Introduction to Latin American Film

Summary

Latin American film has developed in a unique way over the past one hundred years. The cinématographe – an early moving image projector to which we owe the word ‘cinema’ itself – was given its first commercial demonstration by two brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière in the Grand Café, Paris, on 28 December 1895. Given its portability – it weighed less than 20 pounds – the Lumière brothers sent their cameramen around the world to give demonstrations of their new invention. In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the first screening of what was then called the ‘Omnigrapho’ took place on 8 July 1896 (Johnson and Stam, p. 19); the address was listed as 57, rua do Ouvidor (Hennebelle and Gumucio-Dagrón, p. 94). On 28 July 1896, the Lumière brothers’ film, L’arrivée d’un train (Train Arriving at the Station) was screened in the Odeon Theatre in Buenos Aires (Hennebelle and Gumucio-Dagrón, p. 84). In Mexico City in August 1896 audiences were thrilled to see the first moving images projected onto a screen by the cinématographe; the cameraman was Gabriel Vayre, and the showing took place at the Cinematógrafo Lumière, no. 9, Plateros Avenue (Mora, p. 6). For many years the film industry developed in Latin America along the lines suggested by this mould – it was an offshoot of cultural and technological developments happening off-screen in Europe and – gradually more and more – in the United States. Film developed along two rather different tracks since its early inception in Europe; the Lumière brothers emphasised the need to capture the ordinary and the everyday, as suggested by their first reportage piece, L’arrivée d’un train (1895), while Georges Méliès strove to give filmic expression to the fantastic in his 30-scene, 15-minute narrative film Le Voyage dans la lune (Trip to the Moon, 1902) which was based on a novel by Jules Vernes, and was the first film to achieve international distribution. These two distinct film styles were at the heart of the language of film as it developed in the early twentieth century (although account must be taken of Jean-Luc Godard’s important observation that these two poles were not as far apart as might at first be thought; see Lehman and Luhr, p. 249).

The earliest films produced in Latin America aspired to what might be called the Lumière blueprint.