Public Spectacles of Violence: Sensational Cinema and Journalism in Early Twentieth-Century Mexico and Brazil by Rielle Navitski (review)

Even before opening the pages of Public Spectacles of Violence: Sensational Cinema and Journalism in Early Twentieth-Century Mexico and Brazil the reader is met with an image of violence on the cover: in front of a wall, three uniformed men stand, rifles in hand pointed downward. A mass execution seems to have just taken place. A palpable sense of immediacy heightens the drama and impact of the image and is augmented by the men's silhouetted repetition, the regular distance between them, and the notable oblique angle. They resemble a deadly assembly line. This still, from the serial film based on real events and Mexican cinema's first box-office hit, El automóvil gris (The gray automobile; Enrique Rosas, 1919), effectively synthesizes the primary objective of the book, as it alludes to the intricate relationship between the documentary representation of violence and its fictional construction in cinema. And, of course, it gestures toward the reception or consumption of this violence as a problem contemporary to the film's release but also, undoubtedly, a problem today.

In effect, the multiple representations of crime that the Mexican and Brazilian press and cinema produced during the first three decades of the twentieth century interpellated their audiences and continue to interpellate the reader and contemporary viewers in various ways. Navitski presents an extremely provocative hypothesis: the everyday violence perpetrated in the principal cities of Mexico and Brazil at the beginning of the twentieth century was thought about, represented, and reelaborated through new cultural forms (yellow journalism, illustrated newspapers and magazines, theater, and film) as an unequivocal mark of the increasing participation of those countries in global modernity. Ironically, as Navitski suggests, in the cultural imaginary of the time, the risky robbery or ferocious crime tied Mexico City, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro to London, Berlin, and Paris with an indelible red thread. One of the most intriguing points, developed by the author via a careful analysis of police blotters and general discussions of crime in the press, is the idea that the progressive sophistication of the crimes functioned as an index of increasing modernization. Positivism and its logic of progress appear in this way, inverted and distorted.

On the basis of a thorough examination of historical sources including the press, images, and film, Navitski explores representations of violence as different forms of "popular sensationalism," a term she uses to describe widely circulating cultural representations constructed to generate a heightened sensual or moral reception in the public.¹ These representations, she argues, were based principally on widely disseminated imported models like the serialized novel (or folletín) and the film serial. For the author, the use of primarily American or French models implies not servile imitation (a point on which she challenges the existing scholarship) but rather a conscious and specific appropriation on the part of receiving countries. This process can be seen, for example, in the fusion of Hollywood's image of the bandido with that of the Mexican charro (cattle wrangler) in adventure films such as El Zarco (Miguel Contreras Torres, 1920) and El caporal (The foreman; Miguel Contreras Torres and Rafael Bermúdez Zatarain, 1921) or in the influence of French crime serials on Os mistérios de Rio de Janeiro (The mysteries of Rio de Janeiro; Henrique Coelho Neto and Alfredo Musso, 1917), which made film a platform for exhibiting the city's sensational, ultramodern crimes. In this sense Navitski takes up Ben Singer's modernity thesis, which proposes that cinema in general, and especially sensational cinema, not only demonstrated but also shaped the profound transformation of social lives and perception.² Navitski argues that it is imperative to consider precarious industrialization as a significant variable when thinking about the modernity thesis in relationship to Latin America. Navitski suggests that the...