide. Widespread intimacy with the rapidly developing world of Hollywood, combined with increasing economic opportunities for foreign correspondents, technicians, extras and even featured actors, compelled and enabled a number of Latin American novelists to write themselves into Cinelandia’s cast of characters. As the United States’ most immediate southern neighbor, Mexico enjoyed a precarious, politically charged relationship with Hollywood from its inception in the late 1910s—but also one that afforded Mexicans a privileged point of access to the U.S. fi lm industry. It should not be surprising, then, that writers like Reyes and Guzmán were among the fi rst in Latin America to write seriously about the emerging fi lm capital. In his “moral investigation” of the movie studios, Reyes describes Hollywood as “the pictoresque, semi-Mexican land of Bret

Celluloid Border

53

Harte’s short stories” [la pintoresca tierra semimexicana de los cuentos de Bret Harte] (42). Due to its geographical proximity, storied Mexican past and abundance of Hispanic surnames and toponyms, Los Angeles for many writers from both sides of the border retained a “vaguely Mexican atmosphere,” as Octavio Paz later observed in his Labyrinth of Solitude [El laberinto de la soledad] (15). Yet mexicanidad was an integral part of the Hollywood’s real and tropical landscape since its very inception. As Reyes’s article suggests, Hollywood’s origins linked it to a frontier—and in fact, as we have already seen, it was the Western that put Hollywood on the map by exploiting southern California’s natural landscape as well as its ample supply of low-wage, dark-skinned residents. Mexico’s early role in Hollywood, however, ultimately went beyond that of villains and extras. The large-scale transfer of human capital from Mexico to Hollywood included not just actors, but also journalists and novelists forming fluid colonies of émigrés, travelers and tourists that mixed to a limited extent with a large, more settled native-born Mexican community.13 Los Angeles’s foreign-born Mexican population interacted extensively with other Latin Americans in the industry, making Hollywood one of the few places of the period where many Mexicans, Argentines, Spaniards, Portuguese and Brazilians lived in constant contact, united not just by common languages and cultural values but also ethnic exclusion and economic hardship. It was Mexico, however, that held the most prominent position in the industry, both in terms of human capital and symbolic representation. As Joanne Hershfield has noted, the U.S. film industry in the fi rst few decades of the twentieth century succeeded in laying down a “structure of mediation” in which Mexican identity was manufactured and passed on to an international audience. Because this structure relied on a framework that “work[ed] to legitimate unequal relations of political power,” however, Mexican audiences yielded to what amounted to a foreign intervention in the construction of their own national identity at a crucial time in the nation’s history (5). Consequently, Mexican writers had the most to gain by shaping—and contesting—Hollywood’s hegemonic uses of its southern neighbors. The coalescence of geographical proximity, diverse work opportunities and ideological provocation spawned a number of literary treatments by Mexican writers showing south-of-the-border subjects in various forms of engagement and entanglement with Hollywood. In ’Che’ Ferrati, Inventor, the journalist and sometime novelist Carlos Noriega Hope unmasks what we might call the attenuated otherness of the Latin lover “pose” to reveal the artifice of the industry that created it. The novel’s main character conquers Hollywood through an act of imposture, then rejects his own hollow celebrity and also the vacuous flapper with whom he associates his success; in the process, the Mexican actor achieves a modicum of agency and a pile of money. The main protagonist of Julián González’s The Dancer from the Blue Pond [La danzarina del estanque azul] is not so fortunate, as

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his participation in Hollywood ultimately contributes toward the death of his compatriot and former best friend. As in Noriega Hope’s novel, however, González’s aspiring Mexican actor counter-seduces Hollywood—a savage space emblemized by a captivating gringa-fatal—only to abandon the high life for the simple pleasures of the past rather than caving into the fi lm industry’s demeaning ethical demands. The massive penetration of Mexican cinema and newsstands by Hollywood’s formidable machinery, meanwhile, inspires the literary, “conceived” treatment of Hollywood in Jaime Torres Bodet’s Day Star [Estrella de día]. The novel traces a bourgeois chilango’s attempt to “rescue” a Mexican star from a Hollywood he has pieced together from fi lms he has seen and magazines he has read, as literature and erudition are ultimately vindicated by a lettered subsumation of U.S. mass culture. The tense political atmosphere between the United States and Mexico at the dawn of Hollywood partly explains the current of sexual conquest that runs through the works I shall discuss in this chapter. As Andreas Huyssen, Stuart Hall and other critics have observed, Western literature from Madame Bovary to the historical avant-garde tended to attribute feminine qualities to mass culture, in large part because both women and the lower social classes were seen as “irrational” threats to the bourgeois-liberal order, proof of “the persistent gendering as feminine of that which is devalued” (Huyssen 53). Francine Masiello and Vicky Unruh have suggested, moreover, that Latin America’s distinctly “tropical” configurations of modernity and the particularly male-dominated political orientation of the region’s avantgarde groups tended to exacerbate both the exclusion of women from literary “fraternities” and also the gendering of mass culture.14 Mexican male writers of the early studio era give Mexican women a pardon from such “vulgar” associations not by severing the link between cinema and the feminine but rather by making sexually aggressive gringas the key embodiments of popular movie culture. By consigning Mexican women to traditional gender roles, such writers in effect turn back the clock on mass culture and in so doing allay male fears of a loss of power. The unique economic and cultural relationship Mexico shares with the United States, its disproportionate presence in the physical and symbolic landscape of Hollywood, as well as the country’s uniquely national constructions of ethnicity and sexuality, thereby mark these narrative texts in particular ways. Indeed, if the U.S. film industry exploited California’s Mexican past to generate ethnic and sexual stereotypes, early Mexican Hollywood fiction reveals an explicit, gendered strategy of symbolic reconquest and cultural reaffirmation.

HOLLYWOOD IMPOSTURE Carlos Noriega Hope fi rst traveled to Hollywood as a correspondent for El Universal and commuted his success as a reporter into a job as the

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editor-in-chief of the paper’s weekly cultural supplement El Universal Ilustrado. The magazine proved an important publication in post-revolutionary Mexico, providing a forum for both fiction and nonfiction by some of the country’s most important writers of the 1920s, including Mariano Azuela and Salvador Novo.15 For a Latin American intellectual of his time, Noriega Hope showed an unusually public passion for popular cinema, a passion fi rst revealed in a series of cine-crónicas published collectively in the book The World of Shadows [El mundo de las sombras] (1920). Documenting his fi rsthand experience in Hollywood during the winter of 1919–20, the chronicles contrast Los Angeles’ order, progress and technological ethos to a comparatively chaotic, antimodern though more human Mexico. The young writer’s admiration of southern California’s highways, civil institutions and modern architecture is surpassed only by his awe of Hollywood women, whom he describes as “the daughters of a sort of mother Eve we could scarcely imagine, her cheeks the color of a California apple, fragrant with cold cream, in sum a perfectly adorable Eve in her stolid, biblical, Yankee way” (20).16 Noriega Hope’s praise strays into melancholy, however, when he reveals that what he has thought to be movie stars are really fi lm extras, “those disillusioned women who wait in vain for the arrival of bread, since the arrival of glory is no longer expected” (23).17 The episode introduces a theme that will re-emerge throughout the decade in Mexican writing about the U.S. fi lm industry: the exaltation and belittlement of North American women serve as tropes of enchantment and disenchantment through which Hollywood and the mass culture it epitomizes are brought down to size. By disarming formidable gringas, Noriega Hope is able to exhibit his symbolic mastery over the United States and its popular fi lm industry. The Mexican writer’s ambivalence about Hollywood women carries over to his novel “Che” Ferrati, Inventor (1923). The book gets its title from an Argentine character who devises the means to transform a Mexican extra (Federico Granados) into the exact likeness of a recently deceased French fi lm star (Henri Le Goffic), to the delight of Granados’ girlfriend, the gringa flapper Hazel Van Buren. Centering on the love/hate relationship between Federico and Hazel, Noriega Hope presents both as marginal characters in a city characterized by its venality and artifice, “a city of illusion, promoted by the celluloid legend that had made it out to be a new Klondike, but one that turned out also to be a city of frivolity (7).18 The narrator describes Hazel, true to her surroundings, as trivial, slight and commonplace, “pretty like any other pretty girl on the street, in the department stores, in the movie theaters.”19 Hazel in turn typecasts Federico as a Latin lover. When she sees that he has the shiny, straight teeth “of a good criollo,” she associates him with Spanish heartthrob Antonio Moreno and places him in a setting of bullfights and flowers (9). Upon discovering that Federico is in fact Mexican, however, Hazel expresses disgust, which mixes with surprise when she fi nds out that he can read and write (14). Noriega Hope sums up the mutual though

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superficial attraction between the two newcomers in the following manner: “The young Mexican lent her the charm of things exotic, and the morally accommodating and rabidly independent flapper, in turn, dazzled him in unimaginable ways” (12). 20 The ruthlessness at the heart of the novel’s love entanglement reflects the same typecasting—and frequent miscasting—on which Hollywood silent movies in fact depended. Though often condemned in contemporary social criticism, stereotyping reveals a great deal about the underlying power structures of social networks and discourses present in novels like “Che” Ferrati, Inventor. For Michael Pickering, stereotypes provide a “comfort of inflexibility” that “reinforces the conviction that existing relations of power are necessary and fi xed” (3). Given life’s inevitable deviance from the fi xity of stereotyping’s rigid categories, however, the act of stereotyping often takes on a quality of a cover up: what Pickering calls the dissonance of “category mismatches” elicits the need to restore stability through the artificial construction of difference (7). In some ways, however, the very hegemony of anti-Latin American stereotypes in early Hollywood elicits the opposite response from Mexican novelists of the time. Far from demonstrating the “deviance” to which Pickering refers, real life in the industry for Mexican émigrés and travelers like Noriega Hope would have seemed rigid in its normative treatment of ethnicity, and hardly favorable to those whose identity was routinely marginalized. This very rigidity created the conditions for counter-stereotypical literary discourse—what we might call an itch for a “comfort of flexibility.” As “Che” Ferrati unfolds, Noriega Hope deconstructs the stereotyped others coveted by Hazel and Federico by revealing their prolixity and even interchangeability (in each other’s eyes) with desirable onscreen stars. 21 Such confusion between fact and fi lm is foreshadowed when the two lovers see a movie together: Moved by the emotivity of the apparatus, Federico and Hazel began unconsciously to substitute the heroes on screen with their own bodies: Federico by projecting, with amorous desire, Hazel’s figure onto the silhouette of the leading lady; and Hazel by replacing the gallant hero’s masculine physical beauty with her Freddy (12–13). 22 By characterizing the real lives of the two Hollywood pretenders as those of shadows, Noriega Hope draws upon the metaphor he had used in his earlier chronicles. His characters’ “unconscious substitution” of their screen idols desired bodies, meanwhile, anticipates Manuel Puig’s debt to Lacanian psychology. As Puig would do decades later in Betrayed by Rita Hayworth [La traición de Rita Hayworth], Noriega Hope places great emphasis on the ongoing confusion experienced by his two protagonists, a logical consequence of permitting their own gender and ethnic identities to be artificially mediated by the “imago” of Hollywood. 23

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At the same time, the confusion of ethnic stereotypes in the novel underscores the instability inherent in such representations of difference: “comfort of inflexibility” gives way to identity substitution and dissonance. In his discussion of colonial discourse, Homi Bhabha has emphasized the stereotype’s “complex, ambivalent, contradictory mode of representation” whereby the assertion of difference masks an underlying apprehension about the over-determination of categories (“The Other Question” 100). His concept thus characterizes ethnic stereotypes not as unitary discourse but rather as “anxious” devices with which to construct an imaginary fi xity of colonial roles, what Bhabha calls “stereotype-as-suture” (115). In his novel, Noriega Hope stages such anxiety by introducing the eponymous character of ‘Che’ Ferrati, a failed inventor from the Argentine pampas who strikes it rich in California by applying his technological imagination to the artifice of Hollywood. Ferrati conceives of a substance he calls “la ‘Ferratine,’” which the narrator describes as “that mysterious substance able to mold perfect features” [aquella pasta misteriosa capaz de modelar facciones perfectas] (22). When the star of a fi lm already in production dies (Henri Le Goffic), Ferrati is called in to make a secret surrogate of Federico, who already bears an uncanny resemblance to Le Goffic. Noriega Hope captures the intricate politics of ethnicity in early Hollywood by giving French nationality to the deceased “Latin” lead, thus reflecting the conditional acceptance of latinidad in the 1920s. Like such real-life stars as Pola Negri and Rudolph Valentino, Le Goffic is essentially a dual-purpose stock figure capable of satisfying both white metropolitan spectators’ thirst for mild otherness and Latin America audiences’ demand for stylized consanguinity. The exoticism of the imported “Euro-Latin” stars, in short, never seriously threatens the racial status quo. Seen in this light, Ferrati’s conversion of Federico Granados into a lighter shade of Latin assumes metaphorical dimensions. Once unmasked, Noriega Hope suggests, Federico is simply too “Mexican-looking” to pass for a Latin lover on a Hollywood set. Ferrati serves as an intermediary between Granados’ excessive otredad and Hollywood, bridging the gap through his own technical ingenuity. Yet Ferrati is not just any inventor. Noriega Hope might well have chosen a yanqui character to play the role of technologist, as does Monteiro Lobato in his novel The Clash of the Races (discussed in Chapter Two).24 Opting for a character so readily identifiable with a particular nation (given Ferrati’s childhood in the pampas as well his nickname—‘Che’) is significant in the sense that for Latin American readers of the time, Argentines would have represented the closest possible contact with Europe and North America. Through his obscure act of alchemy, Ferrati renders a new subject by making over the Mexican in the Frenchman’s image, thus creating a star for Hollywood and a fortune for Granados. In a sense, Noriega Hope’s Granados constitutes a facsimile of a surrogate, since the model to which he aspires is not hegemonic but rather a diluted version of otherness deemed worthy for mass consumption. Drawing

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from Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Bhabha has argued that the ethnic stereotype is “at once a substitute and a shadow” of colonial authority. “By acceding to the wildest fantasies (in the popular sense) of the colonizer, the stereotyped Other reveals something of the ‘fantasy’ (as desire, defense) of that system of mastery” (117). Therefore it is not just mimicry that Granados practices—the “almost the same, but not quite” meaning that Bhabha lends the word (122). The character also engages in what might be called imposturing, by which I mean to convey a sense of “posing,” often cited as a potentially subversive attribute of dandyism, and also imposture. 25 Noriega Hope thereby turns what appears at fi rst glance to be merely an exercise in debasement into a double-layered spectacle of subversion. The Latin lover of silent Hollywood, essentially a Mediterranean model that systematically excludes any hint of Latin American mestizaje, owes much of its visual lexicon to the European dandy. This is especially true of fictional representations of the silent fi lm industry that reveal off-screen settings where the dandy’s aristocratic picture personality contrasts with abject conditions of the struggling actor. Roland Barthes has noted that the dandy “[radicalizes] the distinction in men’s clothing by subjecting it to an absolute logic” of sartorial detail, through which the dandy emerges as an unrivaled individual ever anxious to distance himself from the masses (“Dandyism and Fashion” 66–67). The peculiar ethnic demands of 1920s Hollywood require that the “Latin” actor similarly distance himself from the crowd by exhibiting his peerless elegance. His affectation of wealth and cultivation offsets the U.S. public’s association of ethnic otherness with poverty and moral depravity—an association particularly unfavorable for Mexican male actors of the early silent era, as I have already discussed. 26 Noriega Hope’s novel, however, reveals the way in which the aspiring Latin lover could hardly avoid being engulfed by the masses behind the scenes of fi lm production. Seen from this angle, the Latin American fi lm extra is condemned to suffer the antithesis of dandyism: to be an unsavory face in the crowd destined to clamor for roles defined by their lack of individuality; a type who plays types. To separate himself from the throng, Federico Granados succumbs to a Faustian pact of duplicitous opportunism. In order to strike the individuating pose of the Latin lover, the Mexican character must resort to imposture. Though “Freddy” clearly has ambitions of his own, his director reminds him that without Le Goffic’s name and physical appearance, he will never amount to anything more than a simple extra. Federico soon realizes his lot in Hollywood, to be “a puppet, a mask, a ‘double’” [un muñeco, un fantoche, un ‘doble’], and manages to haggle with the director for a higher salary than he was originally offered (41). His only consolations, then, are money and what he wrongly perceives to be the unconditional love of Hazel Van Buren. Increasingly distrustful of Hazel’s veneration of his Le Goffic persona, Federico becomes jealous of himself, as it were, eventually “catching Hazel in the act” as she makes advances on his alter ego.

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Noriega Hope’s Latin American ethnic thus envies the white dandy whose identity he has stolen: the impostor envies the poser (whose very pose he has transformed through “compassion” and ingenuity). That they are one and the same character masks a deeper irony that Federico’s imposture lends individuality—the hallmark of the dandy—to Le Goffic’s otherwise flat screen personality. Through his own “prodigious simplicity” and “lack of acting” Federico performs a “superior” version of the original (40). Yet the novel also leaves us with the sense that the character’s cultural agency is ultimately eclipsed by the identity which, according to Hollywood’s strange normative logic, he must assume in order to be “complete”: “Deep down inside he harbored immense compassion for this living mask, in whom he had discovered true talent and—how paradoxical indeed!—a vigorous personality” (47). 27 In the end, virtually all of Federico Granados’ inchoate aspirations boil down to pecuniary gain. Having traded his “authentic” self for one of fortune based on extreme artifice, he is free only to return to Mexico with a fistful of dollars and a story to tell. The psychological brutality of his “imposturing” leaves him bereft of lasting Hollywood stardom (because his sudden celebrity is based entirely on falsification) and also true love. The treachery inherent in the latter, meanwhile, deserves further attention: Hazel betrays Federico by abandoning him for what he is not: a deadringer impostor whose sole purpose is studio-engineered market viability—achieved through the negation of Granados’ commercially infeasible otredad. The necessity of masking his true identity betrays the double artifice of Hollywood. It is not enough that he play a role in the front of the cameras—he must literally adopt a mask in order to gain the spotlight to begin with. Richard Dyer has argued that the Hollywood star system collapses the line between the “authenticity” of the fi lm actor and that of the character he is playing, a collapse that reveals and perpetuates the problematics of “life-as-theatre” (23–24). Hazel Van Buren—as Federico’s ostensible love interest but also as a gauge of his sexual currency—shows him just how unprofitable authenticity can be in silent era Hollywood. Whereas the latter role suits her quite well, there is a sense that she was never fit to be Federico’s ideal woman. Consistently described as a common flapper—lean, hungry and opportunistic as well as coquettish and sexually liberated—Hazel does not at all embody the popular Mexican ideal of beauty. As Salvador Novo writes in an essay written in the 1930s, the working-class Mexican public of the period tended to embrace maternalistic, voluptuous women, in contrast to the pandering of “odious intellectual elites” to international standards mediated primarily by Hollywood (158–59). Novo even goes so far as to disavow the national celebrity of such venerated Mexican actresses as Lupe Vélez and Dolores del Río, explaining that although “on a few occasions we produced this type, [ . . . ] we always exported it quickly” (162). 28 By ultimately rejecting the fashionable type of gringa initially so

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attractive to him, Federico Granados performs an act of patriotism at the same time that he solidifies his own identity, asserting his mexicanidad by rejecting the international cosmopolitan standards emblemized by Hazel Van Buren and the fi lm industry she represents. At the same time, Granados avoids the Hollywood ending typical of the bourgeois silent comedy, a genre imbued with light melodrama and embraced by “odious intellectual elites” of his own country. The character’s return to Mexico at the end of the novel merely fi nalizes such a self-affi rming denial.

THE “DANCER” AND THE GRINGA-FATAL The effeminate gossip, pedant and traitor Paco Aveleira exemplifies the dangerous sexual ambivalence that pervades Julián S. González’s The Dancer from the Blue Pond [La danzarina del estanque azul] (1930), another novel centering on Latin American film actors and their vacillation between homegrown tradition and Hollywood vice. When the Colombian character fl irts with two aspiring Chilean fi lm actresses, it is with an ulterior motive, “more to exercise the gallantry of his vocabulary than to respond to the imperative of his masculinity—an imperative seemingly not well developed, if we are to believe those who applied to him the denigrating epithet androgynous” (56). 29 While the term “androgynous” has often been used in literary discourse as a euphemism, Paco’s lack also serves as a fitting signifier of Hollywood’s “disabling” effect on Latin American sexuality. If, as Foucault contends, homosexuality is constructed as if it were “a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul” (History of Sexuality I 43), then Paquito’s androgyny can be seen as a signifying shell. According to the reigning logic of celluloid fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, Hollywood social constructions differ from those of the rest of society. Since artifice is all that is permitted in González’s cinematic imaginary—and Paquito is perhaps the most fully “Hollywoodized” of the novel’s characters—it should come as little surprise that his sexuality lacks the “interior” to which Foucault refers. Like so many fully assimilated Hollywood characters, Paco is reduced to pure surface, pure outward sign. 30 In most early English-language Hollywood fiction, as Carolyn See points out in her groundbreaking work on the subject, it is common to celebrate the film metropolis as a site of sexual libertinism, reflecting a relatively permissive ethos prevalent until the increasingly stifling moral atmosphere of the 1930s. The unchecked sexual extravagance of such novels as Rupert Hughes’ Souls for Sale (1922), See writes, yields to the moral accountability and apocalyptic imagery of Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust (1939) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s incomplete novel The Last Tycoon (1941). The light-hearted tone of early Hollywood fiction thus gives way to disenchantment with what is widely perceived as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, a shift that can be attributed to the gradual acceptance of

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Hollywood as a literary topic. 31 The consequences of Hollywood’s biblical excess, See writes, lead to a crisis of sexuality in 1930s Hollywood fiction, an anxiety frequently manifested in the form of male impotence, a logical consequence because “the symbolic outcome of Hollywood’s sexual extravagance is fatigue and failure.” At the same time, homosexuality is not generally offered as a viable alternative to the shortcomings of heterosexuality, “for the simple reason that a renewed interest in sex might imply a renewed interest in love” (238). See does not fully address the likelihood that the scarcity of manifest homoeroticism in early Hollywood fiction may also be attributable to a resistance among most writers and publishers of the time to risk losing readers by confronting the issue head on. Such would certainly have been the case in early 1930s Mexico, where the kind of effete pedantry emblemized by Paco would have been associated with prerevolutionary, aristocratic decadence. With his effeminate affectations, González’s character embodies a variation of the fi n-de-siècle poser examined by Sylvia Molloy, cutting a figure anxiously dismissed by modernistas like Rubén Darío as “a fleeting malady” characterized by “vapid posturing” and “[a] genteel fluttering of the hands” (“The Politics of Posing” 184). If González likewise lampoons Paco as an emblem of hollow airs and flowery literature, the character serves as a useful counterpoint to the novel’s principal male characters, the playboy José Manuel and the earnest aspiring actor Eugenio. Both of the “machos” compete for the affections of Isabel—just the sort of Mexican “pure girlfriend” [novia pura] cited by Carlos Monsiváis as one of the stock characters of the national novel (“Sexismo en la literatura mexicana” 108). In effect, the Colombian gadfly’s unambiguous effeminacy creates the latitude for the Mexican men to demonstrate the manners necessary to satisfy 1920s Hollywood’s requirements for urbane latinidad, while also preventing José Manuel and Eugenio’s own dandyism from jeopardizing their nationally encoded masculinity. Typical of the mexicanos de afuera that populate Hollywood’s Latin American colony of the 1920s, José Manuel and Eugenio thus straddle the line between coarse traditionalism and genteel cosmopolitanism. Not just a stock character despite his heterosexual excess, José Manuel also has serious aesthetic pretensions as a painter, emerging as a counterpoint to Eugenio’s fi lm ambitions and also as a foil to his friend’s melodramatic naïveté. When Eugenio accuses him of being a sensualist for his sexual dalliances with Mrs. Mary Patrick, a wealthy middle-age patroness, José Manuel counters by calling his younger compatriot a dreamer and himself a realist (90). Yet José Manuel’s cynical exterior ultimately proves to be a front for his inner sentimentalism. When he brags that “women have always been my weakness,” Eugenio retorts, “At one time in Mexico you said you dreamed of pure love . . . Has this dream already vanished?” (90–91). 32 José Manuel’s stunned reaction betrays the extent to which Hollywood has corrupted his traditional high-mindedness, while foreshadowing the main crisis of the

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novel involving both men’s love for their virginal compatriot Isabel. Significantly, Eugenio fi rst realizes his best friend is also his rival when he beholds one of José Manuel’s paintings—called “The Prayer” [La Plegaria]—for which Isabel has served as a model. As Paquito points out to Eugenio, the work stands out as “classical in terms of the purity of its dimensions and modernist because of the human vitality of its expression” (254). 33 For his part, Eugenio sees in the painting both a reminder of his true love and also a reproach from the woman in whose plaintive countenance he perceives a prayer for his soul. That José Manuel should be so smitten by Isabel should not surprise us, considering what Roger Bartra calls the “logic of eroticism in the Mexican paradise”: Here is how the dialectic of the feminine archetype works: when the man is innocent the woman does not tempt his flesh. But when lust is awoken in the man, the woman must be sweet and understanding. When sinful fever consumes the male, the virgin appears to pacify him; but if a cold sweat should leave him in a stupor, a female must arouse him. (The Cage of Melancholy [La jaula de la melancolía] 223–24). 34 Until he falls for Isabel, José Manuel is an ideal candidate for Bartra’s virgin therapy. Earlier in the novel, he boasts of being happy in his depravity, a happiness unmasked fi rst by Eugenio’s insinuations and then fi nally Isabel’s innocent charms. Eugenio, on the other hand, initially personifies the national condition of “cold melancholy” of which Bartra writes elsewhere in his study. The young Mexican is lovestruck by Isabel early in the novel, yet before he can fully act on the attraction, shackled by his own chaste devotion and the machinations of others—including the treacherous Paco—he meets the seductress Adelina Sanderson while shooting a fi lm in the Philippines. While Eugenio is originally resistant to his leading lady’s considerable charms, a fact that separates him from his peers, she quickly wins him over: Admittedly her type fascinated him. He saw that her eyes were of the purest blue, inferred that her hair was legitimately blonde, acknowledged that her figure quivered like a palm tree from the savage caress of the hot winds. He was sure that her youth dispelled any suspicion of deception [mistificación], but nonetheless . . . he decided that she couldn’t be compared with the Latin beauty of his dreams. (134) 35 That the glorious blonde star bears little resemblance to Noriega Hope’s flapper Hazel reflects a shift in taste from jazz age decadence to the monumental (and frequently Nordic) feminine beauty held in such high regard at the beginning of the sound era, yet it also bespeaks a disparity in status: in the pantheon of Hollywood, if Adelina is the reigning goddess-queen,

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Hazel is a fatuous pretender to the throne. Nevertheless, Adelina’s regalness is upstaged by her hegemonic exoticism. Though a “legitimate” blueeyed beauty, she is also tinged with savagery. The fact that Eugenio feels compelled to accept the hints of “mistificación” in her appearance, her “[quivering] like a palm tree from the savage caress of the hot winds,” implies an ambivalence regarding the actress’s ethnic “impurities.” This produces in the Mexican ingénue sexual desire mixed with distrust and even repugnance. Adelina clearly represents a beauty different from that of his staid, virginal morena. Such lurid otherness is underscored by the location shooting. The gringa-fatal seduces Eugenio aboard the Albatross on the high Pacific, whose blue waters mirror her “dangerous blue eyes,” and during the fi lming of The Typhoon on location in the Philippines. The tropical jungle serves as a backdrop for the moral abandon of the actresses, both native and imported, as “the Hollywood blondes promiscuously mingled with the brunettes from Manila, both groups indistinguishable from the savages—whether authentic or apocryphal—brought in from the heart of the jungle” (211). 36 Eugenio, then, is surrounded by erotic otherness on both fronts: on one hand by “authentic” natives and on the other by savage blondes tinged with artificiality, in effect “constructed” savages akin to Bartra’s nuanced notion of Amazons. 37 The combination of the two proves too much for the Mexican galán to bear. His seduction at the hands of Adelina naturally occurs through the artifice of Hollywood, because the leading lady must teach her partner the “science of the kiss” (230), a power dynamic that again places her “above” him. The simulation quickly leads to an actual affair. Eugenio, meanwhile, is reluctant to contemplate his own betrayal of Isabel. “Bewitched” by the cold blue eyes of his new leading lady, blinded by “science,” Eugenio falls into a state of forgetfulness and “strange anesthesia” under whose spell “he lets himself drift like an automaton toward the vortex of unknown pleasure—the more unknown the more he desired it” (239). 38 In a recent study, Elizabeth K. Menon has argued that the genealogy of the femme fatale reflects the emergence of new aesthetic, ethical and political concerns among French male artists and intellectuals of the mid to late nineteenth century. Menon shows how “volatile mixtures of fashion and the feminine body [became] both advertisements of sensuality and a warning against indulgence in pleasure.” At the same time, she writes, femmes fatales “serve as visual manifestations of confl icting masculine impulses” toward expanding women’s rights and visibility in public life (45). To Mexican men of the 1920s, González’s novel suggests, the relative brazenness of women in the modern urban culture of Los Angeles provoked “confl icting masculine impulses” akin to the anxiety described by Menon. Such encounters would have been compounded by the fact that U.S. women, by virtue of their national origin, generally enjoyed a closer metonymic association with modernity than did Latin American men. In The

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Dancer from the Blue Pond, desire for Adelina reduces the Latin American lover to an “automaton”—a reflection of the actress’s dominion over technological means and the loveless sexuality with which such mastery is associated. By the time Eugenio glimpses the figure of Isabel in José Manuel’s painting, however, he is primed for a traditional Mexican virgin instead of a gringa temptress. In short, once he has endured the “sinful fever” of Adelina and the Hollywood she emblemizes, Eugenio is ready for Isabel again. The lust for adventure that had seized Eugenio years earlier, compelling him to leave Mexico and follow in the footsteps of his compatriots Ramón Novarro and Dolores del Río, had led him inexorably to stardom and moral decadence (84). By the end of the novel, as in “Che” Ferrati, Inventor, the Mexican male protagonist’s success and ensuing disenchantment have turned his gaze homeward. The novel’s denouement fi nds José Manuel martyred and Eugenio saved. At the same time that Eugenio returns to the virginal figure of Isabel, representing a symbolic return to his country of origin, comes the revelation that he has also found his long-lost biological mother in the form of Mrs. Mary Patrick. That Eugenio should be reunited with his mother implies a link between exile and orphanage noted by Julia Kristeva. The loss of the mother—and the mother tongue—is part of the foreigner’s burden (12). Yet it is only a partial loss, or as Kristeva suggests, two partial gains resulting in a “silence of polyglots,” in that the foreigner experiences not just the erosion of her mother tongue but also the unpleasant strangeness and inadequacy of a new one (26–27). What makes the recuperation of the mother tongue so interesting in The Dancer from the Blue Pond is that the “Mexican” mother in question is a gringa, albeit one with knowledge of the language and culture of Mexico. Our hero, in effect, turns out to be only half Mexican. Julián González thus subverts what otherwise might have been a proper nationalist message. Instead of the patrician criollo José Manuel sacrificing himself for the sake of the humble upstart (i.e., a worthy representative of postrevolutionary Mexico), Eugenio is revealed to be the progeny of a wealthy North American woman, who also happens to be a powerful Hollywood insider. Like Adelina Sanderson, however, Eugenio is the product of a kind of mystification, conveying as the word does a sense of deception and mystery as well as ethnic or national impurity. The concealment and subsequent revelation of his yanqui ancestry, while costing Eugenio revolutionary capital, also lends the character cosmopolitan sophistication. At the same time, Mary Patrick’s intimate association with Hollywood suggests another allegorical trade-off in The Dancer from the Blue Pond: If high art emblemized by painting has died along with José Manuel, popular cinema has survived with Eugenio. Far from mapping out a full return to Mexican aristocratic tradition, the novel ends up suggesting a new Mexican subject, less shackled to the erudite and clearly linked to both the United States and mass culture in spite of González’s explicit critique of the film metropolis.

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THE LETTERED CINEPHILE In Jaime Torres Bodet’s novel Day Star (1933), the Mexican fi lm diva Piedad Santelmo, whose binational celebrity and austere sensuality invite comparisons to Dolores del Río, has bewitched an international fi lm audience whose demand for liminal exoticism is especially keen: “A light-haired Mexican woman with blue eyes, doubly exotic, made many things possible that would otherwise have been difficult for someone darker—that is, for a normal Mexican woman” (22). 39 The description captures the tightrope act of attenuated otherness so many Mexican actors of the 1920 and 1930s were forced to perform in order to conquer the metropolitan standards of North American and European moviegoers (by exhibiting whiteness with a difference) and also retain the fealty of Latin American audiences by projecting grandiose consanguinity (difference with whiteness, as it were). Such marketing strategies, however, were not the work of Hollywood alone. On the contrary, in Torres Bodet’s novel Piedad Santelmo is subjected to a series of “mass-mediatic” negotiations through which her screen persona is preceded by an “illusory reputation” invented by the U.S. popular press: A shifting biography, always fictitious, was invariably attached to the image that appeared in the headlines. The Chicago Star wrote that she had descended from Cuauhtemoc—never mind her blue eyes. The Judge, from Los Angeles, said she had been born in the jungle. According to Philadelphia’s The Moon, her father had not begotten her himself: he had adopted her (23).40 By rewriting Piedad’s life story to fit the tastes of their readers, Torres Bodet suggests, tabloid journalists commit more than merely innocent acts of deception, because the sum effect of the web of fabrications is to defile and expatriate a Mexican woman of flesh and blood, “dehumanizing” her in the name of international capital (23–24). Torres Bodet’s mordant description of the popular film press as a dehumanizing agent recalls José Ortega y Gasset’s contemporaneous, apocalyptic assessments of the effects of both mass culture and aesthetic modernism on the “select minorities” of elite society and erudite traditions.41 It is also reminds us of Torres Bodet’s affiliation with Mexico’s Contemporáneos group. Besides Torres Bodet, writers including Salvador Novo, José Gorostiza, Gilberto Owen, Xavier Villaurrutia and Bernando Ortiz de Montellano regularly deployed cinematic techniques in their work—often, as J. Patrick Duffey has pointed out, to achieve specific literary effects that tied them to cosmopolitan currents of the international avant-garde.42 Like others of the group, however, Torres Bodet adhered to rather conventional notions of art precluding wholesale appropriations of popular film thematics that risked endangering the privilege of literary expression. Such thematic focus was inseparable from the “low” journalistic discourse on which the film industry

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paradoxically depended in order to negotiate its continued expansion into the “higher” echelons of society, including intellectuals. While Torres Bodet’s narrator regards the newspapers as ruthless, popular journalism nonetheless plays a key role in the construction of the Mexican actress’s screen persona. Indeed, the narrator scarcely mentions the requirements of the Hollywood studios, essentially attributing the primary star-building power to the press alone. In his study Picture Personalities, Richard deCordova stops short of granting newspapers and fan magazines primacy in the elaboration of star discourse, though he argues that the press effectively extends the period of contact between spectators and the stars. DeCordova’s account focuses on the potential durability of the cinema’s inherent evanescence though the mediating vehicle of published material. “It might be said,” he writes, “that this discourse extended the boundaries of the cinema as institution so that it could more fully occupy people’s lives” (113). His argument can be readily extrapolated to include spatial reach as well. The ubiquity of the popular and movie press in Latin American metropoles like Mexico City allowed the contact between Hollywood and fi lm spectators of which deCordova writes to circulate in spaces (e.g., libraries) and social spheres where popular cinema was stigmatized or inaccessible, if not actually forbidden. In short, the press often “traveled” to places the cinema did not, and lingered longer. Such far-reaching power makes Torres Bodet’s narrator uncomfortable, in part because the popular press endeavors to reduce diverse national characteristics, some of which are European in origin, to Mexican “postcards.” It is simply not enough that Piedad be Mexican by birth: she must fit the popular (U.S.) image of a young Mexican woman: Anxious to bathe her in “local color”—one hundred percent Mexican—they denied her all the delights, all the customs that had constituted her sense of patriotism: her own environment, the piety of her mother, the climate of her moderate region, the song of her ineffable Mexico. They gave a shawl and a calabash to a woman who, when she shopped, always asked for the most European of hats! (28)43 The narrator compares the U.S. mass media’s exoticist treatment of Mexico to Montesquieu’s vision of the Orient in The Persian Letters or Puccini’s Japan in Madame Butterfly (28). In both cases, a dominant gaze bluntly adapts a subaltern object to suit metropolitan needs. Far from sporting the bold local colors required for Hollywood consumption, however, Piedad Santelmo possesses a subtlety of character that resists facile description. “How does a woman ‘be’ Mexican?” the narrator asks. “Piedad fit the bill, and beautifully. But she did so in her own personal, tender, superfluous way. And for this very reason she was unfalsifiable [ . . . ] No mere curio, Mexican blood ran through her veins in subtle places where North Americans failed to look for it” (28–29).44

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Torres Bodet reserves for his Mexican male protagonist the right to decode the fi lm diva’s cryptic nationality. Prior to laying his eyes on Piedad, Enrique is a bookworm, too immersed in ancient and modern travel accounts, Shakespeare, history and Romantic literature to notice any women besides mythological figures like Xóchitl (the Toltec goddess of pulque), Antigone, Isis and Nefertiti (38). Instead of displacing his bibliomania, Piedad’s cinematic presence at fi rst merely expands Enrique’s erudition to include a map and travel guide of Hollywood, to the utter surprise of his bookseller (47). The narrator likens the rupture caused by Piedad’s image to a crisis that prevents the young man from “graduating” from the school of bachelorhood. Enrique, however, sees his education incomplete without the revelation of a living object capable of absorbing his desires and affections. Even if he has beheld Piedad’s likeness on screen—devoid of both true personality and also actual physical presence—he feels as though her celluloid presence had revealed to him a world of which he was totally ignorant: “His intelligence resisted what even a child could discern: a face, a nose, a forehead. To him they seemed like encoded messages. He did not have access to the key with which to read them” (50).45 Since Piedad’s textuality is still indecipherable to Enrique, he sets out to render her legible. With a street map to the stars’ homes (already a fi xture in Hollywood by the 1930s), he locates his beloved’s address, fi nds out where she entertains her guests and even what type of swimming pool she has (66). Yet it dawns on him that the guide has its limitations: “Certain facts—the ones that interested me most—never appear in books” (57).46 Casting aside his travel guide, Enrique returns to a local movie theatre for “clues” to uncharted realities. He sits in the third row so as to better analyze Piedad’s features during close-ups, then endeavors to separate the actress from her unconvincingly stylized surroundings, contrasting her native “authenticity” with the garishly fabricated sets and miscast supporting actors (68). The narrator thus underscores the Mexican actress’s lack of artfulness despite the falsity of her surroundings—a representation that runs exactly counter to Horacio Quiroga’s depiction of North American actors as “natural” compared to Latin Americans’ overly theatrical style (discussed in Chapter Two). Yet even if he wishes to attribute a fully developed personality to his beloved, Enrique still does not have enough information on which to base a profi le without resorting to his own imagination. In spite of himself, therefore, he imitates the very media images he has earlier rejected, basing the “real-life” version of his leading lady on the kind of fanciful photographs found in movie magazines (69). Confronted with a limited sketch of Piedad Santelmo rather than a complete, unbowdlerized text, however, Enrique grows frustrated. At the same time, he blames himself for obstructing the promise of spiritual fulfillment represented by his beloved’s elán vital: “Through who knows what door or window, life

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itself was wafting like a hot breeze into the air-tight world of culture that Enrique himself had forged” (73).47 At the heart of Enrique’s imaginary pursuit of Piedad is a desire not just for possession in the erotic sense but also, more fundamentally, the same thirst for material acquisition that had previously compelled him to add compulsively to his personal library. Walter Benjamin has written that bibliophilia is rooted in an “enchanting” desire for ownership through which the collector strives to experience a renewal of the “old world” and full intimacy with objects, such that “the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object” (“Unpacking my Library” 60–61). At the same time, the owner feels that he has “liberated” the books he has acquired, a sensation Benjamin compares to an episode of the Arabian Nights in which a prince buys the freedom of a beautiful slave (64). In effect, Enrique approaches his pursuit of Piedad much like a bibliophile intent on possessing a new sort of rare volume, one whose “purchase” would guarantee both his renewal and her liberation. Rather than reject the machinery of Hollywood as dehumanizing, in other words, Torres Bodet’s hero borrows from cinema’s modern archive in order to update conventional models of erudition. Hollywood in Day Star thus constitutes a mode of transfer rather than the emblem of epistemological annihilation feared by so many Latin American intellectuals of the period, and in particular, as we have seen, by Torres Bodet’s compatriots. Even before Piedad Santelmo gives up her charmed career to return to Mexico, however, Enrique has begun to prepare himself for their first real encounter. He also realizes he has fallen in love with a shadow, even if he fully expects to meet Piedad in the flesh. For the Mexican bibliophile, the “phantom” presence of Piedad will one day be real: “The shadow that he so loved corresponded, point by point, to the existence of an indisputably living body: solid, well-proportioned, capable of hatred, scars, suffering, and famous in Hollywood” (136).48 When the two finally do meet, it takes some time for Enrique to reconcile Piedad’s manifest physicality with the afterimage of her cinematic presence. Nevertheless, the Mexican actress visually can offer him few surprises, since he has already studied her body in so many guises and from so many angles in films, magazines and newspapers. Her individuality, described as “an important painting that has not been copied” [cuadro importante y sin copia] transcends the photographic truth which, in any event, Enrique has already captured through the remote access of modern mass media: “What [Enrique] needed was not photograph truth, then, but rather, on the contrary, a friendly semidarkness, a vague confidence, the beginning of another lie” (143).49 If Piedad has infused Enrique’s static world with the dynamism of cinema, he finds that he needs to breathe life into his visual construction in order to complete the picture. Though Piedad first comes to his attention through the mass medium of film, Enrique wishes to complement his cinematic creation by seeking out in his beloved the opposite of “photographic truth”—that is, the intangible and invisible aspects of her

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personality that defy the camera eye. The pendulum, in other words, has swung back to what Benjamin calls the authentic “cult” value of the original work of art from the realm of “exhibition value” and mechanical production whence Enrique has snatched it (Benjamin 225). Torres Bodet thus reverses the “contemporary decay of the aura” by staging an unlikely act of literary restoration accompanied by Piedad’s long-anticipated return to Mexico—a national space that epitomizes Benjamin’s “fabric of tradition” (223). Yet even Piedad’s physical presence does not erase traces of her textuality, nor does it, for Enrique, sully her perfection. As he has throughout the novel, Torres Bodet employs the metaphor of writing to articulate the textuality of Piedad’s face, which Enrique has never before been able to “read” so well: Away from the cinema, Piedad’s face was laid bare. It was easily read. One did not find in it the doubts, the misgivings, the thousand little avoidances and contrivances. [ . . . ] Not one wrinkle. Not one spelling error covered up. Everything was expressed cleanly, directly, in block lettering, as in a telegram. Everything. From the date to her signature. From her temples to her mouth. (141) 50 With each new uncinematic detail that Enrique uncovers, he still sees nothing but “eloquent honesty” in Piedad, an apparent flawlessness that engenders more doubt—and desire—in her suitor. At the same time, the Mexican bibliophile experiences the actress on a discursive level betraying the debt owed by film textuality to literature. By refusing to travel to Hollywood as other protagonists before him have, Enrique ultimately elaborates movie stardom in his own, fictive terms. The anticlimax of Piedad’s arrival—and Enrique’s triumph—derives from the transparency of the actress’s literary construction. Thanks to the thoroughness of Enrique’s biographical sketch, Piedad’s subjectivation is very much a fait accompli. Her return to her native terrain, however, restores a missing quality. Once home in Mexico City, accustomed to the simulacra of Hollywood film sets, Piedad is struck by the vivid reality of a city park: Used to dancing, kissing, crying in the middle of a counterfeit setting (volcanoes of cardboard, mechanical canaries, moonlight created by reflectors), the reality of the park moved her. For the first time, the sky, the clouds, were truly sky and clouds. No team of stagehands would come to change the set in twenty minutes in order to prepare for another film. [ . . . ] All that she heard, saw and smelled, everything she could touch, absolutely everything, was authentic (146–147).51 The comforting familiarity and authenticity that greet Piedad Santelmo in Mexico extend to the people she encounters, including Enrique. Ignorant of his family name and personal accomplishments, Piedad is nevertheless able to discern ineffable national traits in her suitor: “All of a sudden she

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saw in him what he himself had perhaps never discovered even in front of the brightest mirror: the profi le of a young Mexican man” (147). 52 Enrique strikes her as typically Mexican, moreover, yet not stereotypically Mexican in the mannered Hollywood fashion. On the contrary, Piedad even fi nds fault in Enrique for being a “beginner” and a “bad actor” (153), although she also professes to admire in him these same qualities. Far from being Quiroga’s affected Latin lover, Enrique is an earnest novice—a quality Piedad Anselmo associates with his mexicanidad. Torres Bodet thus imagines a trade-off between international marketability based on a performance of aristocratic exoticism and national authenticity based on the inability to pull off such a performance. Fernando J. Rosenberg has observed that the Latin American vanguards regard both modern mass culture and aesthetic modernism as sharing, “from the standpoint of the peripheries of capitalism, the affective aura of modernity as identified with an elsewhere” (7). The geographic and temporal distance of new art and markets underscored by Rosenberg fi nds literary expression in Day Star. Caught between the spell of Hollywood and the pull of the past, Enrique’s omnivorous bibliophilia subsumes his nascent cinephilia in the name of national allegiance. Torres Bodet uses a patriotic gesture, in short, to close the distance between the Mexican avant-gardists and the metropolitan models to which they were beholden, revealing Mexico’s cultural entanglement in such an “elsewhere.” Instead of accompanying the Hollywood traveler on a voyage to Tinseltown, as in the case of “Che” Ferrati, Inventor and The Dancer from the Blue Pond, we witness Enrique’s attempt to summon and reconcile himself with the distant Mexican object of his affections. In so doing, Torres Bodet presents the story of Piedad as a cycle of deification, demystification and fi nally repatriation of the Hollywood icon. By displacing her “aura of modernity,” paradoxically, he restores to her a Benjaminian “ritual” aura identified with traditional Mexican normative values. In his article “Sexism in Mexican Literature,” Carlos Monsiváis offers up a succinct survey of feminine archetypes in Mexican literature, from the essential (“the self-denying and understanding mother” [la madre abnegada y comprensiva], “the devourer of men” [la devoradora]) to the slightly less obvious (“the repentant sinner” [la pecadora arrepentida], “the wordly but already fallen female” [la hembra terrenal ya irrecuperable]). At first glance, Piedad Santelmo appears exempt from Monsiváis’s floristics. Inspired by a real-life actress who managed to transcend the mold of “previous designs” by virtue of her well-documented and imagined private life, Piedad tenuously achieves what Monsiváis refers to as “organic” character development (108– 9). Ultimately, though, Torres Bodet’s diva also resembles a modern version of “the remote beloved” [la amada remota], a role typically found in Mexican modernista poetry, in much the same manner that Carlos Noriega Hope reduces Hazel Van Buren to a “victimizable flirt” [coqueta victimable] who “plays with her honor only to lose it” (109). Likewise, Julián González’s novel

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serves up a number of national types, from Adelina Sanderson’s “devourer of men” and Mrs. Mary Patrick’s “repentant sinner” to Isabel’s “pure girlfriend” [novia pura] (108). The feminine archetypes of Mexican Hollywood fiction thus turn out to be both conventional and novel. If Noriega Hope, González and Torres Bodet rely on tried-and-true models of Mexican sexuality, they audaciously export one of the most paradigmatic Mexican figures, la devoradora, recasting her as a North American woman colder and less virtuous than her Mexican counterparts. By conquering and discarding formidable gringas, fictional Mexican men symbolically assert their power to resist the seductive muscle of Hollywood. Such literary performances invert the U.S. silent fi lm model in which North American men vanquish the greaser and seduce the señorita during a rapacious foray into Mexican territory. In the fictional revision of cinematic border crossings, the señorita is the only one who retains something close to her celluloid role. If by the mid 1920s the Mexican male stereotype has become less villainous than its immediate predecessor, meanwhile, Hollywood literatos must contend instead with the sexual ambivalence of the refi ned Latin lover, whose European features and marked dandy airs pose a potential political liability to revolutionary ideals of masculinity. Thus while Mexican writers leave Latin American women relatively untouched—and untouchable—they anxiously appropriate and transform the celluloid image of their male compatriots. Mexican chroniclers and novelists of the classical silent era ultimately seek to reconcile the extremes of the fi rst two dominant representations of the Hollywood Latin male by enabling a more cosmopolitan galán to plunder in the spirit—though not the manner—of a conquerer. If the counterinvasive culture of the Mexican Revolution was epitomized by Pancho Villa’s brief insurgence into Texas, which provoked the wrath of the Wilson administration and ultimately the brief occupation of Veracruz by U.S. troops, the prevailing anti-U.S. sentiment of the period fi nds expression in “About the Greedy Oafs” [De los ambiciosos patones], a revolution-era décima-corrido articulating the desire to win back territory lost to the United States during the U.S.-Mexican War. 53 In the border ballad, such revenge has a corollary of sexual conquest: “Now is the time, comrades, to fight with great zeal / since we’re going to ‘advance’ all the way to their women” [“avanzar” hasta las americanas] (Cited in Paredes 69). 54 Mexican Hollywood fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, still awash in revolutionary ressentiment, harbors a similar though more sophisticated desire to “‘avanzar’ hasta las americanas,” graphically imagining such a raid in a setting altogether different from the one described by the corridista. As Américo Paredes notes, new imperatives of masculinity “[abandon] folkloric forms to fi nd expression in the cinema [and] other mass media” (83). 55 By the early twentieth century, southern California had already begun to attract a large number of Mexican immigrants, forming the foundation of

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the vast, settled communities that have remained in the region to this day. Despite differences in thematic approach and aesthetic sensibility, however, Carlos Noriega Hope, Julián S. González and Jaime Torres Bodet end up sending their protagonists on a southbound train back to Mexico. This symbolic return to the madre patria also implies a reversion to traditional models of gender and ethnicity. In the 1930s and 1940s, it was left up to fi lm to map a more feasible way forward. For the consummate devoradora, Mexican audiences would have to wait for María Félix and the classics of the Época de Oro. Monsiváis has described the key to Golden Age cinema’s success to a strategy of exaggeration. To compete with the mass appeal of Hollywood, the Mexican fi lm industry compensated for budget scarcities by stepping up the “rhetoric of excess,” offering national audiences melodramas “even more crazed” [todavia más enloquecidos] than those produced by Cinelandia (Aires de familia 61). Not unlike Paredes’ vaqueros, therefore, Mexico ultimately avenged itself not by “defeating” the United States outright, but rather by pillaging, redeploying and augmenting its thematics and structures of mediation on local turf. The early Mexican Hollywood novel, by revealing the abuses of mexicanidad during the rise of the U.S. fi lm industry, articulates an earlier moment of creative incursion—and retreat.

4

Tropic of Chaplin Latin American Intellectuals and the Little Tramp

The English clown represents the highest echelon of clown evolution. He is as far as one can be from those noisy, excessive, strident, Mediterranean clowns we are used to fi nding in traveling circuses. —José Carlos Mariátegui, “Explaining Chaplin: A Sketch” [Esquema de una explicación de Chaplin](1928)1 Carnival was too disgusting for bourgeois life to endure except as sentimental spectacle. —Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression

Charles Chaplin’s rise to international celebrity emphatically shows how early twentieth century mass culture readily absorbed and reconverted the carnival elements of the circus and music hall where Chaplin fi rst developed the skills later to make him famous. Chaplin also expedited the silent fi lm industry’s evolution from a “cinema of attractions” targeted mainly at lower social classes to a narrative expression appealing increasingly to middle-class spectators. By the early 1920s, the English-born star was selfconsciously reaching for artistry in his fi lms, gradually refi ning the raucous, frequently bawdy slapstick of his early short reels into feature-length sentimental comedies full of high-minded social commentary. In his 1924 book The Seven Lively Arts, the U.S. essayist Gilbert Seldes bemoaned the increasing predominance of “art” in Chaplin’s work and openly encouraged the fi lmmaker to return to the lowbrow spontaneity of his earlier period (54). That Seldes’s warning went unheeded should not be surprising, as his voice was a minority opinion among prominent intellectuals of the 1920s—many of whom Chaplin had personally befriended. For most intellectuals of the period, Latin Americans included, the sort of mass culture emblemized by Chaplin could only be co-opted if it assumed distinctly artistic dimensions. By covering up the traces of vernacular culture from which the early silent comedy emerged, intellectuals could more easily lay claim to the disputed terrain between the popular and the erudite.

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In their insightful study, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White contend that the bourgeoisie “disowned” the grotesqueness and low language of carnival and relegated it to the terrain of the Other, thus “[encoding] all that which the proper bourgeois must strive not to be in order to preserve a stable and ‘correct’ sense of self” (178). Such “encoding” of the carnivalesque, I would like to propose, is highly applicable to the intellectual rarefaction of Chaplin’s work. Although the English star reached a temporary balance between physical comedy and plot-and-character-driven narrative in fi lms like The Gold Rush (1925) and The Circus (1928), the inspired chaos of his early shorts eventually yielded to tragicomedy, elegant narrative structure and facile morality, the latter quality fully exposed in the fi nal monologue of The Great Dictator (1940). 2 As the fi lm medium garnered a larger public, a shift generally endorsed even by intellectuals opposed to bourgeois institutions that had underwritten the expansion, early cinema gave way to an industry in which the carnival appeared fleetingly and in reduced form—what Stallybrass and White call “voyeuristic glimpses of a promiscuous loss of status and decorum” (183). Such “promiscuous loss” is particularly evident in City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936), in which Chaplin’s character the Little Tramp (usually translated in Latin America as Carlitos or the French moniker Charlot) at different key moments assumes the trappings of middle class culture, only to return to his native misery in passages accompanied by heavy doses of pathos. Chaplin’s self-depuration had particular relevance in Latin America, where intellectuals came to love the English star largely in hindsight. The aura of anachronism and nostalgia that enveloped Chaplin’s fi lms from the very beginning of his career inevitably brought his lettered fans in contact with popular theatrical forms that helped give birth to his perennial screen persona. In fact, the figure of the tramp was rooted in the visual language of the nineteenth century, though there is some debate about the immediate inspiration for the character. At least one historian has cited as a direct ancestor the tramp-clown who emerged in the economic chaos of Reconstruction following the South’s defeat in the U.S. Civil War (Bolognesi 78–79). By another account, Chaplin had been inspired by a hobo he had met early in his career while fi lming in San Francisco (Musser 43). According to Chaplin’s 1964 autobiography, he had improvised the character in 1914 for producer/director Mack Sennett by combining disparate elements—formal and informal wear, to convey the sense that “this fellow is many-sided, a tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure” (Robinson 123). For Nicole Vigouroux-Frey, the Tramp’s fi rst appearance reflected a preference for the English music hall in which Chaplin had gotten his start over the type of U.S. vaudeville figure exemplified by W. C. Fields, a parallel tradition with which Chaplin was also quite familiar, and training ground for such U.S.-born silent stars as Buster Keaton (73).

Tropic of Chaplin 75 Though in the early twentieth century the tramp was still a stock character in the circus and on the U.S. and English popular stage, as an actual flesh-and-blood fi xture of the national landscape, the nineteenth-century wandering vagabond was already in decline. As Charles Musser notes, “By the mid-1910s, tramps usually dressed more casually [than Chaplin’s character], in fi lms in as well as in real life. More and more, Charlie was seen as an old-fashioned tramp, a dying breed susceptible to romanticization by Chaplin, middle-class commentators, and his audience” (44). Carlitos’ pathos, so prevalent in his later appearances on screen, was from the outset meant to evoke a bohemian chivalry and “aristocratic” poverty reminiscent of a moribund world still familiar to audiences of the 1920s and 1930s. In such a way, Chaplin capitalized on melodramatic discourse to retrofit the figure of the vagabond for modern use. Hermann Herlinghaus (after Jesús Martín-Barbero) has characterized the cultural vocabulary of melodrama as a language of “re-cognition” and excess, “a language of body, affect and collective enchantment” [un lenguaje de cuerpo, afecto y encantamiento comunitario] (474–75). Melodrama— Herlinghaus tells us—enables a particularly intense “staging” of anachronism (474). More than a mere generic indicator, melodrama should be seen as a kind of prism through which to explore “anachronistic sites in which social confl icts are negotiated” (467). 3 Chaplin’s revisionist sensibility, which only grew as he courted middle-class spectators, therefore found an ideal vessel in the Little Tramp. Melodrama’s backward gaze would later become crucial to Chaplin’s adoption by Latin American intellectuals. Carlitos’ broad textual appeal in the region was complemented by Chaplin’s carefully tailored public persona of anti-imperialist defiance, humanitarian compassion, and solidarity with the poor and working classes. The voluminous press coverage of Chaplin’s frequent divorces and other personal scandals, framed in a narrative of persecution according to which Chaplin’s punishment at the hands of the North American public and U.S. government seemed ill-suited to his crimes, managed to lend an air of martyrdom to the star’s moral transgressions. Taking stock of Chaplin’s “picture personality” as well as the wealth of interviews, reviews, publicity photos, gossip and biographical information disseminated through fi lm magazines and newspapers, Latin American intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s showcased Chaplin as an emblem of the social and artistic potential of fi lm. Yet the stridency of their praise often masked the essentially conservative core of their applause. Assessments and appropriation of Chaplin’s work, often published in periodicals allied to local avant-garde projects, were predicated on the supposed universalism of silent fi lm, a premise that upstaged the particularism of the social content (including ethnic undertones) so central to Chaplin’s brand of cinematic expression. Furthermore, intellectuals’ nearly unanimous praise of Chaplin made it necessary to underplay sentimental strategies that ran counter to official vanguard policy, even if such strategies held a

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secret appeal to reformed letrados who had not yet managed fully to wean themselves off the aestheticist conventions they opposed on principle. Of course, not all Latin American treatments of Chaplin played out the same. Mindful of the need for contextual analysis and suspicious of wholesale endorsements of modern mass culture, José Carlos Mariátegui and his disciples at the Peruvian journal Amauta focused on the connection between Chaplin and “proletarian” forms such as the circus and music hall traditions. To reconcile the social content of Chaplin’s fi lms with the overarching ideology of Hollywood, the amautistas underscored Chaplin’s increasingly public struggles with the U.S. government as well as his historical and symbolic connections to non-U.S. popular culture and Latin America itself. They also emphasized what they saw as Chaplin’s formidable aesthetic credentials. The problem with such an approach is that it contradicted Amauta policy. Mariátegui’s fundamental essay “Art, Revolution and Decadence” [Arte, revolución y decadencia], fi rst published in 1926, had set the ground rules for the journal’s cultural criticism. In response to the eager embrace of fi lm shown by a number of vanguard journals of the early to mid 1920s, Mariátegui warned against uncritical assessments of modern culture based solely on technical criteria. “An artistic revolution,” he writes, “cannot be satisfied with formal conquests alone” (3). In their treatment of Chaplin, the amautistas in general made a valiant attempt to stay within Mariátegui’s parameters. Xavier Abril’s poetic “Xray” of the Little Tramp celebrates the technology of the cinema only in so far as it “liberates” the clown from its traditional confi nes. The novelist and fi lm critic María Wiesse, meanwhile, is careful to praise Chaplin’s fi lms as works of art whose technique appropriately matches the “new spirit” expressed in them (25). Abril, Wiesse and even Mariátegui himself frequently resorted to the safe harbor of erudite culture as a way to make their case for Chaplin’s “artistry” by point of comparison. The price paid for drawing on high art’s prestige was precisely the kind of loss the amautistas, probably the most cohesively militant wing of the Latin American avant-garde, ostensibly wished to avoid. The popular subject to be interpellated—Chaplin’s Little Tramp—inevitably emerged conspicuously “clean” of the carnival qualities his learned admirers deemed revolutionary to begin with. Fictional works of the late 1920s and 1930s by the Cuban Luis Felipe Rodríguez, Mexican Enrique González Rojo and Uruguayan Ildefonso Pereda Valdés further softened such elements in Chaplin without abandoning their critique of the U.S. film industry. At the same time, these writers rigorously stressed Chaplin’s political relevance to Latin America by granting him what amounted to honorary latinidad. Borrowing from Walter Ong, Martín-Barbero has argued that the advent of such modern mass media as cinema and television transfigured the grammar of popular culture in ways that bypassed the mediating function of intellectual elites. Visual mass culture thus enabled a “secondary orality” largely independent

Tropic of Chaplin 77 of customary institutional supports associated with writing (South of Modernity [Al sur de la modernidad] 31). While Chaplin’s earlier fi lms played much like transpositions of oral culture, his later work increasingly grafted middlebrow sentiment onto working-class fables. Not surprisingly, Latin American writers like González Rojo and Pereda Valdés interpreted Chaplin’s early work as though their literary makeovers were necessary interventions. Like González Rojo, Rodríguez hangs a dream-frame on his story to sell Chaplin’s avant-gardism and to stage an encounter between what he sees as the avatars of (universal) cinematic modernity and (panHispanic) literary tradition, Carlitos and Don Quixote. Finally, the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s strange tribute to Chaplin from the 1940s claims a kinship with the Little Tramp’s struggles at the margins of modernity, while attempting to impose ideological cohesiveness and aesthetic order on what he views as the fi lm star’s fragmentary oeuvre. Such creative interpretations of Chaplin’s work bespoke a Utopian impulse to recast the Little Tramp symbolically as both a universal subject and also a Latin American. They also revealed a widespread and growing discomfort with Hollywood in the region, one that compelled many younger writers to insist on Chaplin’s position in the vanguard of art and politics to “correct” his association with U.S. mass culture. This balancing act was forced and unworkable, in part because of a strangely compelling redundancy: in striving—albeit with great flair and imagination—to elevate the Hollywood star from the realm of the low circus, starstruck vanguardistas relied on many of the same bourgeois conventions that Chaplin himself adopted over the course of his career. More centrally, however, such writers could not fully divest the modern anachronism of popular cinema from the logic of the marketplace. In this sense, Latin American intellectuals’ attempt to interpret Chaplin’s work lays bare the problems presented by early film celebrity generally. The ideological conundrum Chaplin embodied—at once critical of and dependent on the hegemonic machinery of the U.S. fi lm industry, proletarian and middlebrow, progressive and orthodox—ultimately proved too much for Latin American writers to reconcile without revealing their own contradictions on issues of art, politics and modern culture.

THE SILENT CLOWN If the Little Tramp was something of a throwback, the character was undoubtedly instrumental in transferring the tramp tradition from stage to fi lm. And indeed, it is difficult to assess Chaplin’s place in the history of mass culture without fi rst coming to terms with his background in the popular theater. The French fi lm theorist André Bazin writes that cinema provided Chaplin with the means with which to revive the “congenitally atrophied” gags and techniques of vaudeville and music hall. Bazin likens

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such a process to that of the axolotl, the unique Mexican amphibian locked in the larval stage until scientists discovered that hormonal injections were able to provoke metamorphosis (immortalized years later in Julio Cortázar’s eponymous short story). In a similar manner, Bazin writes, the cinema artificially enabled the stage to evolve “organically” (79). For Latin American writers of the 1910s and 1920s, fi lm and theater were indeed linked genealogically, yet not exactly in the way Bazin would later envision. Intellectuals of the period spent a great deal of energy arguing fi lm’s uniqueness as an art form by employing what theorist Noël Carroll has identified as a strategy of “medium essentialism” or “medium specificity.” Such a thesis, Carroll writes, demanded of fi lm both “excellence” and “differentiation” components in order to compete with theater, literature and other traditional forms of artistic expression (325). Yet Latin American intellectuals generally understood the theater not as vaudeville or music hall, but rather in terms of the prevailing currents of the early twentieth century stage, modeled mostly on bourgeois European notions of naturalism and Ibsenian realism—what Antonin Artaud called the “petrified idea” of a theater laden with staid dialogue and psychological subject matter (12–13). Consequently, the bourgeois theater made an easy target for younger critics, particularly those of the avant-gardes. In an essay published in the vanguard magazine Terra Roxa e Outras Terras, for example, the Brazilian writer Antônio de Alcântara Machado declared unequivocally that an “authentic” Brazilian theater did not exist outside of the circus. “Like much of our history,” he writes, “the national stage is not national” (“Undesirables” [Indesejáveis] 5).4 Following the lead of cinematic impressionist critics and filmmakers such as Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac and Jean Epstein, a number of Latin American writers of the 1920s and 1930s went to great lengths to define the specificity—even to assert the supremacy—of film against the literary establishment’s aesthetic precepts. One of the main arguments for fi lm’s uniqueness was its supposed capacity to provide an “unmediated” vision of the artistic imagination. Specifically, for the French avant-gardists and their admirers, there was a potential for automatism common to the silent film d’art linking fi lm spectatorship to dreams. Compared to other alliances of avant-garde writers in Latin America, the Cuban Grupo Minorista—which included such writers as Eugenio Florit, Francisco Ichaso, Jorge Mañach and a young Alejo Carpentier—was particularly rigorous in its engagement with silent fi lm, and it was also particularly imitative of the French cinéma pur philosophy. Consequently, minorista silent fi lm criticism presents us with a useful microcosm of how intellectuals across Latin America tended to frame their assessments of Chaplin. Writing in the magazine Social, Rafael Suárez Solís argues that the silent cinema, compared to the bourgeois theater, gave spectators greater spatial and temporal freedom in which to interpret the actor’s performance. Thanks to the “tele-communication of the gesture,” cinema had created “a

Tropic of Chaplin 79 mobile public, capable of being propelled by the story through all the roads of the on-screen action.”5 Such mobility of the public’s imagination, Suárez Solís adds, linked fi lm to the novel (“The Screen with Sound” [La pantalla con sonido] 59). As Eugenio Florit suggests in another Social article, the visual grammar of silent fi lm constituted a direct, “untranslated” communication between artist and audience. Basing his argument loosely on the aesthetics of Benedetto Croce, Florit privileges silent film as a safekeeper of the “primitive essence” of the imagination. The spoken word threatened the purity of the “Seventh Art,” because “cinema suggests with an image or sequence all that words cannot explain by themselves—limited as they are to the oral expression of concepts” (“Value of the Image in Cinema” [Valor de la imagen en el cine] 67).6 Francisco Ichaso, meanwhile, comes the closest to the spirit of the French cinematic impressionists in a Revista de avance article titled “Film: Dream” [Film: sueño], in which the Cuban essayist compares the silent fi lm spectator’s “immersion in darkness” to a dream-state, while fi lm itself “is a marvellous sleep substitute for modern man, who hardly has time to dream during the deep sleep that follows the exhausting activity of the day” (117).7 The minoristas were not merely writing about fi lm, of course, but about silent fi lm, at a time (in the late 1920s and early 1930s) when the advent of sound was leading to a radical restructuring of the medium, the various national industries (beginning with Hollywood) and also fi lm theory itself. Chaplin, meanwhile, followed the same European lead as his erudite Latin American fans both in his embrace of fi lm art as well as his staunch defense of silent cinema. Forging bonds with Deluc and Epstein as well as U.S. intellectuals like Waldo Frank, who encouraged him to introduce more “serious” elements into his work, Chaplin increasingly straddled the line between artistic ambition and box-office popularity. With fi lms like The Kid (1922), The Gold Rush and The Circus, Chaplin gradually shifted his focus from slapstick vehicles to more restrained films whose gags, compared to those of his early years, were generously sprinkled with subtler pantomime and character development. As such, Chaplin’s career encapsulated what Edgar Morin has called the embourgeoisement of early cinema, by which he means the “originally popular and juvenile” fi lm public expanded to accommodate “an acceleration in the movement of the great mass of people to the psychological level of middle-class individuality” (The Stars 13). The increasingly middling pretensions of Chaplin were not lost on his Latin American enthusiasts, many of whom saw in his films an exception to the vulgar consumerism of Hollywood. The Kid, for example, was praised by several contributors to the Brazilian vanguard journal, Klaxon. One anonymous review announces that Chaplin had reached the culmination of his art: “We see how far fi lm could go and what it should look like. The Kid is the natural expression of our era” (16).8 Another reviewer writes that

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The Vagabond and The Kid arrested an “aestheticist” trend in Chaplin by coupling the comic with high tragedy; consequently Chaplin’s work had become “immense and immortal” and “eternal” in its humanity (14). In one of his fi rst extensive pieces on the cinema, Mário de Andrade calls The Kid “one of the most complete masterpieces of modern times,” and goes to great lengths to defend the film against the criticism of French writer Celina Arnault (13). The Peruvian avant-garde journal Amauta’s María Wiesse, meanwhile, signals that the “great danger” came from Hollywood, whereas the average European fi lmmaker was “more cultivated” and “less of a businessman.” Without mentioning Chaplin’s national affi liation, Wiesse places the director of The Gold Rush in a category all his own: Charles Chaplin is for the cinema what Beethoven is for music and Monet is for painting: a creator, an innovator, a revolutionary [whose] films [. . . ] break with all the procedures and formulas of the medium, procedures and formulas that, unfortunately, have come to be repeated indefinitely (“The Problems of Cinema” [Los problemas del cinema] 24).9 Wiesse’s essay illustrates how many vanguard critics held up Chaplin not as representative of what the cinema was, but rather as an anomalous model of how it could be. Yet Latin American intellectuals’ utopian vision of fi lm was paradoxically both modern and stubbornly reactionary. Not surprisingly, Chaplin’s refusal to cave into studio and market pressures to include dialogue in his 1930s fi lms City Lights and Modern Times won him fierce praise in avant-garde circles. His obstinate exclusion of the spoken word confi rmed the cinéma pur thesis to which so many Latin American intellectuals had adhered since the mid 1920s. This was especially true given the popular and critical success of Chaplin’s last two “silent” features, in which sound was used sparingly. During this period, journals like Cuba’s Social continued to condemn the talkies on aesthetic grounds, only very occasionally (and begrudgingly) acknowledging the success of early sound pictures. Even Hollywood films that received almost unanimous praise from critics internationally, such as Grand Hotel (1932), were seen by Social’s fi lm critic José Manuel Valdés Rodríguez as overly theatrical and hence lacking in uniquely “cinematic” qualities (27).10 Journals like Social eagerly awaited Chaplin’s 1930s fi lms and praised them generously, often using them as pretexts under which to extol the dying virtues of the silent era and underscore the vices of sound. In a fulllength article dedicated to Modern Times, Valdés Rodríguez writes that “Charlot does not talk, and Chaplin’s interpretation thus follows along the lines of the best pantomime tradition,” adding that the fi lm “uses sound wisely” (30).11 Valdés Rodríguez’s concession that sound (if not the spoken word) deserved a place in the cinema reveals the Cuban critic’s debt to Sergei Eisenstein, whose montage theory by this time had begun to have an impact on a number of Latin American intellectuals.12 In the 1930s the

Tropic of Chaplin 81 aestheticism of the French critics thus lost some of its hold, as it appeared less and less likely, Chaplin notwithstanding, that the “purity” of silent fi lm would be preserved. The Soviet critics/filmmakers Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Vertov, meanwhile, forced Latin American fi lm critics and theorists such as Valdés Rodríguez to acknowledge the inevitability of sound without fully accepting either the primacy of dialogue or Hollywood’s brand of talking pictures. The Soviets’ emphasis on social content in fi lm left an equally strong impression, gradually pulling ostensibly “committed” Latin American intellectuals away from the purist, medium-essentialist tendencies of the 1920s. As we shall see, however, Chaplin would be at the center of the ideological debate long after the sound controversy was over.

CIRQUE DU CHARLOT For most film critics of the 1920s, Latin Americans included, the Little Tramp had “human” and “eternal” appeal. As Chaplin’s fi lms increased in length and grew to feature more noncomedic elements, so too did many critics praise the comic’s reach and durability. As Charles Musser notes, however, such universalizing strategies denied another important element in Chaplin’s work. “By presenting Chaplin as a ‘silent clown’ whose art was timeless and universal,” Musser writes, “critics made historical explorations unnecessary (except perhaps the narrow history of biography)” (61). Perhaps nowhere was this truer than in Latin America, with its vast disparities in wealth and cultural capital, its ethnic diversity, not to mention its problematic relationship with the United States and—by association—Hollywood. Indeed, in Latin American criticism of the 1920s, even in vanguard journals whose putative ends were revolutionary, exaggerated claims of universality often overshadowed deeper issues of race and class implicit in Chaplin’s fi lms. The fact that works like The Kid and The Gold Rush appealed to audiences of different colors, ages, educational levels and national origin, however pleasing the idea of fi lm-as-social-equalizer seemed to intellectuals, clearly did not mean all Latin Americans saw Carlitos the same way. It is in Amauta that one fi nds the beginnings of a new appreciation of Chaplin’s work. José Carlos Mariátegui’s 1928 essay “Explaining Chaplin: A Sketch” [Esquema de una explicación de Chaplin] sets out to frame Chaplin specifically within the English music hall tradition. Like his fellow vanguardists in Cuba and elsewhere, Mariátegui begins with the premise (by this time nearly a truism) that the essence of the cinema lay in its visual language, hence silent fi lm constituted “cinematic art” par excellence, one that had “assassinated the theater—bourgeois theater, that is” (171). According to the Peruvian writer, however, the popular theater in its myriad forms was another matter entirely. In its various guises—pantomime, the circus, vaudeville, etc.—popular performance had imbued the

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cinema with a “bohemian” character. Such a “low” pedigree, Mariátegui writes, is masterfully captured by Chaplin in fi lms like The Circus through a formal economy that places more emphasis on actors’ pantomime than on plot or intertitles. Though the Peruvian author is not the first to see the Tramp as a clown, the stress he places on Charlie’s historical construction and nationality is remarkably novel. For Mariátegui, the English clown represents “the highest level of evolution” of the clown tradition: The English clown does not constitute a type, but rather an institution, one at least as respectable as the House of Lords. The art of the clown entails the domestication of the bohemian’s wild and nomadic buffoonery, in accordance with the taste and necessities of a refi ned capitalist society. (172) 13 Appearing on the national landscape at the precise time when the mantle of world military dominance and hegemonic influence had begun to shift from Great Britain to the United States, Mariátegui writes, Chaplin felt the pull of the new metropolis and thus introduced the English clown to the technological means of Hollywood. Both invigorated and revolted by his new work environment, Chaplin fed off of “an intimate confl ict between the artist and North America,” even if the country’s “bourgeois puerility” and “arriviste” banality cramped his style (173).14 By highlighting Chaplin’s ideological incompatibility with the United States, whose industrial and political machinery would help banish him from the country several decades later, Mariátegui denies Chaplin the symbolic U.S. citizenship that Chaplin himself eschewed in real life. Despite attributing to Chaplin a unique capacity to assuage universal suffering through his work, however, the Peruvian writer does not claim Chaplin for Latin America as other writers later will do. Quite to the contrary, the only national references in the Amauta essay are to England and the United States. What Mariátegui seems to want to accomplish, oddly, is a restoration of Chaplin’s English identity by emphasizing Charlot’s clown lineage—a maneuver that allows the Peruvian writer to place Chaplin both above the fray of Hollywood by stressing the “perfect Anglican dignity” of the English clown, and also below the bourgeois oppressiveness of the United States by highlighting the Tramp’s bohemian profi le. Mariátegui’s failure to apply the significance of Chaplin specifically to Latin America lies in the essentialist manner in which he defines Charlie, a figure whose ambiguity went well beyond the “noble” English clown described in the essay. In a brief but revealing analysis of “Explaining Chaplin,” John Kraniauskas sees a paradox in Mariátegui’s condemnation of the “guardians of aesthetic order” while simultaneously treating Chaplin’s films as if they were works of literature (303).15 The Peruvian writer’s elevation of Chaplin in fact depends on the premise that the English actor’s clown stock was, as Kraniauskas suggests, somehow both popular and genteel. Mariátegui himself

Tropic of Chaplin 83 seems aware of the incommensurability of his own position when he suggests to Amauta’s readers that Hollywood star’s appeal is at once “aristocratic” and “democratic,” making Chaplin “a true type of elite, for those of us who remember that elite means electa” (168).16 Far from being a mere analogue of the most “refi ned” manifestation of the clown tradition, Chaplin’s Little Tramp in fact drew from a range of European sources, principally the Italian commedia del’ arte with its motley cast of knaves and fools, and the French Pierrot, itself an adaptation of the Italian servant Arlequino. If the English clown represented an exaggeration of the rustic boob in origin and appearance, the Latin clown tradition tended to emphasize the beleaguered, opportunistic and often amoral aspects of Harlequin. As R. J. Broadbent writes in his classic study A History of Pantomime, Harlequin is a remarkably malleable figure, taking on distinct attributes in different times and places: “Harlequin must be modeled as a national character, the creature of manners; and thus the history of such a Harlequin might be that of the age and of the people, whose genius he ought to represent.” In Italy, the character adopted a number of different guises and even names; in France, Harlequin became a wit and even a moralist, without however rising above his essential naiveté (115). Such an adaptable and heterogeneous profi le would seem a closer fit to Charlie the vagabond than Mariátegui’s noble clown. As many observers have pointed out, including Chaplin himself, over the course of more than two decades’ worth of fi lms, the Tramp is subject to such a seemingly endless series of setbacks, impositions and material deprivation that he does not hesitate to steal when necessary—even from children, as he does in one memorable scene from The Circus.17 At turns generous and egotistical, chivalric and crude, the Little Tramp owes at least as much to Continental models as he does the English clown tradition. Mariátegui notwithstanding, Chaplin’s Latin American audiences would naturally have related the Tramp to the various clowns of their own stage and circus. The centrality of the nineteenth century traveling circus to the emergence of mass culture in Latin America is underscored by Martín-Barbero, who notes that radio plays emerged at the confluence of the folletín and the circo criollo, as the visual spectacle of the circus became increasingly narratized around the turn of the century: “The circo criollo builds the bridge that connects the narrative tradition contained by the folletín with the staging of traveling comic performers” (De los medios a las mediaciones 184).18 If the radio play constituted a mediated continuation of circus narrative, audiences bemoaned the lack of visual spectacle in the new medium. Radio companies responded, Martín-Barbero notes, by going on tour to the provinces: The serial novel that becomes theater continues in the circus not only because radio broadcasts a work that is [simultaneously] represented visually to the public, but also because the companies of actors that do

84

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema radio theater travel through the provinces, allowing people to “watch what they are listening to” (184). 19

By allowing radio audiences to “watch what they were listening to,” such troupes generated much the same publicity as early silent film companies, but in reverse: Chaplin himself in his early years often made public appearances so that his fans could “hear what they were watching” in his movies. For Martín-Barbero, the key to radio theater’s success in Latin American had less to with the new medium per se than with its interpolative function visà-vis vernacular traditions. In the United States as well, the circus helped lay the tracks for mass culture, a web of new industries that, initially on a much larger scale than in Latin America, included the cinema. Chaplin’s films “mediated” in much the same way as the radionovela in Latin America.20 In short, radio theater and early film together resemanticized the circus, vaudeville, folletín and other popular forms throughout the hemisphere. A brief look at the Latin American circus tradition underscores the unique development of such popular forms in the region. As Raul H. Castagnino writes in his study El circo criollo, the nineteenth century traveling circus was a highly theatrical spectacle and not merely an assortment of exotic animals and human oddities. For most provincial residents of Rio de la Plata, excluded by the centralized and elitist theater of Buenos Aires, the circus was virtually the only regular access to popular performance (9). The South American clown tradition generally resembled the Latin model more than the English. The word “payaso,” Castagnino points out, was derived from the Italian pagliaccio, which more than the English term carries a connotation of the “straw man,” “that is, the one who is roughed up, slapped around, the one who receives the blows, the absent one, the one inured to pain. ‘Clown,’ on the other hand, suggests more the idea of simplicity, the image of the rube” (138).21 In Brazil, the clown to this day tends to be more loquacious boor than pathetic mime, thus the Brazilian circus to some extent “tropicalizes” diverse European models in the sense of its emphasis on both verbal expression and material hardship. According to Mário Fernando Bolognesi, the most common clown type in contemporary Brazil is the Augusto, known for his ineptitude and ill-fitted clothes, but also for his long-suffering marginality (74–78). “Mimic clowns,” however, are also quite prevalent, forming a subtle counterpoint to the bigger-than-life gestures of the Augusto.22 Inherent in such depictions of Latin American difference is the notion of the picaresque, of which the word malandragem is the closest Brazilian equivalent. Both terms highlight the social outcast’s unique power to destabilize the structure of authority by occupying the “interstices between order and disorder”—a subversive power Roberto da Matta has identified as the very core of Brazilian carnival (130–31). At the same time, the picture painted by historians of the Latin American circus tradition indicates a general tendency from the mid-nineteenth

Tropic of Chaplin 85 century onward to turn clowns into the stars of the show. In Mexico, writes Luis Reyes de la Maza, the most famous clown of all was Ricardo Bell, who for decades delighted spectators at the Teatro Circo Ollin with his combination of pantomime, dare-devilish stunts and caustic verbal satire. Bell’s fame in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was such that Reyes de la Maza ranks him among the five leading figures in the history of the Mexican stage (364). The newfound celebrity of the clown was nowhere more apparent than in the circo criollo’s Pepino 88 (José Podestá). 23 According to Castagnino, Pepino 88 was “born” in Buenos Aires in the 1880s and quickly distinguished himself from previous generations of Argentine clowns. Compared to the typical English clown so common in the country at the time, Pepino was much more verbal and satirical, playing as much to adults as to children (83). He was also, Castagnino notes, less of a mime than a literary clown whose performance included a great number of comical décimas, songs and sayings that often savagely lampooned the public figures of the day (81–82). Ironically, it is the equally great success of José Podestá’s interpretation of the foundational gaucho Juan Moreira that eventually eclipsed Pepino 88 and ushered in a new age of popular theater centered less on the big top and more on the stage. Piolim, Brazil’s most famous clown, was a creation of the same early twentieth century that saw the demise of Pepino 88. Piolim’s success was such that he was embraced as “arte puro” by Brazilian Modernistas; and in particular by the Clube de Antropofagia, which feted the legendary palhaço on his birthday, later announcing to its readers, “we had Piolim for lunch” [almoçamos Piolim].”24 In an article about the circus published in the Diário Nacional two years later, Mário de Andrade recalls the lunch and concedes that the Modernistas’ enthusiasm for the circus had in truth been an enthusiasm for Piolim himself. Like Chaplin, Andrade writes, “the comedy of Piolim evokes in us an entity, a being [ . . . ] that all of us feel deep inside ourselves, in our indecision and contradictory gestures (“Pony Circus” [Circo de cavalinhos] 104). 25 Charlot and Piolim, in other words, transcended the circus itself and thus belonged in the company of such contemporary “tragicomic” figures as the characters from the great modernist writers: Joyce, Proust and Pirandello (404). As in the case of Pepino 88, mass acclaim and a certain upward mobility ultimately separated the clowns from the popular milieu whence they came. With the exception of Mário de Andrade, Latin American intellectuals who wrote about Chaplin generally failed to draw explicit comparisons between the Little Tramp and local or national popular traditions. Yet several writers of the 1920s and 1930s clearly saw in the Little Tramp a kind of honorary or crypto-compatriot. In his important 1921 study on Chaplin, Louis Delluc begins by remarking that “the mask of Charlie Chaplin, Anglo-American mime, possesses a strange latin-ness [une étrange latinité]” (6). 26 The prominent cineaste goes on to imagine Charlot as a Frenchman

86

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and speculate about his rumored Spanish heritage. Yet Delluc stops short of christening Chaplin a veritable Latin: perhaps, he suggests, Chaplin’s true ethnic makeup did not matter as much as people’s perceptions of the screen idol’s ethnicity (7–8). Besides Delluc, another prominent intellectual whom Chaplin befriended in the 1920s was the prominent U.S. intellectual Waldo Frank, whose ambivalent regard for the filmmaker quickly turned to near reverence as the two became personally acquainted (Maland 85–86). An eloquent and forceful prose stylist who read, wrote and spoke Spanish fluently and championed progressive politics throughout the hemisphere, Frank was a key interlocutor between the United States and Latin American intellectuals. During the late 1920s and 1930s, Frank’s articles repeatedly appeared in the leading cultural and avant-garde journals of the region. In one of them, “Portrait of Chaplin” [Retrato de Chaplin] (published in 1928 in both the Mexican journal Contemporáneos and Peru’s Amauta), Frank gives an intimate portrait of Chaplin, revealing among other things that Chaplin’s mother was of gypsy origin (291). Frank later uses the information to assure Latin American readers of Chaplin’s working-class credentials in spite of his incomparable personal wealth and dominance of the Hollywood market: Chaplin [ . . . ] is a creature of the theater, and there is no theater without a box office in front. But inside Chaplin’s studio there exists—more real than anyone else—a man of the people, a Cockney, a Gypsy, a friend of the music hall, who looks the world in the eye, as in a mirror, to see himself more objectively and precisely (303–4).27 The image of Chaplin that emerges from the article—that of a shrewd, sometimes unforgiving perfectionist—foregrounds the filmmaker’s drive and intelligence. Yet Frank also manages to match Chaplin’s accomplishments to his social class (Cockney), nationality (English) and ethnicity. If as a businessman Chaplin resembled an ambitious Yankee, his pedigree made him international. In two other essays besides Mariátegui and Frank’s, Amauta offers up further ethnic analysis of the Little Tramp. Like Louis Delluc, María Wiesse focuses on Chaplin’s “mask.” After crediting Carlitos with bringing to the screen “a sense of humanity, fantasy, emotion and comedy,” Wiesse stresses the depth behind the comic surface. “Chaplin’s mask—that refi ned, slightly melancholy mask, mixed with traces of latinidad that illuminate two light, dreaming pupils—how it expresses all of life’s nuances, how it translates all feelings and emotions” (“The Problems of Cinema” 25). 28 Wiesse’s description is noteworthy not just for its mention of “latinidad,” but because of the coupling of the Tramp’s perceived ethnicity with dreams and melancholy. The Latin American vanguard commonly associated art fi lm with the oniric, yet here the “dreaminess” of Chaplin emerges as a sign, not of

Tropic of Chaplin 87 automatism or pure art, but rather latinidad and refi ned melancholy. At the same time, despite the specificity of Charlie’s background—the ethnic and cultural attributes that strike the Peruvian writer as an integral part of Chaplin’s persona—Wiesse’s masked man is universal in his interpretative power, capable of “translating” all sentiments. Wiesse’s discussion of Chaplin’s mask reveals a momentary insight and also the need for deeper historical analysis. As a number of critics and historians have pointed out, the history and prehistory of the modern circus is inseparable from the spectacle of physical difference—including that of racial, sexual or cultural “eccentricity”—but also, particularly before the late nineteenth century, outright subjugation for the sake of human exhibits. Particularly in the case of the European circus tradition, the clown thus draws from a long tradition of “Others.” Stallybrass and White point out that subjects from “exotic” lands supplemented the exhibition of “monsters” at the European fair beginning in the sixteenth century. What is more, “savages” were often made to imitate civilized manners for comic effect, such that “the Other’s mimicry of the polite [consolidated] the sense that the civilized is always-already given, the essential and unchanging possession which distinguishes the European citizen from the West Indian and the Zulu as well as from the marmoset and manteger” (40–41). The Little Tramp’s constant, pathetic attempts to play the part of the well-dressed gentleman update the kind of revealing humor produced at such carnival exhibits. Chaplin’s “étrange latinité” subtly reminded viewers of his—and in some cases their own—“already given” subalternity; his inept covering up of his otherness likewise invoked Latin American intellectuals’ own struggle to emulate metropolitan models of self-representation. Gerard Aching, examining the colonialist underpinnings of Caribbean carnival culture, has written about the central importance of “demasking,” which he describes as “an unexpected and undesirable ideological self-recognition (the shock of self-recognition) that is brought on by contact with a masked subject” (6). If the Little Tramp is a kind of “masked subject” by cinematic proxy, Wiesse has to some extent managed to “demask” a common bond by means of the encounter with Chaplin’s character. Yet in Wiesse’s essay there is no recognition of the inherent poverty and marginality of the “Latin” mask, hence the lack of shock value of which Aching writes. On the contrary, Wiesse sees the Little Tramp as an emblem of a “noble” and unproblematic latinidad, as a sign of universalizing harmony rather than jarring difference. Chaplin gets a more extreme makeover by Wiesse’s colleague Xavier Abril, whose “X-Ray of Chaplin” [Radiografía de Chaplin] (1928) gives the star one of his more unique and extensive literary treatments of the period. Published in two separate issues of Amauta, the text consists of a mixture of playful, poetical aphorisms and lengthier meditations on Chaplin as a cultural phenomenon. In part one, Abril emphasizes Chaplin’s universal appeal—with a twist. On one hand, the actor’s celebrity is

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seen as ubiquitous. Indeed, Abril “fi nds” him in the unlikeliest of places. Chaplin’s influence on children, for example, is said to begin before they are born: “The intention of Chaplin is already present in the ovaries of contemporary mothers [ . . . ]. Babies say ‘Chaplin’ and urinate on themselves. In Virginia, to keep infants sleeping they give them a breast to feed—and Chaplin” (175). 29 At times, the poet fl irts with absurdity [e.g., “In the Cantabrian Sea at seven o’clock in the evening there are fi sh that look like Chaplin” (178); and “Children grow too fat watching Chaplin” (176)]. 30 At other times Abril personalizes the universal reach of Carlitos. “We all bear some resemblance to Chaplin. I fi nd that my navel is my childhood and Chaplin” (177). 31 Abril delivers his vaguely surrealist quips with a dose of irony, yet the seriousness with which he generally treats his subject keeps the text from falling into a litany of absurdities. In spite of some conventional Marxist digs at the bourgeoisie (“Chaplin knows [ . . . ] that the doors of the bourgeoisie only open from the inside”) (175), 32 the poet’s language is at its sharpest when it manages to link Chaplin’s star power and sentimentalism with the politics of the marketplace. “Chaplin’s jacket,” he writes, “has Romantic weeping as its trademark” (175). 33 Later he renders the commodification of Chaplin in more explicit terms, connecting the everpresent Carlitos to the mass marketing of goods: “Chaplin should manufacture himself. This way, just as one buys a house or an automobile, one could also buy Chaplin”; and then, more subtly, “Chaplin’s pathos is inspired by the mannequins of poor tailors” (176). 34 If the arrival of Chaplin the creator has inaugurated “a new humanity,” as Abril announces at the conclusion of the fi rst part of his text, Chaplin the businessman is not above marketing himself to promote his message. Abril’s strange paean to Chaplin thus blurs the line between art and industry, and also between praise and criticism of the fi lm icon. Part two of “X-Ray of Chaplin” does not exactly pick up where part one left off. If the jocular vanguard style of the fi rst part yields to a more serious, analytical essay, however, the remainder of the text is still full of lucid insights. Perhaps the most fascinating of all is section 41, “Charlot tipo,” in which Abril envisions Chaplin as emblematic of a return to classical forms: The New Art has found its prototype in Charlot. Nervous Hamlet was the product of a by-gone era just emerging from the Middle Ages. He embodied a nervous mentality in opposition to the classical Greek temperment. Latin culture and the French Revolution gave us nothing but buffoons and puppets. Chaplin incarnates, in a revolutionary way, the opposite of the buffoon: his liberty. With him begins the historical decline of the grotesque man represented by the figure of the juglar. At times Chaplin reveals his skeleton—as if through the terrible black-and-white of X-rays—but not the Rabelaisian, Tudoresque and

Tropic of Chaplin 89 superficial qualities of tattooed flesh, which was the primitive, pirate technique of the juglar (181). 35 In this remarkable passage, Abril in effect rejects the carnivalesque—or does he? In one sense, Chaplin’s “X-ray” of the grotesque juglar articulates an extension of carnival elements by means of technology, what William Solomon has termed the “technocarnivalesque.”36 Chaplin’s supposed “liberation” of the buffoon, however, is a provocative take on the genealogy of clowns and clownism. His singling out of the juglar is particularly interesting, because by the late nineteenth century, the word had come to mean “juggler” more than jongleur, the medieval transmitter of the oral tradition. The juglar as Abril uses the term refers to a staple of the Latin American circus: the malabarista. Abril’s implied condemnation of the Rabelaisian tradition anticipates Terry Eagleton’s criticism of Bakhtin for privileging popular forms that perpetuated social hierarchies as much as they satirized them. By letting the fool loose, Abril is advocating that carnival not be merely a “licensed enclave” (Walter Benjamin 148–49). According to this point of view, Chaplin has endowed the traditional Harlequin with a power and autonomy he was never accorded in previous periods of history. The leitmotif of travel, fi nally, informs many of Chaplin’s films, from the The Vagabond to the Tramp’s famous last exit in Modern Times. Yet for Abril, Chaplin’s vagabond is symbolically located in the ancient migration routes of southern Europe: “His shoes are nothing more than Greek buskins, blackened and humanized by long and sweaty Mediterranean travels” (182). 37 Though a link is drawn between shoes “blackened” by the road and a process of “humanization” through hardship and travel, the buskins suggest an itinerant of classical origin. In this sense, Abril’s version of the Tramp resembles Mariátegui’s “dignified” clown. Beneath both writers’ revolutionary stance lies nostalgia for premodern subjectivity: instead of comparing Carlitos to modern Gypsies, peasants, nomads or beggars unburnished by time and too unsanitary to stoke the erudite imaginary, both Abril and Mariátegui, in spite of their political leanings, seek to elevate Chaplin’s character by casting him as the inheritor and transformer of popular culture’s loftiest attributes. The squalor of the circus, it would seem, is only worthy of salvation provided it can be transformed by modern technology.

DON CARLITOS DE LA MANCHA Abril concludes his unusual poetic essay by lending the Tramp a new Latin guise: Don Quixote. Instead of focusing on the Knight Errant himself, however, Abril—in typical eccentric fashion—compares Charlot’s walking cane to Sancho Panza. “The only sane, logical part of Charlot is his little cane, which is a kind of Sancho left gaunt by a rigorous vegetarian diet”

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(183). 38 The fact that Sancho is now a vegetarian (let alone a stick) suggests that his “carnivalesque spirit” has been diminished somewhat by the rationalizing demands of modernity. Abril’s curious phrasing singles out a symbolic power struggle identified by Bakhtin: “Sancho’s role in relation to Don Quixote can be compared to the role of medieval parodies versus high ideology and cult, to the role of the clown versus serious ceremonial, to charnage versus carême” (Rabelais and his World 22). Xavier Abril is not the only Latin American writer to draw a connection between Quixote and Chaplin’s work. If in Abril’s eyes Charlot resembles a downsized, inanimate Sancho, for the Cuban writer Luis Felipe Rodríguez, Carlitos personifies the carême of the Knight Errant in a modern world. In his unique fictional work, Don Quixote of Hollywood (A Tragi-Comic Surprise) [Don Quijote de Hollywood (Peripecia tragic-cómica)], Rodríguez tells a strange story that begins when the Little Tramp is knocked unconscious after a fall. The rest of the narrative assumes the form of a dream in which Carlitos gradually makes his way from New York to the bowels of Hell, touching down for brief visits to a medium’s office, Limbo and Purgatory—the last two by airplane. Manhattan, looking something like García Lorca’s apocalyptic cityscape from Poet in New York, is a chaotic place populated by millionaires and monsters, “the clamorous metropolis of the dollar, where the pain of the pathetic vagabond strikes a sharp and pictoresque chord” (41). 39 Rodríguez foregrounds the fictiveness of Charlie’s world—the novel’s main character is, after all, Chaplin’s screen creation and not Chaplin himself—by making the dream landscape vaguely cinematic. Charlie senses that something is amiss but cannot quite put his fi nger on what: “He noticed that he now saw buildings from another perspective. They struck him as constructions of straight lines, with an excess of cubes. What is more, the authentic sky was altered and arbitary, as though it had been assembled beforehand by film set designers.” (44–5)40 When dream–New Yorkers (including policemen) begin to ignore him, the Tramp falls into a suicidal depression and seeks out the help of Dr. Procopio Bell, who advises him to listen to Beethoven and tango. After the medium Alma Palmieri tells him he is dead, however, the despondent Tramp embarks on a journey to the Inferno. Along the way Charlot encounters none other than Don Quixote. At fi rst shrinking from the wild rants of the “eternal Spanish lunatic,” Charlie then begins to remember characters and circumstances of films in which he has starred—City Lights, The Circus—and comes to the realization that “it was not the stuff of chivalric novels that exalted the reason of his folly, but rather something in him that only knows how to peer into the deep heroic sense of the soul, free of human limitations” (68–69).41 The meeting of Don Quixote of La Mancha and “Don Quixote of Hollywood” is happy but brief. As the two enter Limbo together, Charlie is the one besieged by admiring fans, especially women, who chase down the Tramp in a scene

Tropic of Chaplin 91 reminiscent of one of Chaplin’s Keystone shorts. And indeed, it is the blissful innocence of Hollywood fandom that Charlie’s dream Limbo most closely resembles: “The dreams of Limbo’s denizens are like the cotton and painted cardboard skies of the Hollywood studios” (72).42 Such a congregation of “innocent saints,” however, leaves Charlie supremely bored (73). The paring of Carlitos and Quixote during this brief episode serves to underscore the quixotic spirit of the entire novel, yet also spotlights what for Rodríguez marks a key difference between literature and cinema generally. While Carlitos, exemplar of a popular modern medium, ingratiates himself to one of the icons of Western literature, fi lm’s mass audience also makes the Tramp the more coveted of the two characters. If Chaplin’s cinematic art owes a debt to Cervantes’ fiction, it also carries the burden of stardom. Don Quixote of Hollywood in many ways reads like a nightmare of modern celebrity: the fl ipside of the Knight Errant’s delusions of grandeur. Rodríguez’s invocation of Hollywood suggests a critique not just of the blind fanaticism shown by Chaplin’s public but also the entire studio star system. As Paul McDonald has stressed, the discursive interplay of screen personality, movie publicity, fi lm journalism and fans’ consumption of all three during the rise of the U.S. fi lm industry betrays a strong dependence on the marketplace. The “personal monopoly” enjoyed by stars like Chaplin translated not just into a purely “enunciative” system of representations—a point made by other theorists and historians from Richard Dyer and Richard deCordova to P. David Marshall, as I have discussed at greater length in Chapter One—but also, crucially, into economic value as well (McDonald 109). Rodríguez resolves the apprehension of film industry’s underlying venality by replacing Chaplin’s fi lm stardom with noncinematic celebrity, a maneuver made possible through the oniric structure of his narrative. Chaplin, Rodríguez suggests, deserves better than unruly mobs, fan adulation and a fistful of dollars. By likening the silent fi lm idol to Quixote and placing him in a dreamscape inhabited by literary figures, Rodríguez ostensibly lends Chaplin a celebrity that transcends the narrow pecuniary confi nes of mass culture. Because the Cuban writer’s dream-Chaplin never actually stops being himself, however, he is also able to reap the benefits of his stardom whenever necessary. His celebrity, for example, guarantees him an audience with the rich, famous and powerful wherever he wanders. In the final two stops of Charlie’s journey—Purgatory and Hell—we are introduced for the first time to a great number of Latin American historical figures, and at this point Rodríguez’s prose becomes its most satirical. Though Limbo had contained only one Latin American figure, Cuba’s first president Tomás Estrada Palma, Purgatory plays host to, of all people, José Martí, “perhaps purging his love for the island, now in the good hands of the Watchdog of the Caribbean.”43 In Hell, meanwhile, the Little Tramp encounters a whole host of generals, Wall Street investors, Inquisitors and ex-presidents of Spanish American republics, “whether or not they were diplomats or had belonged to the League of

92 Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema Nations” (85). Egged on by his infernal audience, which naturally includes infamous caudillos such as Rosas and Francias, the Tramp puts on a dumb show called “The Divine Comedy of Charlie” whose bloody ending does not please Satan and his cohorts, a rebuff that drives the Tramp out of Hell and Chaplin back to consciousness (88). In metaphorical terms, the oniric theme running through Don Quixote of Hollywood permits Rodríguez to indulge in a fantasy of authorial substitution, as the Cuban writer fi lls the void left by the “unconscious” Chaplin. Rodríguez’s Carlitos is twice removed from Chaplin: fi rst because, as a character who dreams, the fictional Tramp is not bound by the physical laws to which the fi lm character is otherwise subject; secondly, because this is a Charlie who speaks, and in Spanish no less. Rodríguez’s temporary “takeover,” therefore, expands the character’s expressive repertoire. Just as Don Quixote has been “liberated” from Cervantes, so too has Charlie been freed from his earthbound silence by literature. Not only is Charlie accorded the right to speak whenever he pleases, moreover, he speaks with authority on issues of importance to Latin American (and specifically Cuban) readers, because his knowledge base includes areas of expertise and shades of irony that reveal the local and regional concerns of the author and his intellectual milieu.44 It would not have been difficult for intellectuals like Luis Felipe Rodríguez to imagine what Chaplin’s views on Latin American politics might be—even if the English-born actor and fi lmmaker never spoke out specifically on Cuban affairs. Since Chaplin was a public figure known for his outspoken opposition to U.S. foreign policy, his silence on particular issues readily lent itself to strategic inference and local appropriation by literatos like Rodríguez. By the late 1920s, Chaplin had become a kind of imperial foil, a singular creative force who had benefited from Hollywood at the same time that he had seemingly worked against the industry’s—and the nation’s—ideological platform. If the United States and Hollywood, as Mariátegui writes, “[did] not love Chaplin, because they thought him subversive and adversarial” (173),45 Chaplin continued to look for creative ways with which to salvage the North American élan of vitality and opportunity. As Rodríguez puts it in his prologue, Chaplin is Charlie’s “spiritual father”: “Author and actor of his own mask, with the lucid understanding of the ancient and modern tragi-comedy of man, he is still the one who seeks a sense of life’s harmony in the twisted kingdom of Caliban” (15).46 By speaking through Charlie’s “mask,” writers like Luis Felipe Rodríguez were able to channel their own anti-imperialist sentiments through a medium whose voice “carried” more than theirs could ever hope to. Rodríguez’s ventriloquism, in short, resonated with political resistance. In his unique study Don Quixote and Charlie: A Tentative Interpretation [D. Quixote e Carlito: Tentativa de Interpretação] (1959), the Brazilian writer Francisco de Oliveira e Silva emphasizes the subversive combativeness common to both characters. Whereas the Knight Errant’s resistance is largely

Tropic of Chaplin 93 single-minded and physical, however, Charlot’s tactics are more diverse and generally less violent; nevertheless, for the Tramp “it is necessary to break urgently with collective deafness, awaken from mortal sleep the sense of solidarity and fraternity among men” (Oliveira e Silva 104).47 As Juan Marinello notes in his provocative forward to Don Quixote of Hollywood, Rodríguez shared with Chaplin an old-fashioned sense of social justice: “Luis Felipe Rodríguez, distant, intimate brother of Charles Chaplin, is a man of a bygone era” (13).48 According to Marinello, the “brethren” shared a knowledge that the celluloid Carlitos survived because he could not grasp the full extent of his predicament. Such blindness in the face of the hard facts tied them to the figure of Quixote. In Rodríguez’s novel, Charlot’s vision of the New York metropolis, his newfound ability to clearly discern the dream world around him, leaves him suicidal. Marinello explains: Before Charlot’s eyes hovers a light, generous little cloud that prevents him from regarding life as cruel and makes him perceive things with a vagueness that eternally promises change and justice. [ . . . ] When the little cloud disappears, Charlot will die, like Don Quixote, from seeing clearly, from seeing like other men see. (12) 49 For a Latin American writing in the early twentieth century, Cervantes may have seemed an oddly imperial choice of inspiration for a piece of vanguard fiction. Such an intertext would have proven a hard sell in Mexico, for instance, whose revolutionary modalities generally sought inspiration in a pre-Columbian past at the expense of traditional hispanidad. Yet for the Cuban avant-garde, the figure of Quixote would have served as a fitting symbol of pathos and humor in the face of the harsh, quickly changing realities of modern life promoted by the “Watchdog of the Caribbean.” For many Cuban intellectuals, moreover, exasperated by their own nation’s inability to shake off the military and economic shackles of the United States, and slower or less willing than other Latin American nations to embrace their own subaltern histories, the former empire became an unlikely site of cultural nostalgia. Quixote’s consecrated yet beleaguered profi le made the character the epitome of Hispanic identity for Latin Americans primarily intent on distinguishing themselves from the “savage” utilitarianism of Anglo America, under whose political and cultural yoke they still struggled. Quixote’s inability to adjust to life in renaissance Spain, furthermore, is mirrored by Charlot’s own difficulty to cope with metropolitan North America. In both cases, a backward-looking dreamer copes with modern reality through imagination and ingenuity. Don Quixote of Hollywood thus serves as a prime example of how Latin American writers of the 1920s and 1930s strove through fiction to render Hollywood a universal object with secondary local utility. As a staple of the Western canon, Cervantes’ work lent literary prestige where it was invoked, at the same time that it underscored the deep cultural and linguistic heritage

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of Latin American writers often toiling in obscurity. By appropriating Chaplin, meanwhile, writers like Luis Felipe Rodríguez balanced their strategic uses of the literary past, laying claim to the present moment by nationalizing an internationally recognized emblem of mass culture. At the same time, the pairing of Don Quixote and Charlot in an imaginary setting suggested a symbolic exchange: if the Knight Errant (and, by extension, literature generally) was made more modern through his contact with the Little Tramp, then Carlitos was rendered more “Hispanic” and also more “artistic” by sharing the stage with Cervantes’ celebrated character.

THE PRIMITIVE PROLETARIAN The Little Tramp’s appeal to Latin American intellectuals did not consist solely of perceived ethnic or aesthetic alliances. In fact, the discourse of propinquity found in so much writing about Chaplin often depends on less obvious dynamics. In one of Roberto Arlt’s idiosyncratic crónicas from the period, “Apotheosis of Charlie Chaplin” [Apoteosis de Charlie Chaplin], the Argentine writer recounts the true story of an immigrant who had shown up at his office one day. The unlucky man, whose wallet had been stolen upon arrival to the country, was then struck by car while looking for work and nearly killed; when he arrived at the newspaper he was bloodied and penniless. The episode strikes Arlt as downright Chaplinesque, and it serves as a point of reference for the rest of the chronicle, proof to the author that Chaplin’s fictions are “our” realities. Arlt uses the collective, informal power of the chronicle form to render the scene local and Argentine, naming every detail down to the street where the man had been run over and the bakery where he was headed. Yet he stresses the universal appeal of Chaplin beyond the particularism of the episode, focusing on Charlot’s smile, which he fi nds disarmingly emblematic of the Tramp’s contradictory appeal to human sympathies: “The sad man, with his feminine smile, psychically embodies the whole mystery we offspring of men and women hold inside ourselves” (47). 50 Even as Arlt suggests that the Tramp’s androgyny is the source of his wide appeal, however, he also signals his lack of masculinity as a testament to his poverty. Placing Charlie in his native habitat—the streets—Arlt describes his life as that of an “ex-man” (“un ex-hombre”): “Misery, blows, persecution, thefts, mining. Charlie only has contact with the poorest social strata” (47). 51 Here Arlt mentions a typically pathetic scene in which the Tramp searches in vain for money with which to pay for a roll at a bakery. The second mention of a bakery, this time in a cinematic context, underscores the local application of Chaplin’s fi lms. “When we see him,” Arlt writes, “we understand how painful the situation is; and how little it would take to remedy” (47). 52 The humor, in short, lies in Carlitos’ familiarity with poverty, implying that Argentine readers are in a position to enjoy

Tropic of Chaplin 95 Chaplin’s fi lms to an extent inversely proportional to their material wealth. Like Charlie, Arlt implies, many of his readers are “ex-men.” Because the Tramp is kept from a full political awareness of his social condition by the sheer scale of his deprivation, Roland Barthes has argued that Charlot is a kind of “primitive proletarian.” As we see in Modern Times, in which Charlie views a labor strike as an obstacle since it only prolongs his hunger, his solidarity with the proletariat is purely incidental: in one notable scene, the Tramp is accused of leading a protest in which his presence is wholly accidental. He gets mixed up with the mobilized working class, in other words, only because he happens to share the physical space of streets and factories with organized labor. As Barthes remarks, “Ensnared in his starvation, Chaplin-Man is always just below political awareness” (“The Poor and the Proletariat” 39). Although Chaplin’s anarchical persona may not have won over all hardcore Marxists, the extent to which most Latin American leftists unabashedly embraced the Little Tramp is remarkable. In a thought-provoking, pseudonymous article published in Social, “Cinefan” (conceivably a pseudonym of Juan Marinello’s53) defends Chaplin against charges by Maxim Gorky, who had called the Little Tramp a “stupid and sentimental clown” and a tool of the United States and bourgeois capitalism. Significantly, “Cinefan” frames his counter-argument in national terms: Let us not forget that a Russian, as Communist as he might be, does not cease to be a Russian; that is, a man with outward or inward characteristics different from our own, who cannot appreciate as we appreciate the true genious of the great English mime. Chaplin is as unintelligible to a Slav as the greatest tragic heroes are to an individual with a Latin mentality and ideology (“Notes on Celluloid: Maxim Gorky vs. Charles Chaplin” [Notas del Celuloide: Máximo Gorky vs. Charles Chaplin] 39). 54 As Mariátegui had done several years earlier in Amauta, Cinefan puts some distance between Chaplin and Hollywood by underscoring the actor’s English origins. At the same time, the Cuban writer suggests that “we” Latin Americans have a more intimate, human understanding of Chaplin’s art that transcends politics—in this case an allegedly shared allegiance to Marxism and class struggle. Yet national or ethnic sensibilities apparently trumped party affi liation. To buttress his argument, Cinefan wisely distinguishes Chaplin from his cinematic creation, arguing that Chaplin the filmmaker laughs at his clown as much as the public does, therefore Charlie is merely a grotesque reflection of the “stupid sentimentalism” of the authentic bourgeoisie (40). Chaplin himself, the Cuban critic writes, is a great citizen of the world whose universality lends him a subtlety of expression lost on the rigid Russian, who fails to see that the two men essentially share the same goals.

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It would not be correct to assert that Chaplin fully embraced the Stalinist politics of the Soviet Union or even Marxism in the abstract. Despite many Latin American writers’ contentions that Chaplin uniformly opposed the free-market ideology of the U.S. government, Chaplin in fact stood by—and stayed in—the United States for a great many years. As Charles J. Maland notes in his study Chaplin and American Culture, Chaplin credited the United States for providing him with work opportunities early in his career where England had not (128). In the early 1930s, moreover, Chaplin publicly endorsed the principles of private enterprise and even the reduction of government, not to mention democratic institutions, and saw the United States as the “hope of the whole world” (129–31). In short, far from being the committed, stealth-Marxist whom Cinefan and so many Latin American writers seemed to want to see in the filmmaker (a desire that united them with Chaplin’s right-wing critics in the United States), Chaplin in the 1930s was probably best described as a New Deal Democrat (Maland 142). Of course, not all Latin American critics were satisfied with Chaplin’s politics. The essayist and novelist Lorenzo Turrent Rozas, in an article first published in the Mexican Communist monthly ruta (later appearing in English in the venerable U.S. magazine The Living Age), compares Chaplin to Cervantes, both “explorers” of the “lost continent of laughter,” but also to the anarchist prince Kropotkin, another revolutionary “teacher” whose time had passed (320). If Chaplin is a restorer of quixotic laughter, he also “digs the grave of bourgeois love” by exposing its hypocrisy through the Tramp’s perennial inability to “fit into the classic Yankee home” (321). But here ends Turrent Rozas’s praise for Chaplin. In essence, the Mexican writer criticizes the “anarchistic” filmmaker for failing to lend the Tramp any sort of upward mobility. Charlie’s circumstances are as unchanging as the society against which he struggles, leaving the spectator-worker nothing but “bombs of laughter” and “handfuls of straw”—this last image an allusion to the final scene of The Circus in which Charlie departs alone, bereft of love and work: Charlie the proletarian left in his primitive state. The 1929 Wall Street crash, Turrent Rozas writes, rendered Chaplin’s art particularly irrelevant and even an “accomplice for capitalism,” for “when anguish grips the working class there is no longer any room for blind, anarchistic, undirected protest” (322). The essay reaches its highest pitch when it cites Chaplin’s loss of appeal among Mexico’s poor, who are said to make “caricatures” of Carlitos “and at working-class festivals these caricatures are laughed at and beaten” (322). Though anecdotal and as such difficult to corroborate, the Mexican writer’s account of Chaplin’s fall from popular grace is unique in even mentioning his films’ reception among the lower classes. Unlike Turrent Rozas, most Latin American intellectuals of the period were content to assert the film idol’s relevance to the proletariat without leaving the safe confines of utopian abstraction. One of the literary works that best exemplifies Chaplin’s broad and enduring blue-collar appeal to Latin American intellectuals is Carlos Drummond

Tropic of Chaplin 97 de Andrade’s long poem “Song to the Man of the People, Charlie Chaplin” [Canto ao Homem do Povo Charlie Chaplin] (1946). Drummond frames the piece as a dual retrospective of both Chaplin’s earlier work and the poet’s experience of these fi lms as “fi laments of tenderness and laughter, fluttering in time” [fi lamentos de ternura e riso, dispersos no tempo] (10–11), fragments which the now “mature” poet intends to “recompose” through his Canto. Citing his own nationality, provinciality, humble origins and stylistic simplicity as prerequisites for writing a tribute worthy of Chaplin, Drummond positions himself in solidarity with the Brazilian people, for whom he presumes to speak. The images he evokes—trampled flowers, extinguished candles, oversized shoes, vagabonds, small merchants, factory workers—are at once the characters in Chaplin’s films and objects familiar to Brazilian moviegoers, whose own lives, the poet intones, reflect the squalor and pathos portrayed on the screen. At the same time, Drummond credits his countrymen with a penchant for transcending poverty and subverting oppressive authority, qualities that link Brazilians to Chaplin’s cinematic world. Drummond thus designates agency both to himself and Chaplin as twin spokesmen for the oppressed. Yet Drummond sees his role not only as one of solidarity but interpretation as well. If, as Barthes later observed, Chaplin’s “primitive proletarian” lacked full political awareness, the Brazilian’s paean transposes the raw material of the Tramp’s work into a more “evolved,” cohesive narrative. “Song to the Man of the People” thus restores ideological consciousness to Chaplin’s work by correcting the supposedly inarticulate expression of the Tramp’s “secondary orality,” reclaiming the vernacular for literary use. Stallybrass and White cite representations of eating, sex and squalor in modern culture as examples of “carnival pleasure” that survive through a discourse of hysteria. A recent study maintains that this same discourse found full expression in early silent film. 55 For Drummond, the question of poverty in Chaplin’s work is inseparable from the politics of consumption—and in particular the consumption of food, as is apparent in the poet’s examination of two famous scenes from The Gold Rush. In the fi rst, Charlie elegantly prepares a Thanksgiving “meal” by boiling one of his shoes, savoring the laces as a side of spaghetti. Far from being a sign of gluttony, Drummond writes, the Little Tramp’s appreciation of food has to do with its sheer scarcity. Drummond links the near-obsessive preoccupation with food in Chaplin’s films with the Tramp’s exclusion from the workforce: “Full of tips on eating, you kill the hunger / Of those who were not invited to the celestial / Or industrial supper” (86–8). 56 In the second famous scene from The Gold Rush, Charlie’s prospector roommate, suffering from hallucinations caused by desperate pangs of hunger, mistakes the Tramp for a giant chicken. Drummond marvels at Chaplin’s metaphorical maneuver—Charlie embodies the hunger that envelops them both, a hunger produced by the very inaccessibility of food kept from the miserable prospectors by the powers that be:

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Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema There are not many proper dinners in the world, you knew this, And the most beautiful chickens Are shielded by thick glass on china plates. There is always the glass, and it never breaks, There is iron, asbestos, the law, There are entire militias protecting the chicken [ . . . ] (99–104)57

The ending of The Gold Rush, in which the two prospectors end up millionaires and Charlie gets the girl he had been pursuing in vain before striking gold, would seem to belie Drummond’s pessimism. Yet the fi nancial-bonanza conclusion is an exception to the customary Chaplin denouement. If he has been working at all, the Tramp generally loses or abandons his job at the end of the story—and even in The Gold Rush, the Tramp understandably stops prospecting and leaves Alaska once he has made his fortune. His difficulty in holding down a job is noted by Drummond. After listing off the different occupations the Tramp has held—fi reman, musician, factory worker, circus performer, etc.—Drummond gently chastises Charlie for being “The one unable to hold property, the / Errant foot, the one fleeing down the highway [ . . . ]” (185–87). 58 In the fi nal section of the poem, culling imagery from Chaplin’s more recent fi lms Modern Times and The Great Dictator, the Brazilian poet meditates at greater length on Charlie’s “occupation.” The picture Drummond paints is one of a dreamer who humanizes and transforms the workplace. By failing to work efficiently and thus conform to conventional standards of productivity, the Tramp reveals the numinous quality of modern artifacts—the clock, the broom, the train. Such transformative power has revolutionary connotations: There is work in you, but it is capricious, Benign, And from it spring non-bourgeois arts, Products of air and tears [ . . . ] (199–202)59

In Drummond’s view, Chaplin privileges a new kind of work antithetical to a rationalized worldview. The poet’s insight is akin to Michel de Certeau’s notion of secondary production. For Certeau, the practice of consumption is defi ned not just by intended use-value but also by hidden uses of the commodity exploited by the “devious” consumer. Certeau likens such “quasi invisible” production to poiesis (484). In a similar way, the Little Tramp’s “capricious” approach to everyday life reveals the creative utility of the modern industrial workplace. Despite his subversion of bourgeois industry, however, Drummond’s Carlitos still occupies an artistically impoverished, fragmented space. Chaplin, Drummond suggests, needs his help. By gathering and rearranging the pieces of Carlitos’s “pulverized” world, the Brazilian poet endeavors

Tropic of Chaplin 99 to give the Tramp the unity of a collage while suggesting that both his own literary art and Chaplin’s cinematic work answer to the same necessity for poetic social protest. The comparison is intriguing but somewhat forced. In spite of Drummond’s unique celebration of the Tramp’s popular appeal, he relies on familiar tactics: like Mariátegui, Xavier Abril, Luis Felipe Rodríguez and others before him, Drummond ultimately leans rhetorically on the prestige of literature and the ideological scaffolding of socialism to lend greater value to Chaplin’s cinematic expression. Like the Tramp’s “work,” therefore, the Brazilian poet’s main endeavor can be read metaphorically as essentially less materialist than alchemical: the conversion of the mass commodity into something of greater symbolic worth. But such a transmutation could not take place were it not for the popular’s exposure to the technological means of modern mass media emblemized by Hollywood. If Carlitos is the champion of “non-bourgeois arts,” Chaplin’s art depends on the capitalist order of industrial society. Drummond’s poetic universe, modeled on Chaplin’s, thus depends on a fundamental irony.

SENTIMENTAL IMPASSE Chaplin’s sanitation project of the 1920s elevated his Little Tramp to a level of pathos at which he ceased to be the earthy, amoral vagabond of his earlier fi lms. Instead, Charlot by the 1930s had become a kind of untouchable in intellectual discourse. The language used by writers of the time, many of whom subscribed to avant-garde schools loudly denouncing the use of sentiment as patently bourgeois, often works to disguise the sentimental turn in Chaplin’s work, a sleight of hand revealing as much about their own ideological slant as that of their beloved fi lmmaker. One such trope is that of Charlie as man-child. In a well-known essay written in the 1940s, Sergei Eisenstein stresses the tragicomedy of Chaplin’s fi lms as their defi ning feature. For the Russian theorist and filmmaker, the Tramp’s unique inability to view human tragedy and hardship disinterestedly is derived from the character’s childlike innocence (261). Xavier Abril, as we have already seen, connects Charlot’s smile to his own childhood as well as the “infancy” of the world. Charlie thus embodies an idealized space beyond—and indeed, before—moral judgment. “I feel Charlie Chaplin’s smile emerge from my earliest childhood,” Abril writes, “from my fi rst way of being in the world” (“X-Ray of Chaplin,” Part I, 73).60 If Eisenstein’s Chaplin is an ahistorical subject, Abril’s belongs to prehistory; whereas Eisenstein sees in Charlot a “kid” impassively beholding the ruins of advanced capitalism (and therefore, by implication, an objective observer of the world), Abril emphasizes the child-like Tramp’s ubiquitous reach and personal touch. Both writers place Charlot beyond the pale of ideology and agency. Drummond de Andrade does not see Charlie as quite so divorced from the real world: the Brazilian’s Tramp, however, is as

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childlike as Abril’s, his malandragem a ludic response to “sentences meted out by unofficial justice.” Yet in Drummond’s eyes Charlie’s puerility is not entirely real, either, because the character occupies “that secret country where children sleep.” For the Brazilian poet, even the Tramp’s walking cane (which Chaplin had originally intended to make him look older), becomes the “magic stick” of a child (II). Drummond’s allusion to the oniric quality of Chaplin’s Tramp films is telling, as it brings to our attention another important strategy frequently used by Latin American intellectuals to decontaminate a Chaplin “dirtied” by the market and the circus. Dreams, as is well known, were a central thematic concern and organizing principle of avant-garde filmmaking from Germaine Dulac and early Luis Buñuel to Mário Peixoto.61 Yet it is not just the supposed phenomenological affinity of dreams and film, or for that matter the vanguard cachet performed by allusions to surrealism, that compelled Latin American writers to associate Chaplin with the oniric. Dreams held the dual attraction of permitting Carlitos a freedom he did not enjoy on film, while also allowing Chaplin himself to enter the particular literary and political realms of those who invoked his presence. Luis Felipe Rodriguez, as we have seen, tells his Chaplin tale through an embedded narrative that transpires during Carlitos’ momentary loss of consciousness. The maneuver affords the Cuban writer a freer format than the one usually given to Charlot by Chaplin himself, who tends to use dream sequences sparingly in his films. In Don Quixote of Hollywood, unencumbered of his customary setting, Charlie is able to think and speak in fluent Spanish, travel freely from the Metropolis to the Underworld, entertain demons and converse with Don Quixote; in short, through Rodriguez’s narrative device, Charlot “channels” the imagination of a 1920s Cuban intellectual, right down to his nationalist concerns and preoccupation with Martí, Catholicism and hispanidad. Another piece of narrative fiction of the time employs the framework of dreams to different effect. In the title story of his 1930 book Chaplin’s Dream [El sueño de Chaplin], the Uruguayan writer Ildefonso Pereda Valdés stages a political fantasy disguised as a nightmare. Pereda Valdés borrows a scene from The Gold Rush in which Charlie pathetically waits for his indifferent leading lady (played by Georgia Hale) to dine with him in his cabin. When she fails to show up (she and her friends are celebrating the New Year at a village dance hall), the Tramp falls asleep, and here Pereda Valdés imagines Charlie’s thoughts and dreams. After a sketch of Chaplin’s real-life problems—his difficult childhood and alcoholic father, his vaudeville career, his troubled marriage to Lita Grey—the narrative transitions into a nightmare in which Chaplin is to be lynched by the Ku Klux Klan. Cast as a Christlike figure, Chaplin asks to see his “disciples,” a list that includes the other stars of silent comedy: Harold Lloyd, Fattie Arbuckle and the “Judas figure” Buster Keaton (12). The episode draws from journalistic discourse both to shorthand Chaplin’s biography and also to paint an ominous backdrop to his nightmare.

Tropic of Chaplin 101 However, rather than reiterating the venality thesis favored by Luis Felipe Rodríguez and others, according to which the fi lm idol’s unassailable artistic virtue is cast against the greed of Hollywood, the Uruguayan writer stresses the unsavory racial and political climate of the United States as a way of highlighting Chaplin’s social consciousness.62 In Pereda Valdés’s vivid imaginary, the Klan-rally atmosphere morphs into a New York City mob in which various sectors of U.S. society call for the comic actor’s execution: professors and politicians accuse of him “killing seriousness” through his films and denounce him as their enemy; hysterical female fans of Valentino fault him for not looking enough like their idol; and Massachusetts Governor Alvan Fuller (who presided over the controversial 1927 execution of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti) declares Chaplin fit for the electric chair (13). Amid a maelstrom of airplanes, automobiles, skyscrapers and sirens, Christ himself appears, only to urge on the bloodthirsty throng: “Let’s lynch him like a Negro” [Lychémosle como a un negro] (14). Pereda Valdés thereby casts Chaplin as a victim of monumental proportions. Unlike Rodríguez, moreover, the Uruguayan writer takes advantage of the nightmare framework to underscore the pathos of Chaplin, rather than the Little Tramp, a tactic allowing the story to focus on the unforgiving moral climate of the United States to which Chaplin the public figure was, in fact, so often subjected. By linking the silent film icon to the political persecution of black Americans, Pereda Valdés stresses the ethnic and ideological otherness of Chaplin frequently found in Latin American literature of the period. At the same time, the Uruguayan writer makes Chaplin’s U.S.-born screen rivals part-and-parcel of the lynching mob, implicating Hollywood itself in the national moral climate that crucifies the movie idol. On an allegorical level, “Chaplin’s Dream” reads like a paranoid account of the abuses of U.S. mass culture and modern industrial society. In the end, though, the text approximates the same populist, sensationalist dimensions it implicitly criticizes. Liberated by its oniricism, the story depicts the United States in exaggerated proportions in order to augment the exculpatory spectacle of Chaplin’s public martyrdom—exculpatory because the scene explicitly positions an “innocent” Chaplin alongside the cruel savagery of U.S. mass culture. By supplementing Chaplin’s screen personality with biographical information, Pereda Valdés uses a melodramatic flair to accentuate Chaplin’s “seriousness” without letting the writing deteriorate into pure pulp or gossip—performing what Oswaldo Capriles has called a “transcodifying” function between high and low registers similar to middlebrow film criticism (172). In an important sense, “Chaplin’s Dream” is a curiously bourgeois critique of bourgeois culture. Chaplin’s conversion into a tragicomic figure depends not just on the star’s bravery in the face of victimization, but also on a demonstration of his fragility and innocence, hence the frequent comparisons of Carlitos to children and angels. (In “Chaplin’s Dream,” children are the only New

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Yorkers to call for the actor’s exoneration.) Yet not all Latin American literature inspired by Chaplin casts the Tramp in the role of hapless victim. First appearing in Contemporáneos in 1928, Enrique González Rojo’s short story “Charlot’s Happiest Day” [El día más feliz de Charlot] radically retells the plot of Chaplin’s 1917 short film The Immigrant—with several significant alterations to the original, as well as a major abridgment. The fi rst half of the story follows very loosely along the same lines as the fi lm: the Tramp fi nds himself on a boat of immigrants bound for New York City. As in Chaplin’s version, González Rojo also has Charlie betting for money, wooing a woman and fleeing from a big villain; as in the film, we fi nd an especially resilient Charlie happily enduring the hardships of ocean travel while his fellow passengers fight seasickness and misery. Yet the Mexican writer breaks from the fi lm narrative in several important ways. One is the expanded development of Charlie’s love interest, a character played by Edna Purviance in the original. In the fi lm, the character receives only cursory treatment. Like most of the women to whom the Little Tramp is drawn, she is a chaste, passive and pathetic victim of circumstances, in this case because her ill mother has been robbed by Charlie’s nemesis. From Edna Purviance’s black-and-white Victorian heroine, however, González Rojo renders a woman with blue eyes, blonde hair and a dress so short it strikes the narrator as “infantile and mischievous” compared to the frumpier attire of the boat’s other female passengers (117–19). At the same time, González Rojo foregrounds the woman’s vulnerability by telling us how both the steward and the menacing giant have tried to force themselves on her (119–20); in The Immigrant the Edna Purviance character scarcely has any contact with other men, and is not pursued by anyone but Charlie. By representing Charlie’s love interest as a delicately erotic prize, González Rojo makes Charlie seem like less of a child-like vagabond and more of a manly gallant than most fictionalizations of the fi lm character. The figure of the menacing giant, played in The Immigrant by Eric Campbell (like Purviance another regular in early Chaplin fi lms), marks the Mexican writer’s fi nal break with Chaplin’s fi lm narrative. In the movie version, Charlie eludes the grasp of his nemesis when he wins his pistol in a hand of cards, then generously gives away part of his winnings to help his beloved’s mother. González Rojo, by contrast, has the giant roughing up Charlie after the card game. The Tramp takes refuge in the arms of his beloved, who has now assumed the role of nurturing mother. When the giant carries her away, a revived Charlie fights and beats his nemesis in a second confrontation in which he matches the thug’s brute force with the speed and caginess of a flyweight boxer.63 The scene, which borrows as much from the famous fisticuffs of The Kid as it does from the The Immigrant, resembles a boy-fantasy ending. The story, meanwhile, disposes entirely of the second half of The Immigrant, which takes place on shore and includes one of Chaplin’s many notable restaurant sketches, to play out

Tropic of Chaplin 103 a scene of revenge in which the adversary ends up being eaten by sharks. Thus, in his reverse adaptation, the Mexican writer almost entirely makes over Chaplin’s screenplay, downplaying some of the fi lm’s main themes (immigrant hopes vs. immigrant squalor, liberty vs. servitude, etc.) in order to showcase a victorious Charlot slaying Campbell’s Goliath. Such an ending requires more than one trade-off. On one hand, if González Rojo manages to make Charlie more virile and heroic than he is in Chaplin’s hands, the character also loses much of his comic appeal in the process. At the same time, the climactic fight scene violently upstages the social content of the fi lm, which had already been softened by the atmospheric rhetoric of moons and clouds generally favored by the Contemporáneos group. The story illustrates the lengths to which Latin American avant-garde writers were prepared to go to retain the Little Tramp as a model of creative expression in spite of the actual content of Chaplin’s fi lms. As the Mexican writer puffs up melodramatic devices used on a smaller scale in The Immigrant—descriptions of martyrdom, the excessive juxtaposition of vice and virtue—his tale veers away from the carnival texture typical of Chaplin’s earlier work. In stripping the silent comedy of its original rawness, González Rojo also manages to drain the fi lm of its humor and social commentary—the very vestiges of Chaplin’s power well into the 1940s. In such a way, “Charlot’s Happiest Day” points to a problem common to Latin American vanguards’ treatment of Chaplin: the essential incompatibility between sanitation strategies and incisive social critique. By stressing Carlitos’ heroism and high-minded pathos, vanguardistas like González Rojo paralleled Chaplin’s increasingly bourgeois uses of the Tramp. But as the story shows, the license with which these writers often freely adapted Chaplin’s fi lms and life went beyond simple transposition. Their true ideological proclivities were particularly in evidence in such instances of literary embroidery. Rather than seizing the opportunity to reverse the nascent conventionality of Chaplin’s work by restoring to it a socially committed charnage, Chaplin’s Latin American scribes, as anxious as Chaplin himself to inoculate themselves from the impurities of the popular that they nevertheless wished to appropriate, reached for even loftier heights. Andreas Huyssen has noted that the historical avant-garde, despite its attempts to mobilize the “emancipatory” elements of the culture industry and thus transform society, ultimately failed where mass culture succeeded on its own (15). Charles Chaplin played into the utopian hopes of Latin American vanguardistas by combining a commitment to social change with unprecedented mass appeal by means of the early twentieth-century technological medium par excellence. Yet, as a director, Chaplin’s cinematic technique and increasing reliance on bourgeois plot and character conventions were, more often than not, far from revolutionary. Still, even as Chaplin was proving to be less of an avant-gardist by the 1930s, his popularity among progressive Latin American writers only grew over time.

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The paradox of his appeal was not lost on everyone. In a remarkable 1943 essay published in the Chilean fi lm journal Ecran, a critic by the name of Santiago Moctezuma excoriated intellectuals for having embraced Chaplin too late and in entirely the wrong spirit: Before the intellectuals of the world, critics and essayists, realized that Chaplin existed, maids, streetsweepers and uncultivated people everywhere were laughing at Chaplin’s humor and pantomime. [ . . . ] And [years later], movie theaters fi lled with intellectually eager men and women who wished to discover in the figure of Chaplin some brilliant detail or other—details they would later spread throughout the world in pretentious articles bloated with praise and philosophical boasting (“Chaplin and Cantinflas” [Chaplin y Cantinflas] 13).64 Though his main objective in the essay is to validate the Mexican comic actor Cantinflas as a more authentic emblem of Latin American identity, along the way Moctezuma also delivers a fierce, long overdue critique of many Latin American writers’ Johnny-come-lately praise of Chaplin’s life and work. Chaplin, who was not immune to class envy of the metropolitan elite, had gradually stripped the bawdiness from his films—in part, no doubt, in hope of honoring and maintaining the artistic “respectability” granted him by his intellectual fans. As Moctezuma writes, “all this flattery grabbed Chaplin’s attention, and he made sure the burst of enthusiasm continued” (13).65 Whatever may have been Chaplin’s motives later in his career for leaning more on self-conscious sentimentality and less on the piquant slapstick of his earlier work, Moctezuma’s essay lays bare the riff between lettered cinephiles and the movie-loving masses forming an important part of their readership—and for whom, more to the point, Latin American writers and journalists ostensibly spoke when proclaiming Chaplin’s working-class credentials and universal appeal. Such contradictions notwithstanding, the sheer volume of literature devoted to Chaplin in the fi rst half of the twentieth century reveals an unprecedented attempt by Latin American writers to reconcile high art and popular culture and in so doing grapple with issues of aesthetic taste, cultural agency, ethnicity and social class at a time of rapid change. Chaplin’s widespread popularity, outsider pedigree and problematic relationship with the fi lm industry on which he depended lent him a peculiar appeal to Latin American intellectuals. Writers of a less political and innovative bent—such as Luis Felipe Rodríguez and Ildefonso Pereda Valdés—grafted Chaplin’s notoriety and cinematic appeal onto a literary framework, thus implicitly acknowledging the intrinsic artistic worth of commercial fi lm. Others, such as José Carlos Mariátegui and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, highlighted the radicalism of Chaplin by downplaying his mutually beneficial relationship with Hollywood, choosing instead to restore the English-born actor and fi lmmaker to an oddly stable site of marginal politics, blue-collar values

Tropic of Chaplin 105 and popular traditions, lending Chaplin an underdog status similar to that enjoyed by his creation the Little Tramp. Still other writers like Roberto Arlt and Xavier Abril, meanwhile, made little effort to hide Chaplin’s complicity with the culture industry against which the fi lm star had publicly struck an antagonistic pose: their irony allowed them to tie Chaplin’s fame to the unprecedented mobility (hence ubiquity) accorded the actor by the rise of modern mass culture. Along the way, Arlt and Abril managed like Drummond de Andrade to show how readily importable a character the Little Tramp was. If the marketplace of cinema had made him an international figure, Carlitos nevertheless proved remarkably simple to adapt to local uses, especially in Latin American cities of the 1920s and 1930s where the kind of economic futility emblemized by the Tramp was particularly commonplace. As the Ecran article reminds us, however, Latin American intellectuals as a whole were prone to overstate the importance of Chaplin the artist and overlook his contradictory attachment to the fi lm industry. If, as a cultural model, the former dance hall performer ultimately failed to live up to his admirers’ ambitions, perhaps it was because so many Latin American writers simply exaggerated their claim to Chaplin as an avatar of modernity, social progress and artistic revolution.

5

Hollywood Chronicles Latin American Journalism and the Early Talkies

In recent years it has become a commonplace to say that silent Hollywood owed much of its rapid growth and maturity to the waves of international talent that graced the southern California landscape during the industry’s infancy. As John Russell Taylor notes in his groundbreaking history Strangers in Paradise, the studio system was primarily founded by foreign-born men like Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Adolph Zukor and William Fox. If some of the biggest stars of the silent era were immigrants—Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino, Greta Garbo—so too were many of Hollywood’s most notable directors, such as Erich von Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch and F. W. Murnau. Though other fi lm historians have tended to attribute the arrival of such talent purely to the money, fame and glamour Hollywood represented for so many foreigners—or conversely, to the U.S. industry’s attempt to elevate the prestige of fi lmmaking through its association with “high-class” European artists—Taylor rightly points out that Hollywood actively encouraged the recruitment of international talent primarily as a way of eliminating competition from rival industries, which it is was “better to enlist than oppose” (19). Entirely missing from Taylor’s otherwise excellent account, however, is the central role played by Latin American émigrés in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and the particularly traumatic way the arrival of sound treated them. If European directors and actors suffered the consequences of the silent-to-sound sea change, Latin American actors—as aggressively pursued by the studios as the Europeans earlier in the decade—played an equally prominent role in the Hollywood imaginary at the end of the silent era. Latin Americans’ struggle to cope with the monumental changes brought on by sound is therefore all the more worthy of analysis. Although a number of critics, historians and novelists have focused in recent decades on the indelible mark left on silent film by the likes of Ramón Novarro, Lupe Vélez and Dolores del Río, as well the precipitous loss of prestige infl icted on such stars by Hollywood’s awkward conversion to sound, few studies have dealt with the lesser-known community of Latin American actors, technicians, journalists and other writers that lingered in Hollywood into the mid-1930s and beyond. A study of the collective role such minor figures played in the

Hollywood Chronicles

107

industry’s transition to sound is crucial to a better understanding not only of “Hispanic Hollywood” but also the ways in which a number of Latin American writers actively participated in Hollywood’s desperate attempts to redefi ne itself after the sudden fall of silent pictures. Hollywood at the end of the 1920s was not merely a source of employment for Latin American actors, but also served as fertile ground for a new kind of writing. This was especially true during the years immediately following the 1927 release of The Jazz Singer (generally considered the beginning of the Hollywood sound era), at which time the studios countered the negative Latin American reception of the fi rst Spanish-dubbed talkies by embarking on an ambitious and ill-fated endeavor: the simultaneous production of multiple-version releases, in which Spanish-language versions featured prominently. Through a combination of fi lm reviews and short polemical essays in daily newspapers and fi lm journals, Latin American journalists played a key role in the talkies debate by mediating public opinion in their home countries. Their critical interventions frequently had a direct impact on the major studios, which kept their fi nger on the pulse of Latin American audiences in part by relying on film journalism published in the region’s major capitals. At the same time, the turn of the decade saw an increasing number of Latin Americans writers traveling to Hollywood, sending their chronicles back home and occasionally publishing their writings in book form. It is perhaps fitting that the chronicle—a chameleon of genres so emblematic of Latin America’s troubled encounters with modernity—served also as a key means of expression during Hollywood’s single most aggressive symbolic advance on the region in the fi rst half of the twentieth century. Posing at once a form of flattery and a menace to Latin American cultural patrimony, Hollywood’s Spanish-language talkies understandably provoked an ambivalent response from those who wrote about them. The formal heterogeneity of the chronicle allowed such writers to blend their ambivalence into a cohesive whole. In the present chapter, I will be focusing on the work of three writers: Chilean journalist and feminist Vera Zouroff, Brazilian journalist, actor and novelist Olympio Guilherme, and Argentine publisher, cronista and cinematic gadfly Israel Chas de Cruz. In the hands of these three oddball intellectuals, the Latin American Hollywood chronicle proves a particularly adaptable, even acrobatic medium—at times serving an important critical function, other times deftly revealing the inner workings of the fi lm industry at a crucial time for Latin Americans, and still elsewhere permitting their authors ample fictional license. “[I]n the broad spectrum of the chronicle,” Walter Benjamin writes, “the ways in which a story can be told are graduated like shadings of one and the same color.” Combining documentary flavor and muckraking with fictive elements, the work of Zouroff, Guilherme and Chas de Cruz nimbly straddles the boundaries between cultural history, journalism and literature. Their Hollywood chronicles reflect both a modern impulse and a throwback: if

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Benjamin’s medieval chroniclers paradoxically use religious doctrine to relieve themselves of the “burden of demonstrable explanation,” focusing instead on interpretation of events (“The Storyteller” 95–96), so too do these modern-day Latin American chroniclers take for granted the immutable power of the U.S. culture industry, all the while tracing Hollywood’s wayward footprints. According to Pierre Bourdieu, as journalism increasingly eclipsed other fields of cultural production, it simultaneously succumbed to the market pressures that dominated its own structure: those of readers and advertisers (“The Power of Journalism” 68–69). This was especially true when the model in question bore the stamp of Hollywood. Both Olympio Guilherme and Israel Chas de Cruz wrote for magazines that depended heavily on the paid advertisements of the U.S. fi lm industry. Their journalistic production, therefore, even when “elevated” to the status of books, had to take into account the readers they had cultivated through their tenure as “mere” cronistas. Even if these writers eventually acquired a modicum of creative autonomy through their book publications, what Bourdieu calls the “dual attachments” of journalist-intellectuals would have “validate[d] market sanctions by giving them a semblance of intellectual authority” (74). Unencumbered of the literary conventions plaguing so many of the works of fiction and poetry of the time, unfettered by the radical political agenda and innovative formal expectations of the avant-gardes, Zouroff, Guilherme and Chas de Cruz were in the enviable position of interpreting not just the fi lms themselves (a limitation to which most international fi lm journalists were subjected) but also the very conditions of cinematic production at a pivotall time for Latin American émigrés. If the chronicle afforded these writers an ideal mechanism with which to capture the mystifying clash of signs at the heart of Hollywood, I would like to propose that they could not ultimately exercise their craft without fi rst making a double-edged pact with the cinema metropolis from which they sent their missives. As a number of theorists, literary critics and cultural historians have shown, the chronicle is a literary genre that assumed particular prominence in Latin America letters during the last few decades of the nineteenth and the first few decades of the twentieth century. According to such critics as Aníbal González, Susana Rotker and Julio Ramos, the Spanish-American crónica had by the late nineteenth century become a key bridge between literature and journalism on one hand, and high and popular culture on the other. González points to the preponderance of Spanish American writers who practiced both narrative fiction and journalism, underscoring the common ground shared by the two discursive practices: both, for example, paralleled the rise of the bourgeoisie in their pursuit of profit; both commonly appropriated other genres and discourses (letters, diaries and so on); and both bore the mark of empiricism (9). In the case of Spanish America, moreover, journalism and narrative fiction until the second half of

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the nineteenth century shared “a common cause [ . . . ] in a struggle against the authority of other discourses that claimed to hold the monopoly of truth: those of religion, the law, and the state” (13). The shared goals of fictional and journalistic discourse, González writes, led to an unusual degree of formal flexibility and overlap between the two, with writers finding “in the gray no-man’s land between discourses the literary space that [ . . . ] allowed them maximum creative freedom” (14). If “mutual mimesis” and formal liminality lent intellectual respectability to journalism and a heightened social conscience (not to mention added income) to fiction writers and poets, the harmonious relationship between the two was challenged at the end of the nineteenth century by modernismo. Although the turn-of-the-century signaled an increased distancing between literature and journalism, the modernistas nevertheless continued to write for newspapers, paving the way for the rise the chronicle. As Susana Rotker has pointed out, the crónica at the end of nineteenth century constituted a partial break from the conventions of journalism. Although José Martí and others did not entirely abandon the tenets of mimesis and empiricism, Rotker writes, they selectively eschewed rules of chronological order and narrative objectivity, replacing them with an increased emphasis on poetic detail, literary tropes and self-referentiality. “The result,” she concludes, “is a chronicle that does not remove the reader from the dimension of factual reality but rather introduces to this plane a mode of perception that mythologizes [this dimension] and lends it transcendence without sacrificing referential balance” (200).1 As Julio Ramos suggests, however, the chronicle constituted more than just a mythologizing function or uniquely heterogeneous discourse. Indeed, for many modernistas it was synonymous with a place of opportunity and risk, enrichment and contamination—one whose formal flexibility “enabled it to become an archive of the ‘dangers’ implicit in the new urban experience” (113). Highlighting José Martí’s North American Scenes [Escenas norteamericanas], Ramos points to the close parallels between the chronicle and the travelogue, the latter of which during the nineteenth century had developed into a prominent, portable subgenre of the former. From Sarmiento to Martí, some of the most pivotal Latin American travel writing of the nineteenth century in fact focused on the United States. Such literature, Ramos writes, typically regarded the U.S. city as an avatar of modernization. Martí’s North American chronicles epitomized modernismo’s project of transformation in that they employed a “rhetoric of consumption and publicity” to dress up virtually every aspect of U.S. capitalist society, thus turning the “threatening signs” and “utilitarian vulgarity of iron” into gleaming, picturesque machines (Ramos 113–14). By the end of the fi rst decade of the twentieth century, the ambivalent archive to which Ramos refers had begun to include the urban experience of cinema spectatorship, an activity initially not particularly associated with the United States. Although the golden age of the Latin American crónica

110 Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema ended with modernismo, the genre took on new life as the “threatening signs” that Ramos mentions proliferated in the fi rst few decades of the new century with the explosion of mass media and consumer culture. The cinema, of course, was foremost among the new arrivals, and for many Latin American writers came to emblemize modernity itself. As I have noted in other chapters, chroniclers of the nickelodeon era (such the Mexican José Juan Tablada and Brazilian João do Rio) commonly attributed magical qualities to film, even as they lauded the cinema as the modern art form par excellence. Such an air of enchantment continued through the 1920s and beyond, and was particularly persistent among avant-garde circles, as my earlier discussion of Chaplin has shown. At the same time, however, consumption of Hollywood was invariably mediated by the studio publicity and press coverage inherent in the burgeoning star system, a fact that eventually demystified the “movie magic” of the fi lms themselves. What Richard deCordova and other critics and fi lm historians have termed “star discourse” included not just the consumption of fi lms but also a supplementary diet of popular literature, fan magazines, publicity photos, newspaper coverage and newsreels whose web of representations complemented the early stars’ “picture personalities” such that “the actor’s identity was essentially an intertextual one based on connections between fi lms and between other kinds of discourse” (deCordova 113). In the early years of Hollywood, deCordova writes, such “star discourse” tended to construct an image of wholesomeness in harmony with actors’ onscreen personae. By the early 1920s, however, a spate of divorces and scandals had permanently dispelled the myth of moral rectitude, as Hollywood quickly developed a reputation for excess and fallibility often at odds with the messages imparted by the films themselves. The resulting rift between the movie public’s perception of actors’ “picture personalities” and that of their private lives lent itself to the uniquely speculative gaze of the crónica, which could “complete the picture” of Hollywood imaginatively without entirely abandoning the mimetic tradition of journalism. Indeed, the chronicle found itself in a uniquely advantageous position, as Aníbal González puts it, to textualize this new phase of modernity and thus “import its ideology” into the Latin American intellectual milieu. Perhaps not coincidentally, then, avant-garde writers of the 1920s restored the balance between literature and journalism by “adopting and adapting” journalistic discourse into fiction (González 18–19). This is especially true in Brazil and Argentina, where writers like Oswald de Andrade (Sentimental Memoirs of João Miramar [Memórias sentimentais de João Miramar]), Antônio de Alcântara Machado (Pathé-Baby) and Roberto Arlt (The Mad Toy [El juguete rabioso]) increasingly used montage techniques and a spare, vulgarized vocabulary to literary ends. By the early 1930s, journalism had thus recovered some of its earlier prestige among Latin American letrados, allowing writers to use plainspoken language and less poetic rhetorical

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strategies without necessarily placing their literary reputations in jeopardy. Unlike their modernista forebears, in short, the chroniclers of Hollywood were primed to give Latin American readers a dressed-down version of the modern metropolis.

LANGUAGE GAMES In a fascinating essay on the subject, the Venezuelan critic and historian Oswaldo Capriles divides film criticism into three basic types or “circuits”: dissemination, diffusion and divulgation. The fi rst category (dissemination) includes specialized commentary intended for cinephiles, intellectuals and fi lmmakers. The second category (diffusion), Capriles writes, is more common, intended for a more general audience and often focusing on the private lives of the stars instead of the fi lms themselves. The third type— divulgation—involves a translation of registers in which specialized technical or critical knowledge of the cinema is adapted for a popular audience. According to Capriles, such a high/low maneuver reflects a desire among fi lm critics of the “political vanguard” to bridge the gap between erudite and popular culture: Divulgation [ . . . ] seeks to move away from the encoded language of the specialist to popular speech and the mass’s growing comprehension of the “secrets” of the cinematic message, through a process of the transcodification of technical and cultural knowledge “reserved” for the highcult and the deaf dialogue between filmmakers, critics and specialists (172). 2 Divulgation, in Capriles’ analysis, thus merges intellectual dissemination with popular diffusion through a kind of elevation of popular journalism, “in some way injecting it with revolutionary knowledge, critical analysis, the demystification of idols and stereotypes [ . . . ]” (173). 3 Although it does not specifically mention the chronicle, Capriles’ study is highly applicable to the cronistas of Hollywood’s Golden Age. At a time when the majority of Latin American fi lm journalism tended to fall within either “dissemination” or “diffusion,” chronicle writing offered a third option. Still clearly a popular practice responding primarily to the demands of the market, the particular malleability and heterogeneity of the genre nevertheless afforded writers the latitude with which to inject their narrative with a critical perspective. As I discuss in this book’s introduction, the late 1920s and early 1930s saw the rise of fi lm journalism throughout Latin America. From daily newspapers such as Mexico’s El Universal and Argentina’s La Nación to specialized fi lm journals such as Brazil’s Cinearte and Chile’s Ecran, periodicals rapidly evolved from the strictly star-gossip format characteristic of the

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early silent era to dedicate more attention to longer film reviews, essays and chronicles, often written by the most prominent writers of the period, from César Vallejo and Mário de Andrade to Xavier Villaurrutia and Jorge Luis Borges. In many cases, “serious” coverage of cinema overshadowed other cultural journalism of the time, particularly theater criticism. In large part, moreover, editors showed a preference for Hollywood over European and national cinema, a choice that reflected general viewership of the period. In spite of film journalism’s rising prestige in Latin America in the late 1920s, however, few publications could afford to keep full-time correspondents in Hollywood. Instead, editors often depended on Latin Americans already in the United States to provide them with “eyewitness” accounts of the fi lm capital with which to complement the fi lm reviews, photos, and information gathered from studio press kits—the standard fodder for most movie journals, society magazines, and arts and entertainments sections of the major dailies. Whether they found themselves in Los Angeles by good fortune, design or a combination of both, such writers were in an ideal position to decode Hollywood fi rsthand, “divulging” the secrets of Tinseltown to an eager Latin American public. One such eyewitness was the Chilean writer and feminist Vera Zouroff [Esmeralda Zenteno], a resident in the United States for several years before visiting Hollywood in 1931. Author of a number of early feminist novels of a late Romantic bent, Zouroff gravitated toward journalism around the time of her departure for the United States in 1922, regularly publishing articles in the Santiago daily newspapers as well as in such periodicals as La Prensa (Argentina), Feminismo Internacional and Pictorial Review (New York). The formal heterogeneity of Zouroff’s 1932 volume Hollywood is encapsulated by the book’s lengthy subtitle: With Illustrations of its Most Interesting Points. How Films are Made. Interviews with the Artists, with Portraits, Anecdotes, etc., etc. . 4 At times resembling a frivolous travelogue full of how-to sensibility, Zouroff’s incongruous collection of chronicles at other moments offers a rare, critical account of Tinseltown’s difficult adolescence, thus vacillating between starstruck awe and frank antipathy toward the fi lm industry—in particular, as we shall see, Hollywood’s ill-fated fl irtation with Spanish-language productions. In his historical survey of the chronicle, Carlos Monsiváis has argued that prior to the twentieth century the genre exercises a “celebratory” function, transforming “common facts into feats and recent feats immediately into legends” (A ustedes les consta 18). In Hollywood, Zouroff superimposes the traditional function of the crónica onto an urban landscape that blends the present with the past. She does so, moreover, in a way that celebrates the outward structure and appearance of Los Angeles if not, as we shall soon see, the inner workings of the fi lm industry, thus refusing to equate the city’s “feats” with its “legends.” Although it is common for writers of the period to speak of Los Angeles and Hollywood interchangeably, Zouroff clearly distinguishes between the two. For the Chilean author, Los

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Angeles embodies an exemplar of modernity by virtue of its democratic accessibility, technological sophistication and practical comforts. At the same time, the city strikes Zouroff as a marvelous emblem of Spanish colonial triumph, epitomizing an urban setting of “luxury” and “dreams” in which “palaces of ostentatious design sit alongside little old houses that still bear the Spanish footprint” (10). 5 If Zouroff initially lends Los Angeles an aura of modern legend, however, her enchantment collapses as soon as she catches a glimpse of the fi lm industry within. Eating in a studio cafeteria, Zouroff is struck by how commonplace the actors appear without the benefit of studio lights, still grotesquely clad in their exotic costumes and makeup while they eat hamburgers. When the actors cross the threshold separating the sound stages from the rest of the studio, she writes, they symbolically penetrate the thin gauze of magic and illusion upheld by the imagination of the film spectator. Once they leave the stage, the aura of the cinema evaporates: “[A]ll that prestige created by the imagination vanishes: the magic has disappeared, fascination no longer exerts its mysterious power, and the studio, the set, the actors and the star become vulgar things of life, flowing along unconsciously like the waters of a river” (41).6 In such a way, the Chilean writer fi rst invokes then punctures her own movie-made expectations of glamorous wonder—expectations, she suggests, shared by her audience—by revealing “the vulgar things of life” under the surface. Despite her ostensible aim to convey “celebratory” information to her readers, Zouroff can scarcely mask her own personal disappointment at fi nding Hollywood reality so mundane. Yet the “vulgarity” of the industry does not prevent Zouroff from diligently pursuing what she calls her “lifelong dream” to act in Hollywood pictures—a dream, she confesses, that drew her to the United States to begin with (50). In one of the most remarkable chapters of the book, Zouroff recounts how and why she inserts herself into the world of grotesque artifice that she describes. If her function so far has been to observe Hollywood “as befits a journalist” (43), her aim now is “to penetrate those pagan sanctuaries and initiate myself in their rites” (41). The passage reflects how by the end of the 1920s the movie public’s expectations of equivalence between actors’ “picture personalities” and lurid public personae had eroded. More centrally, the ensuing episode also breaks with the proper rhetorical strategies of the modern “lady” traveler. As Sidonie Smith has noted, bourgeois women touring exotic climes could not afford to “generously indulge” themselves in autobiographical details, because such gestures risked tilting the gender balance of an already precarious foray into a male-dominated discourse (18). Zouroff’s plan to “penetrate” Hollywood, moreover, breaks with the passive, descriptive discourse of grand tourism, replacing it with a decidedly masculine project of ethnographic immersion, what James Clifford refers to as the “experiential authority” of the participant-observer (“On Ethnographic Authority” 128).

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In order to experience “pagan” studio life in an authentic and authorial fashion, Zouroff goes under cover in Hal Roach Studios, where Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy are busy fi lming scenes for the Spanish version of one of their early talkies. After she has somewhat reluctantly applied excessive make-up for a screen test, the author poses for the director, who growls to his assistant, “How can this lady, who is blonde, be Spanish?”7 The Chilean writer reassures Roach that her hair had nothing to do with her nationality, nor with the diction and purity [“casticidad”] of her language (45). Zouroff’s introduction to Hollywood is further marred by the absurd spectacle of a cast of Spanish-speaking actors and extras taking their orders from a director and two costars completely ignorant of their language. Oliver Hardy, she tells her readers, learns his lines phonetically, and understands the gist of what his character is saying only because he has already spoken the same lines in the English version of the fi lm (47). Even when spoken language does not pose a problem, however, Zouroff fi nds cultural reasons for disqualifying the production on the grounds of inauthenticity, faulting the accompaniment of the Anglo orchestra, for example, for lacking the “Latin temperament” with which to play the Mexican tunes of the Spanish soundtrack (49). Zouroff’s thus corrects the “un-feminine” transgression of her autobiographical pose by foregrounding her whiteness—a maneuver that underscores her bourgeois credentials while at the same dispossessing her of the ethnic otherness required to win a role as a “Latin” woman. She commutes her failure to turn her screen test into cinematic stardom, in other words, into authorial capital. Her brief fl irtation with acting behind her, Zouroff proceeds to return to her customary vocation of “objective” observer. Perhaps to compensate for the indiscretions of her brief experiment with fi lm acting, she quickly turns her attention to the fi nery of make-up and wardrobe, thus temporarily limiting her gaze to what Smith calls “reportage [signaling] the traveler’s attentiveness to the social space of domesticity” (19). Although Zouroff emphasizes the technical difficulty of make-up design, a virtuosity requiring both artistic and “psychological” expertise, ultimately she views such work as secondary to cinematography and performance. The make-up artist, she writes, only holds a central role when it comes to coaxing out the stock qualities of the “types” that populate crowd scenes (43). Such desultory appeals to a “proper” feminine readership do not prevent Zouroff from abruptly changing course once again to tackle the more “serious” topic of Hollywood’s ill-fated Spanish-language experiment—which began in 1929 and was beginning to wane by the time Zouroff’s book was written in 1931. Zouroff’s work aside, some of the most insightful commentary on this fascinating, economically pivotal yet curiously obscure chapter in Hollywood’s conversion to sound came from contemporaneous Latin American fi lm critics, several of whom painstakingly covered the demise of the Spanish talkies picture by picture in newspapers and fi lm journals.

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One writer remarkable for her relentless evisceration of early Hollywood sound cinema is the Mexican journalist Luz Alba. In a series of reviews and brief essays published in the venerable weekly cultural supplement to the daily El Universal, Alba lambastes Hollywood studios for what she perceives as their flawed conception and execution of Spanish-language fi lms. Even before foreign-language productions, Hollywood had briefly experimented with dubbing English productions. In the ominously titled article “Grunting in Spanish” [Gruñidos en español], Alba writes that “[the] fi rst attempt at a fi lm for Spanish-speaking audiences ended up so poor that now everyone, even those who don’t understand English, prefers the films as they were originally” (180).8 In spite of some relatively favorable reviews of early Spanish talkies by colleagues at other publications such as the New York–based journal Cine Mundial, Alba is not quite so generous. In response to one of the earliest productions, Shadows of Glory [Sombras de gloria] (1929), the Mexican critic pans both the acting and the direction, writing of the former, “It seems that Latins don’t know how to act in the natural, carefree way that North Americans do; they speak in such an affected manner that one feels like . . . hearing better films spoken in English” (“The Triumph of the Language” [El triunfo del idioma] 201).9 Later, in 1930, Alba criticizes the quality of the sound as yet another barrier to a favorable reception among Mexican audiences. Finally and most conclusively, however, she debunks the notion that Hollywood has somehow targeted Latin America out of a sense of hemispheric solidarity or cultural respect, a notion belied not only by Hollywood’s equally prolific (and short-lived) simultaneous productions in other foreign languages, but also by studio executives of the time.10 “There are people ready to kiss the feet of Paramount for its ‘gallant’ exhibition of Spanish-production fi lms,” Alba writes, “but it is crucial for everyone to realize that it has not been gallantry but rather business” (“The Body of the Crime” [El cuerpo del delito] 213).11 Luz Alba’s mordant reviews of early Spanish talkies echo Vera Zouroff’s eyewitness chronicles of transitional Hollywood. The tone of Zouroff’s assessment is above all one of an advocate of the Latin American actors and writers often blamed for the demise of the films themselves. If early Spanish-language talkies were generally of poor quality, she writes, then botched encounters with U.S. executives, directors and stars were largely to blame. As Zouroff’s depiction of Hal Roach’s Spanish production illustrates, the linguistic obstacles were only part of the problem. At the heart of the confl ict was a fundamental standoff between the Latin American and Spanish actors—many of whom, fresh off the stages of Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Madrid, saw themselves as serious theatrical artists—and their North American bosses, primarily worried about keeping production within budget (108). Zouroff attributes the awkwardness of many of the earlier performances to an ill-advised adoption of U.S. acting styles, which the Chilean writer sees as unsuitable to the “temperament and psychology

116 Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema of our race” (107). Add to the mix self-righteous, monolingual U.S. directors and scripts seemingly translated by “illiterates,” and the formula for creative calamity was complete (109). The Chilean writer’s post mortem is a far cry from Horacio Quiroga’s contention less than fi fteen years earlier that North American film actors were superior to Latin Americans precisely because of their comparatively restrained, “natural” performance before the cameras. The circumstances had changed. Verisimilitude would have better been served by translating the Hollywood product to a “Latin” equivalent, Zouroff suggests, rather than stubbornly adhering to the “[Anglo]-Saxon mentality and psychology” despite non-U.S. casts and non-English dialogue. In short, many of the Spanish-language fi lms were simply poor adaptations of the originals. Zouroff thus faults Hollywood, in essence, for lacking what Gustavo PérezFirmat has called a “translation sensibility.” As both “transient” subjects and foreign nationals devoid of “a native store of cultural goods” (in terms of cinematic production), Latin Americans in 1930s Hollywood possessed two of the elements Pérez-Firmat cites as prerequisites for the “outward glance” characteristic of such a temperament (4). By contrast, the studios’ xenophobia often translated into cultural arrogance. When the Mexicanborn silent fi lm star Ramón Novarro gently made a few suggestions about the cultural details of a particular production, for example, he was first ignored by the director, then ordered to keep quiet. Such was the closedmindedness of the directors of the Spanish-language productions, which the Chilean writer takes to denote an unfortunate national trait (114). In spite of the culture clashes between the Hollywood directors and producers and Hispanic talent, however, they were apparently not the only confl icts to plague the sets of the early Spanish talkies. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Hollywood did not attract actors from all Latin American and Iberian nations in equal numbers. Since Latin America as a whole comprised a larger export market than Spain, Mexicans—as Zouroff rightly observes—enjoyed as a group the greatest commercial clout of any of the foreign nationals involved in the Spanish-language productions. Their close rivals, however, were the Spaniards, who eventually won over studio executives with a neocolonialist argument.12 Gradually asserting their cultural authority over their Latin American colleagues, Zouroff writes, the Spanish group was fi nally able to convince Hollywood that “Spanish Americans did not speak the language with the purity required in a work of art” (115).13 In short, at least in the case of Fox Studios, Latin Americans (including Brazilians) were given short shrift by the studios only after falling victim to a successful linguistic campaign waged by the Spaniards (117).14 Ultimately, Zouroff places most of the blame for the failure of the Spanish-language productions on Hollywood and the United States generally: “The Saxons [sic] look at Hispanics with deep disdain, something that can only be appreciated after one has lived among them; they consider us inferior beings, because we lack certain qualities they possess that allow

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them to exert greater influence in the world; they don’t accept that we have our own culture, psychology and ideals [ . . . ]” (152).15 Zouroff gives her assessment more weight by mentioning her qualification as someone who had lived “among them” for many years, and more impact by switching from “Hispanics” to the self-inclusive “us” after the fi rst semi-colon. At the same time, the Chilean writer selectively uses the Spanish language as a metonym for Luso-Hispanic “race” and culture. Here the didactic thrust of her book returns in force, with mixed results: “[I] only want to make clear to each Hispanic reader of this book the responsibility that falls on him, as an individual of the Spanish race, to defend both his language and the glorious traditions of his people, who dominated the world and imposed their language and customs on twenty nations (152).16 After previously documenting the infighting between Spanish and Latin Americans over the question of language, it is remarkable that Zouroff would use Castilian—and Spain’s imperial subjugation of Latin America—as a rallying cry against the exploitation and cultural arrogance of the U.S. fi lm industry. The Chilean writer’s invocation of “our race” and “our language” is thus undercut by the cultural and linguistic problematics of Hollywood’s transAtlantic experiment. The epilogue of Zouroff’s account is predictably glum. The most prescient of the Latin Americans in Hollywood, she writes, went home early before the work had dried up entirely. Spoiled by the high salaries they had received compared to their previous careers, more successful actors tarried too long in hope that the industry would turn around. In fact, however, the Spanish-language experiment did not turn out to be quite as disastrous for Latin American cinema as Zouroff suggests. In its strategy to win over Latin American audiences, Hollywood had proven itself vulnerable. Zouroff’s narrative exposes some of the most glaring problems with the U.S. film industry’s attempt to secure foreign markets through an enterprise that amounted to mass ventriloquism: namely, technological difficulties that made dialogue difficult to understand; the over-reliance on inexperienced, second-rate stage actors from Spain and Latin America; amateurish screenwriters; culturally and linguistically ignorant North American directors; and the ungainly mixture of different Spanish-speaking nationalities on the set, which behind the scenes led to tension and strife, and on screen generated what Paulo Antônio Paranaguá has called “a ridiculous cocktail of accents and types” (38). Some of the reasons for the Hollywood Spanish talkies’ downfall doubtless lay beyond the grasp of observers like Vera Zouroff. Several writers (beginning with Luz Alba) have suggested that foreign audiences simply preferred the original English-version stars to their frequently unknown stand-ins. It was as if, as film historian Donald Crafton has put it, Hollywood’s foreign-language versions suffered from the inherent disadvantage of an “ersatz aura,” and hence failed to recreate the magnetism of the originals (438). A comprehensive analysis of the resounding failure of Hollywood’s Spanish talkies lies beyond the scope of this chapter. Whatever ultimately

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were the reasons, the pause in production following their demise—and before the U.S. industry developed a successful export strategy based on new, superior technologies of dubbing and subtitles—lent a window of opportunity for those Latin American industries poised to take advantage of Hollywood’s temporary stumble. In the end, though, it was an opportunity on which few countries capitalized.17 If there was a silver lining to the experiment, it was what lay behind Hollywood’s original intent to produce Spanish talkies: the U.S. industry’s frenzied attempt to maintain its hold on the Latin American markets after the fall of silent pictures, and its insistence on producing Spanish talkies even after other foreign language production was abandoned, highlighting the high value placed by Hollywood on its Latin American audiences. As Zouroff’s account uniquely demonstrates, however, Latin America’s value to Hollywood ultimately proved more monetary than cultural. The Brazilian critic Antônio Cândido has written that the secret to the chronicle’s popularity lies in creating a “communion” between chronicler and reader, one that “constructs a familiar air bringing authors together beyond both their singularity and their differences” (“Life at Street Level” [A vida ao rés-do-chão] 22). As Vera Zouroff’s account shows, at its most effective the Hollywood chronicle of the late 1920s and early 1930s employs simple language to break down customary barriers by appealing to local, national and regional common ground. The informal register of Zouroff’s prose bridges the gap between the writer’s social class and that of her readers, while chapters on make-up and wardrobe cater specifically to a feminine audience. Zouroff’s will to inform, meanwhile, keeps her text from straying too far into the terrain of tabloid journalism, or what Capriles calls “diffusion.” By striking a careful balance between intellectual analysis and gossip, the Chilean writer keeps her book within the democratic parameters of “divulgation,” while never straying for too long from the generic restraints (in both senses of the word) imposed on her as a “lady creole” cronista. At the same time, Zouroff uses the confessional potential of the chronicle to reaffi rm her own qualifications as a Latin American— and more broadly, as a native Spanish speaker. Zouroff’s attempt to manufacture a “familiar air” at times appears forced. Whenever it suits her, she embraces figures such as Antonio Moreno as part of the “family,” only to take sides against the Spanish when recounting the language controversy at Fox studios. In the end, though, the Chilean writer’s pan-Hispanic gesture suits the economic and political objectives of her book. Hollywood, intent on deepening its penetration of Spanish-language markets, may have lumped “Latins” together in crude and demeaning fashion, yet most likely did not count on such an extensive, popularly written yet frequently vitriolic exposé of its exploits. Accustomed to a spirit of cooperation and accommodation from Latin American fi lm journalists, the U.S. fi lm industry was fi nding that its trusted partners of international star discourse were not always prepared to comply with studio mandates.

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THE PRIVILEGED OUTSIDER Given the particular fascination Hollywood exerted over a number of its writers, from Roberto Arlt to Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina constitutes an anomaly among Latin American nations of the 1920s and 1930s. Unlike Mexico, where Hollywood’s proximity caused the fi lm industry’s ripples to be felt sooner and stronger, Argentina for many years beheld Hollywood with a uniquely distant gaze. The physical remoteness of Los Angeles from Buenos Aires, however, did little to diminish the enormity of Hollywood’s impact and popularity with Argentine audiences and journalists. According to a recent survey of Argentine film journals, in the 1920s and 1930s alone, at least twenty-six different periodical publications appeared in Argentina dedicated largely or exclusively to the cinema—not counting the numerous daily newspapers and society magazines that regularly published fi lm reviews, essays and industry gossip. Though some of these publications focused on Argentine cinema and few of them featured hard-hitting criticism, Hollywood remained a fi xation for most fi lm journalists of the period.18 Given the sheer numbers of Argentine writers covering Hollywood in one way or another, it is not surprising that the vast majority of them in fact wrote their columns, reviews and crónicas site unseen. Foremost among Argentina’s wealth of prolific cinephiles was Nicolás Olivari, an intriguing figure at different times loosely associated with both the Boedo and Florida groups of the Argentine vanguard. Olivari’s eccentric collection of texts, The Wounded Cardshark: Cinematic Sketches [El hombre de la baraja y la puñalada: estampas cinematográficas] (1933), stretches the limits of the genre with its highly imaginative treatment of silent and early sound movie stars.19 Since Olivari had no actual contact with the actors and actresses he wrote about, his texts resemble short stories in which Gary Cooper, Marlene Deitrich, Laurel and Hardy and others assume the form of fictional characters who freely interact with the author in local settings. Olivari imagines Gary Cooper in a Buenos Aires dive bar, writes a love letter to Lillian Gish, and likens Laurel and Hardy to honorary porteños, “partly bourgeois and partly layabouts” [medio burgueses y medio vagos] (62). In his “letter” to Lillian Gish, Olivari foregrounds the geographical distance that separates the chronicler from the actress: she is, he writes, “the ‘baby’ of my inner sailor lounging on the docks of San Francisco, condemned by a grotesque twist of fate to practice journalism in Buenos Aires” (78). 20 Olivari thus makes light of his vocation even as he uses journalism to dramatize perceived cultural affi nities between stars’ picture personalities and Argentine fans. If his chronicles thrive on irony and fantasy rather than documentary detail, however, the collection is not without a critical edge. Referring to cinema as “international onanism” (55), Olivari bitterly denounces the “imperialist” Hollywood publicity machine that pedals his beloved fi lm stars to disingenuous Argentine fans “as if it were selling

120 Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema [them] bags of beans or cans of preserved beef” (131). 21 Such salvos aside, the critical function of Olivari’s strange chronicles is necessarily limited by the one-sidedness of the writer’s contact with Hollywood. Even if we concede that the Argentine’s reception of Hollywood’s textuality is real enough, his elaborate imaginings of the stars’ private lives distance his texts from the customary realm of the chronicle. In a way, The Wounded Cardshark constitutes one of the most arduous efforts to capture Hollywood in its discursive entirety—its textual surface as well as its means of production—all without paying boat fare. Insofar as the book outwardly retains the form of a chronicle, it reads like a chronicle of absence. The disenchantment signaled by Olivari is further fleshed out by a number of Argentines who served as Hollywood correspondents during the 1930s, including Roberto Arlt (for El Mundo), Raimundo R. Calcagno, or Calki (Crítica and other publications), and Luis Saslavsky, whose brief tenure in Los Angeles as correspondent for La Nación served as a prelude to his own fruitful fi lm career as one of the most popular and critically acclaimed directors of the Argentine “Golden Age” of the late 1930s and 1940s. 22 Of all these figures, however, the writer, critic and fi lmmaker Israel Chas de Cruz played perhaps the most significant role in bringing Hollywood to Buenos Aires through magazines, newspapers, radio and fi lm itself. Founder and long-time editor of one of the country’s most successful and longest running fi lm journals, El Heraldo del Cinematografi sta, Chas de Cruz wrote as well for a number of other important porteño journals (such as Sintonía) and newspapers (La Nación and Clarín), hosted a highly popular radio show (“Diario del Cine”), and served as a talent scout and high-profi le promoter for the national fi lm industry, launching the careers of a number of Argentine stars, such as Mirtha Legrand. In addition to exercising a critical role for Golden Age cinema, what Domingo Di Núbili in his history of the Argentine fi lm industry calls the “expert eye of the popular cronista” (336), Chas de Cruz also saw a number of his screenplays produced, and codirected a fi lm, ¡Segundos afuera! [Seconds Outside] (1937), that featured the fi lm debut of Delia Garcés and, famously, Evita Duarte. Though an advocate of a strong national industry, Chas de Cruz was also a devoted fan of Hollywood cinema who made several trips to the Film Mecca beginning in the 1930s. The starmaker’s editorials in El Heraldo del Cinematografi sta reveal his marked ambivalence toward the U.S. fi lm industry. In his weekly journal, Chas consistently defended the rights of local exhibitors against the abuses of producers such as MGM, accusing the studio, in one 1932 headline, of extortion (Heraldo 67, 12 oct. 1932, p. 1). The Heraldo’s staunch defense of exhibitors, however, compelled Chas de Cruz in the 1940s to take sides against Argentine state interventionism to protect the national industry, and thus indirectly in favor of Hollywood production. If the journal’s consistent stance in defense of exhibitors’ interests lent it ideological

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coherence over time (Egea 110), this same consistency betrayed Chas’s ambivalence regarding Hollywood’s place in Buenos Aires and Argentine cinema generally. Such ambivalence comes to the fore in Hollywood Undressed [Hollywood al desnudo], a collection of chronicles written with a strange combination of documentary detail, irony and star-struck boastfulness. No doubt intended to pique the curiosity of the Argentine movie-going public in much the same way as Vera Zouroff’s account, Chas de Cruz’s book maintains an ironical aloofness toward its subject matter even as it shamelessly exploits the mystique of the Film Mecca. It is neither the fi rst nor the only time Chas de Cruz would straddle the line between serious art and lurid entertainment. During his long career, Chas de Cruz sporadically attempted to assert his literary voice beyond the scope of his crónicas. Besides an early go at the novel (Jews [Judíos], 1926), Chas published a number of short-story collections, two of which (Filming in the Andes [Filmación en la Cordillera] and The Empty Seat and other stories [La butaca vacía y otros cuentos]) attempted to fictionalize Chas’s cinematic vocation as a chronicler and participant in the fi lm industry. In his prologue to Hollywood Undressed, as if apprehensive of the book format, Chas begins with a disclaimer: “I never supposed that these notes of mine, written as fast as my pen could write with a nervous journalistic rhythm, would be published in book form . . . If I had imagined they would, I would have rid them of the audacity that carelessness brings” (5). 23 Though apologetic of his vocation, Chas also manages to justify his use of journalistic “form” by associating it with a daring and looseness that would have been sacrificed by a more literary approach. Nonetheless, the cronista does not appear to be totally at ease with the “nervous journalistic rhythm” that his prose necessarily assumes. David Viñas has underscored Chas de Cruz’s frustrated desire to be a fiction writer as a constant theme in his Hollywood chronicles. Chas, Viñas writes, is a “journalist with a sense of a handicap [who] insists on being a ‘writer’ even if he must stoop to the frivolous vocation of croniqueur” (223, 225). 24 Ever mindful of a porteño public eager to immerse itself in the gossip suggested by the book’s title, Chas ultimately caves in to what Viñas calls “the indulgences of the gossipy genre” [las complacencias del género chismográfico] (224). All the same, Hollywood Undressed is full of deft analyses of the conditions and strategies of the fi lm industry itself, and not just with the private lives of its most prominent employees. If for an earlier generation of Latin American writers the cinema had been the epitome of modern magic, Chas de Cruz marvels at the ways a particular Hollywood studio artfully and economically uses technology to approximate the inside of a prison: From afar, the stage set perfectly simulates the inner patio of a jailhouse. Innumerable cardboard cells, guarded with thick, coarsely imitated

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Chas de Cruz thus strips Hollywood of its mystical connotations, revealing the fi lm industry as a clever artificer rather than an inscrutable sorcerer. Part of his project is to expose the technical tricks—the “fiction” through which the Hollywood mystique is constructed. If the studios provoke the shame of the Argentine observer, however, their powers to deceive are nevertheless formidable. Calling the construction of sets “experiments of false magic,” Chas de Cruz concludes that “no space is better suited for deception than a fi lm studio” (17). 26 With considerable irony—and a nod to Vicente Huidobro—the Argentine cronista likens Hollywood technicians to the celebrated wizard Cagliostro, but with a twist: “Instead of creating their potions in mysterious laboratories, they do it in spacious, luminous pavillions bathed in the splendid California sun” (18).27 The “magic” of Cinelandia, in other words, far from being cloaked in alchemical darkness, is plainly visible to the naked eye of anyone who visits a film set. For Chas de Cruz, the ingenuity of Hollywood is not limited to its sets and technicians. If Europeans make better fi lms, the Argentine writes, no one equals the North American’s knack for “spreading a name,” surrounding it with the “otherworldly atmosphere” of the Hollywood star (37). Hollywood excels not so much at fi lmmaking, in other words, as it does at manipulating the overarching system of star discourse: “The yanquis,” Chas de Cruz writes, “more than wizards of film, are artificers of fi lm publicity” (37). 28 In spite of the seemingly “otherworldly” object produced by Hollywood, the means of the industry are mundane. Thus the movies cease to be the result of otherworldy alchemy, and become that of organized, methodical labor, exposed to the contingencies of difficult mechanics . . . And the cinema is tranformed from a mysterious, legendary chamber whose secrets are known only to the initiated, to a factory fi lled with the terrible, prosaic eloquence of the spoken word! (49)29 Chas de Cruz, however, does not merely write off Hollywood as an assortment of businessmen engaged in a cynical, half-witted attempt to make a dollar. On the contrary, for the Argentine observer the fi lm industry’s endeavor constitutes more of a conversion of ingenuity from the sacred to the secular, the magical to the modern, than it does a cataclysmic end of the “otherworldly.” The end of the passage I have just cited reveals the extent to which Chas de Cruz highlights the centrality of language to Hollywood’s success; it also encapsulates the kind of anxiety felt by Latin American intellectuals at

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the dawn of the sound era. If Hollywood was dependent on foreign labor (both on screen and behind the scenes), it was deeply ambivalent about showcasing foreign accents, in particular those of the Latin Americans who had figured so prominently in silent fi lm. Such ambivalence was not lost on Chas de Cruz, who saw his latinidad—and, more to the point, his argentinidad—as a potential weapon as well as a liability. In his sketches of such stars as Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin and Joan Crawford as well as a number of Latin lovers—most prominently Ramón Novarro and Dolores del Río—Chas de Cruz foregrounds his own charm, wit and occasional linguistic clumsiness. The Argentine’s encounter with Greta Garbo, a foreigner herself and perhaps the biggest star in Hollywood at the time, is particularly symptomatic of the cronista’s language anxieties. Having been forewarned by the Chilean émigré director Carlos Borcosque that Garbo spoke only Swedish, English and German, Chas de Cruz ironically assures his friend that his “eighteen words of Deustch” would suffice to interview the reclusive diva. When fi nally introduced to her, however, the Argentine journalist becomes tongue-tied. Frustrated, he curses himself in several languages (41). “My reporter’s self-love suffered a difficult set-back,” he writes, “but even harder to take was the failure of the polyglot-in-the-making that I carry inside me.” 30 Thus disqualified for lack of linguistic skill from interviewing “la Garbo,” Chas de Cruz consoles himself that he has managed at least to bring to light a new side of “the modern Babel that is Hollywood” (43). Chas de Cruz’s language difficulties recall two questions raised by James Clifford on the complexities typical of ethnographic participantobservation, with which the Hollywood chronicle shares some important similarities. As I have already suggested in my discussion of Vera Zouroff, journalistic coverage of Hollywood in the 1930s encouraged a dialectic of eyewitness narrative and interpretation, in part because full access (i.e., industry transparency) could not be obtained without the author’s engagement with studio insiders, which often included actors themselves; and also because Latin American writers-journalists gained authorial prestige by documenting their personal familiarity with stars and industry power brokers. As Clifford remarks, such intersubjective engagement “obliges its practitioners to experience, at a bodily as well as intellectual level, the vicissitudes of translation” (119). If Zouroff’s dawning of an extra’s wardrobe and makeup as an “initiation” can be read as an example of “bodily” translation, Chas de Cruz’s communication breakdown with Garbo is an example of the latter. Both episodes, meanwhile, reveal another component of Clifford’s analysis of ethnographic authority: the notion of “fables of rapport.” According to Clifford, ethnographies typically recount initial, anecdotal misencounters, frequently emphasizing the “childlike status” of the writer as a way of highlighting his subsequent acquisition of knowledge connecting him to his subjects qualifying him to serve as “exegete and spokesman” (132). In

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the case of Chas de Cruz, initial linguistic inadequacy serves as a prelude to the Argentine writer’s eventual mastery of Hollywood’s cultural codes. Such mastery foregrounds Chas’s complicity, over the course of the book, in the fi lm industry’s broad application of identity politics concerning Latin Americans, Spaniards and others perceived as “Hispanic.” Rather than treating his own relegation to generic latinidad with bemusement—as Zouroff does—Chas sardonically contrasts Hollywood’s ignorance with his own savvy as an “exegete” of the industry. Chas de Cruz capitalizes on his “Latin” credentials to facilitate his introduction to such celebrities as Dolores del Río and Anita Page. One of the biggest stars of the late silent and early sound eras until her surprise retirement in 1933, Page (née Anita Pomares) attracted the attention of a particularly large number of male fans in the early 1930s. Chas does not hesitate to win the blonde actress’s favor on the dance floor with his “meager” qualities as a tango dancer (58). Though initially seduced by Chas de Cruz’s cynical display of argentinidad (the tango, after all, was at the time still popular in the United States), Page eventually reveals her bigotry toward Latin America and her ambivalence about her own Spanish heritage. When she reproaches her Hispanic admirers for being “too audacious and ready to fall in love, at least in their fan mail,”31 Chas de Cruz rather defensively reminds Page of her own “Latin blood.” The actress quickly responds that her “Yankee descent” serves as an “excellent counterweight” to her Spanish heritage (61). Chas de Cruz’s interview of the German-born Chilean-Argentine singer-composer-director-actor-producer José Bohr provides perhaps the most revealing glimpse of the particular pressures wrought upon Argentines and other Latin Americans in Hollywood. “At the present moment,” Bohr tells Chas, “being Argentine is not advantageous in Hollywood. Our accent doesn’t please directors and producers, and more than one of our fellow countrymen has lost a part because of it” (118). 32 Such a declaration is not news to Chas de Cruz, who by this time has already interviewed enough Latin American stars in Hollywood to realize the economic disadvantages of having a “south-of-the-border” accent. What makes Bohr’s case particularly interesting, however, is his anxiety over his credentials as an Argentine. In spite of his earlier success in Buenos Aires as a composer and performer of tangos, Bohr—no doubt due to his foreign birth and Chilean upbringing, and perhaps also out of concern over his market appeal in Argentina—fears accusations from Latin American fans that he is a “false Argentine” now seeking U.S. citizenship. He uses Chas de Cruz’s interview, therefore, as an opportunity to assure Argentine readers that he is one of their own, “not only because of my passport, but also because of my heart” (118). 33 The episode illustrates the way in which Chas de Cruz selectively chooses to comply with Hollywood stars’ desire to connect with a national audience for which Chas is rightly seen as a strategically important go-between.

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Chas thus deftly inserts himself into the polyglot Hollywood milieu as a privileged Hollywood outsider—that is, a foreign journalist and as such a key interlocutor between the film metropolis and a Latin American public—privy to the time and confidence of the industry’s biggest names. In this sense, the Argentine’s “fables of rapport” with Hollywood do not depend on an eventual immersion, what Clifford calls “the quasi-invisibility of participant-observation” (132), to achieve an effect of authority. (Such a limitation serves as a reminder, fi nally, of the impossibility of a wholesale application of Clifford’s ethnographic model in a setting whose intersubjectivity is complicated by frequent inversions and blurrings of metropolitan/ subaltern binaries.) Instead, to gain admission to the film industry’s inner sanctum, Chas de Cruz must play up his national origins, both as a way to ally himself to Latin American stars and also to assure non-Latin celebrities of his linguistic and cultural privilege to foreign markets. While supposedly winning the trust of Hollywood, Chas de Cruz caustically winks at his own readers by selectively mocking his star-subjects. Like Vera Zouroff, Chas frequently depicts North American and Anglo stars as culturally ignorant, particularly when it comes to Latin America. Moreover, his irony is not limited to fi lm actors: he parodies himself as well, particularly his own tendency to flatter and lie in order to win the stars’ trust. In one telling moment, Chas promises to keep a secret Joan Crawford has shared with him, saying that he will be “like a tomb” [“seré una tumba”]. Crawford’s “secret” now divulged, he concludes his chronicle by confiding to his readers, “And as [you] can confi rm, I am indeed a tomb [ . . . ] an open tomb” (47). 34 “Open tomb” or not, Chas de Cruz’s caustic aside reveals his true allegiance to his readers. When he betrays the star’s confidence, he emulates the duplicity at Hollywood’s core. His revelation is therefore a mimetic act, but also an innocuous one, as the fi lm diva would hardly suffer serious consequences at the hands of one Argentine journalist’s indiscretion. Going back on his word to the likes of Joan Crawford thus constitutes a sly, double-edged gesture of both tribute and harmless retribution. Perhaps it is in this way Chas de Cruz is able to overcome his considerable linguistic malaise, a vexation brought on in part by the sudden importance accorded by the fi lm industry to the human voice. In his 1945 essay “On dubbing” [Sobre el doblaje], Jorge Luis Borges laments the “monstrous” dubbing of the stars into Spanish, a “betrayal” of the original he calls the “usurpation of voices.” For Borges, part of what defi nes the screen presence of actresses such as Katherine Hepburn and Greta Garbo is the uniqueness of their voices in the English versions of their films (72–73). 35 The fact that Borges considers narrative fi lm woefully incomplete without synchronized sound (“a kind of negative paradise”) reveals the extent to which cinéma pur arguments had lost their currency among Latin American intellectuals by the mid 1940s (although, as I will show in my next chapter, purist fi lm aesthetics did not die without a fight).

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In Hollywood Undressed, published nearly ten years before Borges’ essay, Chas de Cruz already speaks about sound cinema without the least bit of nostalgia for the silent era. As a fait accompli, Chas suggests, the talkies should be judged on their own merits and defects. Also conspicuously missing in Hollywood Undressed is the kind of open resentment toward the U.S. industry’s abandonment of the Spanish-language project shown by Vera Zouroff just a few years earlier, with Zouroff’s earnest indignation giving way to Chas de Cruz’s resigned irony. Yet Chas’s derisive treatment of the fi lm industry’s treachery and falsehood ultimately lends his book a contestatory weight matching, if not surpassing, contemporaneous work by the likes of Roberto Arlt and Nicolás Olivari. Although his playful ridicule of any unequivocal notion of “truth” in Hollywood undermines the fidelity of his own account, Chas de Cruz ultimately implicates the U.S. fi lm industry as the inspiration for his lies. If the Argentine’s self-conscious unreliability harms the expository prestige of his narrative, Hollywood Undressed gains literary value by revealing its own fictiveness as coterminous with the world it describes.

THE BEAUTIFUL LOSER In 1920s Brazil, Renato Ortiz writes, “an intellectual’s relationship with the public started through the mass media.” Due to the anemic institutionalization of local literary and cultural spheres, most Brazilian intellectuals of the period were compelled to lean on the legitimacy and fi nancial structure of one mass institution or another (479). For many writers, that institution was the newspaper. From Monteiro Lobato and Oswald de Andrade to Patrícia Galvão and Mário de Andrade, letrados of the time relied on the popular press for income and prestige in spite of an apprehension of artistic compromise this reliance often implied. Print journalism, however, was not the only market-based support available to writers and intellectuals of the 1920s, as Ortiz suggests. For those fortunate and intrepid enough to make the voyage, the U.S. film industry promised a wealth of new options for Brazilian writers, actors, artists and technicians. During the silent era in particular, with many linguistic barriers still held in check, foreign talent thrived in Hollywood. If opportunities for money and renown increased, however, so too did the risks of sacrificing artistic integrity at the altar of popular cinema—an industry associated with a nation whose state apparatus was justifiably viewed as a concrete threat to regional stability as well as local and national networks of power. Although, as Ortiz argues, “the vigor of [U.S.] capitalism builds up the market as a source of artistic and cultural authority” (479), the sheer immensity of such authority was largely foreign to Latin American intellectuals whose customary institutional framework, smaller in scale, allowed them to make a living without necessarily forfeiting their claims to creative autonomy.

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One such figure to take the leap from journalism to popular cinema was the cronista, actor, filmmaker and novelist Olympio Guilherme. Marked by vacillation between a drive for artistic integrity and a growing ambition for film celebrity, the São Paulo native’s story is particularly intriguing, in part because it is almost entirely narrated by Guilherme himself. Richard deCordova argues that during the rise of cinema the unique intertextuality of “star discourse” derived much of its strength from the key supports of movie publicity, film journalism and popular literature, thus according primary status to written expression previously dismissed by film theorists as irrelevant and by literary critics as pulp. If, as Walter Benjamin famously contends, the technique of mechanical reproduction so prominently displayed in the cinema deprived art of its “aura,” deCordova proposes that star discourse filled in the cracks of film’s enunciative function, thereby “completing the picture” by restoring Benjamin’s aura to mass-produced art.36 In light of such considerations, the most extraordinary quality of Olympio Guilherme’s brief Hollywood career was his will to master the constitutive elements of celebrity discourse. In a series of essays and chronicles, the Brazilian jack-of-all-trades narrated his own budding stardom and travails as a fi lmmaker; through fiction, he wrote his own Hollywood obituary. In the end, Guilherme’s growing disdain for the commercial constraints of popular cinema cut short his fi lm career. Yet the sheer heterogeneity of his narrative strategies, his quest for creative autonomy as an actor and fi lmmaker combined with his ongoing ties with the Brazilian trade press, allowed Guilherme to “complete the picture” of his own involvement in Hollywood in strikingly original ways. Olympio Guilherme’s brief fi lm career came upon him suddenly and apparently by sheer chance. While covering a Fox talent search in Brazil for the daily newspaper A Gazeta in 1927, Guilherme decided at the last minute to enter the contest himself; to his surprise, he won. Together with his compatriot Lia Torá, the female winner, the young reporter began work in Hollywood as a movie extra. Guilherme and Torá’s development was closely and anxiously followed by the Brazilian press, including Guilherme himself, who regularly sent off missives to the nation’s leading film journal Cinearte, with which he would maintain crucial ties for several years. Despite their contract with Fox, however, Guilherme and Torá failed to take the fi lm capital by storm as expected, their success limited to a smattering of appearances as fi lm extras and other minor roles. In May 1929, Cinearte announced that Fox would not renew either of their contracts (“A Fox não renovará o contrato com Lia Torá e Olympio Guilherme” 9). Although Torá eventually began to win larger parts, she would have to await the large-scale production of Spanish-language fi lms in the early 1930s to achieve anything approaching the kind of celebrity ardently anticipated by her Brazilian fans. Guilherme, meanwhile, was less patient. When he repeatedly failed to land the kind of starring roles he felt he deserved, he gathered together

128 Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema the funds, equipment, cast and crew necessary to shoot a single picture, a fi lm he eventually starred in, wrote, produced and codirected. According to Guilherme, the film script for Hunger was adapted from a novel, Scandal, written by Guilherme himself, although such authorship is a matter of debate. 37 The plot revolved around a group of Latin American and other non-American actors in Hollywood—one no doubt resembling Guilherme’s own circle of friends and acquaintances. Filmed in the streets of Hollywood and other California locales (including Death Valley and Yosemite National Park) without the luxury of a sound stage or paid extras, Hunger was essentially an independent fi lm revealing the material and spiritual hardships of the fi lm metropolis. The picture screened briefly in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Curitiba late in 1930, receiving negative reviews before being pulled from theaters (Filmografía brasileira 111–13). Cinearte itself, for so long Guilherme’s employer and de facto publicist, felt compelled in October 1930 to offer its own assessment of the picture. Though appreciative of Guilherme’s efforts and best intentions, the anonymous reviewer was ruthless in his criticism of the fi lm. Panning virtually every aspect of Hunger, from the cinematography and the acting to the story, the reviewer couched his criticism in words that expressed personal sympathy for its director: “Being as audacious and intelligent as he is, Olympio by necessity should have learned the Americans’ film language.”38 In spite of the “film’s having very little film artistry,” the reviewer underscored the “daring,” “intense effort” and “great will power” shown by Guilherme throughout, and in fact recommended the picture based on these qualities alone. In the end, though, the fi lm was simply “a nice idea, badly narrated” [uma idéia bonita, mal narrada] (“Screen Reviews” [A Tela em Revista] 30). No doubt the review had a devastating impact on Guilherme: whether by accident or design, Hunger never appeared again in theaters and has apparently been lost. 39 During his residence in Los Angeles, including a return stay after the fi asco of Hunger in which he acted in a number of Spanish versions of Hollywood fi lms, Guilherme continued plying his former trade as journalist, sending several crônicas and essays to Cinearte. The formal flexibility of the chronicle served Guilherme’s purposes well. Flora Süssekind, drawing from the pioneering work of turn-of-the-century cronista João do Rio, has written that the crônica was particularly well adapted to the techniques of the early cinema. Thanks to its unique ability to change modalities and registers, Süssekind sustains, the crônica had developed into a kind of “cinematograph of words” during the rise of the fi lm age (28–29). Guilherme cleverly applies the narrative potential of the genre to the making of his own picture—and indeed, it is only through his chronicles that we are able to piece together the influences and apparently innovative technique of Hunger. Inspired by the writing of Soviet montage theorists and cineastes Vsevolod Pudovkin and Dziga Vertov, Guilherme was also driven by sheer economic necessity to innovate.40 Faced with

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severe budget restrictions, forced to work largely without professional actors, he devised a system of hidden cameras, lending crowd scenes on Los Angeles’ Broadway, for example, a documentary realism unheard of in commercial fi lms of the time.41 Guilherme was keenly aware of the potential importance of his own work, and he did not hesitate to use his position at Cinearte to stress the originality of his fi lm. In one of several chronicles describing the production of Hunger (accompanied in Cinearte by a number of photos shot on location), the fi rst-time fi lmmaker highlights both the effects and the difficulties of his technique: “The effect is simply marvellous, thanks to the extraordinarily natural way everyone moved in the scenes. But at times the method poses insurmountable difficulties. It’s just that, until now, no one has made a fi lm daring to follow, as I did, the formidable school of Puduvkin” (“Olympio Guilherme and his Hunger” [Olympio Guilherme e a sua Fome] 10).42 Years later, Guilherme reiterated the difficult economic conditions under which he and his crew were forced to execute the painstaking camera work, a problem exacerbated by the primitive nature of their equipment (Prado 4). In several other Cinearte essays, rather than offering tantalizing glimpses of the industry, Guilherme focuses instead on Hollywood’s “textual” appeal—the ways the major studios capitalized on standard modes of expression to secure an international market. In this sense, Guilherme’s work is comparable to much contemporaneous fi lm criticism in Latin America. Hollywood’s transition to sound was greeted with open hostility by most Latin American intellectuals. With the exception of a few groundbreaking writers like Horacio Quiroga and Alfonso Reyes, as I have shown in previous chapters, most Latin American intellectuals did not fully champion silent fi lm until the mid to late 1920s, when they took their cue from French theorists and fi lmmakers such as Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac and Jean Epstein. Film’s position in the pantheon of the arts was contingent both on its distinctiveness from and qualitative equivalency to the theater, painting and the other arts—a strategy of consecration identified by Noël Carroll as the medium-specificity (or medium essentialism) thesis, a point I have mentioned previously (325). For cinéma pur theorists and their Latin American disciples, such specificity depended primarily on the extent to which the cinema remained essentially a visual medium. For Guilherme, an eyewitness to the transition to sound, Hollywood talkies represented a menace both to European fi lm art and also to an independent Brazilian cinema. In an article of his written in 1930 (after his fi rsthand experience with sound during the shooting of Hunger), Guilherme argues that recording technology destroyed the “naturalness” of the human voice (“Question of Taste” [Questão de gosto] 143). Combining what had by this time become a commonplace for the defenders of silent film with an ideological-based critique similar to one used by José Carlos Mariátegui in the Peruvian writer’s pivotal 1928 essay “Explaining

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Chaplin: A Sketch” (analyzed at greater length in Chapter Four), the Brazilian claims that the advent of sound had desecrated the cinema’s essence as “classic pantomime” by turning fi lm into a grotesque, “falsified” imitation of second-rate bourgeois theater.43 Guilherme concludes his essay by pointing his fi nger at the U.S. fi lm industry and entreating Brazilian readers of Cinearte to take action. “The Americans,” he writes, “are killing the cinema. Let’s save it. Let’s create our own” (146).44 Hollywood was “killing” the cinema, however, not just by giving it a soundtrack. For Guilherme, the visual lexicon of popular fi lm also represented a threat to film art. In his 1928 article “The Facial Expression ‘Made in U.S.A.’” [A expressão facial ‘Made in U.S.A], Guilherme bemoans the U.S. fi lm industry’s impact on fashion and physical expression worldwide: “American cinema, faster than one could have guessed, is conquering nature itself, making the world’s physiological expressions uniform with barbaric impartiality” (141).45 Guilherme goes on to list the U.S. “exports” that he dreads: laughing, smiling, dancing, even dying will some day, he fears, be homogenized activities, all bearing the stamp of “Made in U.S.A.” As he would in his later article, Guilherme underscores the superficiality of the Hollywood product: “Everything artificial, everything false, made of cardboard. Everything automatic, perfunctory, mechanical, without feeling” (142).46 In this regard, it is worth noting the similarities between Guilherme’s essay and the contemporaneous work of the Hungarian film theorist Béla Balázs, who was struck by what he calls the “microphysiognomy” of the fi lm close-up. For Balázs the close-up underscores the uniqueness of fi lm art by breaking with the reliance on the mise-en-scène inherited from the theater, while also lending cinema a kind of universal grammar of visual expression by textualizing and thus “mythologizing” the human face (306). Guilherme, on the other hand, is quick to point out the reifying potential of the close-up as well. Instead of articulating universal modes of beauty, the microscopic capacity of the medium simply allows for the standardization of a particular face carefully picked and groomed by the industry for consumption. Hollywood then completes the process by imposing its product on other cultures through mechanical reproduction and the sophisticated marketing machinery of the fi lm industry. Guilherme’s essays, both forward-looking and strangely orthodox in their approach to fi lmmaking and spectatorship, were no doubt shaped by Guilherme’s own spectacular failures in Hollywood during the early sound era. In one poignant chronicle published shortly after the U.S. release of Hunger late in 1929, Guilherme writes about the thrill of receiving a call from Fox to do a screen test. The Brazilian had—he thought—fi nally received the call for which he had long been waiting: “Fox, naturally having read what the press was saying about Hunger, enthused about my recent triumph, encouraged by the personal victory still plastered all over the daily newspapers. Fox, fi nally repentant and good, had been convinced that I would add up to more than just a simple background player—and

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here was the proof!” (“The Clown” [O Palhaço] 17).47 Instead, Guilherme suffers the disgrace of showing up to the studio, only to realize he has been summoned to do somersaults while modeling a clown suit. Although the tone of the chronicle is light and ironical, even self-mocking, Guilherme’s resentment toward an industry that would humiliate an elegant, well-read and artistically ambitious young actor and cineaste could hardly be more apparent. Having experienced fi rsthand the challenges presented to foreign actors with either little English or heavy accents, as well as the ethnic prejudice accorded many Latin Americans, Guilherme could not have helped but feel bitterness toward an industry intent on punishing the very “exotic” qualities so often prized during the height of the silent era. The Brazilian dramatizes his indignity by insinuating Hunger’s favorable reception in the U.S. press. Yet the cronista’s disgust with Fox masks another anxiety equally in evidence in his Cinearte pieces: Guilherme’s preoccupation with publicity, and in particular the power of the print media to generate industry buzz. Despite his hints of critical “triumph,” there is scant evidence that the film in fact received much notice in newspapers or trade journals outside of Brazil. Nevertheless, on another occasion Guilherme claims exactly 224 U.S. and Mexican publications had reviewed— and praised—an advance screening of the film. Guilherme even goes so far as to “quote” from three reviews, including one supposedly published by the Los Angeles Times. The Times did in fact publish a short piece marveling at the picture’s production methods, citing the same hiddencamera strategies described in greater detail in Cinearte. The focus of the article, though, is on Guilherme’s can-do attitude in the face of hardship: “Undeterred by his inability to speak English well enough for the films, the Brazilian, a former newspaper man, set out to produce a ‘brain child’ of his own in his own ingenious way” (“Angelenos [sic] Play Extras in Brazilian’s Film Opus” A9). Though the Times piece promotes the film in a way that must have delighted Guilherme, its light-hearted praise of Hunger’s novel approach to fi lmmaking does not come close to being the “meticulous review” Guilherme claims the paper had published (“Hunger is Coming” [Fome vem ahi] 32). Nearly three months later, an advertisement for the film (under the title Hambre) appeared in the Los Angeles Spanish-language newspaper La Opinión, according to which the fi lm was to have opened at El Teatro México in Los Angeles on October 10, 1929. The advertisement, which proclaims the screening the world premiere of the “fi rst synchronized Mexican fi lm,” betrays the lengths to which Guilherme was apparently prepared to go in order to promote his work, even if such strategies often backfi red (10)48. Hunger could hardly have been considered a Latin American fi lm, let alone a Mexican one. By Guilherme’s own admission in Cinearte several months earlier, what dialogue the fi lm contained, with the exception of a smattering of Italian, was in English (“Hunger is Coming” 32). The fi lm’s claim to being a pioneer of synchronized sound, meanwhile,

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was undoubtedly spurred by a desire to capitalize on the frenzy for talking pictures that had seized Hollywood.49 In fact, the industry’s Spanishlanguage experiments in sound were just getting underway, something that was surely not lost on the Brazilian, since the popular press of the time (including La Opinión) was full of advertisements, articles and editorials celebrating the technical novelty of the talkies. Guilherme’s tendency to manufacture his own renown would not be surprising if it were not for his otherwise harsh denunciation of Tinseltown’s artifice and venality—both by-products of the intense market pressures inherent to the industry. Although Guilherme frequently complained about Hollywood’s mercenary tendencies, he himself did not hesitate when necessary to embellish his accomplishments by vaguely boasting of far-reaching critical acclaim, “quoting” from a supposedly glowing review, or exploiting his “Latin” qualifications to market his work. The promotion of Hunger in Cinearte, La Opinión and the Los Angeles Times highlights the extent to which Guilherme tried in vain to take advantage of the vacuum of information between Rio de Janeiro and Hollywood during the late silent and early sound eras. Indeed, the Brazilian could afford to use fictional license in his chronicles precisely because most of Cinearte’s readers had little way to confi rm or deny his affi rmations about the production and critical impact of Hunger. In the absence of studio publicity and press coverage—the film industry’s customary go-betweens—Guilherme himself served as virtually the only mediator of his short career in popular film. He did so, moreover, primarily in the pages of the same fi lm journal he used to attack the industry on which he depended for survival. 50

A BRAZILIAN HOLLYWOOD NOVEL In the scathing review of Hunger, the anonymous Cinearte critic concludes his evisceration of the film with constructive criticism: “If Olympio [. . . ] had written [his idea] in a magazine, it would have made an interesting piece of literature” (“The Screen in Review: Hunger” [A Tela em Revista: Fome] 30). 51 In his 1932 novel Hollywood: A Real-Life Novel [Hollywood: novela da vida real], Guilherme appeared to have heeded the reviewer’s advice. In literary fiction, Guilherme found a medium better suited to narrate the ideological complexities of his life in Hollywood, and one better able to develop the themes of standardization, exploitation and publicity fi rst developed in his chronicles. Largely, though not entirely, autobiographical, Hollywood tells the story of an erstwhile journalist and aspiring actor (Lúcio Aranha) who fi nds himself living the precarious life of an extra in the Latin marginalia of the fi lm metropolis. Lúcio eventually “graduates” from extra to “type,” and Guilherme uses his main character’s transition to expand upon the theory of standardization fi rst developed in his Cinearte pieces. After asserting that, with rare exceptions, what matters most to

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Hollywood are “types” rather than individual artists, Guilherme gives such a division of labor a prominent place in fi lm history: “The formation of types was the fi rst step toward the standardization of cinema. Castings are museums where types are catalogued, in alphabetical order, with a number, a fi le and a portrait” (121). 52 Seen in such a light, Guilherme’s Hollywood assumes the trappings of what Foucault calls a full-blown “system of enunciability” in that it constitutes an archive that “indicates [our presence] in its otherness [and] which, outside ourselves, delimits us” (The Archeology of Knowledge 129–30). In the Brazilian writer’s view, the actors’ functionality is likewise defi ned and molded according to an external order of pre-existing “types.” The categories of labor to which Guilherme refers, moreover, do not adhere to an arbitrary system; on the contrary, they have clear economic functions (122). During the fi rst half of Hollywood, Lúcio Aranha becomes convinced that he must conform to some type or other if he is to be economically viable in Hollywood, and his choice is obvious: like virtually all other male protagonists of Latin American Hollywood novels of the period, Lúcio molds himself into a subspecies of the Latin lover—the gigolo. Once he has acquired the costume to fit the part, Lúcio catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror and sees “the spitting image of a shifty, dark man he had gotten to know in Rio who was living in Copacabana off the wealth of an aging Chilean ex-prima donna of the light opera” (123). 53 As disturbingly convincing as his new look is, however, Lúcio still lacks an ingredient key to his promotion from film extra to type: publicity. For this he turns to another friend, Katy, a journalist who writes for the extras’ trade newspaper, the lowly tabloid Gralha. 54 According to Katy, an aspiring “type” must establish an extra-cinematic identity in harmony with his desired on-screen image before he can begin to catch producers’ attention. Such a step, in Guilherme’s Hollywood, could best be taken by creating a scandal worthy of notice by the types’ leading trade paper. And, indeed, only after Lúcio has publicly and ostentatiously begun to act out his gigolo role, making the front page of Monóculo, does he get work in the industry. Monóculo provides an ideally sensationalist forum for Lúcio’s off-screen performance. “Just above Gralha in terms of circulation, but the blood brother of its fi lthy competitor, [ . . . ] Monóculo [was] printed on yellow paper with red ink, as though the rag were stricken with a repugnant tuburcular fit each time it left the presses” (140–41). 55 Although Guilherme had himself dabbled in serious fi lm journalism, in Hollywood he suggests that the more frivolous arenas of light reporting and tabloid journalism played an even more crucial mediating role in the fi lm metropolis. The primacy of fi lm journalism to Lúcio’s past becomes apparent in the fi rst few chapters of the novel. Like Guilherme himself, the character begins his professional life in São Paulo as a newspaper reporter. Taking a keen interest in Hollywood, he then becomes a film cronista, writing for a number of Brazilian papers and magazines, including “Cinefilme,

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from Rio de Janeiro, the weekly of Brazilian fans” (26). Cinefilme clearly serves as the nom de plume of Cinearte, also published in Rio. Interestingly, Guilherme chooses to omit his real reason for coming to Hollywood—as an actor who had won a talent search—electing to portray Lúcio as a journalist fi rst and foremost, one whose abilities presumably led Cinefilme to send him to California as its Hollywood correspondent. In fact, as I have already suggested, Guilherme in all likelihood had resorted to writing chronicles for Cinearte to help support his floundering acting career. As Lúcio pierces the surface of Tinseltown, experiencing flashes of success amidst long periods of failure and even material deprivation, he uses his journalist past as a nostalgic counterpoint to his disillusionment with the movie industry: Lúcio recalled the times, at Folha da Tarde, when he had written articles about the stars, idiotic crônicas that the public devoured . . . Oh, if he had known, during those good times, that he would later come to know these same film bigshots, see them up close, hear their voices and, if he wished, give John Gilbert a slap on the back and ask in confidence for the address of his bootlegger! (57) 56 The Brazilian character ridicules his days as a chronicler (“idiotic crônicas”) even as he calls them “those good times,” as though his provisional happiness depended on his initial ignorance of the true Hollywood later revealed to him. The reference can easily be read as a disavowal of Guilherme’s own recent past as a Hollywood cronista. If the passage reveals Lúcio’s disdain for the shallowness of the film industry, however, it also betrays an abiding awe of being at such close quarters with the same celebrities about whom he had once written from a distance. Indeed, Lúcio closely resembles the novel’s author during his days with Fox and Cinearte: simultaneously intoxicated by celebrity and repelled by the film industry that generates it. More proof of Hollywood’s power over Lúcio comes when the young Brazilian actor reads a letter from home. Moved by his mother’s description of the futility of his fi lm career and the precariousness of her own health, Lúcio for the fi rst time seriously considers returning to Brazil. At the same time, however, he receives his fi rst fan letter, from a young São Paulo woman who kindly asks the “ex-gossip columnist of Folha” to send her an autographed photo. “Immensely flattered” by the letter, Lúcio speculates that Cinefilme (here Guilherme slips and calls the magazine by its real name, Cinearte) must have published his photograph and included some new information about him and the rest of the “República,” thus “piquing the curiosity of photo collectors” (84). The fan letter motivates Lúcio not just to stay in California but also to continue his uncomfortable ascent to stardom. It is not until Lúcio’s decisive contact with Anne Carter, an aging actress with a weakness for young gigolos, that the Brazilian actor learns just how

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crucial of a role tabloid publicity plays in Hollywood. After being seen in “society” with Anne, beating up a paramour of hers who jealously challenges him to a fistfight, Lúcio is initially embarrassed to fi nd that Monóculo has picked up and embellished the story. His friends assure him that, far from avoiding scandals, he should seek them out. “As far as Hollywood is concerned, you have now begun to be a conqueror,” Vera tells him. “Cinelândia cannot conceive of any other kind of triumph” (156). 57 Anne Carter goes even further in her appraisal of the powers of the press, and particularly of the dissemination of scandal. Calling Hollywood’s yellow journalists “veritable good witches” [verdadeiros bruxos bons] and “the only pillars of the fourth industry of the United States” [os únicos esteios da quarta indústria dos Estados Unidos], Anne represents actors as virtually dependent on the print media. “In truth,” she says, “what would become of us, poor artists, without the extraordinary help of newspapers, of advertisements, of little scandals read by millions?” (174). 58 Lúcio’s instinctive repugnance at succumbing to the calculated vulgarity of tabloid journalism is thus recalibrated into a necessary sacrifice. The validity of such a strategy is only made possible—or at least palatable—by a willing conversion from self-important artist to self-promoting commodity. The most expeditious method of such a transformation, a studio executive later tells Lúcio, is precisely that of the scandal, “because it is the most logical, the simplest and the most efficient form of publicity” (262). 59 The scandal is the preferred subset of self-promotion, then, because it is the most economical. As deCordova tells us (with a nod to Foucault), Hollywood in the 1920s was driven by a “logic of secrecy (and revelation)” in which sexual scandal stood as the ultimate revealer of the actor’s identity, thus constituting “the primal scene of all star discourse,” a fulfi llment of the fi lm fan’s “will to knowledge” about his or her film idol’s private life (140–41). In Guilherme’s view, however, the scandal signifies not just a long-anticipated act of disclosure between stars and fans, but also a rite of passage ushering a fledgling actor into stardom: because scandals only “befall” the stars, one is not a star until he has been initiated by scandal. In his discussion of scandal’s function in classical Hollywood, P. David Marshall emphasizes publicized transgression as an effective way of breaking away from the narrow constraints of picture personalities to which most actors found themselves shackled. Provided the scandal is not so extreme that it permanently damages the actor’s public image (as in the case of Fatty Arbuckle in the early 1920s), the perceived transgression can transform an actor’s career by granting him “autonomous subjectivity” (Marshall 106). Though both deCordova and Marshall focus on film celebrities, scandal would have been particularly attractive for an up-and-coming “type” actor like Guilherme’s Lúcio, whose rigid screen identity might only be liberated through the intervention of tabloid journalism. Unwilling to stomach the lurid cycle of performance and scandal required of an aspiring celebrity, Lúcio slowly winds his way back to his original vocation, fi nally embracing

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the true source of Hollywood power and spin, once again with a pen in his hand. By the end of his stay in the Film Mecca, in other words, Lúcio has managed through writing to salvage for himself a modicum of cultural agency. If he does not achieve the “autonomous subjectivity” of a film star, he has at least become a star-maker. Lúcio’s stint as a screenwriter and public relations man, however, rekindles his original state of antipathy toward the industry. Aghast at fellow studio insiders’ unrelenting frivolousness, cynicism and vanity, the Brazilian discovers how the inverted logic of the Hollywood marketplace runs counter to his traditional notions of originality. Lúcio learns his lesson when he is fi rst hired to write a script. When he confesses to insider Joe Kopfstein that he has never written a screenplay or even a novel, Kopfstein reassures him that originality is not only unnecessary in the movie industry, but also strictly prohibited. Kopfstein even goes so far as to warn the Brazilian novice, “if you come forth with a complex, innovative, different, intelligent idea, you will lose your time and perhaps your job. The difficult part is not being original: it is being mediocre! Plagiarism is not a crime: it is a sacred virtue!” (245).60 Pitting modern mass culture’s predatory “mediocrity” against “original” literary expression, Guilherme identifies the plundering amorality of Hollywood commercialism as antithetical to the artistic sensibility. In Guilherme’s fictional universe, however, journalism remains an explicit if disavowed link between the two opposing poles of cultural production. While Guilherme does not suppress Lúcio’s journalistic past, he consigns it to the same site of vulgar puissance occupied by the fi lm industry itself. At the same time, by narrating Lúcio’s failure to conform to Hollywood’s inverted creative standards, Guilherme also emphasizes his protagonist’s inability to be mediocre—to be unoriginal. The episode illustrates a paradoxically debilitating yet empowering mismatch between Hollywood and the young Brazilian intellectual, one that recalls Vera Zouroff’s account of her own inability to enlist with the fi lm industry she describes. If Zouroff is “too white” to pass her screen test, Lúcio is “too artistic” to pass as a Hollywood writer. Both Zouroff and Guilherme’s alter egos fail to acquiesce to Hollywood’s strange normative practices, a “shortcoming” that only serves to prove their immunity from the “corrosive” otherness of modern mass culture. Hollywood’s conclusion fittingly eschews the Hollywood ending, ultimately distancing itself from the fairytale vulgarity of popular cinema and asserting itself as literature. Quickly tiring of the artifice of the publicity machine in which he has been participating, happily resigned to leaving Los Angeles with Vera, sparing them both from demeaning themselves any further, Lúcio longs for a happy ending in which he gets the girl and returns with her to Brazil. Vera, however, succumbs to the prospect of fi nally landing a leading role. Her dedication to the industry ultimately precludes her from living by the creed of marriage and sacrifice publicly advocated by

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Hollywood during the early sound era—a creed naively followed by Lúcio himself in his private life. As Ivan tells Lúcio in the last page of the novel, “Hollywood won the match” [Hollywood ganhou a partida] (315). Guilherme thus chronicles and consecrates his own “defeat” at the hands of the fi lm industry, while at the same time exercising a lettered revenge over the rude impositions of U.S. mass culture. By making Lúcio in his own image, Guilherme selectively retraces his own evolution from Hollywood journalist to actor and finally author, while editing out his disastrous foray into fi lmmaking, and reimagining his exit as a choice driven by moral conviction rather than practical necessity. In the end, Hollywood: A Real-Life Novel assumes the stature of a master medium, conflating tabloid journalism, “serious” film criticism, studio publicity and cinema itself, thereby positioning itself generically as the ultimate arbiter of the popular film industry. Despite its isolation from contemporaneous literary currents, Guilherme’s work vindicates the ability of literature to frame the power relations at the heart of Hollywood. By foregrounding the different discursive practices that make up the film metropolis, Hollywood reveals how the most celebrated mediator of the star system (print journalism) should not be trusted to “complete the picture” of star discourse, given the press’s entrenched interest in the enterprise—a fact emphatically demonstrated by the Brazilian’s own work as a film journalist. By reconverting the archival potential and popular stylistics of the chronicle, at the same time turning journalism into a thematic focus of a novel ostensibly about the film industry, the Brazilian writer uses the chronicle’s formal strengths against the new instrumentality of journalism. If the chronicle had emerged in the late nineteenth century as a uniquely modern critique of modernity, Guilherme shows how contact with Hollywood only intensified the paradox: by taking to new extremes the chronicle’s “rhetoric of consumption and publicity” (to return to Julio Ramos’s phrase), Hollywood appropriates the language of the U.S. film metropolis even as it lays bare the widespread complicity of film journalism with industry designs. Much theory and criticism dedicated to journalistic writing in Latin America has tended to emphasize not only the popular press’s quintessential modernity, but also its unique adaptability and stylistic informality. Antônio Cândido notes that the chronicle’s lack of ambition is the key to its success—a basic humility he links to popular journalism: Reborn in the newspaper during the machine age, where everything ends as fast as it begins, [the chronicle] has no pretensions of durability. It wasn’t originally intended for books, but rather for those ephemeral publications that one buys one day and uses the next to wrap a pair of shoes or cover the kitchen floor (“Life at Street Level” 14).61 Interestingly, Cândido associates the chronicle’s seeming indifference to posterity not just with the fleeing quality of the daily press but also with

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the speed and inherent obsolescence of the “machine” to which print journalism and fi lm are indelibly linked. Cândido’s observation echoes Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that of all narrative genres the chronicle is best suited for capturing the elusive totality of modernity (“The Storyteller” 96). The works I have examined in the present chapter, however, have survived thanks largely to the book format, not the daily newspapers and film journals to which their authors regularly contributed. Despite having been written from the “ground,” the Hollywood narratives of Vera Zouroff, Olympio Guilherme and Israel Chas de Cruz soon found themselves on the “mountaintop” of bookstores and libraries. If we are surprised to have found such apparently disposable writing as intact and relevant as ever, Cândido concludes, durability is perhaps a just reward for the crônica’s not having been written to stay, affording it a relative expressive freedom lacking in higher-minded literary expression (15). Narrative journalism benefits, in short, from low expectations. Relatively unrestrained by either the aesthetic dictates of the literary establishment or the political constraints of the avant-gardes, and despite the embedded market conditions to which it was subjected, the work of Zouroff, Guilherme and Chas de Cruz exemplifies the heterogeneous output of Latin American Hollywood cronistas of the late 1920s and early 1930s. As an archive of modernity and an expression of the collective struggles of Latin Americans in the Film Mecca, their writing represents a vital branch of fi lm-oriented literature and an invaluable bridge between early Latin American cinematic fiction, criticism and journalism. The seeming immediacy of Hollywood—local readers’ superficial familiarity with screen idols through both the cinema and the popular press—enabled these marginal scribes of the fi lm age to negotiate the relatively uncharted terrain of the “real” Hollywood without making it seem particularly strange, even if Los Angeles epitomized the dangers and attractions of an urban modernity fundamentally different from their own. Their key role as mass culture mediators lent them a critical mandate and also fictional license. Whether or not they ultimately called their work journalism (Zouroff and Chas de Cruz) or literature (Guilherme), Latin American cronistas used the plasticity of popular writing and star discourse to “elevate” journalism while simultaneously permitting literary production to stoop to the sordid source material amply supplied by the film metropolis.

6

Imperial Magic Walt Disney in Latin America, 1930–1945

[The cinema] compels us to watch in slow-motion the invisible dance that captures a jump, a body projected; it carries us to a world of marvels, where flowers bloom in one second, where one can swim in a picture frame hanging from the wall, where macaroni can make a train stop, where objects move, live, talk. (Alejo Carpentier, “Cutting-Edge Cinema” [La cinematografía de avanzada] 77)1

In a relatively little-known article that fi rst appeared in the Cuban magazine Carteles in 1928, written more than a decade before his celebrated prologue to The Kingdom of this World [El reino de este mundo], Alejo Carpentier introduced the marvelous as a concept intimately linked to the cinema. The fi lm camera, he writes, possesses “a glass eye of magical virtues” (76). Like his contemporaries in Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America, Carpentier rejected the conventional narrative standard of Hollywood in favor of the “purer” nonlinear, noncommercialized visual approach of such directors as D. W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein and Fritz Lang. For Carpentier, as for many other intellectuals of his generation, fi lm-art was fighting a losing battle against the vulgar demands of the mass audience; as he puts it, the “concept of the business man” had “imposed itself tyrannically” on the artistic ideal (75). 2 The sooner fi lm dropped the bourgeois, mimetic pretensions of the theater, he writes, the sooner the “mysterious and unknown aspects” of everyday life would be poetically revealed by the microscopic gaze of the cinema (77). Yet Carpentier’s defense of fi lm-art goes beyond the customary “medium specificity” critique leveled against popular fi lm narrative by vanguard writers of the 1920s. In its unique capacity to capture the “mobilization of the absurd,” he writes, film constituted “the very force of the marvelous” [la fuerza misma de lo maravilloso]” (77). In effect, Carpentier views fi lm as more than just a “mobilizer” of the marvelous: it is the ideal medium for what Erik Camayd-Freixas has called the “practice” of magic realism. 3 In his critique of popular fi lm’s abuse of narrative convention—what he and others have criticized as an excessive reliance on “anecdote” or plot

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conventions—Carpentier might well have stopped at fi lm’s barely tapped ability to combat the tyranny of Hollywood through an emphasis on noncommercial, nonnarrative expression. By focusing on “the invisible dance,” Carpentier expresses a wish for something else entirely: a larger break with the mimetic tradition and a return to a “marvelous” suspension of disbelief.4 What he fails to foresee, however, is that commercial filmmakers—in particular animated filmmakers—would soon go well beyond the tentative experiments of the film d’art to capitalize on the nonmimetic capabilities of the medium. In the 1930s, a new Hollywood figure emerged on the world scene whose animated fi lms seemed to realize Carpentier’s early definition of the marvelous in astonishingly popular fashion. Walt Disney’s pre–World War II work was generally well received among Latin American intellectuals, many of whom ostensibly espoused a radical political agenda and perceived in the U.S. fi lmmaker a New Deal sympathy for the proletariat. At the same time, the U.S. fi lmmaker’s work seemed to fulfi ll vanguard ideals of le cinéma pur largely derived from French fi lm theory of the silent era—under whose influence Carpentier had written his early essay. In the remainder of the present chapter, I shall discuss how Latin American intellectuals came to terms with Disney’s early oeuvre in works that range in tone from guardedly appreciative to downright enthusiastic. Although Disney’s earliest feature fi lms Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio elicited the occasional reply from Latin American writers, including a remarkable essay by Carpentier’s compatriot Enrique Labrador Ruiz, it was Fantasia that had an especially resounding impact. Among the scores of writers to offer their assessment of the groundbreaking work, including such figures as Mário de Andrade and José Revueltas, Carpentier was among the most reverent. For one of Carpentier’s compatriots, the poet Guillermo Villarronda, Disney’s work constituted nothing less than a magical force destined to transform the Latin American landscape, a “destiny” Disney made manifest in the 1940s with the support of the Roosevelt administration. Villarronda’s remarkable book of poems served as a coda and a benchmark: the culmination of Latin American writers’ imaginative re-renderings of Hollywood, but also an extreme example of ideological myopia. One might expect the “Good Neighbor” fi lms that followed in Fantasia’s wake (Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros) to have elicited a creative and critical response befitting the studio’s relentlessly exoticist, though remarkably inventive, representations of Latin American geography and culture. By this time, however, Latin American writers had generally ceased to temper their fi lm criticism with counter-hegemonic critiques, as the tepid engagement of the Fantasia criticism gave way to a tacit endorsement of Disney’s growing empire. Carpentier’s essay demonstrates how difficult it is to talk about animated fi lm in the context of Latin America without confronting the aura of magic and fantasy enveloping the cinema during the fi rst three decades

Imperial Magic 141 of the twentieth century. Even before political conditions under Roosevelt convinced even Latin American intellectuals of a radical bent that the United States no longer posed a threat to hemispheric security, Latin Americans like Carpentier were predisposed to revere Disney for a number of reasons: First, as I have discussed in Chapter Two, many Latin Americans stood in awe of Yankee technology and cinematic know-how, whether or not they favored the United States as a model to be emulated or feared it as a linguistic menace, cultural scourge and even military invader. At the same time, there was a tendency among many early fi lm theorists—from Vachel Lindsay and Jean Epstein to Latin Americans like José Juan Tablada and Horacio Quiroga—to associate the cinema with dreams and magic. One of several Mexican intellectuals to write about early film, the Mexican writer Tablada penned several essays and chronicles on the nickelodeons and “cinema of attractions” prevalent in the larger Latin American cities during the fi rst decade of the twentieth century. His views mirrored those of other early intellectual film fans who accepted cinema only insofar as it promised to compete for artistic prestige with the novel, the theatre, erudite music, painting and sculpture. Yet Tablada’s hyperbole also reflected the extent to which many of his contemporaries saw the arrival of fi lm as a quasi-religious event of immeasurable paradigmatic significance: Amid all of life’s simulacra, its grotesque pantomime of reality and laughable fictions . . . , all of life, all of our dreams and illusions are there, in the same mystical and shadowy place, like a catacomb. Exotic countries come together and all the climates and landscapes fall under the same spell—outside time and thrown into space, they vibrate rapidly before our eyes (Salón Rojo 29) 5 Seen as an unprecedented mimetic apparatus, cinema promised to surpass the other arts in its unique ability to capture physical reality and abstraction, fact and fantasy. Tablada’s view of fi lm as a site of dream and witchcraft reflected a late modernista sensibility in which the new art form was seen as capable of delivering the viewer from the wreckage of time. Magically beyond the technical grasp of its learned fans, ubiquitously presenting a spectacle that—unlike theater—did not depend on the physical presence of actors or sets, cinema for Tablada was superior to life “because it is multi-faceted, because it doesn’t die the moment it is born, because it can be infi nitely repeated” (30).6 At the heart of Tablada’s praise of cinema was a nostalgia for enchantment, but also, conversely, a disenchantment with narrative literature. Rachel O. Moore has noted that early film theorists consistently pointed to the inadequacy or “impoverishment” of written language as an expressive form, shortcomings of “arbitrariness and imprecision” that could be overcome by cinema. “The space between the word and the thing is not arbitrary

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but magical,” Moore writes, and for early theorists it is this “magical realm that cinema inhabits” (7). One of those early theorists, Jean Epstein, emphasizes the otherness or “non-human” quality of lives “summoned” by fi lm. “If we wish to understand how an animal, a plant or a stone can inspire respect, fear and horror, those three most sacred sentiments, I think we must watch them on the screen, living their mysterious silent lives, alien to the human sensibility” (cited in Moore 73). Vachel Lindsay similarly ascribes mystical powers to the medium, yet even more than Epstein, the U.S. poet and essayist underscores the interplay of the sacred and the secular in early cinema. He privileges the “magic” of visionaries he calls “prophet-wizards” over the practical savoir-faire of scientists. Yet Lindsay underscores a need for the two sides, “in Merlin’s time, combined in one personality,” to now “make common cause [and] recognize that they serve the same society” (The Art of the Moving Picture 266). If fi lm is a “magical” medium, in other words, it is also one made possible through technological means. For Lindsay, it was no accident that the United States had begun to dominate fi lm production, because the U.S. emblemized the interaction of a primitive, “savage” sensibility with a precocious mastery of technology, a sentiment echoed a decade later by the Brazilian writer Monteiro Lobato, as I have discussed at length in Chapter Two. Despite early theorists’ emphasis on the putative magic or mythical elements of the medium, the vast majority of cinematic production during the silent era relied on conventional storytelling and character development. This disjuncture between theory and practice only heightened many intellectuals’ conviction that cinema was not living up to its potential. The lingering distaste for mimetic narrative among the avant-gardes made many readily embrace the free-form expression that animation promised. As I discussed earlier, Latin American vanguard film critics of the 1920s and early 1930s by and large followed closely in line with notions of cinéma pur popularized by French theorists and filmmakers such as Epstein and Germaine Dulac. In such writing—both French and Latin American—conventional film narrative was viewed as anathema to cinematic “purity.” Film should endeavor, the theory went, to capitalize on its unique visual language and thus avoid emulating the “anecdotal” tendencies of popular theater so closely associated with the bourgeois tastes of the cultural establishment. The further the medium was able to distance itself from the conventions of plot and character, in other words, the more it would succeed in freeing itself from the shackles of its middlebrow theatrical past. By these standards, Disney’s animated cinema could not have seemed more avant-garde: it bore little formal resemblance to any of the other arts (least of all the theater), distorted or totally avoided the human form, featured action over dialogue and storyline, and seemed generally to thrive on invention rather than convention. Robert Sklar has argued that prior to 1933, Disney’s short films distinguished themselves by what he calls magical and—after Lévi-Strauss—“savage” qualities. In the freewheeling narrative of early Mickey Mouse cartoons

Imperial Magic 143 and the Silly Symphonies, notions of rational behavior and logic-driven narrative were foregrounded by an anarchical spirit of fantasy: Freed from the burdens of time and responsibility, events are openended, reversible, episodic, without obvious point. Outlandish events occur without fear of consequence. There is no fixed order of things: the world is plastic to imagination and will (“The Making of Cultural Myths—Walt Disney” 61). Sklar’s reading of very early Disney reminds us that the fantastic in fi lm often accomplishes what it has in literature. In his 1932 essay “Narrative Art and Magic” [El arte narrativo y la magia], Jorge Luis Borges focuses on a point raised decades later by Sklar, that of causality in literature of the fantastic. In a compact yet forceful analysis that encompasses literature as well as film, Borges argues against a binary view in which magic is posited in opposition to logic and reason. On the contrary, Borges writes, magic has its own “frenetic and precise” laws of cause-and-effect and thus is “the coronation or nightmare of the causal, not its contradiction” [la coronación o pesadilla de lo causal, no su contradicción] (177). With the exception of what he dismissively calls the “psychological simulation” of the “morose novel of manners,” Borges argues, causality reigns in the world of narrative fiction, albeit in paradoxically disorderly fashion. Such elegant chaos extends to cinema as well: In the tumultuous, fast-moving novel, [simplistic causality] is inadmissible, and the same goes for the short story and the infinitely spectacular novel that Hollywood composes with such gilded idols as Joan Crawford, idols re-read in cities everywhere. A very diverse, lucid and ancient order governs them: the primitive clarity of magic (176).7 What Borges does in this essay is to present the fantastic as covertly hegemonic, that is, as a sort of “silent majority” employed by most narrative, fi lm included. As Rosemary Jackson has since pointed out, however, as common as the fantastic has been in literary history, it has nevertheless had to contend with its marginality vis-à-vis the kind of “psychological simulation” that Borges dismisses as the exception rather than the rule. Jackson makes a strong argument that modern literary fantasy, marginalized by secular society, has aimed “at dissolution of an order experienced as oppressive and insufficient” (180). The fantastic, therefore, has often been cast as the “art of ‘unreason’” in opposition to dominant normative and discursive practices (173). In this sense, the “aims” of fantasy are consistent with the stated goals of the historical avant-garde, both standing in defiance of the mimetic tradition and the power structure that has kept the art of “unreason” at the margins of mainstream cultural production. Seen in such a light, Disney’s early works were clearly the stuff of vanguard.

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ANIMATION, DISNEY AND LATIN AMERICA One of the fi rst assessments of animated fi lm as the salvation of the medium comes from the Brazilian writer Sergio Milliet, who in a 1931 essay pronounces animation the great hope of the talkies: “Animated talking pictures are the great poetic expression of the cinema. By abolishing any realist or psychological intentions, they permit the total development of the medium, lending it the superhuman character of fairytales” (Dry Terminus and Other Cocktails [Terminus Seco e outros cocktails] 205).8 The Brazilian writer’s heralding of a Brave New World of talking cartoons resembles Carpentier’s essay from a few years earlier, except that it is much more pointed in terms of its objectives. Indeed, Carpentier’s “invisible dance” was conceived as silent live action, whereas Milliet’s recipe calls for an “abolition” of narrative intent altogether, in favor of the “total development” of the cinematic image, now with the support of synchronized sound. In both cases, the debt to cinéma pur, rooted in Crocean aesthetic notions of “pure,” unmediated expression of thought and emotion, is apparent. Milliet goes on to call for “pure cinema, freed of traditions and rules. The image for the image’s sake, movement for movement’s sake” (205).9 Yet the inclusion of sound in Milliet’s prescription signals a change in the customary demands of the avant-garde, for whom (as we have seen in previous chapters) the technical limitations of silent fi lm generally represent an apogee of cinematic expression rather than a hindrance. For Milliet, writing at the beginning of a new decade, cinematic sound was inevitable and promised to revive a medium exhausted by the narrative tropes and conventions of commercial silent fi lm. Yet because sound’s initial promise had so far not revolutionized the medium, fi lm-art’s only hope was the “thousandand-one marvels” of animation (206–7). At such an early stage in the evolution of the talkies—before Hollywood had fully regained its commercial footing in international markets—it is remarkable how hopeful Milliet is that Brazilian cinema would capitalize on the relatively uncharted territory of animated fi lm. He even mentions one national fi lmmaker—Alberto Di Cavalcanti—as someone capable of fully exploiting the artistic potential of sound, color and animation (205–6). In two essays from the mid-1930s, the Spanish-born Venezuelan essayist José Luis Sánchez-Trincado lauds animated fi lm for embodying the “art of synthesis”—a quality heralded twenty-five years earlier by Ricciotto Canudo in his “Manifesto of the Seven Arts” as the cornerstone of the film medium. Sánchez-Trincado bases his writing in part on Disney’s Silly Symphonies, a series of animated shorts (beginning in 1929 with “The Skeleton Dance”) that combined increasing technical sophistication with classical and popular music soundtracks and free-form invention with familiar fables, a formula that constituted an important predecessor to Fantasia. For Sánchez-Trincado, animated fi lm possesses a formal elegance and simplicity akin to that of the poem, short story or fable. Animated narrative,

Imperial Magic 145 however, should not be subject to the same restrictions as written forms, nor should its characters: “They are the Aesop’s characters that don’t speak in verse and—herein lies their glory—do not propose to instruct or moralize. The animated fi lm story is pure art, poetry without didacticism, lessons without a moral . . .” (“America: Novel, Film and Theater” [América: novela, fi lm y drama] 55).10 Like Carpentier and Milliet, Sánchez-Trincado praises above all what he calls the “magical” and “marvelous” qualities of animation. In his view, nonanimated fi lm had been led astray by the impoverished, “mastodon” aesthetics of photography. With animation, on the other hand, “the drawing pencil has again become a magic wand with which marvels are performed” (57). 11 In a second essay (“From Samaniego to Walt Disney” [De Samaniego a Walt Disney]), Sánchez-Trincado focuses on the 1934 Silly Symphony “The Grasshopper and the Ants,” a Disney short based on one of Aesop’s fables in which a happy-go-lucky, famished grasshopper, after wiling away the summer months singing instead of working, begs for food from hardworking ants. For Sánchez-Trincado, Disney’s sketch overturns the didactic thrust of the original fable. The grasshopper—reasons the Venezuelan writer—symbolizes the poet in opposition to the overly rationalistic, joyless worker represented by the ant. In this sense, Sánchez-Trincado’s essay harkens back to Vachel Lindsay’s valorization of the “prophet-wizard” instead of the uninspired scientist as rightful steward of humanity’s future. Like the author of The Art of the Moving Picture, moreover, Sánchez-Trincado sees film as a key vessel of change. The “leisurely” [desocupado] spirit of the grasshopper, he writes, has created the cinema just as it had created poetry, and it is through such an invention that the fable has itself been rewritten: “Cut from the same cloth as the screen, [the grasshopper] represents the curative power of repose, in short, the medicine prescribed to men of excessive action” (62).12 Disney’s retelling of the fable thus constitutes a “vindication” of Aesop’s codified original. The shorter format and narrative simplicity of the Silly Symphonies no doubt appealed to such writers as Sánchez-Trincado in part because intellectuals like him would have associated these fi lms—in spite of their commercial success—with the “poetic” brevity of much 1920s avant-garde cinema. In an essay published in 1938 in the venerable Chilean journal Atenea, however, the Cuban novelist, journalist and short story writer Enrique Labrador Ruiz reverently situates Disney’s fi rst full-length feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) within a larger context of dream, myth and fable. Not surprisingly, Labrador Ruiz begins his “Theory of Snow White” [Teoría de Blanca Nieve] with the premise that Disney’s new production is the “pure” and “authentic” work of an imaginative genius. Disney, he writes, takes viewers on a “stupendous magic-carpet ride”—the likes of which they have never experienced before (233). Praising the film’s “marvelous content,” “capable execution” and “flawless technique,” the Cuban writer lauds Snow White for revealing what he calls the “everyday

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supernatural” (212). His assessment of Disney’s work is comparable to Carpentier’s earlier prescription for film-art. Like Carpentier, too, Labrador Ruiz highlights not simply the fantastic elements of Disney’s animated work, but also its fabulous elements, in particular his creative use of animals. Likening Disney to an impudent, childlike magician delivering the world from its “cowardly” barriers, the Cuban writer declares the Yankee fi lmmaker a pre-modern force who would bring fi lm narrative back to the primeval origins of fable: “Talking birds, thinking animals, suggestive creatures—together creating a mystery—produce an alchemy of calming sensations [that] lead to a perfect mystical resurrection” (213–14).13 Like the French surrealist fi lm theorists, Labrador Ruiz values above all the “purity” of Disney’s art, and he often emphasizes the oniric freedom of his animated creations. Though he does not criticize Hollywood explicitly, the Cuban writer casts Disney as an island of free expression within a sea of bondage and mediocrity, noting that “one notices the bankruptcy of his habitual competitors—the [conventional] cinema of coincidences—compared to the overflowing avalanche of his genius” (215).14 In this sense, Labrador Ruiz’s representation of Disney resembles many writers’ high regard for that other renegade, Charles Chaplin, as I have discussed in Chapter Four. Although such critics as Robert Sklar and Paul Wells have noted an ideological shift in Disney’s work between the early and late 1930s, Labrador Ruiz in fact reads Snow White more as a radical revival of the traditional fable than a parable of political currency.15 As Wells writes, Snow White “was not merely a consolidation of a particular art-form, but reassuring evidence of a populist myth fi nding a clear expression in the material world” (47). Though in the fi nal two pages of his essay the Cuban writer cannot avoid commenting briefly on the anti-autocratic message of the fi lm, in the end it is Disney’s fabulous formal anarchy more than populist content, and his unique capacity as a cineaste to bring new life to the tale of Snow White, that seduce the Cuban writer: “For countless generations we have been ruminating [ . . . ] on this simple fable, only to see this fabulist of light and voice and gesture and gazes and words, in a felicitous moment of creative power, fearlessly revive all the old phantasmagoria stowed away in the attic of ancient oblivion” (214).16 As “Theory of Snow White” shows, even before the release of Fantasia, Disney was beginning to grab the attention of Latin American intellectuals.17 The simplicity of Disney’s style and the “universal appeal” of his fi lms also caught the eye of an influential European living in Mexico. A key mediator between the European avant-garde, Disney and Latin American intellectuals, the French-born muralist and critic Jean Charlot had moved to the United States in the 1930s after living and working Mexico for more than a decade when he wrote an extensive essay fi rst appearing in the summer of 1939 in the journal American Scholar. Beginning his essay with the salvo, “[a]nimation in art antedates the advent of the cinematograph” (246), Charlot makes a case for Disney as the culmination of high art,

Imperial Magic 147 provocatively proclaiming that “[t]he cave man who ‘animated’ the boar of Altamira would have hugged with reverence this other animalist, Disney” (260). Charlot goes on to outline the ways in which painters over the centuries have routinely anticipated cinematographic movement through a variety of means, arguing that “static” representation has been the exception rather than the rule, since “the urge of man for a dynamic art could not wait for the scientists’ permission to perform” (260). Clearly, though, animation has made the “urge” significantly simpler to “perform,” and it is Disney, for the muralist, who has shown the world “the classic flowering of the medium” (274). Charlot even favorably (and hyberbolically) compares Disney’s Donald Duck to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, claiming that “[w]hen human shapes—Snow White or the Prince Charming—are seen side by side with Disney shapes on the screen, it is the human that suffers” (276). Perhaps Jean Charlot’s most penetrating insight is his depiction of animation as the successful realization of vanguard objectives of a return to “impersonal” or collective art. “Without benefit of critical appraisal, and whipped into form by the pressure of balance sheets and the profit motive,” Charlot writes, “the animated cartoon is nevertheless the unexpected flowering of the cubist seed.” Lest his readers conclude that he is attributing to Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck the same sacred origin as the Altamira boar, Charlot acknowledges the “bottom line” of Disney’s animated productions. Yet it is also, he writes, the corporate nature of Hollywood animation’s “communal machinery” that squeezes out any remnant of personality. Just as the cubists had dreamt of an art form that could be produced and reproduced through mechanical means, so too in animated fi lm “the impersonality of a work of art has been captured, the cult of the ‘original’ has been smashed” (279). Here, Charlot’s own experience as a Mexican muralist comes to the fore. Praising animated fi lm as relevant and public in a way that “ancient” art (“entombed in deserted museums”) is not, Charlot places Disney together with mural art in the vanguard. “Truly an art-for-all,” he concludes, “these murals that move are pets of the people” (280).

THE SORCERER’S ACCOMPLICE First released in Latin American cities in 1941, Fantasia brought into focus the shifting ambivalence many Latin American writers felt for Hollywood cinema at a time when—to borrow Andreas Huyssen’s term—an “anxiety of contamination” by mass culture still lingered over intellectuals’ enthusiasm for the cinema.18 Perhaps surprisingly, then, Latin American literatos generally greeted Fantasia as an emblem of aesthetic modernism that exemplified fi lm’s salient features as an art form, fulfilling their notions of pure art in two main ways: by exhibiting a seemingly unlimited freedom

148 Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema of visual expression; and by distorting the human form—in some cases eliminating it entirely. Such praise ignored looming questions of Disney’s ideological ends, in particular his patronizing regard for non-Western cultures, evident in Fantasia as well as his other fi lms of the period. In addition, Fantasia’s glowing literary reception in Latin America betrayed writers’ refusal to acknowledge the popular pedigree of Disney’s symphonic sketches, a style typical of what Néstor García Canclini has since termed the peculiar “mass grammar” of U.S. popular culture (“Dictionary of Misunderstandings” [Diccionario de Malentendidos] 24). The fi lm’s critical and literary acceptance, in short, was predicated on its qualification as high art. Such a prerequisite was made explicit in several revealing essays from the early 1940s by José Revueltas, Alejo Carpentier, Mário de Andrade and other prominent literary figures of the time, as well as in a relatively obscure book of poems written by the Cuban poet Guillermo Villarronda, whose unrestrained enthusiasm for Disney reads like an invitation for cultural expropriation—an “invasion” of Latin America that subsequently did, in fact, take place. In both the essays and the poems published in Fantasia’s wake, a general reluctance to engage Disney as a figurehead of U.S. hegemony and popular culture reveals considerable ideological myopia: an unwillingness by many Latin American writers, some of them politically engaged intellectuals of the fi rst order, to characterize the U.S. fi lmmaker as anything but an avant-garde trendsetter and messianic force in the “Good Neighbor” climate of the late 1930s and early 1940s. For García Canclini, Disney epitomizes a national ethos setting the United States apart as a place where the customary divisions between high and popular culture tend to be diluted, “reabsorbing their components, their differentiating syntaxes, in mass grammars” (“Dictionary of Misunderstandings” 24). 19 At the same time, the early and particularly wellcoordinated effort by the U.S. culture industry, aimed at channeling huge capital investments into technologically driven mass media with a global reach, opened what García Canclini calls “a formidable aesthetic and intellectual aperture to heterogeneous symbolic repertoires” characterized by a blending of erudite and popular “patrimonies” from a variety of national origins—a fusion readily apparent in Hollywood cinema from its advent (24). 20 For Paul Wells, too, the balancing act between high and low, new and old, held the key to Disney’s early success. “The overriding concern,” Wells writes, “was to use the animated form as a popular avant-garde in order to foreground ‘difference’ as proof of ideological and commercial ‘sameness’” (49). Though Wells and García Canclini’s summaries accurately describe Disney’s cinematic production of the 1930s and 1940s, they fall short of explaining his ambivalent critical reception. First released in the United States in 1940, Fantasia opened to violently mixed reviews. Heralded by some North American intellectuals as a work of stunning originality and modern genius, the fi lm was panned by others as a shocking violation of

Imperial Magic 149 the conventional boundaries between high art and popular entertainment. As an example of the former, the New Yorker’s John Mosher praises the fi lm as “a technical triumph of sound mechanism, a step forward in the art of cinema, and the establishment of a new standard for the harmony of sight and sound” (47). Dorothy Thompson, meanwhile, in a ferocious critique more typical of North American music critics, calls Disney’s film “a performance of Satanic defi lement [of the classics],” even going so far as to compare its spectacle of “black magical destruction” to cultural Nazism (cited in Watts 117–18). Despite such extreme reactions, Fantasia represented the culmination of an evolution of concepts and techniques developed by the Disney studio over the previous decade. The scope of Fantasia, however, was considerably more ambitious in terms of cost and length than the Silly Symphonies. The pairing of eight canonical works of the high orchestral tradition with animation rendered a fi lm, as many critics have pointed out, both daring and conventional, ambitious and formulaic, modern and Romantic. By this time, Walt Disney himself saw Fantasia as a way to bring high art to the masses by using what historian and Disney biographer Steven Watts and others have called a strategy of “sentimental modernism”—that is, the expression of facile morality and sentimentalism by way of experimental visual techniques (not to mention certain musical pieces such as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring) that draw from the highest echelons of the historical avant-garde (Watts 104–5). As Esther Leslie points out in her book Hollywood Flatlands, many European avant-garde intellectuals saw animated fi lm more as revolutionary friend than mass culture foe. At the same time, however, Disney’s increasingly “ideal reality” seemed to clash with a potential for formal innovation evinced by animation (Leslie vi). Such contradictions were not lost on contemporaneous Latin American critics of the fi lm. The Mexican writer José Revueltas rightly describes the manifest goal of Fantasia “to introduce a new aesthetic notion without frightening off the bourgeoisie,” an objective that succeeded so greatly, writes Revueltas, that Disney belonged in the same company as cinematic giants such as D. W. Griffith and Orson Welles (118). 21 Such high praise from an avowed socialist like Revueltas perhaps would not have been surprising to an audience of his time. Many international critics, after all, considered Disney’s 1930s smash hits Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio to be thinly disguised defenses of Depression-era working-class values against the abuses of political authority and a rationalized labor structure. The North American Marxist periodical People’s World, for example, glowingly characterized Snow White as “Walt Disney’s contribution to Marxist theory” (Watts 85). Sergei Eisenstein, the highly esteemed Soviet fi lm theorist and director of such silent classics as The Battleship Potempkin (1925) and the influential, though never completed, ¡Que viva México! (1932), went even further in his praise of Disney. Comparing Disney’s work to that of Lewis Car-

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roll, Eisenstein marvels at the U.S. fi lmmaker’s ability to achieve works of childlike purity, writing that “[h]e creates on the conceptual level of man not yet shackled by logic, reason, or experience” (2), and praising Disney’s pictures as “the purest example of the application of the method of art in its purest form” (63). Eisenstein’s reverence of Disney as an artist is unequivocal: “The work of this master is the greatest contribution of the American people to art” (1). Yet the Soviet filmmaker also conveys the common perception that Disney’s pre-Fantasia work is not merely a series of aesthetic exercises but also a salve for the underprivileged, “a marvelous lullaby for the suffering and unfortunate, the oppressed and deprived” (3). Eisenstein’s emphasis on Disney’s ability to create visual forms “unshackled” by experience is echoed by a number of Latin American writers. The Mexican writer Xavier Villaurrutia, for example, begins by discounting a purely musical reading of Fantasia (the kind many North American music critics made) because, as he says, “one cannot just listen with eyes closed” [no se puede oir con los ojos cerrados]. For Villaurrutia, Disney owes his success to “his dynamism, his creationism, [and his ability] to undo reality [and simultaneously] lend reality to the imaginary.”22 Villaurrutia’s allusion to Vicente Huidobro’s “creacionismo,” in which the Chilean poet occupies the center of his own imagined universe, is particularly apropos (209). Culminating in his long poem Altazor (1931), Huidobro’s version of Art for Art’s Sake is steeped in the exquisite imagery of Spanish American modernismo, combining a vanguardista impulse for formal autonomy with a Romantic disposition still wedded to an imaginary of pale princesses and ivory towers. Disney’s world is not so different: in his visual interpretation of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, for example, Disney applies formal experimentation to Victorian notions of classical mythology that neuter the pagan imagery of the original, rendering, for example, female centaurs devoid of nipples and an infantilized version of the god Bacchus. If, thanks to Disney’s sexual prudery and populist sentimentality, his caricaturesque “undoing of reality” differs from Huidobro’s solipsistic universe, both visions draw from common impulses of puerile anarchy and antimimetic fantasy. Villaurrutia is not the only Latin American writer to draw the connection between Disney and Huidobro’s creacionismo. In light of his earlier essays on the cinema, it is hardly surprising that Alejo Carpentier should see in Fantasia a realization of his own longstanding aesthetic ideals. For Carpentier and other Cuban intellectuals of his generation (the so-called Grupo Minorista of the 1920s and 1930s), fi lm—and in particular silent fi lm—constituted a new and improved art form combining the wizardry of technology with an intensified emphasis on movement. As I have discussed at greater length in Chapter Three, the Cuban minoristas privileged fi lms that reduced dialogue and the human voice to a minimum, rather uncritically assimulating the purist sensibility advocated by French critics and fi lmmakers such as Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac and Louis Delluc. The

Imperial Magic 151 disembodied world of Disney, especially one in which human voice and dialogue were largely left out of the picture, thus epitomized an ideology fi rst developed during the silent era. 23 Carpentier begins his review of Fantasia by asserting that Disney has fi lled an artistic void: Our era was in need of the presence of a man who could conceive of the cinema as a poet could. One who could see in fi lm a medium of “total creation.” One who brings to mind, while beholding the virginal screen, the line from Vicente Huidobro: “If it pleases me to see the world as flat, who shall deny me the pleasure?” (61)24 For Carpentier, that “total creator” was Walt Disney, an artist who miraculously worked without the encumbrance of actors, since his cast of players was “contained in his pen.” It follows that Fantasia was not merely Disney’s masterpiece; rather, it was “a truly graphic ballet,” one that gave unprecedented visual form to erudite music. Carpentier calls Disney’s treatment of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, for example, “a veritable triumph of abstract composition.” The Cuban writer saves his highest praise for the filmmaker’s interpretation of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring: “Having been deceived so many times by choreographers and dancers,” Carpentier writes, “Stravinsky, the supreme composer of our times, has found in Hollywood the person to capture the true sense of his musical score, showing us what no stage in the world could show us” (62). 25 Later in his article, Carpentier makes a remarkable claim of hemispheric solidarity based on the premise that European filmmakers and choreographers had failed to give satisfactory visual form to their musical compositions due to their fear of the “dehumanizing” power of technology. Alluding to the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, Carpentier asserts that for the European masters “machine” was synonymous with “abstraction.” By contrast, Carpentier writes, “in our young continent a new civilization is being born in which men befriend machines, using them to end suffering and express their poetic fantasies” (63–64).26 To cement the suggested connection between the United States and Latin America, Carpentier concludes that Disney “has managed, with Fantasia, to place himself among the greatest poets of our times.”27 Returning to Huidobro—who had famously written that “the poet is a little God” [el poeta es un pequeño Dios]—Carpentier proclaims Walt Disney “the little God of Hollywood.” (64).28 Disney’s aesthetic appeal to Spanish-American vanguardistas like Carpentier and Villaurrutia must of course be read in light of the international avant-gardes. Latin America’s marginality vis-à-vis European models, however, compels us also to assess Fantasia’s impact in ways particular to the region. As George Yúdice writes, Latin American avantgardists suffer from a “double bind” with regard to hegemonic avant-garde discourse in that “the Latin American is condemned to be either Europe’s ‘civilizational double’ or its ‘civilizational other.’” In other words, “either

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[Latin Americans] seek to be modern like the Europeans or they resort to a primitivism, albeit autochthonous, which the Europeans themselves have called for in order to regenerate a supposedly dying civilization” (54). As Carpentier’s essay suggests, Fantasia offers Latin American intellectuals a partial escape route from the Yúdice’s double bind: by embracing Disney, they are implicitly rejecting the role of Europe’s “civilizational double”; at the same time, by allying themselves with a North American artist whose work displaces the narrowly primitivist aesthetics generally advocated by the European metropolis, the vanguardistas also symbolically distance themselves from the role of “civilizational other.” Through his mastery of the visual means of technology, Carpentier contends, Disney embodies a new brand of modernism unlike that of the hegemonic avant-garde. By representing the Americas as the privileged site for formal experimentalism, meanwhile, Disney’s brand of creacionismo reconciles what Yúdice calls the two main tendencies of Latin American modernism: the esprit nouveau of the European avant-garde and the mundonovismo of national literatures (53). In Carpentier’s mildly subversive vision of the New World, moreover, it is the North American Disney who follows the Chilean Huidobro’s vanguard blueprint, rather than the other way around, a subtle maneuver that underscores the primacy of Latin American intellectuals, even if they ultimately take a back seat to Disney’s cinematic art. Thanks to a special volume of the influential São Paulo journal Clima dedicated entirely to Fantasia, the impact of Disney’s fi lm on Brazilian letters is particularly well documented. 29 Published in October 1941, the volume featured a short introduction by Oswald de Andrade and several longer essays by such notable vanguard writers as Sérgio Milliet, as well as a young Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes, whose criticism decades later would help to articulate and promote Brazilian Cinema Novo. In addition, the journal offered several reprints of essays and reviews fi rst published in Brazilian newspapers, including texts by Guilherme de Almeida and a young Vinícius de Morais. Of the scores of articles and reviews published in Clima, perhaps the most painstaking analysis came from a Brazilian writer whose musicological credentials—like Carpentier’s—were impeccable. In an essay on Disney’s film fi rst published in Diario de São Paulo and subsequently reprinted in slightly expanded form in the collection of essays The Dance of the Four Arts [O baile das quatro artes], Mário de Andrade stops far short of Carpentier’s unbridled enthusiasm for Fantasia. Although conceding the movie may well prove to be a “classic,” Andrade is reluctant to overlook the most salient artistic defects many critics ascribe to the film: namely, its formal inconsistencies and over-reliance on banality and sentimentalism. Interestingly, for a writer often given to privileging music over the visual arts, Andrade faults Disney’s animators for being too musical, frequently letting the soundtrack dictate the imagery of the fi lm at the expense of visual or narrative logic. In such a way, Andrade writes, “the cinematography became a slave to the music” [a cinematografia se tornou escrava

Imperial Magic 153 da música] (61). The banality of Disney, meanwhile, which Andrade calls “indisputable” (70), is due in large part to the conventions of “stylized simplification” common to animation itself. He points specifically to the centaur scenes from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, scenes that strike the Brazilian author as lacking “the least bit of artistic resonance.” Here, as elsewhere in the essay, however, what begins as a critique ends as an underhanded defense of Disney’s project. Fantasia, Andrade writes, achieves universality precisely because of its childishness: “It is defi nitely ‘infantile,’ and for this reason ‘basic,’ human, universal, just like young children’s reactions to their world” (71). 30 He goes further: “Perhaps the banality, the conventionality of the animated cartoon is an essential necessity. It is derived from its own ‘poetic’ reality. From its own psychological—and moral—destiny” (72). 31 While steadfastly denying the fi lm the status of “masterpiece,” in other words, Andrade nevertheless praises many of Disney’s accomplishments as masterful. Interestingly, Sérgio Milliet, who had been one of the first Latin Americans to write about the revolutionary potential of animated film, is among those least impressed by Fantasia. Although Milliet lauds “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” as technically brilliant with admirable political overtones, he regards much of the rest of the fi lm as frankly disappointing. Milliet is particularly critical of segments generally praised by other intellectuals: the Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony he calls “infantile, superficial, inconceivably unimaginative” (“About Fantasia” [A propósito de Fantasia] 11); whereas he dismisses the animation of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring as “figures lifted from a cheap encyclopedia” 10); and Moussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain as “the gloomy, clownish fight between good and evil” (11). For a writer affi liated with Brazilian Modernismo, Milliet expresses especially harsh criticism of the segments that many other writers had found “avant-garde” about Disney’s work—namely, the visual abstractionism accompanying Bach’s Toccata and Fugue and the caricature of classical ballet in the ostrich-and-hippo rendition of Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours. Milliet ends his essay, meanwhile, with a regret that more of the film could not have been like the brief animated interlude “Meet the Soundtrack,” in which symmetrical patterns of animation accompany the notes of different orchestral instruments (11). The Brazilian writer is satisfied, that is, by the one segment of the fi lm totally devoid of narrative and representational pretension and the conceptual framework of symphonic works. In short, “Meet the Soundtrack” is the only piece worthy of the term cinéma pur— which for Milliet means pure fantasy.

DISNEY POETICS Perhaps the most unique testament to the impact of Disney in Latin America during the early 1940s came from the Cuban poet Guillermo Villarronda,

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whose Poems for Walt Disney [Poemas a Walt Disney] was published in Havana in 1943. Little known outside of Cuba, Villarronda maintained close connections with the Batista regime during the 1930s, 1940 and 1950s, and wrote regularly for the government-owned newspaper Alerta until the triumph of the revolution in 1959, when he fled the country for Puerto Rico. Villarronda’s conservative, nationalist politics at times belie his choice of poetic subjects. In his “Anti-Ode to Pablo Neruda” [Anti-oda a Pablo Neruda], published in 1942 in the journal La Verónica, the Cuban poet offers an introduction to the elaborate poetic flattery that would characterize Poems for Walt Disney one year later: in spite of his leftist politics, Neruda is revered as a messianic force capable of delivering Cuba from creative stagnation. In one sense, the poem reveals the ways in which Latin American dictators of the time—besides Batista, the shortlist would include Juan Perón and Getúlio Vargas—straddled the line between working-class solidarity and authoritarian rule in an effort to solidify their power base against threats from both extremes of the political spectrum. Such a balancing act allowed a pro-Batista poet like Villarronda to praise Neruda and Disney in equally hyperbolic terms without falling out of favor with the current Cuban regime. Like many other poets of his generation, Villarronda eschewed the formal stylistics of the avant-garde, preferring a quasi modernista approach that Max Enríquez Ureña and other literary critics have dubbed neorromanticismo (383–84). In his prologue to Poems for Walt Disney, Villarronda distances himself from any perceived irony with regard to the subject matter. “This is not a book of little toys,” he writes, “but rather of poetry.” To establish the seriousness of his tribute to Disney, Villarronda begins the collection with a sonnet in the modernista vein called “Walt Disney: Portrait of a Poetic Creator” [Walt Disney: retrato de un creador de poesía]: With cool light and a neglected air, on his movie set of glass, anxious and slow, shipwrecked on the moon, attentive to the rose-less quietude of oblivion . . . Sold on the immensity of the music, he who bought freedom from the wind today, tragic and violent, holes himself up in the prison of his own tropical beat . . . The happiness in his face is sown. Lifted up, the flower of his gaze is blue ice on a green peak . . . Dead beneath its frozen hue, his furious profile miraculously melts to release its imprisoned light . . . (13)32

On one level, the poem offers a late Romantic view of the artist ardently suffering in a state of taut concentration, only, in the end, to give violent

Imperial Magic 155 birth to his art. The second stanza, however, betrays an acknowledgment by Villarronda that Disney’s “movie set of glass” is perhaps not as exquisite as it fi rst appears. In the fi rst two lines, the artist is “sold” on (i.e., has given himself over completely to) the music; at the same time, this is a man who has “bought freedom from the wind.” Thus Villarronda, while lauding Disney’s powers of creation, also suggests a pecuniary origin of such powers. What makes the association all the more remarkable is what follows: having spent his energies on the “immense music,” Disney now locks himself away “in the prison of his own tropical beat.” That Villarronda identifies Disney’s pure, dormant state of artistry with a “tropical beat” reveals much about the Cuban poet, who here chooses to see in Disney a kindred Latin “seed” which, when “sown,” gives way to miraculous creation. In another poem, “Imitation of Walt Disney: Script for a Sub-Fantasy” [Imitación de Walt Disney: Asunto para una Sub-Fantasía], Villarronda begins with a synopsis of the Pastoral Symphony segment of Fantasia, then switches his focus from the mythological locus of Diana and the Centaurs to the political theater of World War II. Longing for Disney’s power with which to fight fascism, the Cuban poet writes, “This war undresses your happy lies/ o, Walt Disney . . . The fascist, with his marble chin/does not fit in with the mirth of your great North America/ Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington . . . Franklin Delano Roosevelt/ four glorious oceans drift away because of Europe” (46). 33 The icons of U.S. history—including the most recent entry into the pantheon, Franklin Delano Roosevelt—thus assume the rank of deities. Yet only the creative spark of a Disney, according to the poet, can “ignite” the waters of such oceans, converting the inert into something numinous and lethal. Villarronda himself, as the title of the poem suggests, assumes a subordinate position, playing second fiddle to Disney’s miraculous virtuosity: “If I had a celestial horse/and a prairie, if I had your prairies/with one stroke I could smite your Leviathans/in a sea ignited by your phosphorescence” (45). 34 If the poet-warrior appears ready to take up arms in Disney’s mythological army, his role is still clearly that of a bit actor in a Disney-made world: a sorcerer’s apprentice. It is in the long fi nal poem of Poems to Walt Disney that Villarronda more fully explores the relationship between Disney and Latin America. He does so by imagining a mutually satisfying encounter between the Yankee auteur and Cuba, but fi rst reasserts Disney’s unique power to transform the Americas. Only Disney, Villarronda writes—“with his golden phallus and gray soul”—is capable of rendering Latin America on an epic scale: “thanks to you, Walt Disney, companion/our simple continent awaits/the brilliant Spring/that you ignite with your miraculous canvas” (50).35 As in the collection’s other poems, we see here a reiteration of Disney’s creative virility and alchemical élan, as well as his fraternal ties to Latin America. At this point, however (in parts two and three), Villarronda takes his own pan-American logic to another level, as he depicts Cuba as a site of fertile exoticism in need of impregnation:

156

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema O Walt Disney, friend: Why don’t you look for the flower of your spectacle in my vernacular rum, the moon for your wheat, the soul for the canticles you paint in the long unfolding of your films (51). 36

Villarronda thus unapologetically depicts Cuba in stereotypical, assimilable terms—pushing rum (as a relaxant and aphrodisiac) three times over the course of the poem, emphasizing the tropical climate of the island, the infectiousness of Afro-Cuban music, the luxuriousness of the flora, the attractiveness of the women, the lightheartedness of the men, and the sweetness of the food. Finally, in part VII, Villarronda imagines the arrival of Disney and his cast of animated characters, placing Minnie Mouse in contact with the popular composer and bandleader Ernesto Lecuona (“Now that my ears buzz from all the singing/I ask of Lecuona a rumba for Minnie”37). The poet also gives a recent Disney invention, Dumbo, a role to which he was no doubt unaccustomed (“I have bee’s honey/for the infi nite folds of your ears”38), and suggests that a stressedout Donald Duck take some well-deserved rest and relaxation (“Here you will be cured . . . /Who isn’t?”39)(56–57). In these imagined encounters, Villarronda reverses the active/passive dichotomy of other passages of his poem, male-gendering the Cuban subject and, by placing both Minnie and Dumbo in receiving roles, suggesting that Disney’s hypothetical flirtation with Cuba would benefit both parties. Yet such a view of an equitable North-South exchange is short-lived. In the last stanzas of the poem, Villarronda concludes his reverent sales pitch with an obligatory mention of Maceo and Martí, then casts himself as an Afro-Cuban musician: O Walt Disney, friend, companion, Here I wait for you, sun-drenched, sea-drunk, with my native marímbula, with my bongó of taut smooth leather and my clave’s sweat betraying its vegetable origins . . . (58) 40

Villarronda, of course, is not the fi rst Cuban writer to celebrate the nation’s African or indigenous heritage, nor is he the fi rst to advertise the salubrious benefits of the island’s tropical climate. In many ways, the poem’s imagery transcodifies a vanguard embrace of autocthonous and Afro-Caribbean cultural production, most famously (among Villarronda’s own countrymen) Nicolás Guillén’s Motives of Sound [Motivos de son] (1930) and Sóngoro cosongo (1931); Fernando Ortiz’s vast ethnographic oeuvre; and Alejo Carpentier’s forays into musicology, as well as early

Imperial Magic 157 fiction like Ecué-Yamba-O (1931). Villarronda, however, lacks the skeptical, anti-imperialist sensibility of his predecessors. By stressing both the primitiveness and passivity of Cuba—and, indeed, by allying himself with telluric origins in a way that belies the combative manner in which such writers as Guillén and Carpentier typically employ such tropes— Villarronda suggests that Cuba should provide the raw material for Disney’s miraculous creation. In this sense, Villarronda strikes a pose similar to that of the Brazilian José Lins do Rego. In an essay written the same year, the author of Plantation Boy [Menino de engenho] writes, “Walt Disney should come to our jungles. There he will fi nd living people to serve as the materia prima of his tales” (95).41 Lins do Rego praises Disney for eliding the human form through a combination of impenetrable technology and poetic inspiration—an echo of 1920s cinéma pur fi lm criticism. Despite the fact that Disney animation is a collective effort involving the work of dozens of different artists and technicians, furthermore, Rego attributes the “sorcery” of Fantasia to Disney’s unique capacity to magically assume the forms of native landscape, flora and fauna: “When Walt Disney manifests himself through his flowers, through his creatures, through his rivers, through his seas, we are forced to recognize that his technique does what we are not allowed to: make miracles” (94–95).42 Although they do not categorically deny Latin Americans agency in Disney’s enterprise, Villarronda and Lins do Rego relegate Latin American intellectuals to ancillary functions and consign local landscapes to the status of colorful, erotic, strategically important feudalities. Their literary blandishments thus amount to little more than a self-objectifying pose—a curiously unsubversive, neocolonial variation of what Mary Luise Pratt has called “autoethnographic expression” (Imperial Eyes 7). Lacking the contestatory bite of an engaging “partial collaboration” with metropolitan discourse, Villarronda and Rego in essence roll out the magic carpet for what they see as Hollywood royalty. Instead of transforming hegemonic chronicles of conquest and mastery, the two writers, envious of Disney’s “marvelous” exploitation of other tropical landscapes, draw from the prestige of literature to fashion elegant, eye-catching tourist pamphlets meant to entice the traveling enchanter. Both writers appropriate the grammar of exoticism, in short, to turn their respective countries into aesthetic commodities fit for the pen of one man alone.

GOOD NEIGHBORHOOD? The exultant, messianic tone of Villarronda and Rego’s work is no doubt due in part to Disney’s visit to Latin America in 1941, hot on the heels of Fantasia’s initial release.43 The timing of the trip was not accidental. The fi lm’s arrival in Latin America, as Eric Smoodin has pointed out, coincided

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with the U.S. State Department’s decision to include Disney in its wartime propaganda campaign under the auspices of the Good Neighbor policy (140–41). The trip by Disney, some of his associates and a motley assortment of artists, musicians and writers (calling themselves “El Groupo”) thus epitomized Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s policy of hemispheric solidarity against fascism. As a result of the trip, Disney followed up Fantasia with a number of fi lms—the two most famous being Saludos Amigos (1942) and The Three Caballeros (1944)—which attempted to graft the Disney style of animated fi lmmaking onto a Latin American setting, thereby emphasizing the common cultural ground between North and South America. Though in all likelihood Villarronda’s strange book of poems never came to Disney’s attention, the studio was preparing a number of sketches centered on Cuba before the box-office failure of The Three Caballeros apparently led to the abandonment of the project.44 The case of Cuba demonstrates how the U.S. government’s attempt to corral Latin American countries into an antifascist front, in what later became a larger strategy to create anticommunist buffer zones in the region, often depended on the complicity of autocratic regimes such as Batista’s. Villarronda’s collection of poetry in particular should not be read independently of such tainted alliances. Even before the apogee of Fantasia, the fi rst cracks in Latin American intellectuals’ nearly unanimous praise of Disney had begun to appear. In 1939, the Chilean writer (later a notable environmentalist) Rafael ElizaldeMacClure had published a collection of chronicles titled Los Ángeles de Hollywood in which he dedicates a long chapter to Disney. Elizalde-MacClure prefaces his sharply critical comments by putting Disney’s work from the 1930s in elite company. “Hollywood has produced two oevres of genius that will stand the test of time: the creations of Chaplin and Walt Disney” (139).45 We have seen the comparison before. Though the Chilean writer’s treatment of Disney’s pre-Fantasia work is conventional, he offers an unprecedented amount of information on the technique and labor organization behind what he calls the “veritable miracle” of Disney animation (140). Unlike many chronicles of early Hollywood, however, Elizalde’s account consists of more than just fi rst-hand observation of the studio process. After being asked to translate into Spanish the lyrics to the songs of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the Chilean writer worked in Disney’s studios alongside Latin American actors and singers, as well as studio executives. Given limited time, a miserly budget and frequently confusing oversight, Elizalde communicates the difficulties involved in dubbing dialogue and song into Spanish, while also levying serious accusations against the studio. By denying him screen credit and stripping him of his fi nancial rights of authorship, the Chilean writes, Disney had tainted the otherwise gratifying experience of creating a successful Spanish version of Snow White. Besides condemning the studio’s treatment of its contracted workers, Elizalde depicts the strategic arrogance of Disney toward Latin

Imperial Magic 159 America as representative of US commercial fi lmmakers generally: “The yanquis worry only about the internal market; the odd foreign-language productions are deemed a mere accident that should be given little importance.”46 Much like critics of Hollywood foreign-language productions a decade earlier, the Chilean writer defensively points out the cultural and fi nancial value of the Spanish-speaking market to Hollywood; hence, he writes, “the executives should be less myopic” than Disney had proven to be (154). Elizalde MacClure’s bittersweet encounter with Disney, however, was the exception rather than the rule. When Saludos amigos opened in Brazil in August 1942 (with the title Alô Amigos), and in parts of Spanish America in September and October of the same year, Disney still held considerable prestige among Latin American film journalists and intellectuals. Nevertheless, critical reception of Saludos was mixed. Buenos Aires’ La Prensa called the fi lm “agreeable” though “not among Disney’s best.” Playing down the studio’s problematic treatment of the Latin American settings, the anonymous reviewer prefers instead to focus on the “perfection” of the film’s technical merits (12). La Nación (Buenos Aires) also highlighted the fi lm’s accomplished formal achievements, yet was even more critical than La Prensa of Disney’s essentialist depiction of Latin American customs, citing an “inadequacy of authentic reflexion” and “precarious profundity of synthesis,” even given the conventions of commercial fi lmmaking (8). In a considerably warmer review, O Estado de São Paulo links Disney’s efforts explicitly with Roosevelt’s propaganda campaign in Latin America when it writes that the fi lm “preaches [ . . . ] the political creed of the ‘Good Neighbor.’ And all of the Americas, like the Virgin of the stone cathedral, smiles at him thankfully.” Reminiscent of so many critics of Fantasia, the reviewer explains the North American fi lmmaker’s caricaturesque approach to Latin America in Saludos amigos by attributing to Disney an antimimetic approach, thus placing him in the tradition of earlier observers of Brazil such as the nineteenth-century lithographer Jean Baptiste Depret. Unlike other “artist-travelers” who had sketched “our picturesque colonial land,” however, Disney uses the wonders of cinematic technology to transcend reality, “because he is subjective, not objective; because he is a creator; because he is a poet” (4).47 In Disney’s series of Latin American portraits, Chile is given a particularly demeaning treatment in which an anthropomorphized airplane named Pepe fl ies over the Andes with great difficulty to a deliver a letter to Argentina. Although one might have expected an incensed reaction from Chilean fi lm critics and other intellectuals, the sketch was greeted with an odd sort of strained enthusiasm—betraying the way in which so many Latin American intellectuals of the period were still at pains to read Disney in any way but benevolently. As the Santiago weekly magazine Hoy points out, the only Chilean characters in the scene are airplanes, and the only featured landscape is the “menacing and terrible” Andean peak of Aconcagua.

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Neither Chile’s cities nor its countryside, the reviewer laments, moved Disney and his team of artists enough to render them on celluloid. Though the writer could not disguise her disappointment that Chile had not been accorded the same kind of lavish attention heaped on Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil, however, she nevertheless praises the fi lm otherwise, going so far as to promise that Disney’s new film would make viewers “laugh and think” (23). A symptomatically apologetic response comes from the respected Santiago fi lm journal Ecran. Instead of focusing on the buffoonish depiction of the Chilean “character,” the reviewer, much like his Brazilian colleague, focuses on representations of the national landscape, which he characterizes as a “serious” depiction. Incredibly, however, the Chilean reviewer insists that the entire episode enjoys the same sober objectivity, “without falling into the satire that certainly would not have given a faithful rendition of our customs or marvelous landscapes.”48 In short, Ecran’s response resembles many other Latin American publications’ passive, flattered acceptance of Disney’s cinematic piropo. Indeed, the journal concludes its review of Saludos amigos by thanking its creator for the attention: “Let us thank him for remembering us, and have fun with the macaw [sic] Pepe, the travels of Goofy the Gaucho and the fantastic panorama of the Andes. That by itself is enough.”49 The concluding phrase hints at certain misgivings with Disney’s fi lm. Despite his insistence on Disney’s earnest depiction of South America, the anonymous critic could not have helped but to notice that the picture, if mildly entertaining, hardly constituted a serious treatment of the region. Cornerstone of the US propaganda campaign in the hemisphere, The Three Caballeros made its worldwide premiere in Mexico City in December 1944. The symbolism of the film’s opening was not lost on the Mexican press. The daily newspaper Excelsior dedicated to the film no fewer than 16 columns of print, 10 photos, and 12 articles in its Sunday edition alone. Appearing beneath the headline “Mexico Pays Deserving Tribute to the Extraordinary Genius of the Wizard Walt Disney” [México Rinde Merecido Tributo al Genio Extraordinario del Mago Walt Disney], the articles reverently describe the fi lm in detail, focusing on the technical “wizardry” of Disney as well as the representations of Mexican landscapes, customs and music. Like the reviews of Saludos Amigos one year earlier, the articles convey a sense of admiration and even gratefulness to Disney for having chosen Mexico as one of his studio’s new objects of animated fantasy. The Three Caballeros, writes one reviewer, is the best “embassy” one could ever dream of: This fi lm shows the true spirit of understanding and affection that should exist between two peoples of the same continent. The Three Caballeros uses artistic expression to exalt the positive values of a nation—and in this specific case, the Mexican nation—in the best way

Imperial Magic 161 possible. This is why we should thank Walt Disney: for having understood us so perfectly. (“Watch Out, Because Here Comes Pancho Pistolas, the New Creation of Walt Disney” [Ábranla, que ahí Viene Pancho Pistolas, la Nueva Creación de Walt Disney] 4) 50 The reviewers are particularly taken with Disney’s Mexican invention, the little rooster Pancho Pistolas. Sociable, macho and prankish, Pancho is seen as a true embodiment of Mexican “values.” One writer points out that the way Pancho laughs in the face of death is particularly representative of the national character (“The Mexicanism of Pancho Pistolas, Walt Disney’s New Character” [El Mexicanismo de Pancho Pistolas, el Nuevo Personaje de Walt Disney] 4). As for Mexican “scenery,” another Excelsior writer applauds Disney’s depiction of rural posadas as well as the Indians that lend the architecture “authenticity.” The reviewer justifies the silence of the Indians as a sign of Disney’s painterly respect of Mexico’s natural landscape as well as his ability to capture the national spirit, in which the indigenous peoples play an inherently passive part: “Serious, sad, they are absolutely Mexican. That is why they couldn’t talk and remained motionless, immobile like all of our Indians” (“Our Classic Posadas as Seen by Walt Disney” [Nuestras Clásicas Posadas Vistas por Walt Disney]). 51 Of all the Excelsior articles and sidebars about The Three Caballeros, the one that comes closest to rigorous critical analysis revisits a theme touched upon by writers from Alejo Carpentier to Enrique Labrador Ruiz: that of Disney’s “magical” qualities. The reviewer—once again anonymous— points to the sometimes hallucinatory animation of the film as evidence of Disney’s “literary” merit: stars turn into women, women into flowers, men into guitars, buildings and trees dance, and so on. “Like a window opened to another world,” the critics writes, The Three Caballeros can only be compared to fairytales and fiction, surpassing in this sense all of Disney’s previous fi lms, including Fantasia. “We witness on screen,” the reviewer writes, “something like an incredible dream in which everything appears touched by the magic wand of virtue. And yet one so perfectly, so precisely rendered that even the most extraordinary things appear simple” (“Film Taken to the Purest Realm through Disney’s Magic” [El Cine Llevado al Terreno Puro de la Magia por Disney] 4). 52 The anonymous critic presents an argument in some ways reminiscent of that of Labrador Ruiz’s “Theory of Snow White”—that an “everyday supernatural” underlay the fabulous surface of Disney’s work. Only here, the Excelsior reviewer emphasizes the way in which The Three Caballeros uses verisimilitude as a disguise of the fantastic. The argument would be more compelling if the author did not insist hyperbolically that Disney’s “magic” is somehow “pure”—a throwback to aestheticist theories about silent fi lm. Another of the Excelsior

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articles makes the point that The Three Caballeros constitutes a “revolutionary” technical advance through its innovative mix of animated and live action footage—an innovation whose only precedent is the advent of sound—and that such technical sleight-of-hand is directly responsible for the magical effect of the fi lm on the viewer (“A Revolutionary Technique of Film and Animation” [Una Técnica Revolucionaria de Cine y Dibujos Animados] 5). The use of such words as “wizard,” ”magic,” “genius,” and “laboratory” abound in Excelsior’s reception of The Three Caballeros. These exaggerated assertions serve, however, as a smokescreen to deeper anxieties. In spite of Excelsior’s celebratory tone, the paper frequently assumes a defensive stance. In the earlier-cited article on the representation of posadas, the reviewer argues that the special, somber quality of Mexico’s architecture could be rendered only by an artist of Disney’s talent and sensitivity and not a mere caricaturist (4). Another article, meanwhile, notes that “Disney created neither a book of flattery nor a novel of manners and customs— besides, any idle tourist could have done that” (“The Authentic Mexico of The Three Caballeros” [El México Auténtico de Los Tres Caballeros] 5). 53 The belabored reassurance that Disney is neither frivolous nor costumbrista in his treatment of Mexico merely confi rms that in fact the fi lm does approximate the kind of popular ethnography that Julianne Burton-Carvajal, in her insightful article on Disney’s Latin American campaign, refers to a quest for the “authentic exotic.” According to Burton-Carvajal, Disney and his team of animators enjoyed a “self-appointed mandate to refigure [Latin American artifacts] into transculturating gestures [which were] to be received by the locals as tribute rather than as expropriation” (“Surprise Package” 135). Despite the unilateral thrust of the campaign, however, “El Groupo” was generally assisted by newspapers like Excelsior, which proved more than eager to lend a hand to Disney’s neighborly magic. It is not particularly shocking that a large-circulation daily newspaper like Excelsior should greet Disney’s tribute to Latin America with such fawning—if strangely revealing—prose. After all, the paper’s main competition in Mexico City, El Universal, devoted a similar two-page spread to the fi lm’s opening. As it turned out, however, more radical publications of the period also tended to view the new film through rose-tinted glasses. A telling example is Buenos Aires’ socialist newspaper La Vanguardia. Returning after a several-year hiatus just months before the release of The Three Caballeros in April 1945, the venerable weekly publication announced the Argentine premiere of Disney’s fi lm with certain excitement—though with little of the fanfare marking the Mexican dailies. Proclaiming Disney’s new fi lm as the latest “revolutionary” production by the “wizard of the pencil,” an anonymous article predicted that the film would draw a cultivated crowd in Buenos Aires (“The Opening of The Three Caballeros will be an Artistic Event” [El Estreno de Los Tres Caballeros Será un Acontecimiento Artístico] 6). In spite of the glowing advance notice and a half-page ad for

Imperial Magic 163 the fi lm one week later, La Vanguardia never gave The Three Caballeros a full review, limiting its comments to a blurb (quite possibly furnished by R.K.O. Radio Pictures’ distributors) in the paper’s “Summary of Openings” column. Completely bypassing in-depth analysis of the fi lm, let alone the materialist criticism one might expect from a publication otherwise so committed to wartime events and local labor politics, La Vanguardia simply called the fi lm “magnificent” and technically innovative, mentioning also the picture’s focus on Argentina, Brazil and Mexico (“Los Tres Caballeros” 8). Such critical silence cannot be explained away solely by a general indifference toward Hollywood. The paper routinely dedicated full-length articles to both popular and art cinema, even if the bourgeois tenor of its cultural criticism tended to clash with the politically committed tone of its general news coverage. Seen from another perspective, however, it is understandable that La Vanguardia failed to take Disney to task. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, architect of the very policy that led Disney to Latin America in the fi rst place, happened to die during the same week The Three Caballeros opened in Argentina. The paper, which had been celebrating the imminent defeat of Nazi Germany since the fi rst few weeks of the year, dedicated several long and grateful eulogies to Roosevelt. Given the unprecedented sentiment of appreciation for the United States government as World War II drew to a close, it is hardly surprising that La Vanguardia should have neglected to offer a hard-hitting critique of Hollywood’s most visible cultural emissary. Naturally, there were exceptions to the Left’s reticent stance on Disney’s Latin American fi lms. In the Havana daily newspaper Hoy, the Marxist critic Mirta Aguirre wrote an ambivalent review of The Three Caballeros in which she acknowledged the “attractive and charming” elements of the fi lm as par for the course (76). At the same time, Aguirre writes that Disney’s new fi lm fails to capitalize on what she calls the “poetic use of uniquely ‘Americanist’ elements,” in effect focusing on the wrong artifacts. Her verdict could not be more concise: “Disney has made a fawning tourist pamphlet on celluloid, a little picturesque tambourine that falsely represents countries like Brazil and Mexico through its cheap propaganda. The roots of Brazilian and Mexican culture, the enormous folkloric richness that should lend itself so favorably to Disney’s art, is almost entirely neglected.” 54 In two short sentences, Aguirre manages to use the kind of language almost entirely missing in other Latin American coverage of Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros. “Tourist pamphlet” and “propaganda” are words that would later become Disney epithets commonly used by Latin American intellectuals. Such language often lurked in the subtext of earlier reviews and essays of Disney’s work, but until now had not fully come to the fore. In accepting Disney as an accomplished cinematic folklorist, however, Aguirre does not categorically criticize the appropriation of

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the “authentic exotic.” The main problem with Disney’s ethnographical approach to Latin America, Aguirre argues, is the superficiality of the attention paid to the “deep and essential” African and indigenous cultures of Brazil and Mexico. Yet Aguirre’s expectations are higher than those of her colleagues at Excelsior, for example, for whom any depiction of Mexico’s rural Indians by Disney was viewed positively, and even their silence seen as a sign of authenticity. Another of Aguirre’s main criticisms of The Three Caballeros is that, as an “instrument” of hemispheric solidarity (what she calls “a pan-American rapprochement” [acercamiento panamericano]), Disney fails in his mission. This critique is perhaps the most damming of all, since it begins with the premise that the 1945 film should be viewed as a function of its wartime propaganda, while rejecting the way in which Disney has actually realized his project. If the Cuban writer does not question Disney’s motives, in other words, she faults him for his cultural ignorance and dereliction of duty. The “formidable” Hollywood fi lmmaker, she writes, could have been expected to make a film that was “more refi ned, truer, more knowledgeable about Our America” [más fi no, más verdadero, más conocedor de Nuestra América] (77). Mirta Aguirre’s assessment of Disney is significant for one additional reason. Unlike the Cuban writer’s amicable dissection of The Three Caballeros, most Latin American reviews of Disney’s “Good Neighbor” fi lms were anonymous. The large-scale critical reaction provoked by Fantasia— even if not as ideologically grounded as one might have expected—gave way either to silence, thinly disguised publicity, or desultory film criticism devoid of authorship. Part of this lack of engagement, as we have seen, may be explained by the timing of Disney’s Latin American pictures. In newspapers such as Excelsior and O Estado de São Paulo, critics would have been loathe to write unfavorable reviews at a time when the dailies’ editorial slant as a whole openly celebrated US and Soviet victories over the Axis powers. To be critical of Disney’s “good neighborly” gesture on ideological grounds would have contradicted the political stance of mainstream papers and magazines—where unproven fi lm critics did not generally wield much clout. The only writers of the period with the prestige and political motivation to defy Disney’s appropriation of Latin America’s cultural patrimony, meanwhile, were either dying off or drifting further from the vanguard moorings to which they had held fast fi fteen years earlier. Consequently, the very intellectuals who had greeted Fantasia so loquaciously—Mário de Andrade, Carpentier, Revueltas—had little or nothing to say about Disney’s Latin American pictures. At the same time, the type of journals that would have accorded Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros serious critical treatment had they been made fi fteen years earlier—avant-garde publications like Amauta and Martín Fierro; fi lm journals like Cinearte; weekly and monthly magazines serious enough to feature cultural criticism but

Imperial Magic 165 frivolous enough to focus on popular film, such as Social—were defunct by the mid 1940s. Though this hardly justifies the reticence with which so many public intellectuals greeted Disney’s work of the mid-1940s, it does explain why much of the work was left to younger, relatively unknown writers like Mirta Aguirre or the anonymous critics of the large metropolitan newspapers. Regardless of the Latin American response to the “Buen Vecino” fi lms—or lack thereof—Disney’s approach in the 1940s could not ultimately produce fi lms of mutual respect and solidarity, as any attempt at truly inter-American cultural exchange was foregrounded by the exploitation of ethnic and regional stereotypes for commercial gain. The studio’s odd combination of wartime propaganda and market strategy was bound, furthermore, to render Latin American landscapes and characters in the Disney fashion, a style already by this time readily identifiable with the US culture industry. That the putative reciprocity of Disney’s initial Latin American encounter was illusory is a view with which it would be difficult to disagree. As Burton-Carvajal remarks in her article on “El Groupo,” “all cultural reciprocities are not created equal” (147). Despite the unreflective enthusiasm for Disney often found in the literature of the “Good Neighbor” era, I do not wish, of course, to claim that Latin Americans of the 1940s actively sought out an asymmetrical cultural relationship with the United States. The roots of critical myopia and complacency, as we have seen, began before the war in Europe had dominated Disney’s agenda. “The idealized world molded in Disney’s fairy-tale reels,” Esther Leslie writes, “made graphic the suppression of revolutionary hopes for the social transformation in the 1930s and 1940s” (vi). Either smitten with Disney aesthetics or seduced by the common ground between avantgarde doctrine and the mass-culture practice of animation—namely, formal experimentation—intellectuals simply looked past the fi lmmaker’s ideological ends. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in Latin America, a region that increasingly figured prominently in the Disney imaginary. In the post-Fantasia Magic Kingdom, Disney’s drift away from 1930s political engagement allowed the studio to reduce the region to caricature: instead of the radical transformation for which the vanguardistas had hoped, there was banal distortion and passive complicity.

CONCLUSIONS In Saludos Amigos, the letter that the Chilean airplane Pepe delivers is addressed to a certain Jorge Délano. The reference is not accidental. Délano was himself a prominent cartoonist, editor and filmmaker responsible for the fi rst talking pictures in Chile in the late 1930s. In a number of visits to Hollywood, Délano (or “Coke,” as he was generally known) made the acquaintance of a number of prominent Hollywood stars, directors and

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even politicians, including Orson Welles, Franklin Delano Roosevelt—to whom he was blood related—and Walt Disney. Having gotten along especially well with Disney (hardly surprising considering their common interests), Délano was instrumental in bringing the creator of Fantasia to Chile for the tour that eventually led to the filming of Saludos Amigos. The cinema, however, was only one of Délano’s spheres of influence. As the founder and editor of the influential journal of political satire Topaze, Coke wielded considerable clout in both media and political circles in Santiago for several decades. Topaze was known in Chile as a respected forum for criticism of local, national and international politics and, moreover, played a large part in elevating the political cartoon to one of extensive cultural impact in Chile. One of Délano’s protégés at Topaze was a young, talented caricaturist by the name of René Ríos Boettiger, better known by his pseudonym, Pepo. Though hardly the intellectual figure of Délano’s stature, Ríos turned out to be a brilliant satirist in his own right, one whose acute political eye prevented him from accepting Disney with the open arms shown by his boss and mentor. After seeing Saludos Amigos, Ríos decided that that Disney’s Chilean character reflected poorly on the nation. By the end of the decade, he had come up with an alternative—Condorito—that went on to become the most popular and enduring character in the history of Latin American comics: direct competition for a market previously monopolized by the likes of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. The anecdote illustrates the ways in which Disney seduced mainstream intellectuals and arbiters of media power in the 1940s, often using personal contacts to facilitate his ends, even as a younger generation of Latin American intellectuals was beginning to contest the Disney juggernaut. By the late 1950s, writers like Guillermo Cabrera Infante had begun to reassess even Disney’s most unquestioned successes. In a review of Fantasia—rereleased in Havana late in 1959—Cabrera Infante excoriated the film on grounds of style and content. Questioning Disney’s vaunted reputation as an artist, the author of Three Trapped Tigers [Tres tristes tigres] connects the aesthetic qualities unanimously praised by his forebears to a mawkish, slavish appeal to a mass audience. “His taste for fuscia and green chartreuse—synthetic colors—is not a coincidence. The languor, the Coca Cola sensuality, the sentimentality [of his fi lms] correspond more to the needs of the majority than to individual preferences: that’s the key to his success” (“Fantasía” 432). 55 If Cabrera Infante professes dismay that the fi lm still enjoyed popular appeal among Latin Americans, as evidenced by the long lines in what was by now revolutionary Havana, his biggest complaint is the way Fantasia had sullied the high-art tradition from which it shamelessly borrowed. It was, Cabrera writes, an “arty” fi lm in the worst sense of the word: tacky, pretentious and pseudo-artistic. Despite its unprecedented appeal to Latin American intellectuals upon its release, Fantasia had paradoxically come to reveal Disney’s vulnerability to critical attack in the Cold War era. For the Cuban writer, in short, the fi lm constituted the fi rst crack

Imperial Magic 167 in Disney’s armor—“the fissure that let in all the criticism that came afterward” (433). 56 Within a couple of decades the cracks had multiplied considerably. Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart famously declared in their introduction to How to Read Donald Duck [Para leer al Pato Donald] (1972) that “the great, universal Disney family” [la gran familia universal Disney] was a “supranational” force transcending—and obliterating—national and regional identities (12). Although Dorfman and Mattelart’s frontal assault on Disney’s media empire was long overdue, their rigorous analysis ultimately sacrificed historical nuance for forcefulness of argument. While Disney’s homogenizing effect on Latin America since the 1950s has been uncontestable, the studio’s coordinated, government-sponsored domestication of Latin America in the 1940s revealed political strategies tailored for the domestic markets of such nations as Chile, Mexico, Cuba, Argentina and Brazil. By singling out specific countries for representation, Disney insulated himself from negative criticism through the flattery of differentiation, each tribute rewarded in kind by local film critics’ starstruck praise of Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros. Disney’s Southern forays, in other words, had geopolitical specificity. How to Read Donald Duck derived rhetorical power from its timely articulation of Hollywood as capitalist figurehead and metropolitan despot. By positioning “Third World” audiences generally as the passive recipients of Disney’s imperialist expansionism, however, Dorfman and Mattelart overlooked the complex mediating role played by local intellectuals, including journalists. Latin American writers, long bewitched by the “magic” of cinema, were particularly predisposed to comply with Disney’s commercialism precisely because his studio’s productions seemed to build on the nonverbal, “pure” aesthetic of silent film. By treating popular Hollywood film with a combination of anxious disdain and opportunism, while leaning heavily on French and Soviet film theory, Latin American writers largely failed to foster a lasting tradition of independent film criticism that had begun with such promise in the work of such figures as Alfonso Reyes and Horacio Quiroga. If popular cinema’s intellectual prestige was ratified by Chaplin’s work from the 1920s and 1930s, Latin Americans exposed their residual conservatism and peripheral modernism by clinging above all to Chaplin’s (and the European avant-garde’s) anachronistic exploitation of the silent medium. Following in Chaplin’s wake, the technical ingenuity of Disney’s animation added a sense that the Yankee mago was sparing the fi lm medium from the shackles of mimesis in spite of his concession to sound—exchanging Chaplin’s proletarian silence for disembodied fantasies and fragmentary fables. Whereas Chaplin’s anti-imperialist politics attenuated his mass appeal, Disney’s aesthetics seemed to confi rm precepts of “modern magic” and cinéma pur—even if the young auteur was hardly an exemplar of film art. A temporarily more favorable diplomatic relationship between the United States and Latin America lent aging vanguardistas a pretext to embrace Disney’s brand of popular cinema precisely because, on the surface, it did

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not appear to be popular. Many Latin American writers, as we have seen, countenanced and even encouraged appropriations of their nations’ cultural patrimony by selectively allying themselves with Disney as “fellow Americans” under the rubric of pan-Americanism and novomundismo. Villarronda’s extraordinary poetic invitation is merely the most extreme of such gestures. That the tenor of his work is so close to that of such writers as Carpentier, Revueltas and Mário de Andrade—even if the Cuban poet’s political alliances were ostensibly so different from theirs—attests to the pervasiveness of Disney’s impact among Latin American intellectuals of the time. The obliging stance assumed by writers like Villarronda was made possible by the rhetoric of the Roosevelt administration, a period of U.S. noninterventionism unprecedented since the War of 1898, the United States’ active opposition to fascism and its symbolic alliance with democratic forms of government, and, finally, Disney’s credentials up to that point as a socially conscious innovator. As World War II gave way to the Cold War and Disney’s politics took a decisive turn to the right, so too changed many writers’ perceptions of the maverick fi lmmaker and studio luminary. Latin American intellectuals of this earlier era, however, enchanted by the eye-and-ear candy of fi lms like Fantasia, greeted Disney as an emblem of cinematic modernism and clearly invited his Northern gaze to the light upon the tropics.

Notes

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1. [Necesitando información, cooperación, ayuda en fi n, para compenetrarse debidamente con el tema tratado, [ . . . ] Nicolás Olivari se ha asomado a las oficinas de los señores gerentes de las empresas cinemáticas yanquis y ha salido de ellas dolorosamente herido en su moralidad de artista y en su condición de Argentino.] 2. Ricardo Salvatore has defi ned “informal empire” in the Latin American context as “a collective enterprise encompassing multiple practices of engagement” encompassing a diversity of representational practices by businessmen, priests, engineers and travel writers (71, italics his). 3. Gilbert M. Joseph’s introduction to the anthology Close Encounters of Empire anticipates the inherent risk in using words like “encounter,” lest they be “construed as a euphemizing device, to defang historical analysis of imperialism” (5). Amy Kaplan’s The Anarchy of Empire, meanwhile, underscores the essential instability and disorderliness of U.S. imperialist practices. Both Kaplan’s book and the Close Encounters anthology draw heavily from the language of scholars like Mary Luise Pratt, whose coinage in her book Imperial Eyes is matched by a rigorous analysis of Latin American contestatory discourse. In general, however, many recent English-language studies of U.S. empire have tended to invoke terms like “contact zones” without fully exploring the conditions of contact, preferring to focus on how empire is negotiated and subsequently re-elaborated by U.S. subjects rather than on the ways Latin Americans have partaken in the enterprise. 4. In a survey on cultural imperialism, John Tomlinson criticizes theories that would read empire through discourses of nationality, advocating a “move from a mode of thinking which is governed by the geographical (local and foreign cultures) to one governed by the historical (tradition and modernity)” (24). Such an emphasis on the “global, historical, advance of capitalist modernity,” however, ignores both: (a) the regional—and often national— specificity of Hollywood’s marketing strategies in Latin America; and (b) the fact that Hollywood’s symbolic attributes, especially in the early years, are largely treated by Latin American audiences as metonymic of U.S. mass culture. Seen in this light, Salvatore’s account hits much closer to the mark. 5. The dominant power’s prestige, Gramsci writes, is the sine quo non of the hegemonic: “The ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production” (85).

170

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6. Tracing the history of U.S./Brazilian relations of the previous hundred years, Prado’s polemical treatise (which was initially banned by the Brazilian government) outlines the tepidness—and sometimes outright hostility—with which United States had treated Brazil and Latin America in general since the fi rst Spanish-American wars of independence. With considerable aplomb, Prado characterizes the North/South “alliance” unilaterally proclaimed in the Monroe Doctine (1823) as an “alliance that makes as much sense as that of iron and clay” [aliança tão sensata aliás como a do pote de ferro como o pote de barro] (18). 7. [[L]a maravilla de la palabra es hecha como las auroras de los cielos, para esplendor sobre la Vida;/la Tiranía se llama: Silencio;/la Libertad se llama: Verbo] 8. Aníbal Ford, in a useful comparative overview of the subject, gives the genesis of what he calls the new, “quotidian” brand of journalism a specific date, 1833, and also a specific newspaper, Benjamin Day’s New York Sun (“Literatura, crónica y periodismo” 233–36). 9. Divisions of this kind are necessarily rather arbitrary. In his groundbreaking study Stars, for example, Richard Dyer has grouped what he calls “media texts” in four categories. Besides fi lm itself, his other categories are promotion, publicity and commentaries/criticism. What Dyer has called promotion (“deliberate image-making”) I have chosen to term “studio publicity”; what he terms publicity, I have dubbed “light reporting” to highlight the generally autonomous nature of such journalism. Dyer’s category “commentaries/criticism,” meanwhile, does not seem to me to be inclusive enough, as it fails to take stock of non-expository discourse like fiction (68–72). 10. In the Chilean journal Atenea, Ugarte repeats the “medium specificity” thesis laid down by Latin American writers as far back as João do Rio and Mexican José Juan Tablada, granting fi lm aesthetic status by virtue of its uniqueness from the other arts. Ugarte closes his assessment in telling fashion, predicting that the potential greatness of the medium will be fulfi lled only when “intellectuals with specialized expertise in the cinema rise up, figures as brilliant and celebrated as those who today rule the novel, the theater, painting or music” [mañana se levantarán alrededor del cine intelectuales especializados, que serán tan geniales y tan célebres como los que hoy dominan la novela, el teatro, la pintura o la música] (“El teatro y el cine” 90). 11. Many of the early North American Hollywood novels echo fan magazines of the era in reinforcing the fi lm industry’s growing reputation as a center for vice, wealth and scandal. In Harry Leon Wilson’s 1922 light satire Merton at the Movies, we witness the starstruck male protagonist’s attempt to “make it” as a serious star, only to be unwittingly cast in slapstick comedies. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Girl from Hollywood (1923), meanwhile, tells a somewhat darker tale of scandal, bootlegging and violent crime. Toward the end of the 1920s, Carl Van Vechten’s novel Spider Boy (1928) explores relationships between “serious” literature and screenwriting, while repeating the theme of naïve outsiders’ corruption and entrapment at the hands of Hollywood vice. Such novels pave the way for later classics of the genre in English such as Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust (1939), Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfi nished work The Last Tycoon (1941). In West’s novel, in particular, the recurrent themes of early Hollywood fiction—the grotesque decadence and artifice of the fi lm sets, the fickleness of the industry, the pathetic eccentricity of the city’s inhabitants, the tragic consequences of ambition—are distilled in a masterfully dark satire whose influence on subsequent Hollywood fiction (and fi lm, for that matter) has never since waned.

Notes

171

12. Despite the increasingly privileged position of the Hollywood novel in the canon of U.S. literature, English-language literary criticism has tended to ignore the international scope of the Hollywood novel—surprising, since the U.S. film industry has hardly been a purely domestic phenomenon, either in terms of production or reception. In fact, from its inception Hollywood was teeming with writers from all around the world, some playwrights, poets and novelists unable to resist the money to be made from screenplays; and others who produced chronicles of early Hollywood life, books that generally promised readers salacious exposés of the “real” industry and its stars. Such journalistic works were published in languages as diverse as Japanese, Swedish and Italian. The largest number of non-English Hollywood-themed books in the 1920s and 1930s were European—certainly a logical outgrowth of Europe’s proximity to the United States, its intimate ties of immigration and—by consequence—its predominance among the foreign population of Hollywood. It is interesting to note that two of the earliest serious treatments of Hollywood come from Spain and Portugal. António Ferro’s nonfiction work Hollywood: Capital of Images [Hollywood: capital das imagens] appeared in 1922, the same year as Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s well-known work Cinelandia, a novel combining avant-garde narrative techniques and a Hollywood setting. 13. In fact, intertextuality still marks star discourse to the present day, when we bear in mind the diversity of Hollywood fan media (including print journalism, but also, increasingly, television and the Internet) through which the celebrity continues to be promoted and elaborated. 14. [La hegemonía se afianzaba en ese acceso de las masas al funcionamiento afectivo de la subjetividad burguesa.]

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 1. [Todo lo que de verdad, fuerza franca y fresca tiene hoy el cine, se lo debe a sí mismo. Lo malo que todavía guarda y que oprime por la desviación o hace reir por lo convencional, es patrimonio legítimo del teatro, que heredó y no puede desechar todavía.] 2. [La más pobre sala de cine se halla así convertida en un como misterioso santuario sin voz, sin un ruido [donde una] ola de simpatía [ . . . ] comienza en la pantalla y concluye en la última silla.] Quiroga’s embrace of the less-is-more aesthetic of silent fi lm expresses avant la lettre Rudolph Arnheim’s observation that fi lm’s power is derived in part from its inability to represent reality mimetically. Both critics espouse a view of the cinema in which the spectator is obliged to “complete the picture” shown in truncated form—without sound and, as Quiroga emphasizes, in the half-light of the movie house. Arnheim asserts that not only the absence of sound but also the screen’s inherently limited scope of vision prevent spectators from believing in the fi lm as an illusion; their involvement in the fi lm in spite of the medium’s limited mimetic abilities, writes Arnheim, “give fi lm its right to be called an art” (17). 3. [los sentimientos y pasiones de la pantalla pasan como a través del vacío al alma de los espectadores;—la sombra cómplice, en fin, que nos enseñan los poetas] 4. [como si fuera posible que el cine, técnicamente, pudiera realizar la fantasía de sus espectadores (o sus protagonistas): mezclarse con la vida, continuar en la escena real las pasiones de la escena filmada] 5. [Yo pertenezco al grupo de los podres diablos que salen noche a noche del cinematógrafo enamorados de una estrella. [ . . . T]engo treinta y un años,

172

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

Notes soy alto, delgado y trigueño—como cuadra, a efectos de la exportación, a un americano del sur—] [Tal simulación es fácil, pero no basta. Precisa además revestir mi nombre de una cierta responsabilidad en el orden artístico, que un jefe de sección de ministerio no es común posea.] [[El concepto latino del cine] pivota entero sobre la afectación, y [entre actores norteamericanos] suele hallarse muy a menudo la divina condición que es primera en las obras de arte, como en las cartas de amor: la sinceridad, que es la verdad de expresión interna y externa.] [De modo que, yo soy quien dirige la operación, y yo quien me pongo en venta, con mi acento latino y mis millones.] [el invento por excelencia de la modernidad se convierte en condición de posibilidad de una imaginación narrativa exaltadamente romántica [ . . . ]] [[n]ão se trata mais de investigar apenas como a literatura representa a técnica, mas como, apropriando-se de procedimentos característicos à fotografia, ao cinema, ao cartaz, transforma-se a própria técnica literária] [Tudo o que os poetas modernos tem procurado em vão exprimir pelos meios poéticos poderá provávelmente encontrar uma expressão muito mais adequada e viva na tela do cinema [ . . . ] esse parcelamento infi nito da realidade, que permite realizar combinações inéditas de formas no tempo e no espaço.] [Saneando as demais artes, desviando delas correntes de aspirações que superam os seus meios de expressão e que, portanto, corrompem o seu organismo] Toward the end of his life, it should be noted, Oswald de Andrade planned to a write a novel titled Caminhos de Hollywood in which popular fi lm fandom presumably comes to the fore; the text, however, was apparently never completed. In a poignant letter from the 1940s, Oswald de Andrade calls Lobato “the Gandhi of [Brazilian] Modernism” whose Urupês anticipates both PauBrasil and the early work of Gilberto Freyre in its quietly patriotic call for change. “You persevered and produced maybe the most effective passive resistence that one could expect from a proud, patriotic calling. Nevertheless, they crucified you for lack of patriotism!” [Jejuou e produziu, quem sabe, nesse e noutros setores a mais eficaz resistência passiva de que se possa orgulhar uma vocação patriótica. No entanto, martirizaram você por ter falta de patriotismo!] (Ponta de lança 4). Upon his arrival in New York, Monteiro Lobato was greeted by Ford’s local representative, who handed him a personal letter from Henry Ford himself in which Lobato’s hero offered the Brazilian his personal assistance—an offer that eventually led to an invitation to Detroit. “Beside Ford I am a tiny ant next to Everest,” Lobato later tells his friend Godofredo Rangel. “Could it be that an ant is somebody in these parts?” [[Eu diante do Ford sou pulga magra diante do Everest. Será que pulga tambem é gente aqui?] (A Barca de Gleyre II 303). As critic Alaor Barbosa points out, Lobato does not shy away from inserting modern objects into his children’s fiction. His collection of stories Reinações de Narizinho, for example, features an array of airplanes, trains and automobiles, as well as the appearance of the early Hollywood Western icon Tom Mix (93). The passage illustrates how Lobato often stakes out his own place in the Brazilian literary vanguard by infusing his prose with Futurist color. Futurism, according to Wilson Martins, is an aesthetic sensibility at the heart of much early Modernismo—whether as a source of emulation in its early stages, or

Notes

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

173

as a European school to be avoided in the late 1920s (O Modernismo 77). Lobato leaves little doubt as to the virtues of futurism as a technique with which to liberate Brazilian letters from the “spirit” of French literature and continental Portuguese: “Esta brincadeira de crianças inteligentes, que outra coisa não é tal movimento, vai desempenhar uma função séria em nossas letras” (“O nosso dualismo” 120). The passage echoes the preface to Lobato’s translation of Ford’s My Life and Work (1922). Ford, Lobato writes, “admits man and accepts the world as they are, experiments, and lets the facts present the most thoroughly logical, natural and human conclusion possible. He is the organic idealist” [[Ford a]dmite o homem como é, aceita o mundo como está, experimenta e deixa que os fatos tragam a solução rigorosamente lógica, natural e humana. É o idealista orgânica] (Cavalheiro 291). [A corrente perdia no globo de cristal a sua forma concentrada e visualizavase como numa projeção de cinema, reproduzindo momentos da vida futura com a exatidão que vai ter um dia] [Ficamos na posição de um espectador imóvel num ponto. Só vemos e ouvimos o que passa ao alcance dos nossos olhos ou soa ao alcance dos nossos ouvidos.] [livro que a crítica julgará ficção, embora não passe da simples verdade futura] “When, through our imagination, we evoke a little North American city pulsing with vitality and compare it to one of ours of a comparable population, a lump of despair seizes our throats. The same city, the same sky, the same continent—and always triumphant life there, and always moral lassitude here.” [Quando, por força da imaginativa, evocamos uma cidadezinha norte-americana estuante de vitalidade e a comparamos a uma nossa correspondente em população, constringe-nos a garganta um nó de desespero. A mesma idade, o mesmo ceu, o mesmo continente—e sempre a vida vitoriosa lá, e sempre o marasmo do urupé aqui] (304). [“Qual! pensei furioso comigo mesmo, quem nasceu para empregado de Sá, Pato & Cia não chegará nunca a marido da fi lha do professor Benson . . .”] [O meu modo natural de ser não tem encantos, miss Jane, é bruto, grosseiro, inábil, ingênuo.] For Heidegger (drawing from Greek etymology) the primal source of technology is akin to poiesis, in that both concepts (techne and poiesis) refer to intimate knowledge of the “bringing forth” of underlying truth (aletheia)(13). Machine-powered technology has distanced humanity from its ancient moorings, as the “revealing” function of techne has given way to the concealing essence of modern technology—the “challenging Enframing,” in Heidegger’s lexicon (27–28). That Monteiro Lobato saw a connection between technological and biological “potency” and reproduction is underscored in one of his essays on Ford. “[ . . . W]ho is there in the modern world besides Henry Ford,” he asks, “fecundating human progress with the pollen that will make tomorrow better than today and yesterday?” (“How Henry Ford is Regarded in Brazil” 3). [Atirei-me, como quem se atira à vida, e esmaguei-lhe nos lábios o beijo sem fi m de John Barrymore. E qual o raio que acende em chamas o tronco impassível, meu beijo arrancou da gelada fi lha do professor Benson a ardente mulher que eu sonhara.] [Juzgado como degradante por cualquier espíritu cultivado, ese exceso contiene sin embargo una victoria contra la represión, contra una determinada “economía” del orden, la del ahorro y la retención.]

174

Notes

29. [nos seus lindos olhos azuis vi refl etida com tamanha nitidez a pureza de sua alma que logo me envergonhei do meu ímpeto, fi lho exclusivo da ignorância] 30. [o ímpeto irresistivel do gênio humano que espoja nesta terra livre de todas as peias] 31. [O ‘bear’ exerce uma função preciosa. É quem vivifica o mercado.] 32. [é tão intenso o entusiasmo lobatiano pela América, que passa por cima dos pequenos contratempos, mal tomando conhecimento deles] 33. Though the main character’s last name is an explicit reference to Edgar Allen Poe, his fi rst name, Rolland, could well be a reference the Mexican-born actor Gilbert Rolland (né Luis Antonio Dámaso de Alonso), who began his long career in Hollywood as a Latin lover during the late silent era. Another possibility is the venerable silent and early sound star John Gilbert, a debonaire leading man from whom Gilbert Rolland had taken his screen name. By the time of XYZ’s publication, John Gilbert’s career and health were in decline, yet at the beginning of the decade he had starred in a number of fi lms alongside Greta Garbo. In Queen Christina (1933), Gilbert plays the part of an aristocratic Spanish diplomat—just the kind of refi ned dandy Palma’s Poe resembles. 34. [[e]stos falsos hombres de ciencia de la generación de hace unos treinta o cuarenta años] 35. [¿Por qué suponer imposible que los alquimistas de otros tiempos hayan fabricado el oro? ¿Por qué es demasiado extraordinario? ¿Y no estamos rodeados de lo extraordinario? ¿No es tan extraordinario poner un disco en un gramófono y esa especie de platillo de pasta o de celuloide reproduzca la voz humana? ¿Y la telegrafía sin hilos? ¿Y la televisión?] 36. [[A] medida que se ha ido avanzando en el conocimiento de las leyes biológicas y se van descorriendo los secretos íntimos de la naturaleza, y va el hombre adentrándose en el antro de misterios que parecían insondables, los horizontes se van ampliando.] 37. [antro del nigromante, una vasta sala de unos cincuenta metros cuadrados que recibía la luz cenital a través de espesos cristales ondulados que cubrían gran parte de la bóveda] 38. [La moderna orientación fragmentaria del pensamiento científico excluye cada vez más las luminosas intuiciones de la imaginación, y el avance del conocimiento nos sumerge cada vez más en los rincones del macrocosmos.] 39. [saliendo de boca de un yankee civilizado resulta una burla o una tontería] 40. [le agradezco la hospitalidad que me ofrece, y esperaré, dominando mi curiosidad, la explicación del libreto de esta película bastante rara] 41. [[S]i por acto de voluntad apabullé mis instintos animales, es también por acto de voluntad sugerido por exigencias cerebrales y no medulares que resolví hacer el amor a mi creación.] 42. [un refugio afectivo y sedante de mis preocupaciones científicas y de mis empeños experimentales [y] un amor de artificio] 43. [sus formas delicadas cuyos movimientos distinguidos y castos aristocratizaban su belleza] 44. [Todo lo que sé fría y cientificamente de estas estupendas creaciones, de estas duplicaciones artificiales del ser humano, lo olvido en cuanto estoy al frente de esta divina poupée, sí, viejo, divina, porque solo siéndolo ha podido supeditarme y hacerme olvidar la superioridad del plano que me corresponde como autor de este desconcertante fenómeno de las supervivencias marginales de la humanidad.] 45. In his short essay “The Face of Garbo,” Roland Barthes underscores the “Platonic Ideal” and sexless quality of Greta Garbo’s face, “sculpted in something

Notes

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53.

54.

175

smooth and friable, that is, at once perfect and ephemeral” (Mythologies 56). Palma’s Poe, by contrast, writes off Greta Garbo as a being too modern and sexually accessible, preferring the “chaste” aristocracy of Jeanette MacDonald instead. [la ingenua inclinación que tiene el público de todo el mundo, y muy especialmente el yankee, por lo fantástico y maravilloso] [un mago que tenía tanto de Neptuno como de un Merlin valetudinario y anacrónico] [demostraban tener las mismas superiores calidades de las otras, abriéndose así una nueva era para la industria y el arte del cine norteamericano] [esas mujeres creadas por la ciencia [ . . . h]asta artificiales son ingratas y frívolas] [por las vías del amor, se vengó el radium tomando por cómplice a Eros] The climax of XYZ is a novel reworking of the historical modalities of melodrama outlined by Martín-Barbero. If the traditional melodramic climax reveals the “primordial fidelities” [fidelidades primordiales] of kinship, often involving mysteries of paternity and lost twins, Palma adds a twist to the formula by revealing that he is the rightful, though artificial, father of the andrógenas (themselves “lost twins”). The Peruvian author thus disavows the moral anachronism of kinship typical of melodrama while not abandoning the (also anachronistic) “rhetoric of excess” (De los medios a las mediaciones 130–31). For Huyssen, the “horror of technics” was both a direct response to the atrocities of World War I and also a “a logical and historical outgrowth of the critique of technology and the positivist ideology of progress articulated earlier in the late nineteenth-century cultural radicals who in turn were strongly influenced by Nietzsche’s critique of bourgeois society” (10). The historical avant-garde, in turn, attempted to “reintegrate art and life” by “liberating” technology from bourgeois capitalism’s monopoly of its instrumentality (11). William Rowe and Vivian Schelling argue that the transition from traditional to modern culture in Latin America was articulated principally through popular theater, the newspaper, the circus, the folletín and photography (33). Notably, Rowe and Schelling neglect to mention either the cinema or the radio in their list of key transitional cultural production, although they go on elsewhere in their book to discuss both as important post-transitional expressions. I would argue, however, that both film and radio, particularly in the first three decades of the twentieth century, remain intimately linked to earlier forms and as such equally central interlocutors between vernacular culture and modernity. [se tomará como una fantasía extravagante de un retrasado Julio Verne o Wells]

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 1. [vaqueros y cowboys, bandidos mexicanos y gringos, rurales y rangers, indios yaquis o apaches, rancheros y cattlemen, fugitivos] 2. [Más que ningún otro estado fronterizo con México, California dio el primer cine norteamericano escenarios con la doble ventaja de ser a la vez exóticos y propios.] 3. [Ya vuelve el vaquero hecho cowboy—pistolero y el más macho de los machos]. According to Paredes, just as earlier constructions of U.S. masculinity, forged during the early nineteenth century out of the young nation’s democratic rejection of European (especially British) cultural models, exaggerated the rugged aspects of the North American male in the face of European

176

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

Notes geopolitical superiority, so too does the revolutionary Mexican male ostentatiously display his “macho” characteristics to distinguish himself from his technically more advanced northern neighbor. In both cases, the construction of national masculinity involves a time lag and a strategic use of nostalgia: “El macho norteamericano actúa como si el Wild West no hubiera dejado de existir; el macho se porta como si viviera en tiempos de Pancho Villa” [The North American macho acts as if the Wild West had never ceased to exist; the [Mexican] macho acts as if he lived in the times of Pancho Villa] (83). [Del enredo de las películas denigrantes, el ganador a corto plazo, México; el perdedor a largo plazo, México; porque Goliat aceptó las condiciones de David para cincharlo fuertemente.] [[S]e buscan las fisonomías abyectas y antes de que actúe el mexicano, ya el espectador lo odia, por el gesto.] [[e]sta propaganda de primer orden le daña más [a México] que una escuadra en Veracruz o un escándalo sobre el petróleo] [El cine es, hoy por hoy, una especie de silabario universal en que todos leemos el mundo [mientras] el mundo está aprendiendo el desprecio de un país, quincena a quincena.] [[su] poderío fantástico [ . . . ] desborda de sus fronteras e inunda todos los continentes imponiendo sus normas, gustos y maneras por una múltiple expansión (cinematográfica, linguística, musical, etcétera) siempre fácil y penetrante cuando la empuja una mano sagaz y cuajada de dólares] [[ . . . N]osotros, débiles, desorganizados y con el coloso a las puertas, necesitamos erguirnos en un exceptional esfuerzo inteligente, vasto, tesonero, radical, para defendernos de esa invasión pacífica que va rápidamente desvirtuando nuestras características genuinas, deformando nuestro ser esencial, empobreciendo nuestras íntimas sustancias y que acabaría por suplantar nuestra personalidad como nación para ayancarnos al punto de convertirnos en una simple prolongación de los Estados Unidos.] [[D]e la tienda semítica ha venido el sistema que nos gobierna [ . . . y] de las trincheras nos van a venir unas tablas de virtudes insospechadas.] [Un pueblo en peregrinación acaba por forjarse un concepto del bien y del mal, que no siempre coincide con el concepto del bien y el mal entre los pueblos sedentarios.] [La ausencia de la palabra comunica al cinematógrafo una capacidad indefi nida de cosmopolitismo.] As Douglas Monroy notes in his book on Mexican Los Angeles, Rebirth Rebirth, class lines between the Hollywood mexicanos de afuera—writers, intellectuals, actors, technicians and the like—and the more settled workingclass population of the city’s East Side, were fairly rigid (32). In her analysis of the gender politics of modern literary culture in Argentina, Masiello assigns a key liminal role to women who “[as outsiders] set the boundaries between intelligibility and irrationality, [defi ning] the limits between high and low cultures, between elite and popular responses [ . . . ]” (9). Like Masiello, Unruh sees popular periodicals as a crucial discursive sphere in which women intellectuals negotiated a more active role in literary culture, yet also one whose commodification of “performing” female bodies (principally through the iconic coverage of fi lm actresses and models) overshadowed print space accorded to women writers (13–15). Besides publishing a number of noteworthy essays and chronicles, El Universal Ilustrado also featured short fiction and serialized novels on cinematic themes including, among other oddities, a collection of stories written by a young Juan Bustillo Oro, later to become the director of one avant-garde

Notes

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

177

anomaly (Dos monjes, 1934) and a number of popular fi lms (e.g., Cantinflas’s classic Ahí está el detalle, 1940). [las hijas de alguna madre Eva que nosotros no podemos imaginarnos, sonrojada como una manzana de California, olorosa a cold-cream, de una Eva, en fi n, perfectamente adorable dentro de su flemático aspecto bíblico y yanqui] [esas desencantadas, que esperan en balde la llegada del pan, ya que no, por cierto, la llegada de la gloria] [una ciudad de ensueño, prestigiada por la leyenda del celuloide que había hecho de ella un nuevo Klondike, mas por otra parte resultaba una ciudad de opereta] [una ‘girl’ tan bonita como las otras ‘girls’ de las calles, de los almacenes, de los cines] [Para ella el joven ‘mexican’ le prestaba el hechizo de las cosas exóticas y para él aquella ‘flapper,’ de moral acomodaticia y rabiosa independencia, era como un deslumbramiento no presentido.] In two recent articles, J. Patrick Duffey points to a number of instances of star substitution by Mexican avant-garde writers, including Gilberto Owen’s use of Buster Keaton’s 1924 fi lm Sherlock Jr. in Novela como nube; and Arqueles Vela’s estridentista story “La Señorita Etc.,” in which the lovestruck protagonist gradually replaces his flesh-and-blood ideal woman with a “mechanized Venus” modeled after an anonymous silent fi lm star (“Las muñecas de cera y las sirenas de celuloide” 5–6) [S]ugestionados por aquel aparato emotivo, [Federico y Hazel] llegaban a substituir inconcientemente a los héroes de la pantalla con sus propios cuerpos. Él, plasmando la figura de Hazel a la silueta de la estrella, con amoroso deseo, y ella sustituyendo con el galán de la pantalla, por lo regular de una atractiva belleza masculina, a su ‘Fredy’ . . . ] For an extensive Lacanian interpretation of Puig’s work, see Roberto Echavarren Welker and Enrique Giordano’s Manuel Puig, montaje y alteridad del sujeto (Santiago, Chile: Instituto Profesional del Pacífico, 1986). “La Ferratine” bears a rather uncanny resemblance to a hair-straightening potion from the embedded narrative of O Choque das Raças—a substance which also renders users impotent in the same manner that Granados is metaphorically emasculated by sacrificing his true identity. Silvia Molloy makes an especially convincing reading of “posing” in fi n-desiècle Latin America, referring to it “not as [ . . . ] a set of bodily or textual affectations at odds with national and continental discourses and concerns from which Latin America ultimately recovers, but as an oppositional practice within those very discourses and concerns” (“The Politics of Posing” 184). The Latin lover is not alone in clothing the dandy in ethnic garb during the 1920s. In a fascinating article, Monica Miller proposes that the black dandy of the Harlem Renaissance be situated alongside women as modernism’s “other ‘other’” (184). [En el fondo guardaba una inmensa compasión por ese fantoche viviente, en quien descubriera verdadero talento y, ¡oh paradoja!, una vigorosa personalidad.] [algunas veces producimos este tipo, pero siempre lo exportamos apresuradamente] [más por ejercitar las galanuras de su léxico que por atender al imperativo de la masculinidad; imperativo que, al parecer, no estaba en él muy desarrollado, si hemos de creer a los que le aplicaban el denigrante epíteto de andrógino]

178

Notes

30. Interestingly—and ironically—González’ second Hollywood novel Hollywood Nights [Noches de Hollywood] (1934) refers to the underlying veracity of The Dancer from the Blue Pond’s fictional license. Paco, in particular, is singled out as a Colombian poet who eventually served out a jail sentence in San Quentin for bouncing checks (Hollywood Nights 126). 31. When Edgar Rice Burroughs fi rst proposed the idea of a Hollywood novel— what would turn out to be The Girl from Hollywood (1923)—his editor reacted negatively, citing Harry Leon Wilson’s Merton at the Movies (1922), an early literary take on Hollywood that did not sell particularly well. Sodom and Gomorrah happens to be the title of a popular 1935 exposé on Hollywood written by Max Knepper. The text stands as a testament to the ethos of moral intolerance codified by Hollywood itself several years earlier in the Hays Code (1930), which sought to curb on-screen sex and violence, but also led to the increasing marketability of such lurid tabloid fictionalizations of the Film Mecca, as long as they were accompanied by moral censure. 32. [Alguna vez dijiste en México que soñabas con un amor puro . . . ¿Se ha desvanecido ya . . . ese sueño.] 33. [clásica por la pureza de sus líneas y modernista por el humano vigor de su expresión] 34. [Así funciona la dialéctica del arquetipo femenino: cuando el hombre es inocente la mujer lo tienta con su carne. Pero cuando en el hombre prende la lujuria, la hembra debe ser dulce y comprensiva. Cuando la fiebre pecaminosa consume al macho, allí está la virgen para calmarlo; pero si la fría lo tiene aturdido, una hembra lo ha de despertar.] 35. [Le pareció hermosa, claro está; convino en que su tipo fascinaba; vio que sus ojos eran de un azul purísimo; infi rió que su pelo portaba un dorado tinte de legitimidad; aceptó que su talle tenía cimbreos de palmera bajo la salvaje caricia de un simún; convino en que su juventud alejaba toda sospecha de mistificación, pero, no obstante . . . decidió que no podía compararse con la beldad latina de sus sueños.] 36. [pululaban en promiscuo hermanaje las blondas de Hollywood y las brunettes de Manila, al par que los salvajes—legítimos o apócrifos—traídos del corazón de la floresta] 37. In The Savage in the Mirror [El salvaje en el espejo], Bartra argues that ancient constructions of the savage—which include mythical “semi-beasts” such as Satyrs and Maenads—precede descriptions of the barbarian (22). The image of Amazons, on the other hand, appears to have been constructed from local (Greek) models of women and exported to an imaginary site on the margins of civilization (23). 38. [[s]e deja arrastrar como un autómata hacia la vorágine del placer desconocido—mientras más desconocido más anhelado] 39. [Una mexicana rubia, de ojos azules, doblemente exótica, volvía probables muchos asuntos que, de otro modo, para una mexicana morena–para una mexicana normal—, hubiesen sido difíciles] 40. [Una biografía cambiante, ficticia siempre, la esperaba al pie de cada retrato en la primera plana de cada periódico. El Chicago Star la hizo descender de Cuauhtemoc. No le importaron sus ojos azules. El Judge, de Los Angeles, le dio como cuna el claro de un bosque. Su padre, a juicio del Moon, de Filadelfia, no la había engendrado: la había adoptado.] 41. See in particular The Dehumanization of Art [La deshumanización del arte] (1925) and The Revolt of the Masses [La rebelión de las masas] (1930). 42. Duffey systematically analyzes the use of such cinematic effects as montage, flashback, cross-cut and jump-cut in pieces like Novo’s El joven (1928), Villaurrutia’s Dama de corazones (1928) and Torres Bodet’s Margarita de

Notes

43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53. 54.

179

niebla (1927), not to mention the works of prominent writers not directly associated with the group such Martín Luis Guzmán’s La sombra del caudillo and Mariano Azuela’s El desquite (1925) and La luciérnaga (1926). In Duffey’s view, each cinematic technique employed achieved a specific literary effect associated with the avant-garde: “Montage effects captured the neurasthenia of the era; back projection reflected an enthusiasm for forms of rapid transit; flashbacks, chase scenes, switchbacks and jump cuts manipulated the fragmentation of time typical of all avant-garde arte” [Los montajes capturaban la neurastenia de la época; las proyecciones de fondo reflejaban su entusiasmo por las formas veloces de transporte; los fl ashbacks, las escenas de persecución, los montajes alternos y los saltos (jump cuts), manipulaban el tiempo en la forma fragmentada característica de todo el arte vanguardista] (48–49). [Ansiosas de sumergirla en ese baño de ‘color local’–mexicano al ciento por ciento—, la privaban de todas las delicias, de todas las costumbres que habían constituído para ella su patriotismo: su ambiente propio, la religiosidad de su madre, el clima de su provincia discreta, la canción de su México indescriptible. Le daban un rebozo, una jícara. ¡A ella, que pedía siempre en las tiendas los sombreros más europeos!] [¿Cómo se puede ser mexicana? Piedad lo era, preciosamente. Pero lo era a su modo, íntimo, tierno, superfluo; por eso mismo infalsificable [ . . . ] No era una mexican curios [sic]. En su organismo, la vena mexicana corría por otros sitios, sutiles, donde los norteamericanos no la buscaban.] [[U]na cara, una nariz, una frente, lo que entiende hasta un niño, su inteligencia los ignoraba. Le parecían mensajes cifrados. No conocía la clave para leerlos.] [Ciertos datos–los que más interesan—no figuran nunca en los libros.] [En el hermético mundo de la cultura que Enrique mismo se había forjado, como una brisa candente–quién sabe por qué puerta, por qué ventana—, estaba entrando la vida.] [[L]a sombra que amaba correspondía, punto por punto, con la existencia de un cuerpo indiscutible, sólido, justo, capaz de odios, cicatrices, de sufrimientos, célebre en Hollywood.] [Lo que [a Enrique] le hacía falta no era, pues, la verdad fotográfica, sino, al contrario, una amistosa penumbra, una vaga confidencia, el principio de otra mentira.] [Fuera del cine, el semblante de Piedad no tenía ningún escollo. Se leía de corrido. No existían en él las dudas, los recelos, los mil menudos meandros y subterfugios [ . . . ]. Ni una arruga. Ni una falta de ortografía disimulada. Todo estaba expresado allí limpiamente, sin circunloquios, con letras de molde, como en el telégrafo. Todo. Desde la fecha hasta la firma. De las sienes hasta la boca.] [Acostumbrada a bailar, a besar, a llorar en el seno de una tramposa naturaleza (volcanes de cartón, canarios mecánicos, noches de luna con reflectores), la lealtad de aquel parque la enternecía. Por primera vez, el cielo, las nubes, eran nubes, cielo de verdad. Ningún equipo de tramoyistas vendría a cambiarlos de sitio, dentro de veinte minutos, para disponer la escena de otra película. [ . . . ] Todo cuanto escuchaba, miraba y olía, todo cuanto hubiese podido tocar, todo, todo era auténtico.] [[ . . . V]eía en él, bruscamente, lo que tal vez él mismo no descubriera en el espejo más luminoso: el perfil de un muchacho de México.] I would like to thank Érica Arcega for her assistance in translating this corrido. [ahora es tiempo, camaradas, de pelear con muchas ganas / que les vamos a “avanzar” hasta las americanas]

180

Notes

55. [El sentido de hombría abandona las formas folklóricas para encontrar cabida en el cine [y] otros medios de comunicación de masa.]

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 1. [El clown inglés representa el máximo grado de la evolución del payaso. Está lo más lejos posible de esos payasos bulliciosos, excesivos, estridentes, mediterráneos, que estamos acostumbrados a encontrar en los circos viajeros errantes.] 2. An indication of Chaplin’s evolution toward a more conservative approach is the rerelease of The Gold Rush in 1942. In addition to a soundtrack that Chaplin himself wrote, the later version of the fi lm excludes the passionate kiss at the end between the Prospector (Chaplin) and his love interest, played by Georgia Hale (AFI Catalog of Silent Films). 3. Herlinghaus’s examination of anachronistic narrative is reminiscent of Foucault’s concept of temporal heterotopic spaces, or “heterochronies,” marked either by “a sort of perpetual and indefi nite accumulation of time in an immobile place” or “time in its most fleeting, transitory, precarious aspect,” as in seasonal fairs or festivals (“Texts/Contexts: Of Other Spaces” 377). 4. [O teatro nacional, como muita historia nossa, não é nacional] 5. [el público movible, capaz de trasladarse a remolque de la anécdota por todos los caminos de la acción] 6. [Todo lo que la palabra no puede explicar por sí misma—limitada como está a la expresión oral de los conceptos—el cine lo sugiere con una imagen o una sucesión.] 7. [[El cine] es el maravilloso sucedáneo del sueño para el hombre moderno, que ya apenas tiene tiempo de soñar en el dormir profundo que sigue a la agotadora actividad del día.] 8. [Vemos onde poder chegar o cinema e como ele deve ser. The Kid é integral, harmónico com a época.”] 9. [Charles Chaplin es, en el cinema, lo que Beethoven en la música y Monet en la pintura; un creador, un innovador, un revolucionario [cuyas] películas [ . . . ] se salen de todos los procedimientos y formulas de la cinematografía, procedimientos y fórmulas que, por desgracia, vienen repitiéndose indefi nidamente.] 10. Valdés Rodríguez cannily explains away the enthusiastic critical reception of Grand Hotel by insisting that the Hollywood product had so deteriorated that even a “mediocre” sound fi lm was able to provoke exaggerated praise: “In the last few years Hollywood’s contribution to cinematic art has been so poor, so conventional and conformist in form and content, and we have grown accustomed to its banality and stupidity to such an extent, that all it takes is a modest effort such a Grand Hotel to garner rave reviews from critics, and violent protests from a public roused from its stupor” [Es tan pobre el aporte de Hollywood, desde hace algunos años, al arte cinematográfico, y tan convencional y conformista su obra en lo formal y en el contenido, y estamos de tal modo acostumbrados a su banalidad y estupidez, que basta un intento tan leve como el de Grand Hotel para arrancar a la crítica elogios entusiastas y al público, sacado de su somnolencia, protestas violentas] (29). 11. [Charlot no habla y la interpretación de Chaplin sigue así dentro de la mejor tradición pantomímica.] 12. Valdés Rodríguez in fact dedicates a lengthy article in Social to montage theory and Eisenstein (“El montaje cinematográfico y Eisenstein,” May 1932). Though little more than a recapitulation of Eisenstein’s ideas, the article

Notes

13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

181

bespeaks the impact Soviet theory was beginning to have on Latin American fi lm criticism in the early 1930s. [El clown inglés no constituye un tipo, sino más bien una institución, tan respetable al menos como la cámara de los lores. El arte del clown significa el domesticamiento de la bufonería salvaje y nómade del bohemio, según el gusto y las necesidades de una refi nada sociedad capitalista.] [La tragedia de Chaplin, el humorismo de Chaplin, obtienen su intensidad de un íntimo confl icto entre el artista y Norteamérica. La salud, la energía, el elán de Norteamérica retienen y excitan al artista; pero su puerilidad burguesa, su prosaísmo arribista, repugnan al bohemio, romántico en el fondo.] In reference to The Gold Rush, Mariátegui compares Chaplin to Dumas and Cervantes before concluding that “[a]rtistically, spiritually, [the fi lm] today surpasses the theater of Pirandello and the novel of Proust and Joyce” [Artística, espiritualmente [la película] excede, hoy, el teatro de Pirandello y a la novela de Proust y de Joyce] (170). [[Chaplin es] un verdadero tipo de élite, para todos los que no olividarnos que élite quiere decir electa.] Buster Keaton, while praising Chaplin as “at his best [ . . . ] the greatest comedian who ever lived,” also distinguishes the Little Tramp from his own screen persona: “There was, to me, a basic difference from the start: Charlie’s tramp was a bum with a bum’s philosophy. Lovable as he was, he would steal if he got the chance. My little fellow was a working man and honest” (cited in Robinson 132). [[E]l circo criollo hace el puente que une la tradición narrativa inserta en el folletín con la puesta en escena de los cómicos ambulantes.] [La novela-folletín que se hace teatro continúa en el circo no sólo porque la emisión radial difunde una obra que se representa a la vista del público, sino porque las compañías de actores que hacen el radioteatro viajan por las provincias permitiendo a la gente “ver lo que escucha.”] In her book The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top, Janet M. Davis describes an analogous process in the United States. The circus—and especially the train circus—was instrumental in paving the way for Hollywood fi lm, radio and television. “Like vaudeville, amusement parks, world’s fairs, and the nascent movie industry, the railroad circus was an essential component of a burgeoning [U.S.] mass culture” (34). [[ . . . ] o sea el zarandeado, el vapuleado, el que recibe los golpes, el ‘ausente,’ el insensible. Clown, en cambio, lleva más la idea de la patanería, la imagen del paleto.”] In the contemporary Brazilian circus, Fernando Bolognesi writes, one of the more prominent “mimic clowns” is Kuxixo, whose tramp-like appearance and refi ned gestures clearly bear the influence of Chaplin nearly one hundred years after the Little Tramp fi rst graced the silver screen (95–96). Bakhtin, in Rabelais and His World, argues that Romanticism introduces “a private, ‘chamber’ character” to previous manifestations of the grotesque. This “subjective grotesque” or “individual carnival” marked 19th century literature in particular (36–37). The nineteenth century circus’s isolation of the clown—and later the even more “staged” grotesque of the music hall and fi nally silent comedy—can be seen as extra-literary examples of such an evolution of the carnivalesque. After announcing the week prior to the party that “Piolim will be treated lavishly to/eaten lavishly for lunch by the Clube de Antropofagia, which will thus launch its new menu” [Piolim sera vastamente almoçado pelo Clube de Antropofagia, que assim inaugura o seu menu], the pranksterish

182 Notes

25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39.

antropófagos reported on their antics the following week: “Everything put on our plates was chewed thoroughly, then we washed him down with rum” [Mastigou-se bem tudo o que foi posto nos pratos, e bebeu-se pinga como aperitivo [ . . . ]] (Revista de Antropofagia 2.1 (March 24, 1929) and 2.2 (March 31, 1929)). [[A] comicidade de Piolim evoca na gente uma entidade, um ser [ . . . ] que nós todos profundamente sentimos em nós, nas nossas indecisões e gestos contadictórios.] [Le masque de Charlie Chaplin, mime anglo-américain, est d’une étrange latinité.] [Chaplin [ . . . ] es una criatura del teatro, y no hay teatro sin una “taquilla” en frente. Pero en el studio de Chaplin existe—con más realidad que un ningún hombre—un hombre del pueblo, un cockney, un gitano, un amigo del music-hall, que mira a los ojos del mundo, como en un espejo, para mirarse a sí mismo más objetiva y exactamente.] [El rostro de Chaplin—esa fi na máscara un poco melancólica, en la que intervienen elementos de latinidad y que iluminan dos claras pupilas soñadoras—cómo expresa todos los matices de la vida, cómo traduce todos los sentimientos y todas las emociones.] [La intención de Chaplin está ya en los ovarios de las madres contemporáneas” [ . . . ] Los bebés dicen Chaplin y se orinan. En Virginia, para que los niños se queden dormidos les dan teta y Chaplin.] [En el Cantábrico hay peces a las siete de la noche que se parecen a Chaplin. [ . . . ] Los niños engordan demasiado viendo a Chaplin.] [Todos guardamos algún parecido con Chaplin. Yo encuentro que mi ombligo es mi infancia y Chaplin.] [Chaplin sabe [ . . . ] que las puertas de la burguesía sólo se abren por dentro.] [El jacquet de Chaplin tiene el llanto del Romanticismo como marca de fábrica.] [Chaplin debería manufacturarse. Y así como se compra una villa o un automóvil, se debería comprar Chaplin. [ . . . ] El patetismo de Chaplin está inspirado en los maniquíes de las sastrerías pobres.] [El arte Nuevo ha dado su tipo en Charlot. El tiempo antiguo, salido del medioevo, dio al nervioso Hamlet. Con él se realiza fisiológicamente la mentalidad nerciosa [sic] en oposición al temperamento clásico, griego. Los latinos y la revolución francesa no dieron sino a bufones y títeres. Chaplin encarna la contraria del bufón, y en idea revolucionaria: su libertad. Con él principia en la historia la eliminación del hombre grotesco que es la figura del juglar. Chaplin muestra a veces—como a través de rayos X: en blanco y negro terribles,—su esqueleto, mas no lo rabelesiano, tudesco y epidérmico de la carne tatuada, que era la técnica pirata y primitiva del juglar.] In his book Literature, Amusement and Technology in the Great Depression, Solomon analyses the ways in which Henry Miller and other 1930s U.S. writers celebrate the technological mediation of grotesque imagery. Solomon calls Miller’s work “a striking example of [ . . . ] a genuinely regenerative, albeit masochistic approach to the rapprochement of bodies and machines” (9). [Sus mismos zapatos no son más que los coturnos griegos ennegrecidos, humanizados por un largo y sudoroso peregrinaje mediterráneo.] [En [Charlot], lo único cuerdo, lógico, es su bastoncito que es una especie de Sancho adelgazado por un riguroso régimen vegetariano.] [la estrepitosa metrópolis del dollar, donde el dolor del patético vagabundo era una nota aguda y pintoresca]

Notes

183

40. [Notó que los edificios tenían ahora para él otra perspectiva, eran algo así como construcciones de líneas rectas, donde sobraban los cubos. Además, el cielo auténtico era adaptado y arbitrario, cual si hubiese sido hecho de antemano por artistas cinematográficos.] 41. [No eran sólo cosas de libros de caballería las que exaltaban la razón de su sin razón, sino algo que sólo sabe percibir el hondo sentido heroico del alma, liberada de la limitación humana.] 42. [Los sueños de los limbanos son como los cielos de algodón y de cartón pintado de los Estudios de Cinelandia.] 43. [quizás purgando su pecado de amor a la isla, ahora en las buenas manos del Gendarme del Caribe] 44. Rodríguez’s ventriloquist act gains further standing through the agency of the puppet maker, Chaplin himself. Such prestige is revealed in Carlitos’s travels in the Inferno, when the “political fauna” of the world feel compelled to treat Charlie with deference out of respect to his “creator” (88). 45. [Norteamérica [ . . . ] no ama a Chaplin. Los gerentes de Hollywood, como bien se sabe, lo estiman subversivo, antagónico.] 46. [autor y actor de su propia máscara y con la lúcida intuición de la tragi-comedia vieja y moderna del hombre, es todavía el que busca el sentido armonioso de la vida en el torvo reino de Calibán.] 47. [é preciso romper urgentemente a surdez coletiva, despertar do sono de morte o sentido da solidariedade e da fraternidade entre os homens.] 48. [Luis Felipe Rodríguez, hermano distante y cercano de Charles Chaplin, es un hombre que viene de ayer [ . . . ]] 49. [Sobre las pupilas de Charlot descansa una nubecilla tenue y generosa [que] la impide la visión cruel y le muestra las cosas en una vaguedad que es eterna promesa de cambio y rectificación. [ . . . ] Cuando la nubecilla se licue, Charlot morirá, como Don Quijote, de ver claro, de ver como los demás hombres.] 50. [Hombre triste, con su sonrisa femenina, encarna psíquicamente todo el misterio que encerramos nosotros, hijos de un hombre y de una mujer.] 51. [Miserias, golpes, persecuciones, robos, minero. Charlie sólo vive en contacto con las capas sociales más pobres.] 52. [Nosotros lo vemos, comprendemos lo doloroso de esa situación; lo poco que se necesitaría para remediarla.] 53. Cinefan’s ideological positions are consistent with Marinello’s. Despite consulting a number of pseudonym dictionaries and other resources, however, I have been unable, regrettably, to prove or disprove this hypothesis on Cinefan’s true identity. 54. [No olvidamos que un ruso, por muy comunista que sea, no deja que ser un ruso; es decir, un hombre de características extrínseca e intrínsicamente distintas de las nuestras, que no puede interpretar como nosotros lo interpretamos el genio auténtico del gran mímico inglés. Chaplin resulta tan ininteligible para un eslavo como el más grande de los trágicos para un individuo de mentalidad e ideología latinas.] 55. Rae Beth Gordon, Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2001) 56. [Cheio de sugestões alimentícias, matas a fome/dos que não foram chamados à ceia celeste/ou industrial [ . . . ]] 57. [Não há muitos jantares no mundo, já sabias, e os mais belos frangos / são protegidos em prato / chineses por vidros espessos. / Há sempre o vidro, e não se quebra, / há o aço, o amianto, a lei, há milícias inteiras protegendo o frango [ . . . ]] 58. [o incapaz de propriedade, o pé/ errante, a estrada fugindo [ . . . ]]

184 Notes 59. [Há o trabalho em ti, mas caprichoso / mas benigno, / e dele surgem artes não burguesas, / produtos de ar e lágrimas [ . . . ]] 60. [La sonrisa de Charlie Chaplin la siento salida de la infancia de mis crespos, de mi primera manera de ser en el mundo.] 61. Early French fi lm theory, from which Latin American writers of the 1920s and 1930s drew heavily, tended to emphasize the concept of photogenie over the oniric; and subsequent psychoanalytic theory has intensively re-examined the connection between cinema and dreams fi rst explored by French cinematic impressionism. Jean-Louis Baudry, for example, applies Freud’s notion of dreams as “normal hallucinatory psychosis” to the fi lm medium, arguing that the “simulation apparatus” of cinema offers “an artificial psychosis” defi ned by the reality effect without being shackled to it (775–76). 62. The Ku Klux Klan would be used to similar effect years later by Pablo Neruda in his poem “El viento sobre Lincoln,” from Canto general. 63. “Charlot [ . . . ] advances, retreats, jumps, crouches, charges, unleashes flurries of punches with his weak arms, slips away; whether straight on or from behind, he repeatedly nails the too-easy target of his defeated enemy’s bulk” [Charlot [ . . . ] avanza, retrocede, salta, se agacha, embiste, acciona con sus débiles brazos, se escabulle; y unas veces delante y otras detrás, menudea sus golpes precisos en la mole demasiado aparente de su enemigo en derrota] (127–28). 64. [Antes que los intelectuales del mundo, que los críticos y ensayistas dieran cuenta de que existía Charles Chaplin, las empleadas, los barredores de calle y la gente inculta se reían con las gracias y pantomimas de Chaplin. [ . . . ] Y [años más tarde] los cines se llenaron de hombres y mujeres con afanes intelectuales que deseaban descubrir tal o cual detalle genial en la figura del Chaplin. Detalles que más tarde propagarían por el mundo en zendos articulotes desmedidos de elogios y fanfarronería fi losófica.] 65. [todos estos halagos llegaron a oídos de Chaplin, y él contribuyó para que continuara esta ráfaga de entusiasmo]

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 1. [El resultado es una crónica que no saca al lector de la dimensión de la realidad de los hechos sino que introduce en ese plano un modo de percepción que lo mitologiza y la confiere transcendencia sin perder el equilibrio referencial.] 2. [La divulgación [ . . . ] pretende pasar del lenguaje cifrado del especialista al habla popular y la comprensión creciente por la masa de los “secretos” del mensaje cinematográfico, mediante un proceso de transcodificación del saber técnico y cultural “reservado” a la highcult y al sordo díalogo entre realizadores, críticos y especialistas.] 3. [inyectando allí de alguna manera el saber revolucionario, el análisis crítico, la desmitificación de ídolos y estereotipos [ . . . ]] 4. [Con ilustraciones de sus puntos más interesantes. Cómo se hacen las películas. Entrevistas a los artistas, con retratos y anécdotas, etc., etc] 5. “[Los Angeles es] una ciudad de lujo y de ensueño, donde alternan los palacios de ostentosa arquitectura con las casonas antiguas que aún conservan la huella española [ . . . ]” (10). 6. [[T]odo ese prestigio creado por la imaginación se desvanece: la magia ha desaparecido, la fascinación ya no ejerce su misterioso poder, y el “studio,” el “set,” los artistas y la “estrella” misma pasan a ser cosas vulgares de la vida que se desliza inconsciente como las aguas de un río.]

Notes

185

7. [¿Cómo puede ser [esta señora] “Spanish” siendo rubia?] 8. [[E]l primer ensayo de película para público de habla española resultó tan malo que toda la gente, aun cuando no entienda el inglés, prefiere las películas que se encontraron.] 9. [Parece que los latinos no saben actuar con la despreocupación con que lo hacen los norteamericanos; hablan tan afectadamente que dan ganas de . . . oír mejor películas habladas en inglés.”] 10. One executive wrote anonymously in the trade journal Film Mercury, “We are following, after a few cautious steps, a campaign strategy which is very simple; we are buying [sound] theaters in the capitals and in the important cities fi rst; from there we will spread out everywhere” (cited in Crafton 423). 11. [Hay gentes dispuestas a besarle los pies a la Paramount por su ‘galantería’ de exhibirnos películas habladas en español, pero es preciso de que el público se entere que no es galantería sino negocio.] 12. Argentina and Chile did not lag far behind Mexico and Spain. Besides Carlos Gardel, who became the centerpiece of Paramount’s Joinville (France) versions, the German-born, Chilean-raised Argentine José Bohr was probably the most successful actor of the Spanish-language productions. According to Zouroff, the “true victims” were Latin Americans from smaller countries, who found themselves “in a deplorable minority” (115). 13. [los hispano-americanos no hablaban el idioma con la pureza requerida en una obra de arte] 14. The “beautiful, stupendous” Brazilian actress Lia Torá was considered by Zouroff the best actress of the Spanish-language productions (129; 131). 15. [Los sajones miran a los hispanos con profundo desprecio; esto sólo puede apreciarse habiendo vivido entre ellos; nos consideran seres inferiores, porque no tenemos ciertas cualidades que ellos poseen y que los hacen preponderar en el mundo; no aceptan que tengamos nuestra propia cultura, nuestra psicología y nuestros ideales [ . . . ].] 16. [[Q]uiero solamente hacer comprender a cada hispano que lea este libro, la responsibilidad que le cabe, como individuo de raza española, de defender el idioma que ha recibido junto con las tradiciones gloriosas de un pueblo que dominó al mundo y que impuso su lengua y sus costumbres a veinte naciones.] 17. Both Paulo Antônio Paranaguá and Octavio Getino have acknowledged that the rise of Mexican and Argentine industries in the mid-1930s was due in no small part to the spectacular failure of the Hollywood Spanish talkies, which Getino describes as “a hybrid without popular repercussion, badly executed [ . . . ]” [un híbrido sin repercusión popular; malamente resuelto] (Cine y dependencia 35). Paranaguá, however, emphasizes the peculiar local conditions in Mexico and Argentina that enabled these countries to gain an early foothold in sound cinema: in Mexico’s case, its proximity to Hollywood and the sheer numbers of writers, actors and technicians with experience in popular fi lm; in Argentina’s case, the national audience’s predisposition to tango musicals fi rst cultivated, he argues, during the silent fi lm era, at which time foreign pictures routinely had live-band accompaniment and therefore an “Argentine” soundtrack. As for the rest of Latin America, Paranaguá writes, the 1930s were characterized by wasted opportunity: “With the advent of sound, cinema choked, stuttered or went mute in Latin America. Compared to the introduction of the cinematic apparatus at the end of the nineteenth century, a deep discrepancy arose between the forced amateurism characterizing the work of Latin American fi lmmakers, and the changes imposed by a powerful industry that figured out how to grow under the

186

18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

Notes stimulus of the crisis.” [Com o advento do som, o cinema engasgou, gaguejou ou emudeceu na América Latina, durante uma década. Em comparação com a introdução do cinematógrafo em fi ns do século XIX, pesou a defasagem entre o esforçado artesanato que catereriza a atividade dos cineastas latinoamericanos, em relação às mutações impostas por uma poderosa indústria que soube crescer sob o estímulo da crise] (41). Páginas de cine (Buenos Aires: Archivo General de La Nación, 2004). The title of the book is a reference to one of several stars Olivari mentions, William Powell, whom he describes as “a dirty man in the world’s eyes, holding a deck of cards in his left hand resting sadly on the tablecloth. His right hand no doubt covers the hole in his flesh left by a bullet . . .” [Un hombre sucio ante la opinión del mundo, con una baraja en la mano izquierda, dejada caer melancólicamente sobre el tablete. Su mano derecha taponará el agujero que en su carne le hizo una bala . . . ](56). [la ‘baby’ de mi conciencia de gaviero en los muelles de San Francisco, condenado al periodismo en Buenos Aires, por un destino grotesto] [como si [les] vendieran bolsas de porotos o latas de carne conservada] Calki’s articles about Hollywood were later collected in the book The Sacred Monsters of Hollywood [Los monstruos sagrados de Hollywood] (1957). Saslavsky later wrote about his experiences in Hollywood in the memoir The Studios Cried by Night [Las fábricas lloraban de noche] (1983). [Nunca supuse que estas notas mías, escritas al correr de la pluma, con inquieto ritmo periodístico, llegaran a publicarse en libro . . . De haberlo imaginado, habría puesto más atención, y las preocupaciones de la forma, seguramente, les hubieran quitado la frescura que brinda el descuido.] [[Chas de Cruz es un] periodista con una sensación de minusvalía [que] se empecina en ser un ‘escritor’ aunque tenga que hacer concesiones al oficio frívolo de croniqueur.] [A lo lejos, un decorado simula a la perfección el patio interior de una cárcel. Innúmeras celdas de cartón, con gruesas cerraduras imitadas toscamente, contribuyen a basamentar la ilusión de un momento y a dar visos de realidad al escenario; pero al llevar la vista a la parte posterior, adviértense delgadas vigas de madera, colocadas a guisa de pilones, que ponen la ficción al descubierto, y se experimenta un confuso sentimiento de vergüenza ante la ingenuidad puesta en evidencia [ . . . ].] [ningún campo es más propicio al engaño que un ‘studio’ cinematográfico] [[E]n lugar de crear sus fórmulas en misteriosos gabinetes, lo hacen en amplios y luminosos pabellones bañados por el espléndido sol de California]. [Los yanquis, más que magos del cine, son artífices de la publicidad]. [[Las películas] dejan de ser la resultante de una alquimia ultraterrena, para convertirse en la de una labor organizada, metodizada, expuesta a las contingencias de inconvenientes mecánicos . . . ¡Y el cinematógrafo, de misterioso gabinete de leyenda, cuyos secretos son privativos de los iniciados, se transforma en fábrica, con la terrible elocuencia prosaica del vocablo!] [Mi amor propio de repórter sufrió un duro revés, pero mayor fue el fracaso del políglota en ciernes que llevo dentro]. [enamoradizos y audaces, al menos epistolarmente] [En este momento, ser argentino, no es una recomendación en Hollywood. Nuestro acento no satisface a directores y productores y más de un compatriota ha perdido un papel por ello.] [que soy argentino, no solamente por mi carta de ciudadanía, sino por mi corazón] Bohr’s subsequent career cast further doubt on his emphatic claim to argentidad. Soon after his interview with Chas de Cruz, Bohr left Hollywood for

Notes

34. 35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

43.

187

Mexico, not Argentina, later directing and producing a number of fi lms in Chile as well. [Y como puede comprobarlo el lector, soy una tumba [ . . . ] una tumba abierta] Interestingly, Borges wonders whether the substitution of voices could lead to the “dubbing” of bodies as well. “When will the system be perfect? When will we see Juana González directly, in the role of Greta Garbo, in the role of Queen Christina of Sweden? [¿Cuando será perfecto el sistema? ¿Cuándo veremos directamente a Juana González, en el papel de Greta Garbo, en el papel de la Reina Cristina de Suecia?] (73, footnote). In a sense, of course, Borges’ dubbing/doubling fantasy had already been attempted in the 1930s with the foreign-language versions of popular Hollywood fi lms, including Garbo’s Queen Christina (1933). “The star system,” deCordova writes, “has functioned to ‘fi ll in’ the lack that constitutes the cinematic signifier and thus to elicit a sense of fullness and presence (however imaginary and fleeting) in place of the absence that is the inevitable consequence of the cinematic apparatus” (146). In contemporaneous Cinearte chronicles, Guilherme claimed to have published Scandal in installments in the Beverly Hills–based literary journal Rob Wagner’s Script. My archival research, however, has turned up no confi rmation of such serialized work, and it appears more likely, in spite of the Brazilian director’s assertion to the contrary, that Guilherme adapted his script loosely on Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun’s novel Sult (1890), published in English as Hunger and today widely regarded as an important early work of psychological modernism. This hypothesis has been put forth by at least one other scholar (Filmografía brasileira 113). In its website, the Cinemateca Brasileira lists George W. Richter as the director of the fi lm (“Hunger”). The Cinearte pieces appear split on the matter. On one occasion Richter is indeed claimed as the fi lm’s director (“Fome vem ahi” 32); yet other references point to Guilherme himself, an assertion later confi rmed by Adhemar Gonzaga, coeditor and publisher of Cinearte, who also played a supporting role in Guilherme’s fi lm (Gonzaga por ele mesmo 85). In light of such confl icting reports, it is best to assume Richter and Guilherme codirected the picture. [[ . . . A]udaz e inteligente como é, Olympio devia ter aprendido, por força, a linguagem cinematográfica dos americanos.] This tentative conclusion is based on research undertaken at the archives of the Cinemateca Brasileira and the Museu Lasar Sagall (São Paulo) as well as the Cinemateca of the Museum of Modern Art (Rio de Janeiro); and online consultations of the archives of the American Film Institute (AFI) and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), as well as various library databases. In an interview later in his life, Guilherme conceded that the very last of his personal savings were invested in the fi lm (Prado, page unmarked). Only some fi fteen years later would Italian neorealist directors Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica develop a coherent approach to fi lmmaking incorporating ideas apparently put into practice avant la lettre by Guilherme. The practice of mixing actors with “oblivious” extras, however, dates back to the very origins of fi lm comedy. Chaplin himself routinely resorted to this technique in his early shorts—often with hilarious results. [O efeito é sempre maravilhoso—pela naturalidade extraordinária com que todos se movimentam nas cenas. Mas às vezes tal método oferece dificuldades intransponíveis. Eis porque, até hoje, ninguém se atreveu a produzir uma película seguindo à risca, como eu segui, a formidável escola de Pudowkin.] In this essay, fi rst published in Amauta, Mariátegui cites popular forms such as pantomime, the English music hall, and the circus as crucial anteced-

188

44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

Notes ents both to Chaplin’s work and the cinema generally. Clown pantomime, Mariátegui writes, “es el origen del arte cinematográfico, mudo por excelencia, a pesar del empeño de hacerlo hablar” (171). [Os americanos estão matando o cinema. Vamos salvá-lo. Vamos fazer o nosso . . . ] [O cinema americano, [ . . . ] num trabalho que foi mais rápido do que se poderia julgar, está vencendo sobre a própria natureza, uniformizando, de um modo barbaramente igual, a expressão fisionômica do mundo.] [Tudo artificial, tudo falso, feito de papel cartão. Tudo automático, sem vontade, mecanicamente, insensivelmente]. [Fox, naturalmente, lendo o que sobre Fome a imprensa dizia, entusiasmada pelo meu recente triunfo, encorajada por essa vitória pessoal que ainda estava molhada da tinta dos jornais—a Fox, afi nal, arrependida e boa, se convencera de que eu poderia bem ser alguma coisa mais do que simples figurante—e eis a prova!] The advertisement for Hunger was placed more than a week before it was to screen at the Teatro México, and it appeared only once. Another (Mexican) fi lm ended up being advertised for the night Guilherme’s fi lm was to have premiered. Because Hunger did not appear anywhere else in La Opinión, either in the weeks leading up to October 10 or in the weeks that followed, one can only assume that the picture never debuted as advertised. It is apparent from Cinearte’s review of the fi lm, moreover, that Guilherme used intertitles, suggesting that at least parts of the fi lm lacked either dialogue or sound entirely. In some ways, Guilherme’s ambivalence about Hollywood reflects Cinearte’s vacillation between high and popular registers. On the other hand, the journal actively promoted Brazilian cinema and criticized Hollywood conventions. According to one of its publishers, Mário Behring, however, Cinearte also functioned as “the natural intermediary between Brazilian consumer markets and North American producers” [o natural intermediario entre os mercados consumidores brasileiros e o productor norte-americano] (Salles Gomes 319). [Se Olympio [ . . . ] escrevesse [sua ideía] numa revista talvez fosse uma página de interessante literatura]. [A formação dos tipos foi o primeiro passo para a estandardização do cinema. Os castings são museus onde os tipos se catalogam, em ordem alfabética, com um número, uma ficha e um retrato.] [a cópia fidelíssima de um sujeitinho moreno que conhecera no Rio, vivendo em Copacabana à custa de uma chilena, ex-prima-dona de opereta, já velhusca] Guilherme writes lucidly about Gralha’s dubious status in Hollywood. “In the complicated hierarchy of Cinelândia, Gralha occupied the lowest rank; it was a concrete symbol, a synthesis of all that was most sordid and infamous” [Na complicada hierarquia de Cinelândia, a Gralha ocupava a última ordem; era o símbolo concreto, a síntese de tudo quanto havia de mais sórdido e infame] (140). [Imediatamente acima na importância da tiragem, mas irmão de leite da suja Gralha, havia o Monóculo, impresso em papel amarelo e escrito com tinta vermelha, como se o jornalzinho, cada vez que saísse do prélo, ao escurecer, tivesse uma hemoptise repugnante.] [Lúcio recordou os tempos em que, na Folha da Tarde, escrevia artigos sobre as estrelas, crônicas idiotas que o público devorava . . . Ah! se ele soubesse, naqueles bons tempos, que mais tarde havia de conhecer os figurões do cinema, vê-los de perto, ouvir-lhes a voz e poder, se quisesse, dar uma palmada

Notes

57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

189

nas costas do John Gilbert e intimamente perguntar pelo endereço do seu bootlegger!] [Para Hollywood você já começa a ser um vencedor! Cinelândia não concebe outros triunfos.] [Na verdade, que seria de nós, pobres artistas, sem a extraordinária ajuda do jornal, do anúncio, do escandalozinho que é lido por milhões [ . . . ]]. [porque é a forma mais lógica, mais simples e eficiente de publicidade] [[S]e o Sr. apresentar um tema diverso, inédito, diferente, inteligente, perderá o tempo e talvez o emprego. O difícil aqui não é ser original: é ser medíocre! Plagiar não é crime: é uma virtude peregrina!] [[A crônica] tem pretensões a durar, uma vez que é fi lha do jornal e da era de máquina, onde tudo acaba tão depressa. Ela não foi feita originariamente para o livro, mas para essa publicação efêmera que se compra num dia e no dia seguinte é usada para embrulhar um par de sapatos ou forrar o chão da cozinha. (“A vida ao rés-do-chão” 14)]

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6 1. [[P]or medio de la cámara lenta, [el cine] nos hizo asistir a la danza invisible que encierra un salto, un cuerpo en proyección; nos llevó a un mundo de prodigios, donde las flores crecen en un segundo, donde se puede nadar en un cuadro colgado de una pared, donde los macarrones logran detener un ferrocarril, donde los objetos se mueven, viven, opinan.] 2. [El concepto del businessman se ha impuesto tiránicamente al ideal artístico.] 3. For Camayd-Freixas, writing about Carpentier, the distinction between the marvelous and magic realism is clear: “The marvelous-real refers solely to more or less objective facts [ . . . ] about the people and natural landscape of the Americas (the real) [which], when seen from the right angle, affect the subject in such a way that he interprets them as ‘marvelous.’ On the other hand, ‘magic realism’ of course is an ‘ism’: not something one is but rather something one practices, a mode of expression, a collection of procedures.” [Lo real maravilloso se refiere únicamente a [ . . . ] datos más o menos objetivos acerca de la naturaleza y del hombre americano (lo real), [los cuales], percibidos desde el ángulo adecuado, afectan al sujeto de tal modo, que éste los interpreta como ‘maravillosos.’ En cambio, el ‘realismo mágico’ es, desde luego, un ‘ismo’: no algo que se es sino algo que se practica, un modo de expresión, un conjunto de procedimientos.] (Realismo mágico y primitivismo 110) 4. In his analysis of the prologue to The Kingdom of This World, Roberto González Echevarría has highlighted the contradictions of Carpentier’s position on the marvelous, a position, he suggests, that amounts to forced credulity. “If marvelous reality only reveals itself to the believer,” González Echevarría asks rhetorically, “what hope can Carpentier have of elevating himself to the state required in order to perceive it?” (126) 5. [Entre todos los simulacros de la vida, pantomimas grotescas de la realidad o ficciones risibles . . . , toda la vida, todo el ensueño, toda la ilusión están allí, en el lugar místico y sombrío como una catacumba; los países exóticos se acercan y todos los climas y todos los paisajes obedecen al conjuro, y fuera del tiempo y arrebatados al espacio vibran rápidamente ante nosotros.] 6. [porque es múltiple, porque no perece en un instante, porque puede repetirse hasta el infi nito]

190 Notes 7. [En la novela tumultuosa y en marcha, esa motivación es improcedente, y lo mismo en el relato de breves páginas y en la infi nita novela espectacular que compone Hollywood con los plateados ídola de Joan Crawford y que las ciudades releen. Un orden muy diverso los rige, lúcido y ancestral. La primitiva claridad de la magia.] 8. [O desenho animado e sonoro é a grande poesia do cinema. Ele permite, como a abolição de toda intenção realista ou psicológica, o desenvolvimento total da imagem. Ele dá invenção um caráter sobrehumano [ . . . ] de conto de hadas.] 9. [[c]inema puro, libertado de tradições e de regras. A imagem pela imagem, o movimento pelo movimento] 10. [Son los personajes de Esopo que no hablan en verso y que—y ésta es su gloria—no pretenden instruirnos ni moralizarnos. El cuento cinematográfico dibujado es arte puro, poesía sin didáctica, lección sin moraleja . . . ] 11. [el lápiz ha sido nuevamente la varita mágica que ha obrado el repetido prodigio] 12. [[H]echa de la misma tela que la pantalla, [la cigarra es una] cura de reposo, en suma, medicina preceptuada para los excesos de los hombres de acción.] 13. [[L]os pájaros parlantes, los animales pensantes, las criaturas insinuantes— lo que compone un misterio—se liga en ella una alquimia de sensaciones enternecedoras hasta lograr una perfecta resurrección mítica.] 14. [se advierte la bancarrota de sus competidores habituales—el cine de circunstancias—ante la avalancha desbordada de su genio] 15. Sklar calls it a shift from a “magical,” freewheeling “fantasy style” to an “idealized” mode in which moral consequences play an increasingly larger role (“The Making of Cultural Myths—Walt Disney” 61–3). 16. [[U]n infi nito número de generaciones ha estado pensando [ . . . ] en esta fábula sencilla, para que este fabulista de la luz y la voz y el ademán y la mirada y la palabra resucite ufanamente, en un minuto dichoso de su facultad creadora, toda la vieja fantasmagoría arrollada en desván de los olvidos inmemoriales.] 17. Labrador Ruiz was one of the few Latin American voices to weigh in on the artistic merit and significance of Disney’s fi rst full-length features. But he was not completely alone. Xavier Villaurrutia, writing for the Mexican journal Hoy, reviewed both Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Disney’s next full-length feature Pinocchio (1940). Villaurrutia generally praises the technical accomplishments of both fi lms, as well as their special appeal to children, including adults who are “young at heart.” In his review of Pinocchio, however, Villaurrutia apologetically states his preference for the “less ambitious” fi lm shorts of the Silly Symphonies (175). 18. Modernism, Huyssen writes, had always “constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination of its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfi ng mass culture” (vii). 19. [reabsorbiendo sus componentes, sus sintaxis diferenciales, en gramáticas masivas] 20. [una formidable apertura estética e intelectual hacia repertorios simbólicos heterogéneous] 21. [introducir, sin que se espanten los burgueses, una nueva noción estética] 22. [su dinamismo, su creacionismo [y su capacidad para] desrealizar la realidad [y] dar realidad a lo imaginado] 23. Charlie Chaplin’s stubbornly nontalking pictures from the sound era—City Lights, Modern Times, The Great Dictator—were also loudly celebrated by the minorista writers as well as many other like-minded Latin American intellectuals.

Notes

191

24. [Nuestra época necesitaba la presencia de un hombre que concibiera el cine como podría concebirlo un gran poeta. Que viera en la película un medio de “creación total.” Que se permitiera repetir, ante el celuloide virgen, la frase de Vicente Huidobro: “Si se me antoja ver el horizonte cuadrado, ¿quién podría impedírmelo?”] 25. [Después de haber sido traicionado tantas veces por sus coreógrafos e intérpretes,” Carpentier writes, “Stravinsky, el máximo compositor de nuestra época, encuentra en Hollywood quien haya captado el verdadero sentido de su partitura, mostrándonos lo que ningún escenario del mundo podría mostrarnos.] 26. [en nuestro joven continente nace una civilización nueva, ésta en que los hombres se hacen amigos de las máquinas, sirviéndose de ellas para ahuyentar el sufrimiento o para plasmar sus ensueños poéticos] 27. [ha logrado, con Fantasia, situarse entre los más grandes poetas de nuestro tiempo.] 28. Vicente Huidobro’s case is particularly remarkable because his own purist poetics almost certainly had an impact on the Parisian circle of avant-garde critics and fi lmmakers such as Dulac and Epstein, whose own work in turn popularizes the aesthetic tenets of le cinéma pur among Latin American intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s. 29. I would like to thank my colleague Carlos Jáuregui for bringing this edition to my attention. 30. [É exatamente ‘infantil,’ e portanto ‘geral,’ humano, universal, como o são as reações infantis e o seu mundo psicológico.] 31. [Talvez o banal, o convencionalismo do desenho animado seja uma necessidade de essência. Derive da sua própria realidade ‘poética.’ Do seu destino psicológico. E moral.] 32. [Con fresca luz, con aire preterido, en el set del cristal, ansioso y lento, naufragando en la luna, más atento a la quietud sin rosas del olvido . . . A las inmensas músicas vendido, él, que compró la libertad del viento! hoy se encarcela, trágico y violento, frente a su propio, tropical latido . . . La alegría en su faz está sembrada. Y, alzándose, la flor de su mirada es hielo azul sobre la verde cumbre . . . Muerto está en su color, él, milagroso, cuando derrite su perfi l furioso para soltar su prisionera lumbre . . . ] 33. [Esta guerra deshoja tus mentiras alegres oh, Walt Disney . . . El fascio, con su mentón de mármol, no cabe en la alegría de tu gran Norteamérica . . . Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington . . . Franklin Delano Roosevelt: cuatro mares gloriosos se alejan por Europa.] 34. [Si tuviera un caballo celeste y una llanura; si tuviera tus llanuras, con un gesto podría matar tus leviatanes en el mar encendido por tus fosforescencias.] 35. [por tí, Walt Disney, compañero,/nuestro sencillo Continente espera/la iluminada primavera/que enciendes tú en el lienzo milagrero] 36. [Ay, Walt Disney, amigo: ¿por qué no buscas en mi ron vernáculo

192 Notes

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

flor para tu espectáculo, luna para tu trigo y alma para los cánticos que pintas en el largo destino de tus cintas.] [Ahora que mi oido, de tanto canto, zumba,/le pido a Lecuona, para Minnie, una rumba . . . ] [Yo tengo miel de abejas/para las infi nitas capas de sus orejas] [Aqui lo curarás. . . . /Quién no se cura aquí?] [Ay, Walt Disney, amigo, compañero aquí, lleno de sol, ebrio de mar, te espero, con mi marímbula aborígen, con mi bongó de lacio y terso cuero y mi clave que suda su vegetal origen . . . ] [Walt Disney deve sair para as nossas matas. Lá ele encontrará uma gente bem viva para matéria-prima dos seus contos] [Quando Walt Disney se manifesta através de suas flores, de seus bichos, de seus rios, dos seus mares, a gente é forçada a reconhecer que a sua técnica faz o que à gente não é permitido: faz o milagre.] Many Brazilians felt much the same way about Orson Welles, whose own dabbling in Latin America around the same time can be seen in the nevercompleted fi lm It’s All True. The preliminary sketches once again team Donald with José Carioca, the Brazilian parrot who made his debut in The Three Caballeros. Together, Donald and José witness cockfights and carnivals. In one sketch, the two characters befriend the owner of a tobacco plantation and dance with a line of self-rolling cigars. In another scene, Donald pursues a feminine-looking palm tree that turns out to be José in “drag” (Solomon 118). The sketches, if realized, would have provided some obvious contrasts—and some intriguing similarities—to Villarronda’s “invitation.” [Hollywood ha producido dos obras geniales que pasarán a la posteridad como tales: las creaciones de Chaplin y las de Walt Disney.] [Los yanquis se preocupan de su mercado interno únicamente; las versiones extranjeras casuales que se hacen son mero accidente a los cuales no se les puede dar mucha importancia.] [porque é um subjetivista, e não um objetivista; porque é um criador; porque é um poeta] [[sin] caer en la sátira que, a lo mejor, no habría sido la fiel expresión de nuestras costumbres ni de nuestros maravillosos paisajes] [Agredezcámosle el recuerdo que hace de nosotros y divertámonos con el guacamayo [sic] Pepe, con las correrías del Gaucho Goofy y con ese panorama fantástico del Altiplano. Eso ya es suficiente.] [Tiene esta película el verdadero espíritu de comprensión y de cariño que debe existir entre los pueblos de un mismo continente. Es Los tres caballeros la mejor expresión del arte de exaltar los valores positivos de una nacionalidad. Concretamente, por lo que a nosotros se refiere, de la nacionalidad mexicana. Esto es lo que debemos agradecer a Walt Disney, el que nos haya comprendido tan a la perfección.] [[ . . . ] severos, tristes, [ . . . ] son absolutamente mexicanos, por eso no podían hablar y están fijos, inmóviles como lo son todos nuestros indios] [asistimos a algo como un sueño, increible, en el que todo parece tocado por una varita mágica de virtud. Y sin embargo, de tan perfecto, de tan exacto, todo tiene una apariencia real, verdadera, al grado que las cosas más extraordinarias nos parecen sencillas]

Notes

193

53. [[n]o es un libro de ditirambos ni una novela costumbrista lo que hizo Disney; además, eso no sería Disney, sino cualquier turista ocioso] 54. [Disney ha hecho un manoseado folleto de turismo en celuloide, una gruesa pandereta pintoresquista que repite un Brasil y un México falseados por la propaganda barata. El tuétano de lo brasileño y de lo mexicano, su enorme riqueza folklórica tan propicia al arte de Disney, son casi enteramente desaprovechados.] 55. [Su gusto por el fuscia y el verde chartreuse—colores ‘sintéticos’—no es una casualidad. La languidez, el sensualismo de Coca-Cola, la sensiblería corresponden más con necesidades de mayoría que con preferencias individuales: de ahí su éxito.] 56. [la fisura que dejó penetrar toda la crítica que ha venido después]

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Index

A Abril, Xavier, 76, 87–90, 99–100, 105 Aching, Gerard, 87 After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (Huxley), 170n Aguirre, Mirta, 163–165 Alba, Luz, 115, 117 Alcântara Machado, Antônio de, 29, 78, 110 alchemy and alchemists, 19, 36–38, 43, 57, 99, 122, 146, 155 America: os Estados Unidos de 1929 (Lobato), 35 Andrade, Mário de, 80, 85, 112, 126, 140, 148, 152–153, 164, 168 Andrade, Oswald de, 19, 30, 110, 126, 152, 172n androgyny, 60, 94 “Apoteosis de Charlie Chaplin” (Arlt), 94–95 Arbuckle, Fatty, 100, 135 Argentina, 1–3, 21–26, 55, 57, 85, 94–95, 110, 119–126, 159–160, 162–163, 167, 176n, 185n, 187n argentinidad 123–124 Arlt, Roberto, 94–95, 105, 110, 119–120, 126 “arte narrativo y la magia, El” (Borges), 143 Art from the Mayans to Disney (Charlot), 146–147 Artaud, Antonin, 78 aura (Benjamin) 15–16, 25, 42, 69–70, 127 autoethnographic expression, 24, 157 avant-garde Brazilian. See Modernism, Brazilian international, 18, 35, 54, 65, 100, 103, 142–143, 145–146,

148–149, 151–153, 167, 171n, 175n, 179n, 191n Latin American, 2, 10, 12, 21, 27–28, 36, 45, 75–76, 78–80, 86, 93, 99, 103, 108, 110, 138, 142, 151–152, 154, 164, 176n179n, 191n Azuela, Mariano, 55, 179n

B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 89, 181n Balázs, Béla, 130 Barreto, Paulo. See Rio, João do Barthes, Roland, 58, 95, 97, 174n Bartra, Roger, 62–63, 178n Baudry, Jean-Louis, 184n Bazin, André, 77–78 Benjamin, Walter, 15–16, 25, 42, 68–69, 107–108, 127, 138 Bhabha, Homi, 57–58 bibliophilia, 68–70 Bohr, José, 124, 185n, 186n Borges, Jorge Luis, 28, 112, 119, 125–126, 143, 187n Bourdieu, Pierre, 108 Brazil, 3, 10, 18, 28–35, 53, 78–80, 84–85, 97–100, 110, 116, 126–137, 144, 152–153, 157, 159–160, 163–164, 167, 170n, 172n, 173n, 181n, 185n, 187n, 188n, 192 Buenos Aires, 21–24, 26, 84–85, 115, 119–121, 124, 159, 162–163 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 170n, 178n Burton-Carvajal, Julianne, 162, 165

C Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 166–167 Cagliostro (Huidobro), 19, 37

206

Index

Camayd-Freixas, Erik, 139–140, 189n Cândido, Antônio, 118, 137–138 Canudo, Ricciotto, 18, 144 Cantinflas, 104 Capriles, Oswaldo, 111, 118 carnival and the carnivalesque, 73–76, 84, 87–90, 97, 103, 181n Carpentier, Alejo, 13, 19, 78, 139–141, 144–146, 148, 150–153, 156–157, 161, 164, 168, 189n, 191n Carroll, Noël, 78, 129 celebrity, 10–12, 15–17, 25, 42, 53, 59, 65, 73, 77, 85, 91–92, 127–128, 134–136, 171n Chaplin, Charles Circus, The, 74, 79, 82–83, 90, 96 Gold Rush, The, 74, 79, 80–81, 97–98, 100, 181n Kid, The, 79–81, 102 Great Dictator, The, 74, 98, 190n Immigrant, The, 102–103 Little Tramp, character of, 12, 16, 73–87, 90–92, 94–105, 181n Modern Times, 74, 80, 89, 95, 98, 190n Vagabond, The, 80, 89 “Chaplin y Cantinflas” (Moctezuma), 104 “Charlie Chaplin’s Decline” (Turrent Rozas), 96 Charlot, Jean, 146–147 Chas de Cruz, Israel, 13, 15, 107–108, 120–126, 138, 186–187n “Che” Ferrati, Inventor (Noriega Hope), 53, 55–60, 64, 70 Chile, 37, 50–51, 60, 104, 112–118, 123–124, 133, 145, 150–152, 158–160, 165–167, 170n, 185n, 187n-188n Choque das Raças, O (Lobato), 11, 21, 30–36, 40, 57 cinéma pur, 78, 80, 125, 129, 140, 142, 144, 153, 157, 167, 191n “cinematografía de avanzada, La” (Carpentier), 139–141 Cinematographo (do Rio), 18–19 circus and clowns, 29, 44, 73–78, 81– 90, 95–96, 98–100, 130–131, 175n, 180n-181n, 187n-188n “city of protocols” (Rama), 10 “Canto ao homem do povo Charlie Chaplin” (Drummond de Andrade), 97–99

Cooper, Gary, 119 cosmopolitanism, 19, 45, 52, 60–61, 64–65, 71 Crawford, Joan, 38–39, 123, 125, 143 creacionismo (Huidobro) 150, 152 crónicas and crônicas, 1–3, 9, 12, 15, 18, 35, 51–52, 55–56, 71, 94, 106–138 Cuba, 3, 19, 76, 78–81, 90–95, 100, 139, 145–146, 148, 150–151, 153–158, 164–168

D dandyism, 58–59, 61, 71, 174n, 177n danzarina del estanque azul, La (Julián González), 53–54, 60–64, 70, 178n Davis, Mike, 13–14 Day of the Locust, The (West), 60, 170n de Certeau, Michel, 98–99 de Orellana, Margarita, 49–50 deCordova, Richard, 7, 15, 25, 66, 91, 110, 127, 135, 187n del Río, Dolores, 16, 59, 64–65, 106, 123–124 Deitrich, Marlene, 119 Delluc, Louis, 78, 85–86, 129, 150 “día más feliz de Charlot, El” (González Rojo), 102–103 Disney, Walt Fantasia, 140, 144, 146–153, 155, 157–159, 161, 164–166, 168 Pinocchio, 140, 149, 190n Saludos Amigos, 13, 140, 158–160, 163–167 Silly Symphonies, The, 143–145, 149, 190n Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 140, 145–147, 149, 158, 161, 190n Three Caballeros, The, 13, 140, 158, 160–165, 167, 192n Do Rio, João, 18, 20, 22, 110, 170n D. Quixote e Carlito: Tentativa de Interpretação (Oliveira e Silva), 92–93 Don Quijote de Hollywood (Rodríguez), 76–77, 90–94, 99, 101, 183n Dorfman, Ariel, 167 double, the, 38–41, 43–44, 58–59, 151–152 Drummond de Andrade, Carlos, 12, 77, 96–100, 104–105

Index dubbing, difficulties of, 115, 118, 125, 158, 187n Duffey, J. Patrick, 65, 177n, 179n Dulac, Germaine, 78, 100, 129, 142, 150, 191n Dyer, Richard, 25, 59, 91, 170n

E Eisenstein, Sergei, 80–81, 99, 139, 149–150, 180n-181n Elizalde-MacClure, Rafael, 158–159 empire and imperialism, 1–7, 12–13, 17–18, 20, 24, 27, 35, 46–47, 51, 75, 92–93, 117, 119, 140, 157, 167, 169n Epstein, Jean, 78–79, 129, 141–142, 150, 191n “Esquema de una explicación de Chaplin” (Mariátegui), 12, 73, 81–83, 89, 92, 95, 104, 129–130, 181n, 187n-188n Estrella de día (Torres Bodet), 12, 16, 54, 65–71 ethnographic authority (Clifford), 113, 123–124 eugenics, 21, 30–32

F “Fantasía, de Walt Disney” (Carpentier), 13, 150–152 Félix, María, 72 femme fatale, the, 54, 63–64 Ferro, António, 171n film extras, 42, 46, 48, 52–53, 55, 58, 114, 123, 127–128, 131–133, 187n “Film: sueño” (Ichaso), 79 film theory auteur, 16, 155, 167 microphysiognomy, 130 montage, 80–81, 110, 128–129, 178n-181n photogenie, 184n psychoanalytic, 25–26, 184n Specificity Thesis, the (Carroll), 78, 129 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 60, 170n Florit, Eugenio, 78–79 folletín and folhetim, 8, 27, 30, 36, 52, 83–84, 175n Ford, Henry, 30–31, 33–34, 172n-173n Foucault, Michel, 14, 60, 133, 135, 180n Frank, Waldo, 79, 86

207

G Garbo, Greta, 16, 38, 41–42, 106, 123, 125, 174n, 184n-185n, 187n García Riera, Emilio, 48–49 Gardel, Carlos, 185n gender and sexuality, 10, 32, 54–56, 60–64, 70–72, 112–114, 118, 176n Getino, Octavio, 185n Gilbert, John, 134, 174n Girl from Hollywood, The (Burroughs), 170n, 178n Gish, Lillian, 119 Gómez de la Serna, Ramón, 171n González, Aníbal, 108–110 González, Julián, 12, 14, 53–54, 60–64, 70–72, 178n González Echevarría, Roberto, 189n González Rojo, Enrique, 76–77, 102–103 Good Neighbor policy, The, 13, 17, 140, 148, 158–159, 164–165 Griffith, D.W., 48, 139, 149 Grupo Minorista, 78, 150 Guilherme, Olympio, 13–14, 107–108, 127–138, 187n-188n Guzmán, Martín Luis, 12, 20, 51–52, 179n

H Habermas, Jürgen, 7–9, 33 Hardy, Oliver, 114, 119 Hays Code, 178n Heidegger, Martin, 33, 173n hegemony, 2–6, 8, 10–11, 17, 24, 28, 50–53, 56–57, 63, 77, 82, 140, 143, 148, 151, 157, 169n Herlinghaus, Hermann, 75, 180n Hollywood (Zouroff), 13, 15, 107–108, 112–118, 121, 123–124, 126, 136 Hollywood al desnudo (Chas de Cruz), 13, 15, 107–108, 120–126, 138, 186n-187n Hollywood: capital das imagens (Ferro), 179n Hollywood novel, The as international literary genre, 133, 160–161, 170n-171n, 178n Hollywood: novela da vida real (Guilherme), 107, 127, 131–138, 188n Hombre de la baraja y la puñalada, El (Olivari), 1–2, 119–120, 126, 186n

208 Index How Henry Ford is Regarded in Brazil (Lobato), 30, 173n Huidobro, Vicente, 37–38, 122, 150–152, 191n Huxley, Aldous, 170n Huyssen, Andreas, 44, 54, 103, 147, 175n, 190n

I Ichaso, Francisco, 79 imposture, 26, 53, 58–59 “intelectuales y el cine, Los” (Quiroga), 22

K Keaton, Buster, 74, 100, 177n, 181n Kraniauskas, John, 82–83

L Labrador Ruiz, Enrique, 140, 145–146, 161, 190n Last Tycoon, The (Fitzgerald), 60, 170n “Latin Lover,” 12, 14, 26, 46, 53, 55, 57–58, 70–71, 123, 133, 174n, 177n latinidad, 12, 36, 46, 57, 61, 76, 86–87, 123–124 Laurel, Stan, 114, 119 Lima, Alceu Amoroso, 29 Lins do Rego, José, 157 Lobato, José Bento Monteiro, 11, 14, 16, 21, 28–37, 45–47, 57, 126, 142, 172n-173n Los Angeles, 13–14, 28, 53, 55, 63, 65, 112–113, 119–120, 128–129, 131–132, 136, 138, 176n Los Ángeles de Hollywood (ElizaldeMacClure), 158–159

M Mañach, Jorge, 78 Mariátegui, José Carlos, 12, 73, 81–83, 89, 92, 95, 104, 129–130, 181n, 187n-188n Marinello, Juan, 93, 95, 183n Marshall, P. David, 15–16, 91, 135 Martí, José, 3–4, 91, 100, 109, 156 Martín-Barbero, Jesús, 7–9, 17, 25, 34, 75–77, 83–84, 175n Masiello, Francine, 54, 176n mass culture, 2, 8, 11, 18, 21, 29, 35– 36, 42, 44–45, 54–55, 64–65, 70, 73, 76–77, 83–84, 91, 94,

101, 103, 105, 136–138, 147, 149, 165, 169n, 181n, 190n Mattelart, Armand, 167 “Máximo Gorky vs. Charlie Chaplin” (Cinefan), 95 medium essentialism, 78, 129 melodrama, 22, 28, 34, 36, 45, 60–61, 72, 75, 101, 103, 175n Merton at the Movies (Wilson), 170n, 178n Metz, Christian, 25–26 Mexico, 11–12, 48–72, 85, 93, 96, 111–112, 115, 119, 146–147, 160–164, 167, 175n-180n, 185n, 187n Mexican Revolution, 49, 71 mexicanidad, 12, 49–50, 53, 60, 70, 72 microphysiognomy, 130 Milliet, Sérgio, 144–145, 152–153 “Miss Dorothy Phillips, mi esposa” (Quiroga), 14, 20, 23–28, 36, 43–44 Mistral, Gabriela, 50–51 Moctezuma, Santiago, 104 modernism. See also, avant-garde. Brazilian, 28–30, 78, 85, 144, 153, 172n–173n. international, 2, 13, 44, 62, 65, 70, 85, 147–148, 149, 152, 167– 168, 177n, 187n, 190n Modernismo, Spanish American, 4, 20–21, 36–37, 52, 61, 70, 109–111, 141, 150, 154 Molloy, Sylvia, 61, 177n Monsiváis, Carlos, 61, 70, 72, 112–113 Moreno, Antonio, 55, 118 Moreno, Mario. See Cantinflas mundo de las sombras, El (Noriega Hope), 55 music hall, 73–74, 76–78, 81, 86, 181n, 187n–188n

N New York, 28, 30, 34, 90–91, 101– 102, 112, 115, 172n newspapers. See Periodicals, daily (general) Noches de Hollywood (Julián González), 178n Noriega Hope, Carlos, 12, 14, 53–60, 62–63, 70–72 Novarro, Ramón, 64, 106, 116, 123

Index Novo, Salvador, 55, 59–60, 65, 178n novomundismo, 168 novum, 40, 45

O Olivari, Nicolás, 1–2, 119–120, 126, 186n Oliveira e Silva, Francisco de, 92–93 Ortega y Gasset, José, 65, 151

P Palma, Clemente, 11, 14, 16, 20–21, 36–47, 174n–175n Para leer al Pato Donald (Dorfman and Mattelart), 167 Paranaguá, Paulo Antônio, 117, 185n–186n Paredes, Americo, 48–49, 71–72, 175n–176n Paz, Octavio, 37, 53 Pepino 88, 85 Pereda Valdés, Ildefonso, 76–77, 100–102, 104 performance Hollywood actors and, 26–27, 78–79, 81–82, 116 of aristocracy, 25–26, 39, 46, 58–59, 70 of sexuality, 60–64 scandal and, 133, 135–136 periodicals, weekly and monthly (general) American Scholar [Washington], 146–147 Atenea [Santiago de Chile], 145, 170n Atlántida [Buenos Aires], 9, 22–23 Caras y Caretas [Buenos Aires], 9 Carteles [Havana], 139 Clarté [Paris], 22 Clima [São Paulo], 152 Hoy [Santiago de Chile], 159–160 Living Age, The [New York], 96 Novela del Día, La [Buenos Aires], 24 Revista do Brasil [São Paulo], 30 Rob Wagner’s Script (Beverly Hills), 187n ruta [Mexico City], 96 Sintonía [Buenos Aires], 120 Social [Havana], 9, 78–80, 95, 165, 180n–181n Topaze [Santiago de Chile], 166 Universal Ilustrado, El [Mexico City], 55, 176n

209

Vanguardia, La [Buenos Aires], 162–163 Verónica, La [Havana], 154 periodicals, film Cinearte [Rio de Janeiro], 9, 111–112, 127–132, 134, 164, 187n-188n Cinema [Havana], 9, 42 Cine Mundial [New York], 9, 42, 115 Ecran [Santiago de Chile], 9, 42, 104–105, 160 El Heraldo del Cinematografista [Buenos Aires], 120–121 Film Mercury [Los Angeles], 185n Motion Picture Magazine [New York], 7 Photoplay [Chicago], 7 periodicals, Latin American avant-garde Amauta [Lima], 10, 76, 80–83, 86–87, 95, 164, 187n Contemporáneos [Mexico City], 10, 65, 86, 102–103 Klaxon [São Paulo], 10, 19, 29, 89–90 Martín Fierro [Buenos Aires], 10, 28, 164 Prisma [Buenos Aires], 19, 36 Revista de Antropofagia [São Paulo], 85, 182n Revista de avance [Havana], 10, 79 Terra Roxa e Outras Terras [São Paulo], 78 periodicals, daily (general) Alerta [Havana], 154 Clarín [Buenos Aires], 120 Crítica [Buenos Aires], 120 Diário de São Paulo, 152 Estado de São Paulo, O, 159, 164 Excelsior [Mexico City], 160–164 Folha da Tarde [São Paulo], 134 Gazeta, A [Rio de Janeiro], 127 Imparcial, El [Madrid], 51–52 Jornal, O [São Paulo], 30 Los Angeles Times, 131–132 Manhã, A [Rio de Janeiro], 30 Mundo, El [Buenos Aires], 120 Nación, La [Buenos Aires], 111–112, 120, 159 New York Sun, 170n Opinión, La [Los Angeles], 131–132, 188n Prensa, La [Buenos Aires], 112, 159

210

Index

Universal, El [Mexico City], 9, 50– 51, 54–55, 111, 115, 162–163 Peru, 11, 20, 36–37, 76, 80–83, 86–89 Pickford, Mary, 48, 106 Piolim, 85, 181n-182n Podestá, José. See Pepino 88 Poe, Edgar Allen, 40, 174n Poemas a Walt Disney (Villarronda), 13, 153–158 posing, 57–61, 177n Powell, William, 186n Prado, Eduardo, 3, 170n Pratt, Mary Louise, 24, 157, 169n “problemas del cine, Los” (Wiesse), 76, 80, 86–87 public sphere theory, 7–11, 17, 33 publicity, film industry and, 7–9, 15–17, 24–25, 75, 84, 91, 109–110, 119–120, 122, 127, 131–137, 164, 170n Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 81, 128

Q Quiroga, Horacio, 10–11, 14, 20–29, 36, 43–47, 51, 67, 70, 116, 129, 141, 167, 171n

R race and racism, 10, 21, 30–36, 38–39, 47–51, 57, 81, 85–87, 100–101, 114–117 “Radiografía de Chaplin” (Abril), 76, 87–90, 99–100, 105 Rama, Ángel, 5–7, 10 Ramos, Julio, 8, 108–110, 137 Rank, Otto, 43 “Retrato de Charles Chaplin” (Frank), 86 Reyes, Alfonso, 9–12, 20, 51–53, 129, 167 Rio de Janeiro, 128, 132, 134 Roach, Hal, 114–116 Rodríguez, Luis Felipe, 76–77, 90–94, 99, 101, 183n Rodríguez Monegal, Emir, 28 Rolland, Gilbert, 174n Rotker, Susana, 108–109 Rowe, William, 1–2, 175n

S Said, Edward, 6 Sánchez-Trincado, José Luis, 144–145 São Paulo, 127–128, 133–134, 152 Sarlo, Beatriz, 7, 21–24, 27

secondary orality, 76–77, 97 secondary production (Certeau), 98 Seldes, Gilbert, 73 scandal, 9, 75, 110, 133–136, 170n Schelling, Vivian, 1–2, 175n silent pictures, aesthetics of, 7, 17–23, 52, 75, 78–81, 140–144, 150–151, 161, 167, 171n, 185n, 190n “Sobre el doblaje” (Borges), 125, 187n Soja, Edward W., 14–15 Spain, 5, 48, 51, 53, 55, 86, 90, 93, 113, 115–118, 124, 151, 171n, 174n, 185n Spider Boy (Van Vechten), 170n Stallybrass, Peter, 73–74, 87, 97 star discourse, 7, 14–16, 25, 42, 44, 66, 110, 118, 122, 127, 135, 137–138, 171n star system, 10–11, 15–16, 36, 42, 45, 59, 91, 110, 137, 187n stars, film. See individual entries. stereotypes and stereotyping, 12, 14, 20, 24, 46–50, 54–58, 70–71, 111, 156, 165 studios and studio system, 1–2, 7, 9, 15–16, 19, 25, 39–40, 42–44, 49–54, 59, 66, 91, 106–107, 110, 112–118, 120–123, 127, 129, 130–132, 136–137, 140, 149, 158–159, 165, 167, 170n, 186n Disney, 140, 149, 158–160, 165, 167 Fox, 116, 118, 127, 130–131, 134 MGM, 39–40, 42–44, 120 Suárez Solís, Rafael, 78–79 sueño de Chaplin, narraciones, El (Pereda Valdés), 76–77, 100– 102, 104 Süssekind, Flora, 29, 128 Suvin, Darko, 40

T Tablada, José Juan, 52, 110, 141, 170n talking pictures, 12–13, 50, 78–81, 106–107, 114–118, 125–126, 129–133, 144, 153, 167, 171n, 180n, 185n, 190n transition to—controversy, 78–81, 125–126, 129–131, 144, 153, 167, 171n, 180n, 190n Spanish-language productions of, 12–13, 107, 114–118, 132, 185n techne (Heidegger), 33–34, 173n

Index

211

technology, 3, 18–47, 52, 55, 57, 64, 76, 82, 89, 99, 103, 112–113, 118, 121–122, 129, 141–142, 148, 150–152, 157, 159, 173n, 175n “Tema de actualidad—El amor y la sombra” (Quiroga), 22–23 “Teoría de Blanca Nieve” (Labrador Ruiz), 140, 145–146, 161, 190n Torá, Lia, 127, 185n Torres Bodet, Jaime, 12, 16, 54, 65–71 travel writing, 3, 12, 14, 35, 52–56, 67, 69–70, 89, 107, 109–110, 112–115, 157, 159, 169n Turrent Rozas, Lorenzo, 96

Van Vechten, Carl, 170n Vargas Vila, José María, 4–6 vaudeville, 44, 74, 77–78, 81–82, 84, 100, 181n Vélez, Lupe, 59, 106 vertical integration, 9, 19 Vertov, Dziga, 81, 128 Villarronda, Guillermo, 13, 140, 148, 153–158, 168 Villaurrutia, Xavier, 65, 112, 150–151, 178n-179n, 190n Viñas, David, 121 vulgarity, 11, 17, 54, 79–80, 109, 113, 135–136, 139

U

W

Ugarte, Manuel, 4, 6, 10, 20, 35, 170n United States, 1–8, 11, 13–14, 17–18, 21–22, 24, 27–28, 30–33, 35, 38, 45–47, 48, 50–55, 64, 71–72, 81–82, 84, 86, 92–93, 95–96, 101, 109–110, 112–113, 116, 124, 135, 141–142, 146, 148, 151, 163, 165, 167–168, 170n-171n, 181n Unruh, Vicky, 19, 54, 176n urban space and spatiality, 13–14, 109–110, 112–113, 138

“Walt Disney” (Lins do Rego), 157 Welles, Orson, 149, 166, 192n West, Nathaniel, 60, 170n Western films, 48–49, 53, 172n White, Allon, 73–74, 87, 97 Wiesse, María, 76, 80, 86–87 Williams, Raymond, 3, 40 Wilson, Harry Leon, 170n, 178n

V

Y

Valdés Rodríguez, José Manuel, 80–81, 180n Valentino, Rudolph, 45, 57, 101, 106 Vallejo, César, 10–11, 112 “Valor de la imagen en el cine” (Florit), 78–79

Yúdice, George, 151–152

X XYZ: novela grotesca (Palma), 11, 20–21, 36–47, 174n-175n

Z Zenteno, Esmeralda. See Zouroff, Vera Zouroff, Vera, 13, 15, 107–108, 112– 118, 121, 123–124, 126, 136