Introduction: The Culture of Mexican Silent Cinema

This special issue of Film History aims to expand the dominant Euro-American focus of silent-cinema scholarship, highlighting the limitations of timelines and taxonomies developed in these contexts for addressing the cases of Mexico and Latin America more broadly.¹ It also proposes cinema culture as a key critical category for tracking transcultural relations in theater, literature, politics, and the film trade between Mexico, Europe and the United States during an era of postrevolutionary modernization. The contributors collectively argue for the need to reinsert Mexico and Latin America into the broader narrative of the global film trade in the 1910s and 1920s, considering both the economic ambitions of major film-producing nations, which viewed Latin American countries as lucrative, and coveted export markets in which cinema was consumed and reconfigured within local exhibition and reception contexts. Cinema culture for Mexicans at home and abroad was highly mediated by figures embodying discursive authority; these included literary critics and trade press reviewers, but also Mexican-born stars, such as Ramón Novarro, who immigrated to the United States to work for Hollywood studios, and pioneers like cameraman Salvador Toscano, who shaped competing and often ambiguous discourses of national identity. Transmitted through poetry and novels, localized commerce, fan letters, and archival film fragments, cinema culture, as the contributors show, crisscrossed many borders and spaces as it traveled from Los Angeles and Europe to the capital, Mexico City, and to localized areas such as the Yucatán peninsula and back. In presenting new evidence, this special issue seeks to reevaluate and expand on some of the assumptions, methodologies, and forms of evidence employed in film historiography, especially work written in Mexico, whose circulation has been, in most cases, previously limited to Spanishlanguage audiences.

SOURCES AND TRACES: FILM PRINTS, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE NATIONAL

The rediscovery, over two decades ago, of early cinema and critical constructions of its difference from later institutionalized practices has changed our understanding of what cinema is and altered how we do film history. Made visible through access-driven film preservation efforts, film prints have served, and continue to serve, a dual purpose as unique objects valued both as empirically sound evidence of the past—particularly of a nation's cinematic traditions—and as a source of viewer pleasure. In this sense, archivists and scholars, by sharing the same selected sources, participate (for very different reasons) in constructing a speculative historical trajectory of national cinemas. However, the existing framework of national cinema proves highly problematic in the context of early twentieth-century Latin America.² First, commercially viable national industries were never established in the region during this era on a level comparable with major film-exporting countries like the United States, France, Italy, Germany, and Great Britain. Second, in the absence of a stable industrialized system and accompanying forms of documentation—especially legally mandated protection typical of studio and state-sponsored archives—and given the fact that no national film archive existed in Mexico until 1960, relatively few traces of silent-era production remain. The inevitable rarity of complete, unaltered film prints available as textual evidence presents both historians and preservationists with ambiguities and inconsistencies that are not easily reconciled. As David Wood shows, practices of collecting moving-image materials, both past and present, are linked to the creation and reworking of national historical narratives (as in the compilation film's treatment of the Mexican Revolution), but also to more localized forms of cultural affiliation, as Laura Serna's essay indicates. Fragmentary, heterogeneous, and unstable forms of textual evidence have by necessity pushed scholars of Mexican silent cinema to incorporate the diverse methodological approaches of border historians, ethnologists, and historians of immigration, among others, in order to effectively recuperate marginalized film cultures. Mexican film historians have traditionally taken the speculative accounts of silent-era protagonists, as well as the sparse, fragmentary traces of film production—compilations comprised of repurposed footage, newspaper reviews, photographic stills, and magazine illustrations—as evidence of national identities asserted in the face of imported films' dominance of local screens.

The contributors here rely less on film viewing, and instead have sought out...