Montevideanos at the Movies: Rethinking Film Culture in Uruguay in the 1930s and 1940s

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

Abstract

The history of Uruguayan cinema in the 1930s and 1940s occupies the periphery of Latin American cinema scholarship. This paper considers how Uruguayan film culture developed in the late 1930s and 1940s by highlighting the importance of film journalists and popular magazines in expanding the consumption of film culture in Uruguay at a time when Uruguayan national cinema struggled to exist. During the decade of the 1930s, Uruguay was a major site of film spectatorship for Hollywood cinema and cinema from neighboring Argentina. Uruguay's national cinema continued its slow advance into the "modern era" of cinema with the country's inaugural sound film Dos Destinos in 1936. The film did not attract local audiences in a vibrant local market saturated with Hollywood and Argentine releases nor did it lead to the growth of Uruguayan cinema that would be overshadowed by Argentina's cinema for decades.

The same year as the release of Dos Destinos, the Uruguayan magazine Cine Radio Actualidad was launched by the journalists Arturo Despoeuy and Emilio Dominoni while the duo hosted a radio show about cinema. The careers of Despoey and Dominoni reflected the transnational circuits that connected Montevideo into a wider Hispanic world that embraced cinema, radio, and print culture at a moment when all three forms were arguably at their zenith. This paper examines the worlds of mass culture in Uruguay and highlights the local and regional consequences of Hollywood and Argentine cinema's shared dominance of the Uruguayan market from the early 1930s through the 1940s.

Author

• Daniel Richter, University of Maryland