Latin American Cinema: A Comparative History by Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez (review)

Latin American Cinema: A Comparative History begins with a clarification. In telling the history of cinema in Latin America, Paul Schroeder Rodriguez is not aiming for a "national perspective [or] a single period" (1). Instead, he aims to widen the understanding of the history of the region, through new methods and a comparative tactic. He takes up the arguments of the new history of Latin American cinema laid out previously by Paulo Antonio Paranaguá in his book of essays Tradición y modernidad en el cine de America Latina (2003) as well as his comparative approach to the telling of film history.

Instead of defining "modernity" as singular, as Paranaguá does, Schroeder Rodriguez defines it as plural modernities and draws on comparative modernity studies, which he defines as "an interdisciplinary field that approaches modernity in the plural as the crystallization of economic, political, and cultural institutions into different configurations" (11). Expanding on this approach, Schroeder Rodriguez explains how "In Latin America, no single form or discourse of modernity has ever become dominant, and this has meant that the region has experienced modernity in the plural, as both sequence and simultaneity" (13).

The main purpose and argument of the book is to systematically go through the history of Latin American cinema from the silent era until the present, all the while comparing national cinemas and their particular films to other cinematic traditions in the continent, as well as how they were created in response to the cultural, political, and economic realities at the time, in some cases looking into the realities of Europe and the United States. Through the University of California Press website, Schroeder Rodriguez also offers a sample syllabus in order to frame a Latin American cinema course around this publication.

The book is set up chronologically, with particular attention to narrative cinema, and the film industries of Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina, being as they were the three countries with the largest numbers of films and production companies. Other national cinemas and films are taken into consideration, however, as he explains "these films serve as signposts on a continental journey; I discuss some in greater depth than others, but all are important in the conceptual mapping of what is an exceedingly diverse landscape characterized by aesthetic and ideological heterogeneity over space and over time" (4).

The first chapter of Part One covers silent cinema, breaking it down into conventional silent cinema and avant-garde silent cinema. The first of these is distinguished by a cinema that is "by and for criollos," a term which he defines as "a stand-in for national hegemonic cultures throughout Spanish America" and "Europeanized cultures throughout Latin America, including Brazil" (17). The avant-garde silent films that follow this era, however, "experiment with non-Aristotelian narratives, and with a nonrealist cinematography" (45). Schroeder Rodriguez acknowledges the lack of surviving films of the era, and only looks into four films that have remained. Of these, he takes particular interest in ¡Que Viva México! (Sergei Eisenstein) and how the director's cinematography and techniques made an impact in subsequent filmmaking and the aesthetic of Mexican film.

With Part Two, Schroeder Rodriguez covers studio cinema, breaking this period down into three parts; the transition to sound, the birth and growth of the industry, and the crisis and decline of studio cinema. He sets up this era by briefly introducing the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and explaining how throughout Latin America there was a growth of corporatist states, which funded many of the early studios "aimed at a rapidly growing urban population" (71). In keeping with the understanding of Latin American cinema as being in conversation with Hollywood, there is a short section that explores how Latin American studio cinema was a "vernacular" of Hollywood's international style, copying many of the same tropes and genres.

After covering the transition to sound, the book goes on to the growth of the industry, in particular through musical films. The chapter...