Panning for Gold: Critical Nationalism, Vernacular Modernism, and Recasting Golden Age Cinema

• In Event: Cine clásico latinoamericano: estrategias de inclusión y exclusión en la representación de la nación

Abstract

The Golden Age period in Latin America often coincides with the consolidation of political power and the officialization of the cultural sphere during the Second World War and post-war period. This period is characterized by statist plans for modernization and the articulation of modernism to nationalism, a turn Esther Gabara characterizes as one from critical nationalism born in the regional expressions of artistic practice to cultural nationalism born from administrative intervention in the capital cities (30). This paper uses Miriam Hansen’s concept of vernacular modernism to argue that the commercial cinema from this period of so-called cultural nationalism bears remarkable continuities with the period of critical nationalism. Hansen’s rearticulation of modernism allows us to redraw the boundaries of cultural practice to include expressions of mass culture often aligned unproblematically with State cultural apparatuses. This expanded modernist field allows us to study the commercial cinema from the 1930s-1950s without relying on an essentialist popular identity and beyond what Ana López dubs the "nationness" of the film texts — both categories often a retroactive historico-aesthetic telos. This paper examines popular film comedies and leverages the allegation that they travel poorly in order to move beyond the nation as well as other discursive frameworks of conventional film histories. By attending to the embodied and affective registers of the cinema experience, this paper demonstrates how the critical nationalism, temporal play, spatial practice, and anti-subjectivism of film comedies allow us to re-examine the nationness that characterizes studies of the region’s early, transition, and commercial cinemas.

Author

• Nilo Fernando Couret, University of Michigan