Dealing with the Stranger at Home: Argentine Writers and the Rise of Classical Hollywood Cinema

• In Event: Visual regimes and the politics of intermediality

Abstract

The 1920s and early 1930s were witness to Hollywood’s rise to global dominance in the transnational mass culture market. This period also marked the transition between the silent and sound film eras. Both developments greatly affected the ways in which audiences around the world experienced cinema. As these transformations took place, a growing number of journalists and literary writers across Latin America began to write about film in connection to a variety of themes and problems. By comparing journalistic chronicles and critical texts by Nicolás Olivari, Roberto Arlt, Jorge Luis Borges and Israel Chas de Cruz, this presentation will discuss the singularity and diversity of early critical approaches to film in Argentina. The presentation will focus on the treatment that each of these writers gave to three themes: the possibilities and limitations of film as a platform for artistic expression and cultural influence, the transnational economic structures that largely determined local access to the medium, and the growing tensions between cosmopolitanism and nationalism in the Argentine culture market during this period. Lastly, the presentation will interrogate these sets of views in terms of their broader implications in different political contexts. Particularly relevant in this regard will be the crisis that, starting in the late 1920s, marked the beginning of a decades-long cycle of authoritarianism and political instability in Argentina.

Author

• Emmanuel A Pardo, Stony Brook University