IUELEE NAVITSKI

“Ese pequeño arte que tanto amamos”: Remediating Cinema in El Universal Ilustrado

The Mexico City magazine El Universal Ilustrado (1917-34) is best known today fo r its promotion o f the avant-garde estridentista movement and the rival Contemporáneos group; however, the publications engagement with cinema, unparalleled in the Mexican press, has gone largely unexamined. This essay contends that El Universal Ilustrado’̂ remediation o f cinema through literary, journalistic, and visual discourses negotiated between postrevolutionary cultural nationalism and US mass culture, and thus between the intellectual ambitions o f lettered elites and emerging popular audiences. Cinema’s social ejfects in the period highlighted a perceived divide between cultural producers and consumers, given Mexico’s status as an importer rather than a producer o f moving-image entertainment. A t the same time, the publication staged procedures for assimi­lating the medium o f film (as a technology, an industry, and a set o f subjective experiences) by linking cinema to new forms o f urban circulation and erotically charged social encounters, highlighting Mexicans’ role as cultural producers in the imagined space ofLos Angeles, and articulating and enforcing ideals for domestic film production and consumption. El Universal Ilustrado s visual and verbal heterogeneity allowed it to negotiate the conflicting cultural meanings attached to cinema, even as discourses on the medium reinscribed hierarchies o f nation, race, gender, and class.

On the occasion of its sixth anniversary, the Mexico City magazine El Universal Ilustrado celebrated what it considered to be its greatest virtues: “nuestro eclecticismo” and “la constante rectificación de nuestros errores” (El Universal Ilustrado 13). In the same issue, editor- in-chief Carlos Noriega Hope described a weekly recalibration of the periodicals structure and content in order to appeal to a reading public that was heterogeneous and growing, though still limited in size:

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 50 (2016)

294 Rielle Navitski

Lo más difícil, realmente, en un periódico ilustrado es guardar una proporción juiciosa, una ponderada arquitectura, en cada número. Es decir, debe haber ‘de todo y para todos,’ distribuido de tal manera que el lector ingenuo recorra cada página lentamente, sin hojear seis o sietede un tirón para detenerse en una sola.........

En muchas ocasiones la arquitectura, la ponderación a que me he referido, falla lamentablemente. Parece entonces EL UNIVERSAL ILUSTRADO demasiado frívolo, o demasiado serio, o excesivamente cinematográfico, o tremendamente internacional. Hay que cruzarse, entonces, de brazos con paciencia, porque el error no tiene una rectifica­ción posible sino hasta los ochos días (“Del moderno periodismo” 50)1

Noriega Hope’s comments signal both the specificity of the illustrated magazine’s form—which amalgamates text, photography, and illus­tration in an ephemeral architecture of sections and columns that is reinvented on a weekly basis— and the cultural registers and reference points through which the magazine navigated as it sought to attract an emerging mass audience at a moment of national reconstruction and modernization.

Part of a wave of new publications that emerged after many Porfirian-era newspapers and magazines shuttered during the Revo­lution (Timoteo Alvarez and Martinez Riaza 217-18), El Universal Ilustrado (1917-34) is perhaps best known today for its dissemination of writings by the estridentistas, who advocated the development of a uniquely national mode of artistic expression even as they took inspira­tion from European avant-gardes, and the rival Contemporáneos group, which cultivated an overtly cosmopolitan and universalist mode of literary production.2 Yet intellectual debates like the 1925 polemic involving the two groups were only one element of the kaleidoscopic variety of topics covered by the magazine, which described itself as a “semanario artistico-popular.”3 The publication featured articles on the latest technologies, intellectual trends, and political developments in the United States and Europe alongside coverage of emerging forms of postrevolutionary cultural nationalism that would become hegemonic by the end of the 1920s.4 Initiatives spearheaded by El Universal Ilus­trado paralleled official efforts to forge a unified national identity that bridged ethnic, class, and regional divides in the wake of the Revolu­tion, which were linked to desires for an economically prosperous and culturally modern nation (Knight, Vaughn and Lewis). The 1921 “In­dia Bonita” beauty contest organized by the magazine exemplified the exaltation of Mexico’s indigenous heritage, even as indios were actively

Remediating Cinema in El Universal Ilustrado 295

encouraged to assimilate into the Spanish-speaking, mestizo population (López 29-64). Special issues showcased the picturesque landscapes, notable landmarks, and modernizing infrastructure of Mexico’s states, an initiative viewed to contribute “al desarollo de las relaciones entre los habitantes del país y va creando vínculos que afianzan la nacionali­dad” (“Nuestro Distrito Federal” 7). El Universal Ilustrado also covered the work of Diego Rivera, who was quickly becoming the most visible representative of Mexico’s burgeoning muralist movement, and helped consecrate Mariano Azuelas Los de abajo as the quintessential “novela de la Revolución Mexicana” by re-publishing it in serial form in 1925 (Mahieux 393).5

In describing El Universal Ilustrados, balancing of the serious with the frivolous, the national and the international, Noriega Hope significantly notes that the magazine was often viewed as “excesivamen­te cinematográfico” (“Del moderno periodismo” 50.” The publication’s attention to cinema— affectionately called “ese pequeño arte que tanto amamos” by contributors—was unequaled in the Mexico City press (Miquel, “Por las pantallas” 89), ranging from cinema-themed literary works to film criticism, film-related contests, reports from Hollywood correspondents, and articles on local production. These varied engage­ments with the medium exemplify the heterogeneity of El Universal Ilustrados cultural reference points: film was associated with triviality and ephemerality, but was also a focus of reflections on aesthetics. As a topic, it crystallized tensions between the emerging currents of postrevolutionary nationalism (including ambitions for a national film industry) and popular fascination with novel forms of entertainment and consumer culture associated with US influence.

Emerging from Mexico City’s robust and expanding exhibition culture, El Universal Ilustrado capitalized on the sense of novelty linked with cinema to frame itself as emphatically contemporary, even after the medium’s consolidation as a distinct, primarily narrative-driven form, rather than a non-narrative “cinema of attractions” inseparable from its intermedial relations with other forms of “screen practice” like the magic lantern (Gunning, Musser). Whereas emerging media forms often “remediate” the content and formal strategies of preexisting media in order to tap into established audiences and accrue cultural legitimacy (Bolter and Grusin 68—70), El Universal Ilustrado remediated cinema— simultaneously understood as a technological apparatus, a repertoire of aesthetic strategies, and a set of subjective experiences linked to new

296 Rielle Navitski

entertainment venues and social practices. Engagements with cinema within El Universal Ilustrados, constantly shifting architecture of literary works, crónicas, journalistic coverage, and film criticism, accompanied by half-tone photographs and illustrations (made possible by the roto­gravure printing process), worked to “bridge or join old and new tech­nologies, formats, and audiences” (Thornburn and Jenkins 3). Adopting a comparative media studies approach sheds light on how the magazine functioned as a space of encounter between avant-gardes fascinated with cinema’s aesthetic potential and a growing popular audience captivated by Hollywood and its star system.

This essay thus shifts direction from recent explorations of cine­mas place in the literary imagination of early twentieth-century Mexico (Rashkin, “Una opalescente claridad”) and Latin America more broadly (Borge). In many cases, these scholars extract literary works from their original context: the visually rich and discursively heterogeneous space of the illustrated magazine.6 I argue for the value of de-centering liter­ary production as the focus of analysis, building on approaches from periodical studies that “insist[s] on the autonomy and distinctiveness of periodicals as cultural objects,” rather than simply “aggregations of otherwise autonomous works” (Latham and Scholes 519, 521). By contrast with previous scholarship on relationships between cinema and print media in early twentieth-century Mexico, which traces the development of film criticism as discourse (González Casanova; Miquel, Por las pantallas) or examens literary engagements with cinema (Miquel, Disolvencias), I ground my analysis in the material and textual proper­ties of the original publications, charting the interrelations of cinema and print staged in the magazine’s pages.

Curiously, El Universal Ilustrados fascination with film has gone largely unexamined in recent re-evaluations of the magazine, even as literary critics delve into its complex negotiation of commodified mass culture and avant-garde movements (Gallo; Gabara). Scholars have emphasized the publication’s role as a key site for the dissemi­nation of literary avant-gardes (Mahieux; Flores 132, 147), focusing on how modernist writers’ interest in new media technologies was materialized in the illustrated press. Noting the estridentistas fascina­tion with radio broadcasting— in particular, the radically new spatial configurations it instituted and its potential to dissolve language into abstract sound— Rubén Gallo emphasizes their work’s convergence with popular discourses on radio in El Universal Ilustrado, which sponsored Mexico’s first commercial radio broadcast in April 1923 (123-29).

Remediating Cinema in El Universal Ilustrado 297

Noriega Hope commissioned a poem for the occasion by leading estri- dentista Manuel Maples Arce. Entitled “T.S.H.” (“telefonía sin hilos”), it was read over the airwaves and published in the magazine accompanied by an illustration by Fernando Bolaños Cacho that dramatizes the sense of displacement generated by fragments of radio broadcasts received from distant locales (Flores 145-46). While implicitly addressing the remediation of radio in poetry and print, Gallo grounds his analysis in notions of medium specificity, privileging works that he views as fully exploiting radio’s unique characteristics rather than examining how radio and the illustrated press might have functioned as mutu­ally constitutive media forms. Esther Gabara takes a more intermedial approach in her discussion of the estridentistas and Contemporáneos complex relationship with the medium of photography, which they viewed as aligned with the feminized sphere of mass culture and thus with promiscuous forms of cultural mixture that exceeded hegemonic forms of postrevolutionary nationalism (143-44).

By contrast with photography and radio, film’s place in El Uni­versal Ilustrado has received very little attention, perhaps because reme­diations of cinema in the magazines’ pages are impossible to untangle from the specter of Hollywood’s cultural hegemony. In El Universal Ilustrado, engagements with cinema highlighted a perceived divide between cultural producers and consumers, rendered particularly stark by the expense and technical complexity of film production and by Mexico’s status as an importer rather than a producer of moving-image entertainment. At the same time, this divide was tentatively bridged through a series of procedures for assimilating the medium of film—as a technology, an industry, and a set of subjective experiences— that were staged within the visual and discursive space of the magazine’s pages. I focus on three principal textual procedures that blurred the boundaries between spectacle and spectator, and, by extension, between passive spectator and active participant in film culture. Crónicas and literary works equated elements of film language (such as close-ups and dis­solves) with distinctly modern forms of visual perception linked to male heterosexual desire, elaborating structures of looking that placed the texts’ narrators within a network of erotic connections unfolding in urban space. Second, fictional and journalistic narratives of Los Angeles visually and verbally positioned Mexicans as cultural producers within the imagined space of Hollywood, highlighting forms of Mexican creative labor that were often elided in popular discourses on the US

298 Rielle Navitski

film industry. Finally, film reviews and coverage of local film produc­tion harnessed both activities to patriotic ends. Pedagogical works of film criticism instructed readers about elements of style and narrative, encouraging them to adopt a sympathetic attitude towards Mexican productions and to actively evaluate and interpret films, instead of being transfixed by the allure of foreign—especially Hollywood—stars.

The growing presence of US cinema in Mexico was a particularly vexed issue due to Hollywood’s frequent stereotyp­ing of Mexican characters as savage bandits and alluring señori­tas, a practice that led to a nation il boycott of some US films in 1922 (Serna 163-71, Vasey 93-94, 170-76). Yet despite— and, indeed, because of—the openly conflictual relationship between the Mexican government and US film producers in the 1920s, Laura Isabel Serna argues that “exhibition and moviegoing, discussions about what cinema should be and should do in Mexican society, and the fan culture that emerged around the cross-border circula­tion of American cinema were as important for the production of a distinctly national film culture— perhaps more so—than any film produced in Mexico during this period” (6). El Universal Ilustrado played a pivotal role in this process, articulating broader public dis­courses on cinema with literary and artistic experimentation.

Placing avant-gardes in dialogue with emerging globalized forms of popular culture, El Universal Ilustrados engagement with the medium participates in a phenomenon that Miriam Hansen has influ­entially called “vernacular modernism,” which encompasses “a whole range of cultural practices that register, respond to, and reflect upon processes of modernization and the experience of modernity” (60). Classical Hollywood cinema, in Hansen’s view, mirrored perceptual and subjective experiences generated by industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of mass consumer culture, giving it a “transnational and translatable resonance” that enabled it to function as “something like the first global vernacular” (68, 70). While this formulation usefully highlights local responses to the dominant US industry, it overlooks the diversity of imported goods circulating in cultural markets and the contested process through which they are attributed with social mean­ings. Aaron Gerow emphasizes that in Hansen’s model, “the ability to appropriate is taken as a given, is seen as inherent in the semiotic process; a notion such as this elides the often-contentious history of conflict over the extent and possession of this ability” (23). Gerow stresses that public discourse about media technologies, particularly new

Remediating Cinema in El Universal Ilustrado 299

media, is a site of struggle where the boundaries of medium and nation are continually re-defined through the assertion and re-negotiation of discursive authority (22-24). In El Universal Ilustrado, efforts to rhe­torically frame Mexicans as cultural producers, rather than consumers of imported cultural goods, often reinscribed hierarchies of gender and race. Overwhelmingly male letrado journalists and white/mestizo film producers presented themselves as the arbiters of cinemas resignifica­tion, whether as a vehicle for literary experimentation or as a means of instituting a national film culture (Rama). The publication reserved a limited place for the indigenous within national culture and expressed anxieties about cinema’s impact on popular audiences and women. As the magazine remediated cinema through literary experimentation, fictional and non-fictional chronicles of Hollywood, and commentary on local film production and consumption, it attached social meanings to the medium that oscillated between the erudite and the popular, and between Hollywood and postrevolutionary Mexican nationalism.

Urban Encounters and the Desiring Gaze: Remediating Film in Literature and the Crónica

Throughout the late teens and twenties, El Universal Ilustrados contributors invoked cinema as a marker of all that was superficial, ephemeral and thus quintessentially modern, bolstering the magazine’s claims to novelty and variety. In the 1925 survey “¿Cómo Pierde Ud. el Tiempo?,” poet Rafael López, a founding member of the Ateneo de la Juventud, admitted to a passion for “leyendo las historias de las ar­tistas de cine” published in “las páginas frívolamente transcendentales del ‘Fotoplay [sic]”’ (Aldebarán 20) (Figure l).7 As this description of Hollywood’s preeminent fan magazine suggests, cinema’s significance was paradoxically perceived to reside in its triviality. This position was echoed by Salvador Novo, a leading member of the Contemporáneos group and frequent contributor to El Universal Ilustrado, in his article “Bataclanicemos la vida,” whose title refers to a daring French musical revue that sparked a craze in Mexico City. Invoking a spirit of frivolity in arts and letters, Novo writes “el cine es nuestro arte, el de América. Cine trágico es cosa griega y la Venus de Milo se ha engordado. Cine frívolo, que acaba bien precisamente por contraposición a la vida, es el Ba-ta-clán, es Gloria Swanson, y debemos empezar a ser ya en México”

300 Rielle Navitski

(39). Claiming film as an art of the Americas (not solely the United States), Novo rejected Old World aesthetic canons and hailed film’s potential to reenergize Mexican intellectual life. By contrast, Nicara­guan journalist and intellectual Francisco Zamora expressed skepticism about cinema’s modernizing potential, even as he highlighted its links to avant-garde movements:

A pesar de lo que opinen los jóvenes cinematófilos y ‘dadaistas’ de los cuatro puntos cardinales de la República, no me es posible tomar en serio ‘ese pequeño arte que tanto amamos [.]’ Hasta sospecho ¡así el Señor me perdone! que está produciendo un añoñamiento en eso que llaman los editorialistas la ‘conciencia colectiva, añoñamiento semejante al que produjeron en el mundo la literatura de Jorge Ohnet y las novelas del señor Pérez Escrich.(“Del arte mudo” 21)

Evoking the work of well-known serial novelists, Zamora attributes film with similarly stupefying effects.

Expressing both suspicion and optimism about cinema’s social effects and aesthetic possibilities, estridentista writers hailed the me­dium’s capacity to level social and artistic hierarchies in a more radical fashion. Suggesting a fascination with Charlie Chaplin shared by avant- gardes across Latin America (Borge 73-105), Maples Arce declared in a 1923 interview published in El Universal Ilustrado, “Aún hay muchas gentes que se alumbran con lámpara de petróleo: se espantan de la luz eléctrica. Mary Pickford y Lenin les meten miedo [. . .] no quieren entender que Chariot es representativo y democrático” (qtd. in Rash- kin, “Una opalescente claridad” 56). The final phrase appears almost verbatim in the second estridentista manifesto posted as a broadsheet in the city of Puebla in January 1923. Expressing “Horror a los ídolos populares,” the signatories declared, “CAGUEMONOS: Primero:—En la estatuta del Grab Zaragoza, bravucón insolente de zarzuela, William Duncan del ‘film’ intervencionista del imperio, encaramado sobre el pedestal de la ignorancia colectiva” (qtd. in Schneider 277). This latter reference to a popular star of US westerns implied the masses’ suscep­tibility to US cultural imperialism (imagined as a film and exercised through the export of cinema). Even as Hollywood cinema raised the specter of “ignorancia colectiva,” Chaplin (celebrated by international avant-gardes) could be recuperated as the sign of an eminently modern and non-hierarchical aesthetic: “Charles Chaplin es angular, represen­tativo y democrático” (qtd. in Schneider 277).

Remediating Cinema in El Universal Ilustrado 301

Nuestias Encuestas Trascendentes

(Cóma Pierde Ud. el Tiempo?

Por Aldebarán

SA BE R cóm o c o rre el tiem po, y s e n tir lo que se va com o a g u a le n ta y m on ó to n a que pasa por

e l cuenco de laa m anos, req u ie re una filosofía p a ra q u e d ar en la g ra c ia del ocio In te l ig en te y ponderado que los an ­tiguó'* considera ron como no rm a su p re ­m a de vida. >ío la pereza In ú til, sino las h o ras que s e rá n como u n a p re p a ra ­ción p a ra o tra s labo res , po rq u e e l e s ­p ír itu a d q u irió una ta l especio de fina com prensión que le h ag a p e n e tra r en to d a s la s in tenciones.

Los po e tas y la s tip les son los que m e jo r e abeu p e rd e r el tiem po. Son los q u e lp p a jpan , m is terio so y m usica l, con voces ú n ic as y m ú ltip le s , Son ellos, tam b ién , los que m e jo r lo In te rp re ta n .

ICI sonriente vote Frías, quo pierde el tlcni|K) cu e l aprendizaje de la confec­

ción d e loa eocktnlle*.

RAFAEL LOPEZ D IC E . .

H e a q u í un silencio hondo . Un si­lencio casi p a rdo , d e que re su l ta p o r la concen trac ión m ágica del g r is d e los vo­lúm enes , y la q u ie tu d d o rad a do sol Pe ro es un c a lla r p a lp ita n te , en e l que s lén tenso p o te n tes y a lta s voces: la de un poe ta , la s de v a rio s h ls to rldo res- R afael López, don L u is G onzález O bre­gón. don N ico lás R a n g e l . . .

E l m a estro de "Con los o jos a b ie r ­to s” , d tce:

— P ie rd o el tiem po— y u n a sonrisa vaga por su s lab ios de lgados y volup­tuosos— . leyendo la s h is to ria s de las a r ti s ta s d e cine, pub licadas po r los ma- gazlues espec ia lis ta s . Q uedé encan tado de la a v e n tu ra de esa Incom parab le

O o rla Sw anson, convertida en j l i r q u i se de la F u la lse po r e l am or d e en Ira n:co f r a n c é s . . .

La Bonrlsa con tinúa , m ie n tra s ol pos lo va repasando las pág inas fr lv u ía n e n U trasce n d en ta le s dol “ F o t o p l a y j

UNA MECANOGRAFA M URMURA.

Figure 1. Poet Rafael López poses reading the “páginas frívola­mente transcendentales” of Photoplay magazine, suggesting the associations between cinema, the superficial, and the up-to-date

cultivated by El Universal Ilustrado. Estridentistas Manuel Maples Arce and Fermín Revueltas also appear in the layout.

El Universal Ilustrado, April 2, 1925. Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University

of Texas at Austin.

302 Rielle Navitski

As Elissa J. Rashkin has stressed, the estridentistas imagined aes­thetic interventions as public performances encompassing semi-staged events like the posting of the manifestos, pranks and provocations, ex­positions, theater, and interventions in the popular press (“The Striden- tist Movement” 11-12). Stressing estridentista Arqueles Vela’s conviction that journalism itself functioned as a meaningful mode of artistic pro­duction (148), Tatiana Flores describes his series of recurring columns in El Universal Ilustrado, which juxtaposed idiosyncratic reflections on stories from the telegraph news service with unrelated photographs that offered the reader unexpected and novel sights (149-50). Vela wrote in one of these columns in 1922,

La influencia del cinematógrafo ha llegado hasta lo increíble. Todo tiende a cinematografiarse. Las reinas, las cupletistas, las actrices se cinematografizan. / La vida está tomando la incoloridad del cine­matógrafo. Se camina con pasos de sombras cinemáticas. Se dan saltos inverosímiles. Las palabras no pronunciadas se subrayan con guiños cinematográficos (“Mientras el mundo gira” 41)

Echoing broader anxieties regarding cinema’s sweeping impact on mov­iegoers’ behavior, physical gestures, and self-presentation (de los Reyes, Sucedió en Jalisco 145), Vela’s crónica articulates an implicitly gendered concern: that women’s mimicry of onscreen performers threatened to strip them of sincerity and spontaneity. Ironically, across Vela’s writings in the magazine, the incorporation of cinematic tropes into first-person narration becomes a catalyst for literary experimentation, exemplifying the estridentistas1 interest in how “subjectivity was itself shaped by exter­nal forces” in the sensory environment of urban modernity (Rashkin, “The Stridentist Movement” 43).

In a series of writings published in the magazine in the early 1920s, Vela contends that the mechanisms of memory, desire, and the gaze had themselves become filmic in modernity, describing this shift in terms of a heterosexual male subjectivity. In the 1925 crónica “Las luces de los automóviles,” Vela invokes cinema as a mode of perception that has been assimilated into everyday acts of looking. Describing how the beams of light emitted by incandescent bulbs guide the attention and provoke the desire of the onlooker, he writes, “Las luces de los estribos de los coches nos presentan las pantarillas [sic] como en un ‘close-up.’ Parece que se han puesto de moda estas luces, precisamente, ahora que las faldas cortas triunfan de los comentarios y de la figura alargada” (70).

Remediating Cinema in El Universal Ilustrado 303

Linking an explicitly filmic mode of looking to technologies of electric light, new modes of urban circulation, and contemporary fashions, the text appears alongside a drawing by cartoonist Andrés Audiffred that renders the crónicas subject in graphic form: an abstracted silhouette of a woman stepping into an automobile as the headlight of a second car, which strongly resembles a projector beam, illuminates her feet and calves (Figure 2). The page’s layout constitutes a calculated mirroring of text and image, subject of Vela’s article “El pictografismo ideológico,” published the previous month. Vela describes his efforts to achieve in written form the graphic impact of illustration, stressing the need to explore the plastic possibilities of text in a modern moment marked by the decline of reading and the ascendance of the visual (35). Capital­izing on specifically visual and verbal resources, Audiffred’s illustration and Vela’s text jointly evoke the fetishistic logic of the cinematic close- up, which offers up a fragmented body for (implicitly erotic) contem­plation.

Vela’s exploration of the convergence between subjective pro­cesses and elements of film language arguably reached its height in La Señorita Etcétera, presented as evidence of El Universal Ilustrados eclecticism and openness to literary experimentation upon its publi­cation (Monterde 11). Serialized between September and December 1922 in La novela semanal—a booklet of reduced size inserted in the magazine’s binding—Vela’s text was the first installment of the supplement to include illustrations (Monterde 11). It recounts the un­named narrator’s pursuit of an elusive woman identified only as “ella” as he moves aimlessly through city streets, offices, hotel rooms, streetcars, and trains. Describing his first chance encounter with “ella” when he impulsively leaves the train in an unknown city, the narrator describes their dreamlike movements through urban space: “La calle fue pasan­do bajo nuestros pies, como en una proyección cinemática” (272). As the narrator repeatedly loses sight of, abandons, and re-encounters his fantasized love object, it becomes increasingly ambiguous whether she is one woman or several. This erosion of individuality is heightened by descriptions of “ella” as mechanized and infinitely reproducible: “Era, en realidad, ella, pero era una mujer automática. . . . Sus movimientos eran a líneas rectas, sus palabras las resucitaba una delicada aguja de fo­nógrafo (278). In the text’s final passages, “ella” is described as increas­ingly phantasmatic as allusions to the filmic medium multiply. The final encounter between the narrator and the elusive woman takes place in a

304 Rielle Navitski

movie theater: “en la puerta de un cine, un timbre saqueaba a los tran­suntes. Me detuve un instante para explicarme su realidad. / Sus pasos apenas si rozaban el silencio aglomerado numéricamente en las butacas” (280). The narrator portrays the movie theater as an anonymous space ripe for the projection and repetition of erotic reverie— “Todas las noches, como en un sueño, yo desenrollaba mi ilusión cinemática”— as the text’s focus shifts from the female figures threatening incorporation of media technologies to the male narrator’s internalization of cinematic forms of memory and fantasy.

HAY una «ran variedad en las lacea de los automóviles. Lu­ces de matice* diverso»- Luees

que encantan e ilusionan el paisaje, Luces picarescas, románticas, fatídicas.sentiment.ales, aluclnadcrae, hipootlza-

dlicretas. ensoñadoras, simbó-Ilesa, ’ buimaderas, ineoietit.es, tímidas.exceoreablee, simpática», Impon dera-bles, slnceras, eruditas, colegiala», etc.,

LAS LUCES PICARESCAS

traen una nueva inquietud a loa tran ­seúnte* de la noche. Un desoenslego do loa senidos. Una nueva ocasión para el flirteo. . .

El Inventor es anónimo—como todos lo» grande» Inventores— y por ese aoo- n(mismo este invento es ya universal. La comodidad que presenta a ios tu ­ristas y sobre todo a las turistas, el modernismo de loa luces en ios estri­bos del automóvil, «e para nosotros una de las más grandee incomodidades

Esas lucee recrudecen la tentación de los tobillo» cuando menos lo «ape­ramos y cuando •?« a tentación. Si en el dia. ba el eepectáciüo de un dar un coebe, en la s poquefio y malévolo bombillas en el estriba adquiere mayor lnqule dnaclones.

La» lacee en loe ea' ches no» presentan iai mo en an ‘•close-up". F puesto de moda «ata

. nos sugestióna­la mujer al abor- ioche y con este reflector de las o, el espectáculo tlimo y miti afü-

tribos de los eo- t pantarrlUas co- ’arece quo se han s lucee, precisa- i faldee cortas tetarlos y de la

Recortes para Llenar

Las Luces de los Automóviles

Por Arquetes Velasubrayar los encantos de las mujeres y dispersan nuestras miradas, las pier­den, ¡as desbandan hada toda» las ca­lles.

Hay en cetas luces un guifio pica­resco y una intención aviesa do que las veamos fugazmente, de que recorte­mos la figura femenina y centralice­mos la estupefacción en bu actitud al subir al automóvil.

Lucee picarescas que son algo asi co­mo el pararrayo de las miradas trah-

LAH LUCES ROMANTICAS

En los caminos sileucioeoa y som­brío», las farolas de lo» automóviles dejan una huella celeste por la que se bacen todos loa viajes Inverosímiles ha­cia la» países Inventado» por loe cuen­tistas. Cuando un automóvil hace una excursión por nuestras pueblo» destar­talados y desolados, esta luz enferma de romanticismo las miradas de los mu­chachas quo sueñan con los viajes. , .

LAS LUCES FATIDICAS

Hay farolas que desconciertan al transeúnte y lo desamparan de la vi­da. Farolas que tienen un poder suges­tivo y malévolo. Que obligan al tran­

seúnte a verlas fijamente, indefinida­mente hasta quedar qneniados en sue irradiaciones. Estas luces son las que ocasionan los accidentes- Hay que mar­carlas y que ponerlos un salvavidas pa­ra las miradas.

LAS LUCES SENTIMENTALES

Al pasar un automóvil por una ca­rretera a la media noche, nos sorpren­de su luz, que aunque muchos veces no es de ese tono, la encontramos con el mismo matiz de aquella luz que nos llevó a la prim ara aventura del espi­r i ta . . .

E sta luz es algo asi como loe rayos ultravioleta que rofracc'onan la imagi­nación y la preparan para un daltonis­mo sentimental.

LAS LUCES ALUCIN ADORAS

Son generalmente las más pequeñas, ¡as máe Insignificantes. Las que se van apagando y encendiendo, según bu au ­tomatismo, que es idéntico al guifio de cic-rtae mujeres que encontramos ea las calles prohibidas. Luces que tergi­versan el sentido de las calles, que nos cambian de dirección, como si hubie­sen movido el "swltoh” de las perspec­tivas.

LAS LUCES HIPNOTIZADORAS

A veces, mientras estamos esperan­do un tren, nos hiere una luz insospe­chada y de una gran fuerza. Sentimos su presión y su decidida ¡itraetivídad.

La seguimos a lo largo de ¡as calle» y la perdemos y la seguimos después-----

Sí

(Signe en la u&srluo 7U)

Remediating Cinema in E l Universal Ilustrado 305

Figure 2. Arqueles Vela’s text “Las luces de los automóviles” and Audiffred’s accompanying drawing equate the exercise o f an im­plicitly male erotic gaze in urban space with the mechanisms of

cinematic framing and projection. El Universal Ilustrado, August 27, 1925. Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection,

University o f Texas Libraries, The University o f Texas at Austin.

Written in a much more conventional prose style, a series of short stories by Juan Bustillo Oro (who would later become an impor­tant director of Mexican sound cinema) entitled La penumbra inquieta also presents the movie theater as a privileged space of heterosexual de­sire, linking the Hollywood star system to new forms of public sexuality exercised in the movie theater (Serna 79-80).9 These texts describe a dialectic of distance and proximity, in which unattainable stars became the object of intimate fantasies that could foster erotic connections be­tween moviegoers. In “El ladrón de Bagdad,” the first-person narrator, a bohemian student, observes an unaccompanied woman raptly admiring the hyperkinetic performances of Douglas Fairbanks in the 1924 film referenced in the story’s title: “Tuve celos de Douglas Fairbanks, una mujer sola en el cine parece absurdamente nuestra” (50). Equating the woman’s solitary presence in public space with sexual availability, the narrator embarks on a wordless flirtation, taking advantage of her ab­sorption in the film to initiate physical contact, culminating in a series of kisses (51). Taking advantage of her state of distraction to fulfill an erotic conquest, the narrator capitalizes on desires mobilized by Holly­wood’s star system and temporarily contests its seductive power. Where­as Vela and Bustillo Oro focus on the transformative dimensions of film spectatorship, describing its impact on bodily gestures, sexual desire, perception, and memory in gendered terms, journalistic and fictional chronicles of Hollywood emphasized participation in film production as the most powerful means of appropriating cinema’s cultural force.

“El Espejismo de Los Angeles”: Imaginarles o f Film Production

As the Mexico City press developed a network of Los Angeles correspondents in the early 1920s (Miquel, Por las pantallas 101-06), illustrated magazines increasingly explored the imagined space of Los

306 Rielle Navitski

Angeles. In the pages of El Universal Ilustrado, the city is framed as si­multaneously cosmopolitan and hostile, attracting a flood of newcomers with dreams of fame and economic prosperity that ultimately prove to be mirages. In an article entitled “La Ciudad Cosmopolita,” the maga­zine’s Los Angeles correspondent Armando Vargas de la Maza writes, “A Los Angeles viene arribando de todos los puntos del mundo, gentes de todas las razas y todos los tipos. . . . Con todo, estos horizontes son apenas espejismos. La fuente de riqueza del cine está completamente cerrada, agotada, a los nuevos buscadores de oro” (43). Despite this cautionary tone regarding Hollywood’s allure, especially for young women (Serna 123-27, 145-51), El Universal Ilustrado facilitated fan­tasies of mobility linked to the city and portrayed it as more familiar than foreign. In a 1925 article entitled “El espejismo de Los Angeles,” which announced a contest for a trip to the city co-sponsored by the magazine and the Los Angeles Times, novelist Alfonso Teja Zabre writes, “Los Angeles también tiene algo de Cosmópolis como París y como Nueva York. . . . En Los Angeles la perspectiva de la tierra, del aire, del ambiente y de la población tiene algo de meridional, de criollo, de asiá­tico y de trópico (17). Emphasizing that “En California, un mexicano es algo más que un extraño. Porque fue algo más en otro tiempo” (17), Teja Zabre references Los Angeles’s cultural heterogeneity and historical past to affirm Mexicans’ belonging in the city, and by extension, within Hollywood’s industrial structure.

While El Universal Ilustrado was quick to publicize Mexican actors’ successes in Hollywood, however minor, occasionally the maga­zine highlighted the real-life obstacles facing Mexican performers in a racially stratified industry (Serna 209—12). An article signed by José Corral Rigan (a pseudonym shared by Noriega Hope, Vela, and writer Febronio Ortega) chronicles the indignities suffered by an anonymous Mexican extra in Hollywood. In contrast with the self-aggrandizing claims of “todos los artistas y pseudo-artistas mexicanos que trabajan en Los Angeles [que] son, indefectiblemente, dos cosas: Estrellas y Patrio­tas” (6), the extra admits to being forced by financial need to play two diametrically opposed but equally dehumanizing roles: a stereotyped Mexican bandit or “greaser,” and his heroic Anglo opponent. During the performance of this latter role, the extra’s consciousness of a double masquerade leads to an explosion of violence: “Como buen mexicano sufría entonces una oculta indignación contra esos fantoches que nos parodiaban y ¡claro!, repartía golpes con todas fuerzas, no obstante las vociferaciones del director” (6). In this account, the extra’s national

Remediating Cinema in El Universal Ilustrado 307

identity is either caricatured or rendered invisible by Hollywood’s ra- cialized system of representation, prefiguring the themes of masquerade and misrecognition manifest in Noriega Hope’s “‘Che’ Ferrati, inven­tor.”

Drawing on the writer’s his real-life trip to Los Angeles between December 1919 and March 1920 and published in the magazine in 1923, the story mingles technological fantasy with a deep suspicion of Hollywood’s artifice. Its protagonist, Mexican extra Federico Granados, rises to stardom thanks to a highly malleable modeling compound cre­ated by the eponymous Argentine inventor. Applied to Federico’s face, the material allows him to exactly mimic the appearance of a recently deceased French matinee idol, Henri Le Goffic. The masquerade wins him fame, even as it erodes his relationship with his lover, a star-struck American flapper who is increasingly smitten by the dead actor. In its emphasis on ingenuity, “‘Che’ Ferrati” participates in what Beatriz Sarlo has called an “imaginación técnica,” constituted by popular discourses on technology that offered readers forms of practical “know-how” that became meaningful sources of cultural capital and class mobility at a moment of ongoing urbanization and modernization (16). The story would have resonated with technical articles published El Universal Ilustrado that offered details about special effects and advances in color, sound, and 3-D projection (Honoré; Brigard; “Las verdades y mentiras de la pantalla;” “Los trucos de la pantalla”). Yet the narrative of “‘Che’ Ferrati” offers only a partial reversal of the mastery of technology and technique monopolized by US studios. Ferrati’s invention allows Federico to insert himself in— but not overturn— the racial and national hierarchies embedded in Hollywood’s mode of production. Studio power brokers are forced to acknowledge Federico’s superior acting ability and masculinity; director Roy Margram declares, “he­mos acabado por hallar un Henri Le Goffic superior, más artista, más hombre” (957).9 Yet despite this declaration, the inflexibility of the star system condemns Federico to either continue his masquerade or return to his anonymity as an extra.

These racial and national hierarchies are both highlighted and provisionally undone by the reassertion of male dominance within the heterosexual romance central to the plot, portrayed as permeated from its inception by cinematic forms of looking and desire. In a passage that recalls the visual fragmentation of the woman’s body and the pro­liferation of interchangeable women in Vela’s writings, Noriega Hope describes Federico’s initial meeting with the flapper Hazel van Burén

308 Rielle Navitski

at the Mount Wilson observatory: “su vista clavóse irresistiblemente en dos pantorillas que, un poco más allá, pendían sobre el abismo. . . . Luego vio el rostro imperturbable de una girl de las calles, de los almacenes, de los cines” (932). Federicos gaze first focuses fetishistically on Hazel’s calves before moving to her face, described in terms of anonymous young women circulating in public space. Hazel’s glances at Federico also signal a de-individualizing and explicitly filmic form of desire: she mistakes him for a movie star, foreshadowing her growing fascination with Le Goffic. After Hazel sends a flirtatious note to Federico in his disguise as the star, the ironies of his situation push him to the verge of suicide. In the story’s climax, after a physical confrontation with Hazel, Federico and departs for Mexico to make a new start in life with his earnings. Jason Borge argues that in “‘Che’ Ferrari” and other Latin American fictions with Hollywood settings, “The exaltation and belittlement of North American women serve as tropes of enchantment and disenchantment through which Hollywood and the mass culture it epitomizes are brought down to size,” a strategy that offers “symbolic mastery over the United States and its popular film industry” (55). Yet Borge does not address the intertextual relationships between the story and journalistic discourses that aligned Hollywood with technological mastery while framing the Mexican nation as the only viable space for self-realization.

Accounts of Mexican actors’ real-life sojourns in Los Angeles proliferated in El Universal Ilustrados pages, mimicking the profiles of US stars that appeared in the magazine’s weekly section “Crónicas de Los Ángeles.” Elvira Ortiz, who had previously appeared in a handful of Mexican films, offered a conventionalized narrative of her entrance in the film business entitled “Mis primeras experiencias en el ‘set’” (28-29). The text is interspersed with photos that provide a behind- the-scenes glimpse at film production, offer proof of Ortiz’s intimacy with Hollywood luminaries like Spanish actor Antonio Moreno, and show her as a bathing beauty, a stock trope of studio publicity photos. Similarly, an account by actor/producer Miguel Contreras Torres of a trip to Los Angeles to film scenes for his cross-border drama El hom­bre sin patria stressed longstanding fantasies of visiting Hollywood and encounters with well-known actors like Rudolph Valentino (35). Mexicans’ participation in US productions was presented as a point of pride, even as it highlighted the failure to establish a national industry. Commenting on the Hollywood roles of Mexican actress Ligia de Gol- conda, journalist Rafael Fuentes Jr. observes, “Miles y miles de intentos

Remediating Cinema in El Universal Ilustrado 309

cinematográficos ha habido entre nosotros [. . .] el resultado final fue un fracaso. Y es que la técnica, esa técnica de la pantalla que los americanos tienen aprisionada entre sus manos y no dejan huir fácilmente, faltaba de manera lastimosa en nuestras producciones” (59). Mentioning Gol- conda’s appearance in the film El secreto {Her Sacrifice, 1926), Fuentes urges readers to attend its Mexico City premiere, declaring “Hay que ayudar hasta donde sea posible a estos y a todos los compatriotas que se han lanzado tras la conquista de gloria” (59). In the absence of a vi­able film industry, success in Hollywood could be framed as holding patriotic significance.

In El Universal Ilustrado, literary works like “‘Che’ Ferrad” of­fered the possibility of symbolically re-writing the relationship between Mexico and Hollywood, while journalistic accounts made visible the la­bor of Mexican film industry workers, visually and verbally positioning them alongside the US industry’s power brokers. Yet even as chronicles of Los Angeles fueled readers’ fascination with Hollywood, El Universal Ilustrado s coverage of local productions signaled persistent desires to lay claim— however precariously— to a film industry Mexico City could call its own. The magazine’s film critics emphasized that in order for a national film industry to take root, it was necessary to cultivate not only technological proficiency, but also a patriotic and discriminating viewer.

National Production, Cosmopolitan Spectatorship

Whereas literary texts and Hollywood chronicles developed imaginaries of spectatorship and production that privileged individual fantasies and desires, emerging forms of journalistic coverage and film criticism sought to enlist the cinema in service of explicitly nationalistic goals. The first half of the 1920s was marked by initial optimism, then disappointment regarding ambitions for a Mexican film industry as Hollywood solidified its dominance of Mexican screens. During World War I, French, Italian, and German industries faced profound challeng­es to producing and distributing films, and US production companies took advantage of the circumstances to expand aggressively into global film markets (Thompson). Beginning in the late teens, they devoted special attention to Mexico, hoping to discourage film piracy (prevalent along the US-Mexico border) and establish a “gateway to even larger and more lucrative audiences in other parts of Latin America” (Serna 31—33). The percentage of US films shown in Mexico increased sharply

310 Rielle Navitski

from just over 29 percent in 1917 (Amador and Ayala Blanco 161) to nearly 56 percent in 1920 and over 87 percent by 1925 (de los Reyes, Sucedió en Jalisco 145).

After a period dominated by non-fiction compilation films (1911-16) documenting the events of the Revolution, film producers turned to fiction, yielding a handful of box-office successes like Santa (1918), adapted from Federico Gamboa’s naturalist novel, and the serial film El automóvil gris (1919), based on a real-life case involving a gang of motorized bandits. Impresario Germán Camus constructed studio facilities in the capital in 1920, generating new optimism about the prospects for domestic production (de los Reyes 50-51). Yet by mid- 1922, Camus’s studio had suspended its activities due to the “fracaso económico originado por el alto costo de las cintas, que el público quiere ver al mismo precio que las extranjeras” (Soto, “Crónica de Mé­jico” 258). The presence of Hollywood films, in particular, undercut the financial prospects of Mexican productions; they generally covered the cost of their production in the domestic market and could be sold cheaply overseas (Thompson 1). Mexican features thus struggled to re­coup their budgets in a market glutted by inexpensive films. Contreras Torres also complained of unfavorable agreements with distributors and exhibitors who kept the bulk of the box-office profits (Soto, “Yo prefiero las morenas” 604). After a brief wave of films made between 1920 and 1922, the number of features produced in Mexico declined from fourteen in 1922 to ten in 1923 and five in 1924 (de los Reyes, Bajo el cielo de México 244).

Throughout this initial boom in production, El Universal Ilus­trado publicized domestic film production through interviews with Mexican actors and photo essays that showcased features in progress, offering visible evidence of Mexico’s incipient industry. These efforts were almost inevitably framed in patriotic terms; for example, upon the release of Alfredo B. Cuellar’s film El escándalo in 1921, the magazine claimed, “La cinematografía nacional ha entrado en un período de verdadero auge que hace creer que llegará a alcanzar un lugar decoroso entre la producción mundial” (“Una gran película nacional” 35). Films and journalistic texts alike invoked the emerging iconography of post­revolutionary nationalism, which packaged regional customs, crafts, and folklore into an imagined national identity suitable for both domestic and foreign consumption (Saragoza 92-93, 98-101).

Remediating Cinema in El Universal Ilustrado 311

In particular, the charro or traditionally costumed cattle wran­gler, increasingly framed as a national icon in the 1920s (Nájera Ra­mirez), enjoyed a prominent place in adventure films starring Contreras Torres, which eschewed the aristocratic settings of previous Mexican feature films in favor of on-location shooting. In an interview published in El Universal Ilustrado, the actor declares, “Para qué interpretar ‘snobs’ y señoritas de alta sociedad si nosotros somos, ante todo, hombres nuevos, de una raza que no puede distinguirse por su ‘snobismo’?” (Ega 17). Promising that his upcoming film El caporal (The Foreman, 1921) would depict “nuestros hombres de lucha y acción,” Contreras Torres invokes a rhetoric of racial superiority and— surprisingly— the stars of Hollywood westerns, infamous for their denigrating representations of Mexicans:

No crea usted . . . que en la película aparecen indios miserables y casucas más miserables aún. No . . . México tiene bellezas imponderables y los verdaderos hombres de hacienda no son los exponentes de una raza degenerada e inútil . . . . Creo que si los americanos hacen maravillas con un William Hart o un Douglas Fairbanks, nosotros necesitamos actores que, como ellos, sinteticen el alma de México. (17)

These comments privilege whiteness by linking it to the physical force and dynamism associated with male Hollywood stars, signalling an overlap between the racial hierarchies enforced by Hollywood’s mode of representation and production and the rhetoric of postrevolutionary nationalism.

Even as Contreras Torres framed indigenous communities as a source of racial degeneration, other rural melodramas echoed tendencies towards indigenismo in postrevolutionary cultural policy. Intellectual elites embarked on the systematic study and documentation of native populations while encouraging their assimilation into the Spanish­speaking, mestizo “mainstream” (López). These contradictions are evi­dent in a 1921 article publicizing the film En la hacienda, directed by Ernesto Vollrath and produced by Germán Camus (Figure 3). Featuring two photographs of actress Elena Sánchez Valenzuela costumed as an indigenous woman and posing with a clay water jar, the article notes that she “interpreta el espíritu dulce y sufrido de nuestras indígenas. Su papel en la obra . . . viene a sintetizar . . . a las hijas de esa raza de bronce que dentro de su impasibilidad interior, guardan un exceso de altos sentimientos altruistas” (“Las próximas películas nacionales” 27).

312 Rielle Navitski

This description feminizes the indigenous, describing them as passive and long-suffering. At the same time, the images of the actress—who is light-skinned with dark hair and European-looking features—highlight the gap between the indigenous ideal and its onscreen embodiment, whitening and thereby effacing the figure of the indigenous woman. The discursive and visual framing of national film production in the magazine reinscribed hierarchies of gender and race, even as it sought to appropriate cinema for patriotic ends.

Lasn o T - ^ s c i n e

P r ó x i m a s PM A < T O q i - ( f

e l i c u l a sC A 3

R a c i o n a l e sEN el mes de enero de 1922 va a cono-

terso, do una manera absoluta, el ver­dadero valor de la Industria cinema­

tográfica en Méxlio, ya <¡ue para entcncee entrarán a competir en nuestras pantallas un buen número de películas mexicanas, d i di­versas facturas y técnicas, en la3 cuales vi­bra el deseo do crear obras de a r t ’, dent o ds las imperfecciones iaberentea al cinema­tógrafo y a nuestro relativamente ©suato co­nocimiento de la Indtutria que, por ahora, se adueña del mundo.

Ln Casa Catnua presentará dos obras de cortes distinto», hechas para todos les pú­blicos puesto que en ellas se explota tanto el metió indígena como la vida d_> sociedad. Bitas dos obras son "Amnisfn". basad i en un (tiento de Amado Ne vo, del corte llama­do “do sodadad" y "En la Hacienda', adip- tada de una conocida pieza de teatro qua h i ce alguno* años tuvo gran éxito oa nuestros foros, en la cual so muestra un ambimte campesino. Hay, per otra parte, pelit ulas in­dependientes que saldrán al mercado, como "lien Juan Manuel", obra célenla) donde se explota la famosa leyenda, “Knnny o el Ro­to d> los Veinte Mllíones”, film da aventu­ras y "Cuento da Otoño", comedia de cinco rollos que Inaugurará un nuevo estilo en nueítras películas nacionales, tod3B ellas ex ceslvaniBnle dramáticas o excoslvamenti cá­rnicas. "Cuento da Otoño” vend;á dentro da poco a M 'slco, después de inbe - sido vendi­do el negativa en los Estados Unidos.

Creamos Justo cementar ahora la reapa­rición que hará en nuestras pantallas la co­

nocida Intérprete de "Santa", Eleulta Sán­chez Valenzuela, quien regresa de la capi­tal del cine con un verdadero acopio ds co­nocimientos en la técnica cinematográfica, conoclmlentcs que, a no dudarlo, pondrá de manifiesto "En la Hacienda", obra en la cual tiene a su cargo el principal papel, en com­pañía ds la conocida y excelente actriz de la pantalla Elvira Ortiz, hasta ahora la más refinada Intérprete del arte silencioso con que se cuenta en México,

Elenita Sánchez Valenzuela, bajo la sa bla dirección de Ernesto Volrath, lnterprt ta el espli itu dulce y sufrido de nuestras In­dígenas. Su papel en la obra no eg solamen te un aislado caso psicológico sino que, en cierta manera, viene a sintetizar u nuestras indígenas, a las hilas de esa raza de bron­ce que dentro de su impasibilidad interior, guardan un exceso de altos sentimientos al­truistas. La señorita Valenzuela nos ba ex­presado su ferviente simpatía por nuestra olvidada raza Indígena y de allí sus de­seos vehementlslmcs de encarnar, en la pan- talla, ese "eBpecimen" de nuestra naciona­lidad.

Y ahora solo no* resta esperar, con ver­dadera inquietud, las obras cinematográficas hechas en México que mostrarán, el próxi­mo enero si somos realmente productores de películas.

8111 H A R T .27

Remediating Cinema in El Universal Ilustrado 313

Figure 3. The light-skinned actress Elena Sánchez Valenzuela “interpreta el espíritu dulce y sufrido de nuestras indígenas” in

the film En la hacienda, embodying white and mestizo Mexicans’ tendency to appropriate iconographies o f the indigenous in the postrevolutionary period. El Universal Ilustrado, December 15,

1921. Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University o f Texas at Austin.

Although publicity discourses surrounding domestic film pro­duction drew on the ambivalent rhetoric of postrevolutionary national­ism, unlike the muralist movement and efforts to popularize indigenous arts and crafts, the impact of Mexican feature films in the 1920s was sharply limited. Beyond their disappointing box-office returns, these productions failed to meet the technical standards established by im­ported films. Tellingly, a 1921 article in El Universal Ilustrado posed the question “¿Qué Falta en México Para que las Películas Resulten Perfectas Fotográficamente?” to Mexico City cameramen (Bermudez Zatarain 35). Contributors like Noriega Piope and columnist Cube Bonifant, respectively director and star of the 1923 film La gran noticia (known as “la película de los periodistas mexicanos”), published humor­ous first-person accounts of their own rather hapless filmmaking activi­ties (“La gran noticia”; Bonifant, “Algo que ustedes no saben;” Noriega Piope, “Indiscreciones”). Even as they demystified film production for El Universal Ilustrados readers, these narratives emphasized the technical and practical obstacles to local film production. On occasion, contribu­tors even broke with nationalistic rhetoric and panned Mexican films (Bonifant, “Permitan que les cuente algo”). Yet the magazine continued to invoke an appreciation for Mexican films as a sign of elevated taste, defining norms of spectatorship that yoked film consumption to ambi­tions for national production.

Conceptions of cinematic technique— understood in terms of both technical mastery and aesthetics—were at the heart of El Universal Ilustrado s attempts to foster the proper critical orientation towards cin­ema in its readers. In the March 1921 debut of the section “La crítica y las películas,” the magazine invited readers to send letters expressing their opinions about recent releases for possible publication, providing guidelines that enumerate elements of cinematic technique: “Tanto nuestro juicio como el de nuestros lectores, deseamos que abarque,

314 Rielle Navitski

no solo la película juzgada como entretenimiento, sino en su parte de interpretación, dirección, técnica, argumento, fotografía y presenta­ción” (“Un servicio a nuestros lectores” 48). Film critics’ judgments were informed by references both to Hollywood productions and their European rivals, which were often presented as excessively risqué and technically deficient by comparison. Film critic Marco-Aurelio Galindo declared German film producers—who were seeking to recapture their lost share of foreign markets in the early twenties— “desconocedores de la técnica fotográfica, desconocedores de la técnica de la dirección, desconocedores de los efectos dramáticos, desconocedores del arte de la expresión” (“Los estrenos cinematográficos” 51). Galindo turns this condemnation into an opportunity to instruct readers, writing, “Pero, ¿cual es la técnica fotográfica? preguntarán sin un real interés los que frecuentan nuestros salones cinematográficos en busca de una película cuya procedencia los tiene sin cuidado. Estos señores, claro está, no saben otra cosa que de las actitudes de Francesca Bertini o del gesto sabio de Norma Talmadge” (51). Focusing spectators’ attention on camera movement, lighting, and optical effects like fade-outs and irises, Galindo suggested that a proper appreciation of photographic technique could contribute to an awareness of national cinemas’ distinct characteristics and mitigate the seductive appeal of attractive film stars.

Beyond this pedagogy of film viewing, El Universal Ilustrado explicitly sought to link moviegoing to nationalistic ambitions. A 1921 contest that invited readers to vote for the best Mexican film exhibited during the previous year was described as an effort to “cooperar en todos nuestro esfuerzo para crear verdadero cine en México . . . para impulsar hasta donde esté a nuestro alcance, la marcha lenta y difícil de la cinematografía nacional” (“Varias escenas” 12). Yet the contest failed to generate the desired effect: in February 1922, the magazine expressed frustration about readers’ comments on national productions, pronouncing many sectors of the audience unfit to pass judgment on Mexico’s incipient industry. The harshest criticism was reserved for a “público mediocre, formado en su totalidad por elementos mal preveni­dos en contra de las Películas Nacionales. .. personas todas sin ninguna cultura previa que juzgan a priori y siempre mal” (“Una opinión” 10). Conversely, the magazine’s definition of a “público intelectual, en muy escasa minoría desgraciadamente” was described as

Remediating Cinema in El Universal Ilustrado 315

formado por elemento culto, instruido, previamente preparado y que asiste como crítico inteligente a los progresos del arte mudo nacional, que sigue sus pasos lentos pero seguros, que aplaude los éxitos porque los considera fundados y merecidos; que advierte los defectos y los disculpa en atención que es algo nuevo en nuestro medio que piensa a hacer los primeros tanteos en Cinematografía. (10)

Constituting a transparent attempt to stem attacks on national produc­tions, these comments also reinforce the conventional hierarchies of letrado culture— an impulse in conflict with the El Universal Ilustrados, self-proclaimed appeal to new readers and popular audiences— by suggesting that an educated, intellectualized mode of film viewing is required for the success of national productions. The magazine’s en­forcement of cultural hierarchies suggests Mexican films’ lack of mass appeal; yet it also affirms film spectatorship as an active labor of inter­pretation and stresses the value of public discourse on cinema when practical measures to foster film production faltered.

The distinct forms of discursive authority exercised in the maga­zine shaped the range of social meanings attached to cinema as it was remediated through text, photography, and illustration. Remediations of cinema in El Universal Ilustrado blurred the distinction between pas­sive consumers and active participants in film culture as the magazine navigated between emerging discourses of postrevolutionary national­ism and incipient forms of globalized popular culture. Literary texts and crónicas framed cinema’s perceived transformations of subjectivity through texts that framed cinema’s transformation of social practices and perceptual experiences through the lens of heterosexual male desire. Journalistic and fictional chronicles of Hollywood framed Mexicans as cultural producers by rendering their labor in the US film industry vis­ible, but in the process highlighted the subordinate status of Mexican production. Finally, national productions and pedagogical forms of film criticism sought to harness the medium in the service of national progress, but reinscribed hierarchies of race and class embedded in the rhetoric of postrevolutionary nationalism, even as they contested the dominance of Mexican screens by Hollywood films. Navigating be­tween cosmopolitan conceptions of cinematic technique and patriotic rhetoric, El Universal Ilustrado resignified cinema as an aesthetic form, industry, and set of social practices, exemplifying the magazine’s role as a cultural mediator in the construction of a contested postrevolutionary modernity.

U niversity of G eorgia

316 Rielle Navitski

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

* The author would like to thank Michael O. Hironymous of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University ofTexas Libraries, The University ofTexas at Austin; Emily Sahakian; and the editor of this special issue, Jerónimo Arellano.

NOTES

1 Bartra estimates the number of newspaper readers in Mexico in the period at five percent of the population (302), although overall literacy approached 33 percent by 1930, rendering the visual content of periodicals essential to attracting a larger audi­ence (Serna 90).

1 The magazine’s name became Ilustrado in 1928.

3 See “¿Existe una literatura mexicana moderna?” in the January 22 and January 29 issues of the magazine.

4 On European avant-gardes, see Rafael Lozano, “El Endemoniado Dada se Adueña de París,” February 3, 1921,28-29 and “Marinetti y la Ultima Renovación Futurista: “El Tactilismo,” March 3,1921, 19, 46, as web as Fernando Vela, “El suprarrealismo,” August 6, 1925, 4.

5 Between 1923 and 1925 the magazine publ.shed special issues on Colima, Nayarit and Sinaloa, Sonora, Tampico, Chihuahua, Puebla, Yucatán, Veracruz, the Estado de México, and Querétaro. On Rivera, see “La oara genial del pintor Diego M. Rivera,” February 19, 1925 and “Homenaje a Diego FLivera,” March 12, 1925.

6 The difficulty of accessing original periodicals complicates matters, particularly with regard to literary supplements like La novela semanal, which are rarely preserved alongside the standard edition of the magazine.

7 Founded in 1909, the Ateneo de la Juventud was comprised of young intellectuals who advocated educational reform and freedom of thought, including influential figures of the postrevolutionary period like José Vasconcelos, Alfonso Reyes, and Martín Luis Guzmán.

8 This was certainly not the only form of eroticism fostered by film spectatorship; in his memoir La estatua de sal, Novo describes the queer desires activated during his viewing of romantic scenes (Miquel, Disolvencias, 135-36).

9 Margram is a thinly disguised version of Rex Ingram, who directed the quintessential “Latin lover” Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen o f the Apocalypse (1921).

Remediating Cinema in El Universal Ilustrado 317

WORKS CITED

Aldebarán [pseud.]. “¿Cómo Pierde Ud. el Tiempo?.” El Universal Ilustrado 2 Apr. 1925: 20-21. Microform.

Amador, Maria Luisa, and Jorge Ayala Blanco. Cartelera Cinematográfica 1912-1919.México, D.F.: U Nacional Autónoma de México, 2009. Print.

Bartra, Armando. “The Seduction of the Innocents: The First Tumultuous Moments of Mass Literacy in Postrevolutionary Mexico.” Everyday Forms o f State For­mation: Revolution and the Negotiation o f Rule in Postrevolutionary Mexico. Ed. Gilbert M. Joseph & Daniel Nugent. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994. 301-25. Print.

Bermudez Zatarain, Rafael. “¿Qué Falta en México Para que las Películas Resulten Perfectas Fotográficamente?” El Universal Ilustrado 22 Sep. 1921: 35, 56. Microform.

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1999. Print.

Bonifant, Cube. “Algo de lo que usted no sabe cuando mira una película.” El Universal Ilustrado 2 Jun. 1921: 22-23. Microform.

----------. “Permitan que les cuente algo.” El Universal Ilustrado 7 Jul. 1921: 15, 18. Print.Borge, Jason. Latin American Writers and the Rise o f Hollywood Cinema. New York:

Routledge, 2008. Print.Brigard, Rene. “¡Por fin el cinematógrafo no será mudo!” El Universal Ilustrado 22 Nov.

1923, 73, 97. Microform.Bustillo Oro, Juan. “La penumbra inquieta: cuentos del cine.” Monterde, 18 novelas

47-63.El Caporal. Dir. Juan Canal de Holms and Rafael Bermúdez Zatarain. Perf. Miguel

Contreras Torres. 1921. Film.Contreras Torres, Miguel. “Cómo filmé una película en Los Angeles.” El Universal

Ilustrado 17 Aug. 1922: 34-35, 63. Print.Corral Rigan, José [pseud.]. “De cómo un extra’ se estrelló en Los Angeles.” El Universal

Ilustrado, 23 Sept. 1920: 6—7. Print.Ega, Juan de. “El alma de México en el cine.” El Universal Ilustrado 17 Mar. 1921:

17. Print.Flores, Tatiana. Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes: From Estridentismo to ¡30-30! New

Haven: Yale UP, 2013. Print.Fuentes Jr., Rafael. “La Primera ‘Estrella’ Mexicana en Los Angeles.” El Universal

Ilustrado 10 Sept. 1925: 59, 71. Microform.Gabara, Esther. Errant Modernism: The Ethos o f Photography in Mexico and Brazil.

Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2008. Print.Galindo, Marco Aurelio. “Los estrenos cinematográficos.” El Universal Ilustrado 4 Oct.

1923: 51, 73. Microform.Gallo, Rubén. Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution.

Cambridge: MIT P, 2005. Print.

318 Rielle Navitski

Gerow, Aaron. Visions o f Japanese Modernity: Articulations o f Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925. Berkeley: U of California P, 2010. Print.

González Casanova, Manuel, ed. Por la pantalla: Génesis de la crítica cinematográfica en México. México, D.F.: U Nacional Autónoma de México, 2000. Print.

Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant- Garde.” Wide Angle 8.3-4 (1986): 63-70. Print.

Hart, Bill [pseud.] “Las próximas películas nacionales.” El Universal Ilustrado 15 Dec. 1921: 27. Microform.

Her Sacrifice. Dir. Wilfred Lucas. Perf. Gaston Glass, Ligia de Golconda, and Wilfred Lucas. Sanford Productions, 1926. Film.

Honoré, F. “Un Nuevo Procedimiento de la Cinematografía a Colores.” El Universal Ilustrado 15 Mar. 1923: 42. Microform.

Knight, Alan. “Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico, 1910-1940.” Hispanic American Historical Revino 74.3 (1994): 393—444. JSTOR. Web. 12 Jan. 2014.

“‘La gran noticia:’ La película de los periodistas mexicanos.” El Universal Ilustrado 4 Jan. 1923: 42. Microform.

“Las Verdades y Las Mentiras de la Pantalla.” El Universal Ilustrado 30 Aug. 1923: 35-36, 58. Microform.

Latham, Sean, and Robert Scholes. “The Rise of Periodical Studies.” PMLA 121 (2006): 517-31 .JSTOR. Web. 22 Jan. 2014.

López, Rick A. Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, and the State after the Revolution. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010.

“Los Trucos de la Pantalla.” El Universal Ilustrado 21 May 1921: 63, 71. Microform.Mahieux, Viviane. “Carlos Noriega Hope y la vanguardia en México: Intervenciones

desde el periodismo.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos45 (2011): 375-96. Ebsco Humanities International Complete. Web. 5 Dec. 2014.

Miquel, Angel. Disolvencias: Literatura, cine y radio en México (1900-1950). México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005. Print.

—— -—. Por las pantallas de la Ciudad de México: periodistas del cine mudo (Guadalajara: U de Guadalajara, 1995). Print.

Monterde, Francisco, ed. 18 novelas de “El Universal Ilustrado”: 1922-1925- Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. México, D.F., 1969. Print.

----------. Prólogo. Monterde, 18 novelas 7—16.Musser, Charles. “Towards a History of Screen Practice.” Quarterly Review o f Film

Studies9.\ (1984): 59—69. Print.Nájera Ramírez, Olga. “Engendering Nationalism: Identity, Discourse and the Mexi­

can Charro.” Anthropological Qiiarterly 67.1 (1994): 1-14. JSTOR. Web. 4 Dec. 2014.

Noriega Hope, Carlos. “‘Che’ Ferrati, inventor: La novela de los estudios cinemato­gráficos.” Antología de la narrativa mexicana del siglo XX. Ed. Christopher Domínguez Michael. México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989. 931-73. Print.

Remediating Cinema in El Universal Ilustrado 319

----------. “Indiscreciones de un pésimo director.” E l Universal Ilustrado 11 Jan. 1923:40-41. Microform.

----------. “Del moderno periodismo: Cómo se hace el Universal Ilustrado.” El UniversalIlustrado 10 May 1923: 16-17, 50. Microform.

Novo, Salvador. “Bataclanicemos la vida.” E l Universal Ilustrado 26 Feb. 1925: 39. Microform.

“Nuestro Distrito Federal.” E l Universal Ilustrado 7 May 1925: 7. Microform.Ortiz, Elvira. “Mis primeras experiencias en el ‘set.’” E l Universal Ilustrado 20 Sep.

1923: 28-29. Microform.Rama, Angel. The Lettered City. Trans. John Charles Chasteen. Durham, NC: Duke

UP, 1996. Print.Rashkin, ElissaJ. The Stridentist Movement in Mexico: The Avant-Garde and Cultural

Change in the 1920s. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. Print.----------. ‘“Una opalescente claridad de celuloide’: el estridentismo y el cine.” Ulúa

12 (2008): 53-71. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad Veracruzana. Web. 6 May 2015.

de los Reyes, Aurelio. Cine y sociedad en México, 1896-1930, vol. II: Bajo el cielo de México, 1920-1924. México, D.F.: U Nacional Autónoma de México/Cine- teca Nacional, 1993. Print.

----------. Cine y sociedad en México, 1896-1930, vol. III: Sucedió en Jalisco o los Cristeros.México, D.F.: U Nacional Autónoma de México, 2014.

Saragoza, Alex. “The Selling of Mexico: Tourism and the State, 1929-1952.” Fragments o f a Golden Age. Ed. Gilbert M. Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, & Eric Zolov. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001. 91-115. Print.

Sarlo, Beatriz. La imaginación técnica: Sueños modernos de la cultura argentina. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Nueva Visión, 1992. Print.

Schneider, Luis Mario. E l estridentismo o una literatura de la estrategia. México, D.F.: CONACULTA, 1997. Print.

Serna, Laura Isabel. M aking Cinelandia: American Films and Mexican Film Culture Befare the Golden Age. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2014. Print.

Soto, Epifanio. “Crónica de Méjico.” Cine-Mundial May 1922: 258, 278. Media His­tory Digital Library. Web. 28 Feb. 2016.

----------. “Yo prefiero las morenas, dice Miguel Contreras Torres.” Cine-Mundial Nov.1922: 604, 622. Media History Digital Library. Web. 15 Jan. 2016.

Teja Zabre. Alfonso. “El espejismo de Los Angeles.” El Universal Ilustrado 11 Jun. 1925: 17, 72. Microform.

Thompson, Kristin. Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market 1907- 1934. London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1985. Davidbordwell.net. Web. 15 Mar. 2016.

Thorburn, David, and Henry Jenkins. Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics o f Transition. Cambridge, MA: M IT P, 2003. Print.

Timoteo Alvarez, Jesús, and Ascensión Martínez Riaza. Historia de la prensa hispano­americana. Madrid: Editorial Mapfre, 1992. 217-18. Print.

“Una gran película nacional.” El Universal Ilustrado 10 Mar. 1921: 35. Print.

320 Rielle Navitski

“Una opinión acerca de la producción nacional.” El Universal Ilustrado 2 Feb. 1922: 10. Microform.

“Un servicio a nuestros lectores.” El Universal Ilustrado 31 Mar. 1921: 48. Microform.Universal Ilustrado, El. 10 May 1923: 13. Microform.Vargas de la Maza, Armando. “La Ciudad Cosmopolita.” El Universal Ilustrado (19 Jul.

1923): 4 3 ^ 4 . Microform.“Varias escenas de ‘En la hacienda.’” El Universal Ilustrado 9 Mar. 1922: 12-13.

Microform.Vasey, Ruth. The World According to Hollywood, 1918-1939. Madison: U of Wisconsin

P, 1997. Print.Vaughn, Mary Kay, and Stephen E. Lewis. Introduction. The Eagle and the Virgin:

Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006. Print.

Vela, Arqueles. “Las luces de los automóviles.” El Universal Ilustrado 27 Aug. 1925: 25, 70. Microform.

----------. “Mientras el mundo gira - Glosas del momento.” El Universal Ilustrado 17Aug. 1922: 41. Print.

----------. “El pictografismo ideológico.” El Universal Ilustrado 23 Jul. 1925: 35. Mi­croform.

----------. La Señorita Etcétera. Monterde, 18 novelas 272-80.Zamora, Francisco. “Del arte mudo.” El Universal Ilustrado 28 Jul. 1921: 21. Micro­

form.

Keywords: film, illustrated magazines, visual culture, remediation, postrevolutionary Mexico.

Palabras clave: cine, revistas ilustradas, cultura visual, remediación, México posre­volucionario.

Date of Receipt: June 15, 2015Date of Acceptance: November 15, 2015

Copyright of Revista de Estudios Hispanicos is the property of Washington University and itscontent may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without thecopyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or emailarticles for individual use.