Furtive looks in the dark: feelings of love and adoration in Latin American audiences, 1920s.

• In Event: From Hollywood to Bogota and Buenos Aires: New Histories of Latin American Cinema

Abstract

Since the 1910s cinema became one of the most popular forms of entertainments in the world, and Latin America was one of its biggest markets. Given its popularity, cinema became a vehicle that helped to develop new paradigms of modernity and cultural models. Going to the movies offered people a direct way to connect themselves with modernity by participating in it through this experience. Films and the activity of going to the movies were accompanied by specialized magazines, which helped to bring cinema to the audiences’ homes.
The specialized press played an active role in the change of sensitivity within Latin American audiences: these publications presented new styles and tastes that could be the daily life of Latin American households. Due to their role as accompaniment to the films, cinema magazines became cultural actors in their own right, since it was through them that readers could establish a personal contact with their favourite stars, following gossip or the latest Hollywood trends.
Through research based on specialized magazines, I suggest that Latin American audiences developed complex emotional relationships towards the stars on the screen. Once the lights went out, cinemas became private spaces where audiences felt protected by the darkness of the space. Specialized magazines supported and gave a space for these feelings in their pages. In this sense, in the modern activity of going to the movies, emotions played a key part of the experience.

Author

• Camila Gatica Mizala, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile