Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America (review)

Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America. New ed. By JOHN KING. Critical Studies in Latin American and Iberian Cultures. London: Verso, 2000. Plates. Notes. Bibliography. Index. vi, 314 pp. Paper, $20.00.

As its cover announces, the book reviewed here is a new edition, not a revised one. Magical Reels's previously published chapters are unchanged since their original appearance in 1990. The new edition's new addition is an afterward, covering developments during the last century's last decade. This substantial final chapter offers John King's cautious, yet shrewd, observations about macro issues—such as transnationalism, globalization, and neoliberalism—pertinent to (Latin American) cinema's contemporary history (and intellectual discourse about mass culture). It also replicates the earlier chapters' admirable mixture of material and representational analysis as well as their nation-by-nation survey of Latin American filmmaking. In doing so, this new final chapter makes good use of recent works about fin de siglofilmmaking to explore the interplay of contemporary economic patterns and cultural production. The previous chapters, however, do not benefit from interpolation of significant scholarship published since 1990 about pre-1990 Latin American film.

Magical Reels's cover photograph indicates, too, what is different and the same about its millennium edition. As with the earlier version, the current one features a production still, depicting a heterosexual couple, from an "internationally acclaimed" Mexican film (that is, one well-received in U.S. and European art house film circuits). An image of María Rojo and her dance partner from María Novaro's Danzón (1991) replaces one of Pedro Armendáriz and Dolores del Río from Emilio Fernández's María Candelaria (1943). This change announces the most obvious difference between this edition and its predecessor: coverage of the 1990s. It also perpetuates Mexican cinema's dominant visibility within English-language scholarship about Latin American film. To a large degree this is derived from the overrepresentation of internationally influential films (that is, relative critical and commercial "successes" in North America and Europe) in scholarly discourse about cinema. It is often a story of "winners," judged as such by their presence among elite audiences outside of Latin America more often than by their resonance among popular ones within the region. This too-common convergence of international market and scholarship belies Magical Reels's comprehensive geocultural scope. However, by displaying, in the first case (1990), an iconographic marker of canonical film history, and in the second (2000), a widely identifiable contemporary commercial symbol, the book's cover anticipates its broad audience. Neither film represented was mere quotidian fodder, but international film-festival fare; both feature not just any actors but movie stars; each is the work of an auteur.

Magical Reels is essentially a political history of culture. Its top-down approach foregrounds national production and individual accomplishment. It focuses more on the formation of famous filmmakers, state policies, and business ventures than on life in and around the movie theater. The impact of economic and political power on filmmaking takes precedence over that of cinema on national and international history. Its representational analysis privileges particular plots and genres over discursive patterns and practices. But Magical Reels is particularly effective in demonstrating the centrality of state intervention and (more recently) nonintervention in the development of Latin American culture industries. And students and scholars of not only mass media but almost every other aspect of twentieth-century Latin American history—including state formation and national identity, economics and business, revolution and international relations, art and ideas, class, race, and gender relations, to name a few—will find much to add to their respective historiographies. This underlines a broader point implied by Magical Reels, but one that deserves explicit enunciation: the integral relationship between the historical study of audiovisual culture and "the rest of" history. Film (and radio and television) is not a short subject preceding "real" history...