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

Rielle Navitski's book offers a productive and well-researched discussion of the interrelationship between journalism and early cinema in Mexico and Brazil. The author clearly elucidates the contexts in question, situating the relevant forms of cultural production within processes of modernity in both countries. The book offers an in-depth study of the impact of visual culture, and of the intricacies of media dissemination within specific contexts, which are compared and contrasted throughout. The larger contextualization resonates with both local and global preoccupations, reflecting a solid investigation on the place of Mexican and Brazilian cinemas and journalism within a global framework. Among the multiple methodologies applied, the author offers archival media history of the period within national and regional debates, film, image and discourse analyses, and discussions of particular means of production, distribution, and reception.

Evoking Guy Debord's society of the spectacle and the notion that public spectacles mediate violence, Navitski examines the commodification of violence through the illustrated press and early cinema, approaching a nascent consumer mass culture intrinsically linked with modernization and global markets. The book discusses how public narratives are framed and ostensibly mediated through the information and entertainment industries, and how interconnected those industries are to national economies, political climate, and quotidian experiences in Brazil and Mexico. Further, the study attests to how violence operates as an index of modernity. On the one hand, Navitski examines how violence was exploited, criticized, and moralized as spectacle in both print media and cinema. On the other, violence is presented as an indication of the urban growth under way in early twentieth-century Mexico and Brazil. In general, the research presents a clear relationship between violence and industrialized urbanity. But this is not its sole purpose: the author also explores the nuances of violence and the role violence plays within a larger imaginary beyond processes of modernization. The duality of urban/rural is also evoked, particularly as it is represented in early cinema. Other factors present in Navitski's discussion of modernity are foreign interest and investments in Latin America; dialogues with Hollywood and European cinema; and dialogues with established parameters of journalism and literary and filmic genres from Europe and the United States.

The book is organized around two main approaches the author calls "violent actualities" and "sensational fictions." The terminology alludes to the author's methodologies for examining films and journalism that often incorporated crime reenactments and documentary techniques; other times they applied sensational melodrama in the shape of explicit violence and special effects; and sometimes they offered simultaneous applications of both documentation and melodramatic sensationalism. One of the goals of the book is to show how "emerging forms of popular culture simultaneously documented and dramatized quotidian experience" (13). The author explores "sensationalism as a structuring category of public discourse in modernizing, stratified societies" (16), aligning her criticism with affect studies and intersubjectivity vis-à-vis the public sphere.

The book is organized in two clear sections and five cohesive chapters. The first part, "Sensationalizing Violence in Mexico," has two chapters discussing the particular historical impact of the Porfiriato and the Mexican Revolution, indicating the specificity of context and its implications for the culture industry and cultural projects. Chapter 1, "Staging Public Violence in Porfirian and Revolutionary Mexico, 1896–1922," examines "films of actuality" of the period, "which blurred the distinction between the spontaneous recording and the reenactment of topical events" (32). "Films of actuality" is an early cinematic genre that preceded the documentary but used footage of real events. The chapter examines films such as Enrique Rosas's El automóvil gris (1919) and Ernesto Vollrath's La banda del auto-móvil (1919), among others. Given the ramifications and effects of the (then) new medium of cinema, Navitski points out how "Mexican cinema's development shaped historically specific understandings of the ontology of the moving image, leading to unique configurations of documentation and fictionalization...