12 - Cinema in Latin America

Summary

Dazzled by so many marvellous inventions, the people of Macondo did not know where their amazement began . . . They became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theatre . . . for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortunes tears of affliction had been shed would appear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one.

In this passage from the novel Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), Gabriel García Márquez depicts the impact of 'modernity' on the previously isolated town of Macondo. New technologies of light, speed and sound - 'so many marvellous inventions' - are brought in on what is described as an 'innocent' yellow train, though this innocence is revealed to have more sinister implications as the imperial powers, in the form of the banana company, soon arrive and take charge of the region. A local merchant offers the first movie projection in town, with films and equipment bought in from outside: the very technology of cinema, its cost and sophistication, is seen to reflect and exacerbate the unequal development between 'peripheral' places like Macondo and the metropolitan centres. The new audiences would gradually learn the conventions of documentary and narrative cinema, but the immediate impact of the medium was thrilling, ‘dazzling’, ‘amazing’. The people of Macondo have an immediate empathy with filmic melodrama – and melodrama would be one of the main structuring forces of Latin American cinema – but find the developing ‘star’ system, with celebrated actors in different roles, somewhat less believable. Cinema, which Macondo’s mayor calls ‘a machine of illusions’, is here seen as a most powerful form of entertainment, instruction but also obfuscation.