Beneficient Cinema: State Formation, Elite Reproduction, and Silent Film in Uruguay, 1910s-1920s

Introduction

In her study of early cinema and modernity in Latin America, Ana López wrote: "Latin American modernity has been a global, intertextual experience, addressing impulses and models from abroad, in which every nation and region created, and creates, its own ways of playing with and at modernity."¹ Early Uruguayan cinema exemplifies this interaction of global phenomena with local realities and thus provides an instructive window onto some of the ways Latin Americans were "playing with and at modernity" in the early twentieth century. During that era, Uruguay emerged as Latin America's first welfare state and a model of progressive reform in the region. The complexities of that transition are reflected in so-called cine de beneficencia (beneficent cinema), film made by and for social assistance organizations for fundraising and propaganda purposes. Film historian José Carlos Álvarez identifies beneficent cinema as "something that we think was purely Uruguayan, and specific to this era."² While any confirmation of Uruguayan uniqueness in this regard seems premature, the story of early Uruguayan film is intimately tied to that of the country's state and class formation during the 1910s and 1920s. Linking early film with these larger historical trajectories are a handful of elite "ladies' committees,"ostensibly private social assistance organizations frequently subsidized by public funds. Finding themselves in need of new private fundraising venues and techniques to justify their existence and assert some autonomy vis a vis state agencies, these groups sought in film, and eventually in filmmaking, a new medium and venue for generating income and for elite reproduction and regeneration.

This article highlights the connections between social assistance, class reproduction, and early cinema in Uruguay in the 1910s and 1920s. Following a brief overview of Uruguayan welfare state formation during these years is a discussion of the origins of beneficent cinema in both the cinematic fundraisers and filmmaking experiments of elite women's charity organizations. One "ladies' committee" in particular, the Asociación La Bonne Garde, an organization that housed juvenile single mothers and oversaw their placement in "respectable" homes, was an especially important producer of early cinema. The Bonne Garde oversaw the production of a number of films, including the 1926 documentary La Bonne Garde and the 1929 feature Del Pingo al Volante, one of only three full-length silents made in Uruguay. A trite romantic tale on one level, Del Pingo reflects the anxieties of Uruguayan elites in the later 1920s, and a crisis of paternalism and reproduction that was distinctly felt within elite women's social assistance circles at that time. More generally, beneficient cinema speaks to the ways in which film, as a visual medium, played to elite audiences' narcissistic and nationalistic desires to see themselves (literally and symbolically) projected on the big screen. In that sense, these films were a modern manifestation of noblesse oblige, mediated through both modern technology and the twentieth-century welfare state.

"Ladies' Committees" and State Formation in Uruguay: An Overview

Distinguishing features of early Uruguayan cinema can be found in the contours of the estado batllista, named for José Batlle y Ordóñez, president from 1903-1907 and 1911 to 1915 and a dominant political figure until his death in 1929. During the Batllista era, Uruguay became the first nation in Latin America to legislate the eight-hour day, the first to guarantee health care to the poor, and the home of a social security system that became a model for the rest of the continent. And in 1910, the Uruguayan Law of National Public Assistance established the notion of the right to universal care, declaring that "anyone . . . indigent or lacking resources has the right to free assistance at the expense of the state," legislation which set Uruguay apart from its neighbors in the Americas in the 1910s and 1920s.³

Yet despite its aspirations to social equality, Batllista policy and its evolution over time is best viewed as a modernization of paternalism, where traditional notions of social hierarchy and mutual obligation were recast and preserved in a modified, state-mediated form. As a...