The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories 3031387899, 9783031387890

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The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories Edited by  Daniela Treveri Gennari Lies Van de Vijver Pierluigi Ercole

The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories

Daniela Treveri Gennari Lies Van de Vijver  •  Pierluigi Ercole Editors

The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories

Editors Daniela Treveri Gennari School of Arts Oxford Brookes University Oxford, UK

Lies Van de Vijver LUCA School of Arts Ghent University Ghent, Belgium

Pierluigi Ercole Leicester Media School De Montfort University Leicester, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-38788-3    ISBN 978-3-031-38789-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38789-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, ­reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material ­contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Arena Quattro Palme, Bari, 1955. Archivio di Stato di Bari This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgements

The present edited collection stems out of the research project European Cinema Audiences. Entangled Histories and Shared Memories and the vibrant and inspiring discussions we had with our researchers, Steering Committee, and National Validation Panel members: Seán Allan, Daniel Biltereyst, Silvia Dibeltulo, Kim Khavar Fahlstedt, Åsa Jernudd, Kathleen Lotze, Sam Manning, Philippe Meers, Julia Noordegraaf, Clara Pafort-Overduin, Terézia Porubčanská, John Sedgwick, Pavel Skopal, Silvia Sivo, and Thunnis van Oort. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to them for their generosity and continuous encouragement. We wish to thank attendees of the annual HoMER (History of Movie-­Going, Exhibition and Reception) international conferences for sharing and discussing their projects with us. The richness of the world-wide research presented at HoMER each year inspired us to broaden our initial idea for this edited collection. We are grateful to the Arts & Humanities Research Council for the financial support provided to this research project [grant number AH/R006326/1] . We thank our publisher, Palgrave, and in particular Camille Davies and Raghupathy Kalynaraman for their guidance on the production of this volume. We also thank our reviewers for helping us improve it and Robert Hensley-­ King for supervising the linguistic challenges. A special acknowledgement goes to Andrea Dellimauri, for rigorously and patiently reviewing the entire manuscript in the editing process. We would like to express our gratitude to the contributors to this volume, who have embraced the challenge of comparative research and the complexity of collaborative work. Our heartfelt appreciation goes to the late Karel Dibbets, whose remarkable research has inspired us to embrace the values of sharing, collaborating, and comparing historical data on film cultures. Daniela Treveri Gennari Lies Van de Vijver Pierluigi Ercole v

Contents

1 Comparing  New Cinema Histories: An Introduction  1 Daniela Treveri Gennari, Lies Van de Vijver, and Pierluigi Ercole Part I Local Encounters: Introduction  11 2 Comparing  Localised Film Culture in English Cities: The Diversity of Film Exhibition in Bristol and Liverpool 15 Peter Merrington, Matthew Hanchard, and Bridgette Wessels 3 Cinema-Going  in Turkey between 1960 and 1980: Cinema Memories, Film Culture, and Modernity 35 Hasan Akbulut 4 “A  United Stand and a Concerted Effort”: Black Cinemagoing in Harlem and Jacksonville During the Silent Era 53 David Morton and Agata Frymus 5 Exhibition  of National and Foreign Films in Six Mexican Cities During the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema: The Year of 1952 73 José Carlos Lozano, Blanca Chong, Efraín Delgado, Jaime Miguel González, Jorge Nieto Malpica, and Brenda Muñoz 6 Comparing  Aspects of Regional and Local Cinema Differentiation through Perceptions of Cinema-going in Post-socialist Bulgaria101 Maya Nedyalkova

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7 A  Comparative Analysis of the Polish Film Market from the First Years of Independence to 1930125 Karina Pryt 8 Managing  Constraints and Stories of Freedom: Comparing Cinema Memories from the 1950s and 1960s in Sweden147 Åsa Jernudd and Jono Van Belle 9 Film  Consumption and Censorship Pre- and Post-COVID-19 Global Pandemic: A Comparison on Undergraduate Perspective in The Bahamas173 Monique Toppin Part II European Encounters: Introduction 191 10 “Our  job is to pull audience to Soviet films with all means necessary”. State-Monopolised Film Distribution and Patterns of Film Exhibition in Two Eastern Bloc Cities in the Stalinist Period: A Comparative Case Study of Cracow (Poland) and Magdeburg (East Germany)195 Kathleen Lotze and Konrad Klejsa 11 Cinephiles  without Films: Culture, Censorship and Alternative Forms of Film Consumption in Spain and the GDR around 1960221 Fernando Ramos Arenas 12 Discovering  Cinema Typologies in Urban Cinema Cultures: Comparing Programming Strategies in Antwerp and Amsterdam, 1952–1972239 Julia Noordegraaf, Thunnis van Oort, Kathleen Lotze, Daniel Biltereyst, Philippe Meers, and Ivan Kisjes 13 Ticket  Whistles and Football Scores: Auditory Ecology, Memory and the Cinema Experience in 1950s Gothenburg and Bari263 Kim Khavar Fahlstedt and Daniela Treveri Gennari 14 Measuring  and Interpreting Film Preferences in Autocratic States281 Joseph Garncarz

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15 Cinema-going  in German-occupied Territory in the Second World War. The Impact of Film Market Regulations on Supply and Demand in Brno, Brussels, Krakow and The Hague307 Clara Pafort-Overduin, Andrzej Dębski, Terézia Porubčanská, Karina Pryt, Pavel Skopal, Thunnis van Oort, and Roel Vande Winkel Part III Global Encounters: Introduction 333 16 Cinema-Going  in the South Asian Diaspora: Indian Films, Entrepreneurs and Audiences in Trinidad and Durban, South Africa337 James Burns 17 Cinema  Intermediaries, Communities and Audiences (Soviet Siberia, Post-Ottoman Greek Thessaloniki, Colonial Maghreb)359 Morgan Corriou, Caroline Damiens, Mélisande Leventopoulos, and Nefeli Liontou 18 German  Films in Latin America and the Second World War: A Comparative Study on Argentina and Ecuador383 Marina Moguillansky and Yazmín Echeverría 19 Towards  a Global and Decentralised History of Film Cultures: Networks of Exchange among Ibero-American Film Clubs (1924–1958)401 Ainamar Clariana-Rodagut and Diana Roig-Sanz 20 Intercultural  Transfers in Cinema Dynamics: A Global and Digital Approach to Early Writings on Cinema through the Uruguayan Periodicals Archive423 Pablo Suárez-Mansilla and Ventsislav Ikoff 21 Transnational  Cinema Memory: Latin American Women Remembering Cinema-Going Across Borders445 Dalila Missero Index465

Notes on Contributors

Hasan  Akbulut  is a professor at the Department of Radio-Television and ̇ Cinema at the Faculty of Communication at Istanbul University in Turkey. He is a member of the editorial board of Sinecine: Journal of Film Studies. He has conducted research on cinema-­going experience in Turkey, and transnational film reception practices in London. His academic studies focus on film criticism, cinema-going, cinema memory, and film reception. He has books, chapters, and articles on Nuri Bilge Ceylan's cinema, Turkish melodrama films, and cinema culture in Turkey. Currently, he is researching the healing power of watching movies and cinema therapy. Fernando Ramos Arenas  is Associate Professor of European Cinema History at Complutense University in Madrid, where he is also PI of the Horizon project REBOOT.  He was Marie Curie fellow and assistant professor at Leipzig University, Germany (2010-2017), where he earned his PhD in 2010, and his Habilitation in 2020. His research focuses on European film culture, national cinemas and film heritage. He has published two monographs on European cinema (on authorship, 2011, and cinephilia, 2021), edited three volumes and written articles in journals such as Screen, Media History, Hispanic Research Journal and Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. Daniel Biltereyst  is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the Department of Communication Studies, Ghent University, Belgium, where he leads the Centre for Media and Cinema Studies (CIMS) and teaches film and media history. Biltereyst is (co-)editor of several volumes and theme issues, including New Perspectives on Early Cinema History (2022, with M. Slugan) and Cinema in the Arab World (2023, with I. Elsaket and Ph. Meers). He also published a monograph on the history of film/cinema censorship in Belgium. He is now working on the Screening Censorship Companion and a theme issue for Cinéma & Cie. James Burns  is Professor of History at Clemson University. He is the author of Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe (2003), Cinema and Society in the British Empire, 1895-1940 (Palgrave/MacMillan, xi

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2013) and co-author of the Cambridge History of Sub-Saharan Africa (2007, 2013). He has published several essays about cinema-going in the global south. He is currently researching the history of Bollywood throughout the South Asian Diaspora. Jaime Miguel González Chávez  has a PhD in Sciences and Humanities for Interdisciplinary Development (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México / Universidad de Coahuila) and is a Lecturer at De La Salle Bajío University, México with research interests in: Media studies. He is a Team Leader of the Screen Culture Research Project in León, México. Blanca  Chong  holds a PhD in Communication Sciences (Universidad de la Habana, Cuba). She is a Lecturer at the master’s in Education and Teaching Processes and at the doctoral program in Research of Social Processes at Universidad Iberoamericana, Torreón, México. She is a Member of the Executive Committee of the National Council for Communication Education and Research (CONEICC) (2006–2009, 2012–2015, and 2008–2018.) and a Research Fellow of the Mexican National System of Researchers at Level 1 (2008–2018). She is the Site reviewer for the Council for the Accreditation of Communication and Social Sciences Programs (CONAC) and the Team Leader of the Screen Culture Research Project in Torreón, México. Ainamar Clariana-Rodagut  is a postdoctoral fellow at the ERC StG project “Social Networks of the Past: Mapping Hispanic and Lusophone Literary Modernity, 1898-1959”, led by D. Roig-Sanz in Barcelona. Ainamar is also a member of the Global Literary Studies Research Lab, where she leads the Global Cinema research line. She is currently writing her second thesis (UOC-Marburg University) on Ibero-American film clubs and women between 1923 and 1938. Among her publications, she has co-­ authored a chapter with M.  Hagener (2022) and she is currently editing a special issue on film clubs with V. Camporesi. Morgan Corriou  is Assistant Professor in Media Studies at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis. Her research focuses on the economic and social history of cinema in colonial Maghreb as well as the correlation of cinephilia and Third World struggles in Africa. She edited the collective volume Publics et spectacle cinématographique en situation coloniale (Tunis, IRMC : CERES, 2012). Caroline Damiens  is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of Paris Nanterre. Her contributions on film and Indigenous peoples, expedition film and Siberian Indigenous cinema have appeared in such journals as Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, InterDisciplines, Mise au Point, Revue d’histoire culturelle and Etudes Inuit Studies. She edited the volume Ciné-expéditions: une zone de contact cinématographique (Paris: AFRHC, 2022) and co-edited (with Csaba Mészáros) the KinoKultura special issue on Sakha (Yakutia) cinema (2022).

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Andrzej  Dębski  is an assistant professor at the Willy Brandt Centre for German and European Studies at the University of Wrocław. He is the author of two books on the history of cinema in Wrocław in the years 1896-1918 (2009) and 1919-1945 (2019), and (co-)editor of publications on early cinema, Polish-German film relations and Polish filmmakers (Stanisław Lenartowicz, Sylwester Chęciński). He is directing a project on cinema-going in the General Government during the Second World War. Yazmín Echeverría  is a sociologist and MA in political science at UNSAM, Argentina. Her research focuses on cinematographic policies in Ecuador and she has also explored the Nazi influence the country. She received a national award for an essay on Ecuador’s cinema. Pierluigi  Ercole is Associate Professor in Film Studies at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK). Much of his research is grounded in audience and reception studies, transnational cinema, and the diaspora. He has been coinvestigator for the British Academy/Leverhulme-funded project: Mapping European Cinema: A Comparative Project on Cinema-Going Experiences in the 1950s, and the AHRC-funded project European Cinema Audiences: Entangled Histories and Shared Memories,” both in collaboration with Ghent University (Belgium) and Oxford Brookes University (UK). With Daniela Treveri Gennari and Lies Van de Vijver he has published the article “Challenges to Comparative Oral Histories of Cinema Audiences” in TMG Journal for Media History, 23 (1-2) 2020, and “Defining a typology of cinemas across 1950s Europe,”, Participations, Vol. 18, Issue 2, November 2021. Kim K. Fahlstedt  is a writer and a film historian at Stockholm University. He is the author of Chinatown Film Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2020) and a forthcoming book on the life and movie star persona of Hollywood actor Warner Oland. His research encompasses audience reception, cultural translation, intermedial phenomena and environmental cinema and has been featured in journals such as Film History, Early Popular Visual Culture and Technology & Culture. Agata Frymus  is a Senior Lecturer in Film, TV and Screen Studies at Monash University Malaysia. Her work has been published in Film History, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and Feminist Media Studies, amongst other journals. She’s the author of Damsels and Divas: European Stardom Hollywood (Rutgers University Press2020). Joseph Garncarz  is a professor at the Institute for Media Culture and Theatre at the University of Cologne, Germany. His main research interests are film history, cinema-­goers and their film preferences. He has worked at various European universities, has led several research projects and is currently working on his eighth monograph on the cinema of the GDR and its viewers. His publications have been translated into English, French, Czech and Polish. His research has been funded by the German Research Foundation, among others, and was awarded the Willy Haas Prize in 2011.

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Matthew S. Hanchard  is a research associate at the University of Sheffield. He works for a Wellcome Trust–funded project on pharmaceutical pricing for rare disease medicine. He leads a Research England project on open qualitative research and contributes towards projects on participatory patient access, the social lives of patient stories, and the future of creative computing. Matthew’s research sits at the intersection of data science/critical data studies, science and technology studies, and sociological studies with particular interests in digital society, the sociology of health and medicine, novel methodologies, and visual cultures. Ventsislav  Ikoff  is a postdoctoral researcher at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain. He has a PhD in language sciences and translation from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), with a thesis on the literary translation flows between Bulgaria and the Spanish-speaking world and cultural mediators in the area from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. His research interests include the sociology of translation, the circulation of translated literature, cultural mediators, and the digital humanities. His current work focuses on using computational methods to study cultural transformation processes in Ibero-America. Åsa Jernudd  is Associate Professor in Media- and Communication Studies at Örebro University with a Phd. in Film Studies from Stockholm University (2007). She has published in edited volumes and journals on the spaces of cinema exhibition in Sweden and on the complexity of memories of cinema going. Since 2019, the publications are part of or spin-offs from the research project, Swedish Cinema and Everyday Life: A Study of Cinema-going in Its Peak and Decline (nr. 2018-02187) (2019–2022), funded by the Swedish National Research Council. These include two articles in a special issue of TMG—Journal for Media History (2020) featuring comparative histories of cinema audiences. One with Professor Mats Lundmark, “The Persistence of Society-driven Engagement in Swedish Cinema: A Locational Analysis, 1936–2016” and the other in collaboration with Clara Pafort-Overduin, Thunnis van Oort and Kathleen Lotze, “Moving films: Visualising Film Flow in Three European Cities in 1952.” With Professor John Sedgwick, Jernudd has written “Popular films in Stockholm during the 1930s: A Presentation and Discussion of the Pioneering Work of Leif Furhammar” In: Sedgwick, J. (2022) (ed.) Towards a Comparative Economic History of Cinema, 1930-1970 and with Jono Van Belle, “Remembering Television as a New Medium: Conceptual Boundaries and Connections” forthcoming in the Journal of Scandinavian Cinema. Ivan Kisjes  is part of the technical research support team at the CREATE lab of the University of Amsterdam. Trained as an archaeologist, he has been working as a programmer in various humanities fields as a part of this team, including various projects in cinema history, some of which included comparisons between Dutch and Belgian data.

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Konrad Klejsa  is a professor at Department of Film and Audio-Visual Media at University of Lodz. His research interests focus on the history of post-1945 Polish film culture, audience studies and German-Polish film cooperation (Deutschland und Polen: filmische Grenzen und Nachbarschaften, Schüren Verlag, 2011, 269 p. co-editorship). Currently, he supervises the research project “Film distribution and exhibition in Poland, 1945-1989”, funded by the Polish National Science Centre. Mélisande Leventopoulos  is an associate professor at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis. After completing a doctoral thesis in history on Catholics and the Cinema in France (2013), she gradually redirected the geographical focus of her work to Greece and the Balkans. Her field of investigation is currently the history of cinema distribution, exhibition, audiences and reception in Macedonia and Thrace. She runs the global history project “Community Building at the Cinema” with Morgan Corriou and Caroline Damiens, and the project “Visual Salonica” on Thessaloniki’s visual history with Nefeli Liontou. Nefeli Liontou  is an archaeologist-museologist and a PhD candidate in history at the National Institute for Art History of the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (INHA). Her research interests focus on the relationship between history and photography, and more specifically on the visual history of the Holocaust in Greece. With Mélisande Leventopoulos, she works on  the project “Visual Salonica” on Thessaloniki’s visual history. She has worked in various collections and museums in Greece. Kathleen  Lotze  has been teaching at the Film Academy since 2019. Since 1999, she has also worked for various research projects and as a lecturer at universities in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and England. In 2020, she obtained her PhD at the University of Antwerp, with a study of film screenings and cinema visits in Antwerp between 1945 and 1995. She regularly presents the results of her research at international conferences and in books and magazines. José  Carlos  Lozano is Professor and Chair of the Psychology and Communication Department at Texas A&M International University (Laredo, Texas). He got his MA in Communication Research from Leicester University, England, and his PhD in International Communication and Media Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He is Co-Principal investigator and coordinator of the international research project Cultura de la Pantalla, comparing the historical exhibition of films and cinema-­going in Ibero-America. His research lines are: social history of cinema in Mexico and the US-Mexican border and media and culture along the US-Mexico border. Jorge  Nieto  Malpica holds an MA and PhD in Communication and Journalism (Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Spain). He is Professor of Communication at Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas, Mexico and

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Research Fellow of the Mexican National System of Researchers as National Researcher Candidate. His research interests are: Film Commissions; New Cinema History; Screen Culture; Communication and development; Communication and Risk. He is the Team Leader of the Screen Culture Research Project in Tampico, México. Philippe Meers  is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, where he is director of the Visual and Digital Cultures Research Center (ViDi) and the Center for Mexican Studies. He has published widely on historical and contemporary film cultures and audiences. With Richard Maltby and Daniel Biltereyst, he co-­ edited Explorations in New Cinema History (2011), Audiences, Cinema and Modernity (2012) and The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History (2019). With Ifdal Elsaket and Daniel Biltereyst, he co-edited Cinema in the Arab World: New Histories, New Approaches (2023). Peter  Merrington  is Lecturer in the Business of the Creative and Cultural Industries in the School of Arts and Creative Technologies at the University of York. He is an interdisciplinary researcher, with a background in history of art, cultural production, and creative practice. His recent work has been published in journals including Studies in European Cinema, Cultural Trends, The Journal of British Cinema and Television, and Participations. Previously he was a research associate on the AHRC project “Beyond the Multiplex: Audiences for Specialised Film in English Regions,” a collaboration between the universities of Glasgow, Sheffield, Liverpool, and York. Dalila  Missero  is a lecturer in Film Studies at Lancaster University. Her research interests include feminist cinema history, audience studies, and popular and transnational cinema. She has published essays on gender, sexuality, and film in the journals Feminist Media Histories, About Gender, and Participations and a monograph titled “Women, Feminism and Italian Cinema. Archives from a Film Culture” (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). Marina Moguillansky  has a PhD in social sciences (UBA) and MA in cultural sociology (UNSAM). She is a full-time researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET) in Argentina. Her research interests focus on cinema history, film distribution and exhibition in Latin America. David  Morton  is a Lecturer in the Film and History Departments at the University of Central Florida, where he received his PhD in Texts and Technology in 2019. He was a recipient of the 2016–2017 Fulbright scholarship, where he conducted research on the activities of American distributors in Belgium during the interwar period as a visiting scholar at the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies (CIMS) at Ghent University. His upcoming book, A Motion Picture Paradise: A History of the Florida Film Industry, is expected for publication in 2023.

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Brenda  Azucena  Muñoz  holds a PhD in Social Sciences: Communication Studies (University of Antwerp, 2014) and a PhD in Humanistic Studies and Cultural Studies (ITESM, 2014). M.Sc. in Communication (ITESM, 2010). She is a Research Fellow of the Mexican National System of Researchers at Level 1 (2018-2020). She is the author of the book “Contenidos Alternativos en YouTube: Nuevos formatos, mismos significados” (Fontamara & UAdeC, 2019). Her research interests include: Diversity and social development, alternative media, communication and gender, audience and fan studies. She is the Team Leader of the Screen Culture Research Project in Saltillo, México. Maya Nedyalkova  is a Research Fellow for the Creative Industries Research and Innovation Network at Oxford Brookes University, interested in popular culture and film/media audiences. She explored aspects of the transnational Bulgarian film industry during her AHRC-funded PhD and contemporary Bulgarian film consumption for her British Academy fellowship. She co-edited two themed sections, titled “International Film Audiences,” for the Participations Journal of Audience and Reception Studies and has published in journals (Open Screens and Studies in Eastern European Cinema) and edited volumes (Routledge Companion to European Cinema, Popular Music and the Moving Image in Eastern Europe, and Transformation Processes in Post-socialist Screen Media). Julia  Noordegraaf is Professor of Digital Heritage in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam and Vice Dean of Research in the Faculty Board. At the Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research, she leads the research programme and lab Creative Amsterdam (CREATE) that studies the history of urban creativity using digital data and methods. Noordegraaf’s current research focuses on the reuse of digital cultural heritage for media historiography. She is a board member for CLARIAH, the national Dutch infrastructure for digital humanities research, and editor-in-chief of Cinema Context. Thunnis van Oort  is a historian interested in digital methods. He is working on a database of the population of Suriname between 1830 and 1950 and on the history of movie-going in Suriname at Radboud University. He participated in the CREATE digital humanities research programme of the University of Amsterdam. He has taught at universities in Utrecht and Amsterdam and at Roosevelt University College and was a researcher at Antwerp University and Oxford Brookes University. He is editorial board member of the Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences and editor of Cinema Context. Clara  Pafort-Overduin  is a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Media and Culture Studies and the Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University. She is a founding member of the HoMER network (History of Moviegoing Exhibition and Reception). She works on popular films and published several book chapters and articles on the popularity of national (Dutch)

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films. She considers collaboration with colleagues a very fruitful way to do interdisciplinary and comparative research. She collaborated with colleagues from different fields, ranging from film history, economic film history, marketing and geography to data specialists. Her work focuses on cultural aspects of popularity reflected in the form and content of films. Terézia Porubčanská  is a PhD candidate at the University of Antwerp and Masaryk University in Brno, preparing her doctoral thesis on the methods of comparative research in New Cinema History with a case study of Brno, Antwerp and Ghent. She has edited a special issue of the magazine Iluminace with a focus on digital tools in local cinema history and co-authored a chapter in an edited monograph, Towards a Comparative Economic History of Cinema, 1930–1970, on film popularity in Czechoslovakia during the period of late Stalinism. Karina  Pryt  studied German literature and modern history at the AlbertLudwigs-­University in Freiburg im Breisgau. Her doctorate in history on cultural diplomatic relations between Germany and Poland in the 1930s (Befohlene Freundschaft. Die Deutsch-Polnischen Kulturbeziehungen 1934–1939, Osnabrück 2010) trigged also her interest in both the incorporation of film in politics and the economic and social history of cinema. Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), she worked on the local cinema culture in Warsaw 1895/6–1939 at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. Efraín Delgado Rivera  is a Research professor in media analysis and history of Mexican media with a PhD in Sciences and Humanities for Interdisciplinary Development (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México/Universidad de Coahuila) and acting as a Team Leader of the Screen Culture Research Project in León, México. Diana Roig-Sanz  is an ICREA Full Professor and ERC Starting Grant holder at the IN3-UOC, in Barcelona. She coordinates the Global Literary Studies Research Lab and is the PI of the European project “Social Networks of the Past: Mapping Hispanic and Lusophone Literary Modernity, 1898-1959”. Her interests deal with global and cultural approaches to literary and translation history within a digital humanities perspective, and her publications include Literary Translation and Cultural Mediators in “Peripheral” Cultures (2018, with R. Meylaerts), Cultural Organisations, Networks and Mediators in Contemporary Ibero-America (2020, with J.  Subirana), or Culture as Soft Power (2022, with E. Carbó-Catalan). Pavel Skopal  is an associate professor in the Department of Film Studies and Audiovisual Culture, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. In 2010–2012, he was a visiting researcher at the Konrad Wolf Film and Television University in Potsdam, Germany (on a research project supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation). Besides other publications, he coedited two anthologies in English, Cinema in Service of the State (with Lars

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Karl) and Film Professionals in Nazi-Occupied Europe (with Roel Vande Winkel). He has published articles in numerous academic journals, including Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Film History, Convergence or Participations. Pablo Suárez-Mansilla  is a research fellow in the ERC StG project “Social Networks of the Past: Mapping Hispanic and Lusophone Literary Modernity, 1898-1959” and a member of the Global Literary Studies Research Lab. He is also a PhD candidate at the IN3-UOC in Barcelona and at the Universiteit van Amsterdam in the Department of Media Studies and the Amsterdam School of Heritage, Memory and Material Culture. Monique  Toppin  is Head of the Journalism and Communication department at the University of The Bahamas in Nassau, Bahamas, where she teaches classes in Media and Communication. She earned a doctoral degree from the University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland. Her thesis is titled “Cinema and Cultural Memory in The Bahamas in the 1950s.’ She has presented at conferences in Portugal, Germany, and the UK at ECREA, NECS, and HOMER on cinema ratings and censorship, and cinema history, memory, and culture in The Bahamas. Daniela Treveri Gennari  is Professor of Cinema Studies at Oxford Brookes University with an interest in audiences, popular cinema, film exhibition, and programming. Daniela has led the AHRC-funded projects “Italian Cinema Audiences” and “European Cinema Audiences: Entangled Histories and Shared Memories,” and she recently secured AHRC funding for the collaborative project “Women in the Italian Film Industry” led by the University of Warwick. Among her most recent publications, “Five Italian Cities: Comparative Analysis of Cinema Types, Film Circulation and Relative Popularity in the Mid-1950s” (with John Sedgwick), in Towards a Comparative Economic History of Cinema, 1930-1970 (2022) and “Defining a typology of cinemas across 1950s Europe” (with Lies Van de Vijver and Pierluigi Ercole), Participations, Vol. 18, Issue 2, November 2021. Jono Van Belle  is a senior lecturer in Media- and Communication Studies at Örebro University with a double PhD from Ghent University (Belgium) and Stockholm University (Sweden) in 2019. Her doctoral thesis compared memories of Ingmar Bergman as persona and his films in Belgium and Sweden, making use of a variety of methods such as archival and textual research, and most importantly, oral history interviews. Van Belle was a postdoctoral researcher on the project Swedish Cinema and Everyday Life, led by Åsa Jernudd. Currently, she is working on the project Digiscreens (2022–2026) with Professor Maria Jansson. The project focuses on identity and democracy on digital film- and TV-platforms in Europe and investigates distribution, reception, and representation. Forthcoming publications include co-authored articles with Jernudd on cinema-going in the 1950s and 1960s in Sweden, and the edited volume Ingmar Bergman Out of Focus, about the reception of

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Bergman around the world, co-­edited with María Paz Peirano (Universidad de Chile, Chile) and Fernando Ramos Arenas (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain). Van Belle’s research interests are audience studies, memory studies, feminism, media policy, and sociology of emotions. Lies  Van de Vijver  is a research coordinator of FilmEU, the European Universities Alliance for Film and Media Arts at LUCA School of Arts. She works on historical and contemporary screen culture, film programming, and cinema experience, and her work has been published in edited volumes and international journals. She is the co-editor of “Mapping Movie Magazines” (with Daniel Biltereyst, 2020) and author of “Gent Filmstad. Cinema’s en filmaffiches. 1938-1961” (with Guy Dupont and Roel Vande Winkel, 2021). She was the project manager of European Cinema Audiences (AHRC, 2018-2021) at Ghent University, and she has been a lecturer in Film History, Cultural Media Studies, and Visual Culture. Roel  Vande Winkel  is Associate Professor of Film and TV Studies at KU Leuven and at LUCA School of Arts, Belgium. Via the website http://www. cinema-­in-­occupied-­belgium.be, he disseminates the results of ongoing research on film programming and the organisation of the cinema sector during the Second World War in Belgium. He is writing a Dutch-language monograph on that subject, to appear in 2024. He is associate editor of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and his recent books include Researching Newsreels. Local, National and Transnational Case Studies (2018, with Ciara Chambers and Mats Jönsson), Silencing Cinema: Film Censorship Around the World (2013, with Daniel Biltereyst) and Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema (2011 revised, with David Welch). Bridgette  Wessels is Professor of Sociology in Social Inequality at the University of Glasgow, UK. Her research focuses on cultural participation and audiences across numerous cultural forms and contexts. She has published over 90 articles and has written 9 books, and her latest book is Film Journeys: Personal Journeys with Film (2023) co-authored with Merrington, Hanchard, and Forrest with the Beyond the Multiplex Team. She was PI on the AHRCfunded project “Beyond the Multiplex: Audiences for Specialised Film in English Regions” (2017–2021).

List of Figures

Fig. 10.1 Shares of screenings of films from the East and West Bloc per city per examined year Fig. 10.2 The share of screenings of Soviet (co-)productions in Cracow and Magdeburg in 1951–1953 Fig. 10.3 Shares of East/West and Soviet screenings per cinema per city in 1951–1953 (Cracow on top, Magdeburg at bottom; premiere theatres on the left, all other cinemas sorted either according to the category (Cracow) or seating capacity (Magdeburg) from highest to lowest) Fig. 14.1 Attendance per screening of Swiss top 100 films, 1976–1987 Fig. 19.1 Clariana-Rodagut, A. and Ikoff, V., “Emergence of Ibero-American film clubs per year based on the database of the project Social Networks of the Past” Fig. 20.1 Number of journal issues (continuous line, left scale) and their combined text length (dotted line, right scale) covered by our corpus between 1898 and 1959 Fig. 20.2 Frequency of cinema-related morphemes in the corpus

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214 289 410 427 427

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List of Images

Image 2.1 The Futurist Cinema (previously the Picture House), Lime Street, Liverpool, 1938 19 Image 2.2 Facade of the Lime Street redevelopment in Liverpool, depicting the historical reference panels designed by Anthony Brown. (Source: Peter Merrington, 2022)  25 Images 3.1 Büyük Cinema in Ankara and its folkloric ornaments. (Source: and 3.2 https://galeri3.arkitera.com/index.php/arkiv-­2/proje/buyuk-­ sinema-­ankara, March 21, 2017) 45 Image 4.1 Building of the Alhambra theatre in Harlem, which housed a Black-oriented cinema in the 1920s. (Source: Agata Frymus, 2019) 58 Image 4.2 Headline of the New York Age article outlining racist mistreatment experienced by Mrs Strickland (Loew’s Theatres Charged with Jim Crow, 1928, p. 1) 60 Image 4.3 1913 Sanborn map illustrating the location of the Colored Airdome and Globe Theatre at West Ashley and North Broad Streets 62 Image 4.4 Crowd gathered outside the Strand Theatre in Jacksonville, June 1915 66 Image 6.1 Map of Bulgarian regions and planning regions, as classified by NUTS109 Image 6.2 Cinema venue and cinema screen clusters across settlements in the six Bulgarian planning regions, as outlined by the Bulgarian National Film Center at the end of 2017 113 Image 7.1 Number of cinemas in 1925. (Source: Jewsiewicki, 1951, pp. 114–117)134 Image 7.2 Seats per 1000 inhabitants in 1925. (Source: Jewsiewicki, 1951, pp. 114–117)135 Image 7.3 Cinema numbers in the respective provinces in 1925. (Source: Balcerzak, 1928a, p. 23) 136 Image 7.4 The concentration of cinemas in the largest cities against the cinema numbers in the respective regions in 1925. (Sources: Jewsiewicki, 1951, pp. 119–121; Balcerzak, 1928a, p. 23) 139

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Image 7.5 The concentration of cinemas in the largest cities against the cinema numbers in the respective regions in 1930. (Sources: Jewsiewicki, 1951, pp. 119–121; Kinematografy w Polsce w latach, 1923, 1929, 1930 (1932). In Mały Rocznik Statystyczny, 1932, p. 128) 139 Image 7.6 The share of Jews in the urban population in 1931. (Source: Ludność według wyznania w 1931 r. In Mały Rocznik Statystyczny, 1939, p. 24) 140 Image 8.1 Private photo courtesy of respondent BE, male, b. 1943, Hällabrottet152 Image 8.2 Excerpt from private photo album courtesy of respondent MK, female, b. 1951, Degerfors and Karlskoga 162 Image 8.3 Tommy Steele with The Ken-Tones performing in Linköping, Sweden in 1958. Photo: Arne Gustafsson, Östgöta Bild, Östergötlands museum (CC BY-NC) 164 Image 9.1 Classifications for films in The Bahamas. (Source: The Commonwealth of The Bahamas website (Statute Law of The Bahamas, 1976)) 177 Image 9.2 List of reasons that would/should cause a film to be classified or rated 183 Image 10.1 Map of Central Europe in the early 1950s, including the location of Warsaw, Berlin, Cracow, Magdeburg 197 Image 10.2 Examples of film listings for Cracow (left) and Magdeburg (right) 203 Image 10.3 Special screening at Theater des Friedens on the occasion of Stalin’s birthday in 1952 208 Image 10.4 A special edition of the match box to advertise the Festival of Soviet Film in Poland (held annually in November) 209 Image 12.1 Map of Antwerp showing the location of cinemas active in 1972. The size of the dots indicates the run order: the larger the dot, the higher the run order (cinemas that show films in the first run are indicated by a small dot). The decentrally located cinema Monty was part of the group of cinema owners that allied with the Majors to compete with Heylen and that, thus, in 1972 operated as a first-run theatre 247 Image 12.2 Map of Antwerp cinemas in 1952 according to the k-means clustering (stars: cinemas in cluster 1; circles: cinemas in cluster 2; squares: cinemas in cluster 0) 250 Image 12.3 Map of Amsterdam showing the location of the cinemas active in 1962. The size of the dots indicates the run order: the larger the dot, the higher the run order (cinemas that show films in the first run are indicated by a small dot). The map identifies cinema Du Midi, the first cinema in the Amsterdam “New South” area, as a first-­run theatre 253 Image 12.4 2D radar plots showing how the cinemas Astoria, Cinema West, Cinetol and Victoria score on the six variables in the cluster analysis for Amsterdam, 1962. With their high scores on most variables except seating capacity, they demonstrate the profile of a clear neighbourhood cinema 254

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Image 12.5 3D plots showing the three clusters of cinemas in Amsterdam and Antwerp in 1972 identified with k-means clustering 256 Image 16.1 Durban cinema map circa 1970. The outlined area represents the borders of the Grey Street complex 340 Image 16.2 Durban’s Victoria Picture Palace n.d. (Source: The GandhiLuthuli Documentation Centre, University of KwaZulu/Natal, Durban)348 Image 16.3 Cinemas in Trinidad circa 1970. Note the cluster of cinemas along the island’s west coast, where most immigrants from South Asia settled 349 Image 16.4 Shah Jehan Cinema, Durban n.d. (Source: The Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre, University of KwaZulu/Natal, Durban) 354

List of Tables

Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3 Table 5.4 Table 5.5 Table 5.6 Table 5.7 Table 6.1

Table 6.2 Table 6.3 Table 7.1 Table 7.2 Table 7.3 Table 7.4 Table 7.5 Table 7.6 Table 10.1

Cities included in the study by population, number of theatres, and percentage of migrants 78 Percentage of US and Mexican screenings per city and theatre 1952 79 Number of screenings of films in 1952 by country of origin in cinema theatres of six Mexican provincial cities 82 Mexican and foreign titles with most screenings in each of the cities in 52 days of 1952 85 Number of US and Mexican films by year of production and by city 90 Top-gross films in the United States in 1952 and 1951 by release dates in Mexico City and the six Mexican cities during 1952 92 Most popular actors in six Mexican cities by country of origin of films and number of screenings: 1952 95 Comparison between general population and cinema-going statistics in Bulgaria (as adapted from NSI reports), the questionnaire sample dataset and the demographics of the focus group participants 107 Spread of questionnaire and focus group participants according to planning regions, as classified by NUTS 109 Number of cinemas, multiplexes (with six or more screens) and screens across the six Bulgarian planning regions, according to data from the Bulgarian National Film Center at the end of 2017 113 Listing of the number of cinemas and inhabitants per cinema seat in 1925 130 Growth in the number of cinemas between 1923 and 1930 131 Growth in the number of cinema seats between 1923 and 1930 131 Variation in the number of cinema seats per 1000 inhabitants between 1923 and 1930 132 Comparison of the growth of cinema seats between the four historical regions in the years 1925–1930 137 Population growth in the whole country and in the four historical regions 137 Number of cinemas per city, including capacity 202

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Table 10.2 Table 10.3

Table 10.4 Table 10.5 Table 12.1 Table 14.1 Table 14.2 Table 14.3 Table 14.4 Table 14.5 Table 14.6 Table 14.7 Table 14.8 Table 14.9 Table 14.10 Table 14.11 Table 14.12 Table 14.13 Table 15.1 Table 15.2 Table 15.3 Table 15.4 Table 15.5 Table 18.1 Table 18.2

Total shares per city of identified screenings, film titles and average screening duration from East and West Bloc countries Shares of screenings and film titles in 1951–1953 per individual country (countries with less than five film titles in each of the two cities are subsumed as “other”; countries in bold are those that became part of the East Bloc after 1945) Films with the highest numbers of screenings in Magdeburg cinemas, 1951–1953 Films with the highest numbers of screenings in Cracow cinemas, 1951–1953 The total number of cinemas active in each city for more than 10 weeks in the sample year Number of performances and number of tickets sold in Berlin-­Friedrichshain 1948 Screenings and attendances in the GDR in 1958 by district Relationship between film screenings and attendances in the district Neubrandenburg, 1972–1977 Screenings and audience numbers of annual top 15 films, in the GDR, 1978–1987 Film statistics derived from the 29 cinemas screening films in Wroclaw in 1972 Screenings and attendances for films ranked 1 to 10, 20, 50 and 100 screened in Switzerland between 1976 and 1987 Comparison of the actual number of tickets sold and the number estimated using the POPSTAT method, for 27 films released between 1933 and 1942 Comparison of the actual number of tickets sold and the number estimated with POPSTAT in the GDR, 1980 Survey data, GDR 1980 Utilisation index applied to domestic and Hollywood productions in nine European economies during the 1930s Utilisation indices for Cracow 1940–1944 Demand for films in the GDR in 1980 Indices of use for Wroclaw, 1972 Period covered in the dataset for each city Regulation of the occupied film markets Division of periods regarding the import regulations Supply and demand of German films in the four cities Supply and demand of doemstic films in the four cities Nazi propaganda films released in Buenos Aires from 1936 till 1942 Nazi propaganda films released in Quito and Guayaquil from 1936 till 1942

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207 212 212 243 286 286 287 287 288 289 291 292 294 296 298 299 300 310 321 322 323 324 389 393

CHAPTER 1

Comparing New Cinema Histories: An Introduction Daniela Treveri Gennari, Lies Van de Vijver, and Pierluigi Ercole

Comparative history, a growing and broadly scholarly debated approach, has evolved over time, presenting diverse methodological and theoretical challenges for historians. From the 1950s and 1960s the comparative method was predominantly carried out “through statistical data analysis on large samples” (Ragin, 1981, p. 102).1 Since the 1970s a growing body of literature interested in comparative historical methods has further developed, predominantly in the United States and Europe (Kaelble, 2010, p. 33). However, while up until the 1980s in “the majority of comparative studies by European historians were located in social and economic history” (Kocka & Haupt, 2010, pp. 17–18), over the last decades cultural history has started introducing comparative

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 See also Schmidt-Catran et al. (2019).

D. Treveri Gennari (*) Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] L. Van de Vijver LUCA School of Arts, Ghent, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] P. Ercole De Montfort University, Leicester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Treveri Gennari et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38789-0_1

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methodologies. This has, however, come not without its difficulties, as scholars have often questioned how to “grasp the construction of meanings and power across diverse cultural contexts” (Butsch & Livingstone, 2014, p. 1). In her essay titled Is Comparative History Possible, historian Philippa Levine discusses advantages and weaknesses of the comparative approach in historical research. Whilst reminding us that “comparative studies are the exceptions rather than the rule, not least because the practice can be quite strenuous” (Levine, 2014, p. 332), she highlights some of the objections moved against the comparative approach. Two, in particular, interest us here. Firstly, comparative history has been often associated with national histories; hence, it was seen as unable to question “national specificities” (Levine, 2014, p. 333). Nonetheless, comparative history can play a key role in “undoing the dominance of national histories” (Levine, 2014, p. 334), by questioning the “national” as a paradigm in order to reveal key internal and external factors that shaped national borders and their cultural, social, and political histories. Secondly, Levine points out that the tendency to merge comparative history, transnational, or cross-national history and even world history is based on the mistaken assumption that “comparative history always works cross-nationally” (Levine, 2014, p. 335). Our discussion and understanding of the comparative method need to take into consideration and acknowledge the distinctive, but often complementary, research practices developed by these diverse approaches. For instance, during the last two decades the scholarly discussion about two methods—“comparative history” and “entangled history”—has repeatedly pointed out the relation between the two approaches and their compatibility. Whilst “comparative history deals with similarities and differences between historical units” and it is “analytically ambitious and empirically demanding,” entangled history “deals with transfer, interconnection and mutual influences across boundaries” (Kocka & Haupt, 2010, p. 5). Both approaches share the same methodological challenges and questions. How many units of analysis does the historian need to take into consideration in order to begin to detect signs of reciprocity and influence but also differences and similarities amongst units? When is it more appropriate to expand or reduce the spatial or geographical scope of a study? Based on what criteria do we decide to make a synchronic or a diachronic comparison? What type of sources would be most appropriate for a comparative analysis? What are the different characteristics of the sources that need to be mediated in order to be able to compare them? How do we approach multi-language projects and the consequent issue of semantic distinctions and differences of the same word used in different languages and contexts? How do we take into account the complexity of expressing cultural nuances of one nation, society, or group of people in comparison to another? Whilst discussing issues and problems of formulating an answer to some of these questions, Levine (2014, p. 343) reminds us that “History is about interactions—between peoples and cultures, between values, between ecologies and environments—and the comparative is one of the key ways in which we make sense of such interactions, by exploring the very ‘between-ness’ at work here.”

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As scholars who endeavour to adopt a comparative approach to New Cinema History, Levine’s essay reminds us that, in our attempt to investigate the “between-ness” amongst cinema cultures, film industries and exhibition markets and economies, there is a danger of creating hierarchical structures within our analysis. Our approach needs to be a “comparison of” instead of a “comparison to.” In addition, she highlights that the comparative method promotes and thrives on interdisciplinarity. New Cinema Historians are very well rehearsed in adopting multidisciplinary methods and approaches, as a community of researchers; therefore, we are well equipped to further develop the implementation of a comparative aspect to our investigations. The aim of this edited volume is to promote exactly that. It is to promote the adoption of a comparative approach that can start to reveal unexpected characteristics of interactions, convergences, differentiations, and similarities across cultures within the same country, neighbouring regions and far away states, as well as across periods of times within the same geographical location. As scholars like Levine have clearly highlighted, the comparative approach in historical research presents a variety of challenges but also clear methodological advantages. Firstly, comparative cinema history allows the formulation of a set of questions that would otherwise be difficult to pose. Questions about similarities, differences, transfer, and influences, for instance, become essential within a comparative frame of analysis. Secondly, a historical comparison of cinema cultures, film distribution, or reception allows one to better understand specific case studies whose peculiarities could only be understood if compared to similar individual cases that took place in a different geographical space or time period or cultural setting. Thirdly, whilst on the one hand the comparative method requires a certain level of generalisations, on the other hand it becomes a key tool for testing research hypotheses. For instance, the comparison of national cases of film distribution practices can reveal not only macro aspects of industrial organisation, but also more specific and distinct characteristics of workforce structure and management. Finally, as Kocka and Haupt (2010, p.  18) point out, “comparison can help to de-familiarise the familiar.” Comparative cinema history, therefore, engages in a dynamic process of challenging research assumptions and tests the uniqueness of case studies which, within the comparative mode, can be understood as different, similar, or as an alternative to many others. As we highlight briefly below, New Cinema Historians have engaged with, tested, and discussed the comparative approach through a series of large- and small-scale projects and key publications. Historians engaging with the debate regarding comparative history have highlighted that whilst the approach is often valued and acknowledged by the research community, comparison remains a matter for a minority of scholars. Similarly, New Cinema Historians have over the years called for “comparative local histories” (Maltby, 2006, p. 91) as well as a more systematic comparative approach to the study of cultural, political, and economic aspects of cinema history (Biltereyst & Meers, 2016, p. 13). Since Maltby’s appeal for a different approach to cinema history that shifts the attention to a comparative analysis of

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local histories, and the consequent invitation from Biltereyst and Meers for a rigorous comparative approach, some scholars have begun concentrating on comparison of cinema practices and film cultures. This has been initially based on local and national internal comparisons (see for example the Czeck Film Culture in Brno (1945–1970), The ‘Enlightened’ City in Belgium,2 Italian Cinema Audiences,3 Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain,4 Cinema Memories: A People’s Histories of Cinema-Going in 1960s Britain, and the more recent Beyond the Multiplex5) where not only local comparison within a city or a region, but also urban vs rural, capital cities vs smaller centres, north vs south or insular vs mainland have provided opportunities for comparative analysis within the same national context. Gradually a wider and more explicitly articulated comparative analysis of cross-national film cultures has started to emerge. The Cultura de la Pantalla network—consisting of an international group of film, media, and communication researchers in (Latin) America (Mexico, Colombia, US) and Europe (Belgium, Spain)—had already been working for several years to apply a series of multi-method longitudinal studies on urban cinema cultures across the Spanish language world by conducting replication studies of the Enlightened City project. This project has led the way through its overall goal of presenting local, national, regional, and cross-continental comparative studies on historical cinema cultures (Meers et al., 2018, p. 164). A different approach—based on geographical visualisation of film exhibition—is the one employed by Jeffrey Klenotic in Mapping Movies.6 This project, which pioneered in 2003 with the intention of creating a “space for diverse users to collaborate, exchange data, and interact with multiple information streams in an open-ended way” (Klenotic, 2003), brought the comparative dimension at the forefront of the geographical analysis of film consumption. In fact, while it started exclusively with American data, it has now added projects from several European countries, encouraging a more explicit comparative spatial analysis of its data. Within a European context, the British Academy/Leverhulme-funded Mapping European Cinema: A Comparative Project on Cinema-going Experiences in the 1950s (2015) was a timely project seeking to understand cultural connectedness beyond national borders, addressing the gap in comparative research on experiences of cinema-going in 1950s Europe, a time in which cinema was the most popular pastime.7 This research re-evaluated the popular reception of film, conducting an ethnographic audience study, while reconstructing the film programming and exhibition structure of the time across cities in the UK, Italy, and Belgium. While these projects engaged with the comparative dimension in both nuanced and explicit manners, at the same time several publications have  www.cinemabelgica.be  www.italiancinemaaudiences.org 4  www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/cmda/ 5  www.beyondthemultiplex.org/ 6  www.mappingmovies.com 7  See Ercole et al. (2020). For a full list of research projects see https://homernetwork.org/ 2 3

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started to adopt a comparative lens in their analysis. Articles and book chapters have surfaced in the last few years addressing both the heterogeneous corpus of cinema data across the world and the different circumstances in which films have been viewed across different geographical areas, times, and cultures. This was the case for some of the articles included in the Special Issue of TMG Journal for Media History (2018) New Cinema History in the Low Countries and Beyond, where alongside national studies and methodological reflections, individual contributions concentrated on the similarities between the Netherlands and Belgium (van Oort & Pafort-Overduin, 2018) or audiences preferences and popularity in three medium-sized Northern European cities in the mid-1930s (Pafort-Overduin et al., 2018). However, it was finally with the Special Issue of TMG Journal for Media History (2020), Comparative Histories of Moviegoing, that van Oort and Whitehead brought the attention of comparative analysis within New Cinema History by presenting “a broad array of themes, places, and approaches ranging from a classical systematic comparison between various localities focused on clearly defined units of comparison to more intuitive and loosely defined objects of analysis using a comparative sensibility” as well as “critical reflections on comparative methodology” (van Oort & Whitehead, 2020, p. 7). This collection of essays highlighted how “there certainly has been a growth of interest in comparative histories in the field”, aiming “to take stock of that scholarly activity” (van Oort & Whitehead, 2020, p. 3) but also reflected on the perceived tension between generalisation and microhistories at the heart of the discipline, a discipline with a broad range of themes, methodologies and perspectives. A similar approach was used in the volume Towards a Comparative Economic History of Cinema (1930–1970), where John Sedgwick (2022) worked closely with several scholars to develop an analysis of the economic circumstances in which films were produced, distributed, and exhibited in a very specific time period allowing for comparative analysis across different areas of the world. These are just two examples of research aiming to broaden the discussion on comparative methodologies applied to cinema history and move forward to stimulate further global collaborative projects. The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories stems from the AHRC-funded European Cinema Audiences. Entangled Histories & Shared Memories8 project, a research which for the very first time explored film cultures in seven different countries across 1950s Europe, through a systematic analysis of their film exhibition, programming, and audience’s memories. Therefore, with such a project, the comparative dimension was at the heart of a research on cinema history which moved beyond the particularism of national cinema study and language differences in order to explore industrial practices and shared memories of cinema-going across seven European cities. It developed new methodologies to investigate these practices (Treveri Gennari et al., 2021) and encouraged collaborations across disciplines to ensure a sound 8

 www.europeancinemaaudiences.org

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c­omparative analysis of film consumption, memories, and film circulation. While the analysis will result in a European Cinema Audiences separate monograph, the project’s investigators, also, hoped through this volume, to inspire collaborations on comparative projects that could include new localities, new analytical perspectives, and a wider historical spread of the research. The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories does precisely this. The volume brings together contributions that focus on historical and contemporary, comparative case studies of: film consumption, exhibition strategies, cinema memories, film programming, audiences, distribution networks and international strategies, cinema-going patterns, exhibition characteristics, economic film history, censorship, and, more generally, practices of cinema-going at a global level. What makes this volume distinctive is how a comparative analysis is at the core of each chapter, rather than a thread the reader must unravel across the entire volume. Every contributor has distinctly offered a new focus in their research area by articulating the comparative dimension of their work, and hence by moving away from what has been defined as a more “implicit” form of comparison (Kocka & Haupt, 2010, p. 2). By doing so, the volume also addresses what is for the French historian Michel Espagne (1999) one of the main weaknesses of comparative work: disregarding possible contacts between cultures, while concentrating only on national case studies and their differences. The contributions in this edited handbook, in fact, have found ways to explore and articulate contacts between cultures, the “betweenness” Levine refers to. For instance, film censorship is discussed in an essay that focuses on film cultures in Francoist Spain and in the German Democratic Republic in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In addition, the reception of Indian films by the South Asian Diaspora is investigated through their circulation in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and Durban, South Africa, during the colonial period, whilst issues related to the relationship between nation state building in the early-twentieth-century, cinema-going, communities and languages are discussed in an essay that focuses on Soviet Siberia, colonial Tunisia, and post-­ Ottoman Greek Macedonia. These are only a few examples of how The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories aims not only to move beyond the “monocentric” approach and the particularism of national cinema histories. It also finds ways to develop new contacts between areas geographically or culturally distant, but also to find new and diverse film cultures across cities, regions, and countries, as well as time periods and methodologies. This volume brings together a wide variety of case studies on film historic research, each of them addressing a wide variety of sources, periods, and nations. It is the result of a successful call for chapters that brought together 47 scholars from over 15 different countries working on cinema history. In order to truly expose the global dimension of the comparative approach, this edited collection gives voice to a wide range of countries, historical timeframes, and perspectives, representing not only geographical and historical breadth, but also exhibiting a significant methodological and theoretical diversity. Overall,

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the chapters included in this volume outline how their comparative angle can push the cultural and geographical boundaries of New Cinema History research into new levels of understanding cinema in a global perspective. The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories presents case studies that aim to further the investigation into the field of comparative history applied to cinema studies. The comparative dimension is interpreted in this volume either between different regions or areas within a specific country (Part 1), or between countries geographically close (Part 2) or between countries geographically distant (Part 3). More details on each chapter are provided in the introductions to each part of the volume. Moreover, some of the chapters are based on a “comparison” of the film market in one geographical area but in diverse periods of time. These kinds of studies have not always been considered comparative in a strict sense and interpreted rather as studies of change. However, as editors of this volume, we felt it was important to include these specific researches, because they clearly demonstrate that an understanding of the historical changes and modifications of units of analysis is key for a comparative approach. Presenting a comparative longitudinal analysis (Fairbrother, 2014) that promises to explore “changes of country-level variables over time” (Schmidt-Catran et al., 2019, p. 112), these studies still add to the complex world of comparative study, where “there can be no one-fits-all solution” (Goerres et al., 2019, p. 75). While our volume does not pretend to be exhaustive in its case studies and approaches, the authors of the essays that compose this volume have embraced the methodological challenges of the comparative approach and tested their research against its potentials and limitations. Whilst the answers to the question, is comparative New Cinema History possible? might need further refining and discussion, we agree with Philippa Levine who suggests that in order to promote the comparative approach in historical studies the “trick lies in normalising the comparative, claiming it as a heuristic instrument in the standard historical toolbox, not something to be feared or shunned, but a tool to be utilised—like everything else in that same toolbox—with care and sensitivity” (Levine, 2014, p. 346). The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories represents a step further to normalise the comparative method within New Cinema History. The publication of this volume is testimony to a community of scholars who have continuously and successfully encouraged and promoted a debate on historical methodologies applied to the study of cinema cultures, cinema audiences, and film exhibition. The HoMER (History of Moviegoing, Exhibition and Reception) network and its annual conference have been, and will continue to be, the ideal venue for the development of such discussions. In addition, the Cinema Histories digital archive,9 that federates historical cinema data from multiple international projects, aims to continue to inspire comparative cinema history research by offering open access digital data and tools. 9

 www.cinemahistories.org

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References Biltereyst, D., & Meers, P. (2016). New cinema history and the comparative mode: Reflections on comparing historical cinema cultures. Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, (11), 13–32. Butsch, R., & Livingstone, S. (2014). Meanings of audiences: Comparative discourses. Routledge. Ercole, P., Van de Vijver, L., & Treveri Gennari, D. (2020). Challenges to comparative oral histories of cinema audiences. TMG Journal for Media History, 23(1–2), 1–19. Espagne, M. (1999). Les transferts culturels franco-allemands. Presses Universitaires de France. Fairbrother, M. (2014). Two multilevel modelling techniques for analyzing comparative longitudinal survey datasets. Political Science Research and Methods, 2(1), 119–140. Goerres, A., Siewert, M.  B., & Wagemann, C. (2019). Internationally comparative research designs in the social sciences: Fundamental issues, case selection logics, and research limitations. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 71(1), 75–97. Kaelble, H. (2010). Between comparison and transfers—And what now?: A FrenchGerman debate. In H.-G. Haupt & J. Kocka (Eds.), Comparative and transnational history: Central European approaches and new perspectives (pp. 33–38). Berghahn Books. Klenotic, J. (2003). Mapping movies. Retrieved June 1, 2023, from https://www.mappingmovies.com/ Kocka, J., & Haupt, H.-G. (2010). Comparison and beyond: Traditions, scope, and perspectives of comparative history. In H.-G. Haupt & J. Kocka (Eds.), Comparative and transnational history: Central European approaches and new perspectives (pp. 1–30). Berghahn Books. Levine, P. (2014). Is comparative history possible? History and Theory, 53(3), 331–347. Maltby, R. (2006). On the prospect of writing cinema history from below. TMG Journal for Media History, 9(2), 74–96. https://doi.org/10.18146/tmg.550 Meers, P., Biltereyst, D., & Lozano, J. C. (2018). The Cultura de la Pantalla network: Writing new cinema histories across Latin America and Europe. Revista Internacional de Comunicación y Desarrollo (RICD), 2(9), 161–168. Pafort-Overduin, C., Sedgwick, J., & Van de Vijver, L. (2018). Identifying cinema cultures and audience preferences: A comparative analysis of audience choice and popularity in three medium-sized Northern European Cities in the Mid-1930s. TMG Journal for Media History, 21(1), 102–118. Ragin, C. C. (1981). Comparative sociology and the comparative method. International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 22(1–2, 102), –120. Schmidt-Catran, A. W., Fairbrother, M., & Hans-Jürgen, A. (2019). Multilevel models for the analysis of comparative survey data: Common problems and some solutions. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 71(1), 99–128. Sedgwick, J. (2022). Towards a comparative economic history of cinema, 1930–1970. Springer.

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Treveri Gennari, D., Van de Vijver, L., & Ercole, P. (2021). Defining a typology of cinemas across 1950s Europe. Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, 18(2), 395–418. van Oort, T., & Pafort-Overduin, C. (2018). New cinema history in the low countries and beyond: An introduction. TMG Journal for Media History, 21(1), 10–18. van Oort, T., & Whitehead, J. L. (2020). Common ground: Comparative histories of cinema audiences. TMG Journal for Media History, 23(1–2), 1–11. https://doi. org/10.18146/tmg.797

PART I

Local Encounters: Introduction

The first section of the handbook focuses on comparative research in local case studies confining the comparison to cases within one nation using either similar or multiple methodological frames. Peter Merrington, Bridgette Wessels and Matthew Hanchard research the diversity of film exhibition in contemporary Bristol and Liverpool. The research starts by contextualising the investment processes and policy framework in place related to public funding in England that aim to support and develop diversity within the film exhibition sector. In order to understand the different opportunities audiences have to watch film in cinemas, the authors describe Bristol as well served for both mainstream and independent film, while Liverpool in contrast, with many mainstream commercial cinemas, but relatively underserved for independent film. Considering the current debates around audiences, place and film policy, the authors proceed to analyse audience interviews to understand the changing conceptions of contemporary film culture, film consumption and film audiences. The detailed comparative analysis allows for an understanding of how varied urban film cultures have developed while raising questions about the role of national film policy in developing film provision in underserved cities. Hasan Akbulut’s contribution on cinema-going in Turkey between 1960 and 1980 focuses on the importance of questioning the memories of historical cinema audiences using oral history methods, and thus connects to a long-­ standing tradition of researching cinema-going as a social phenomenon within New Cinema History. By contextualising and comparing the memories of cinema-­going experiences with information on the districts, venues and politics in urban Ankara and Istanbul, and rural areas, Akbulut highlights the underlining modernisation discourses shaping cinema memories. With attention for gendered memories, ritual cinema-going practices, the experience of domestic and foreign film programming and remembered varied cinema spaces from film palaces to mobile cinema, Akbulut illustrates how cinema memories are shaped by the sociopolitical context of Turkey and function as mediators in the understanding, desiring and performing of modernity.

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In their contribution on understanding the experience of segregated cinema cultures, David Morton and Agata Frymus draw on archival research and established scholarship to compare the histories of Black cinema-going in Harlem, New York, and Jacksonville, Florida, during the silent film era. Both case studies of different historical context towards Black participation in cultural life are contextualised, and particularly linked to its effect on the local urban cinema cultures. Harlem grappled with the mass arrival of displaced African American refugees, and Jacksonville suffered increasingly draconian political and legal restrictions placed on leisure and movement of Black life. As such, Morton and Frymus carefully craft cinema theatres as spaces where Black voices could be heard cultivating various forms of resistance in the midst of the early twentieth-century racial politics. From the late 1930s through the early 1950s, Mexico experienced a golden age of cinema. Hundreds of movies were made and exported to Latin America, Spain and the United States, yet the huge popularity of Mexican films did not displace American productions. This contribution by José Carlos Lozano et al. analyses the programming of Mexican and American films in six Mexican provincial cities defocusing research from the capital. The chapter details the exhibition structures, explaining the importance of the quasi-monopolistic control of Mexican film exhibition by a few circuits, and discusses the programming during the year 1952, a year exemplary for its low-quality national films, higher number of Hollywood new releases and the increasingly fast urban growth in the six sampled cities. The analysis explains that in 1952 there was a drastically uneven number of national releases versus American ones, reflecting the popularity of national contents among viewers who were less cosmopolitan and literate than their Mexico City’s counterparts. The films leaning on strong emotional bonds and fondness for Mexican films and stars had a working-class setting, eventually diminishing the appeal of national cinema among the middle class. Yet taking a correlation between programming and consumption into account, Hollywood movies proved to be as popular as Mexican ones. Maya Nedyalkova’s contribution has a focus on contemporary cinema accessibility across Eastern Europe when researching cinema businesses across six national regions in Bulgaria. By combining and comparing Bulgarian film exhibition statistics with experiences of cinema-goers the transformation from an inclusive, low-cost everyday activity to an exclusive and expensive special occasion is understood. Audience experiences are largely missing from most accounts on exhibition developments after the end of the Cold War and Nedyalkova precisely combines reception research and audiences surveys to explore the meaning of cinema and uncover current systematic inequalities by questioning the cost of cinema-going, the ease of access and the information flows. Nedyalkova concludes that the post-socialist reformation turned cinema into an urban, Hollywood-dominated, costly pastime riddled with inequalities of access not unlike the broader European context driven by cinema commercialisation and concentration.

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Karina Pryt’s comparative analysis of the newly independent Polish film market from the post-war years to 1930 offers an insight into the unequal dynamic of market growth and the potential participation of Jewish minorities in the cinema market. The analysis uses spatial and statistical data to research, on the one hand, to demonstrate the particularities and remarkable progression of the cinema market at a subnational level, sharing the critique of the dominant Polish national narrative in research and pointing to the importance of prior urbanisation and the expansion of the railway infrastructure. This urbanity, on the other hand, clusters Jewish minorities as advantaged cinema-goers, correcting their status as minority audiences. In their contribution Åsa Jernudd and Jono Van Belle research the very nature of cinema-going memories. By comparing cinema memories from the heydays in Sweden in the 1950s to a decade later after cinema attendance plummeted, Jernudd and Van Belle research a transforming set of practices. Yet instead of a focus on the known crisis in cinema, the chapter reveals significant gender differences related to cinema-going during this period of expansion of popular media, youth cultures and liberating socio-economic changes for young women. The oral history method used in the chapter captured cinema memories in the context of everyday life and analysed them in dialogue with research in Swedish socio-economic, cultural and media history. The research centres on considering the gendered memory narration of social cinema-going key to understanding the social, cultural and experiential dimensions of modernisation. Finally, Monique Toppin questions undergraduate students comparatively prior to and during the global COVID-19 pandemic in an effort to understand the views of contemporary cinema-goers regarding film consumption, the relevance of censorship of films generally and film classification specifically in The Bahamas. Both groups of undergraduates have a very active consumption of movies in both public and private arenas. Sharing similar views despite the uptake in ‘uncensored’ access to various electronic devices, and unregulated exposure to the media content of the internet, censorship is still considered a necessary component for public protection, and comparably, film classification in The Bahamas is still held in relevance, despite the fact that most do not view the film classification system as a useful guide for themselves when selecting a film.

CHAPTER 2

Comparing Localised Film Culture in English Cities: The Diversity of Film Exhibition in Bristol and Liverpool Peter Merrington, Matthew Hanchard, and Bridgette Wessels

Despite community campaigns, petitions, and even appeals to UNESCO, in 2016 Liverpool’s first purpose-built cinema, The Futurist, was demolished to make way for a block of student flats and a shopping centre. Liverpool City Council granted permission for the 100-year-old derelict building to be replaced by developers, who decided to memorialise the much-loved building by etching its image onto the facade of the new building. An act that one commentator described as resembling the creation of a “lurid death mask” (Wainwright, 2021). Not long after this, in Bristol, the city’s flagship independent cinema, The Watershed, announced a £12m expansion with finance underwritten by Bristol City Council (BBC, 2020). The project planned to grow and

P. Merrington (*) University of York, York, UK e-mail: [email protected] M. Hanchard University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK e-mail: [email protected] B. Wessels University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Treveri Gennari et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38789-0_2

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develop the cinema, by adding a fourth cinema screen as well as developing the building’s access and inclusion support to enable greater diversity in audiences, including disabled audiences. While these two events are unrelated, they begin to speak about the different histories and approaches to the development and maintenance of urban film cultures within two English cities. Bristol in south west England is well served for both mainstream and independent film, with a diversity of programmes, events, festivals, and venues. In contrast, although Liverpool in north west England has a plurality of mainstream commercial cinemas, it is relatively underserved for independent film and programmes are often limited to small-scale, temporary, or one-off initiatives. Neither of these cities has the range and diversity of cultural provision that is found in London, but they both have distinctive cultural and social identities. Liverpool and Bristol are both port cities on the west coast of England, with populations around half a million, both with more than one university (see Bristol City Council, 2021 and Liverpool City Council, 2021 for local demographics).1 Both Liverpool and Bristol are in England’s collective of ten “Core Cities” (Corecities, 2021).2 While they differ in levels of deprivation, as Liverpool has the largest proportion of neighbourhoods in the highest deprivation percentile of English Core Cities and Bristol has the least (Liverpool City Council, 2020, p. 10), they both have an extensive and comparable range of cultural, arts and heritage venues, theatres, galleries, and museums. There are 22 organisations based in the Liverpool local authority area that are part of Arts Council England’s National Portfolio of supported organisations and 20 in the Bristol Local Authority area (Arts Council England, 2018). Therefore, any difference in localised film culture in these two cities cannot simply be attributed to relative affluence alone. By looking at these two cities’ localised film exhibition cultures comparatively, it is possible to critically assess relational, localised and urban film cultures to understand how differing characteristics of film exhibition influence people’s sense of place. The chapter argues for the significance of place in shaping the relationship contemporary audiences have with film by providing detailed insights into the specific contextual relationships and interactions between films, people, policy, and place that generate and sustain audiences in Bristol and Liverpool in different ways. As well as comparatively assessing the provision and perception of film exhibition in these cities, the chapter questions the role of national film policy and local authorities in developing film provision in UK cities.

1  Liverpool’s estimated population in 2021 was 500,500 and in 2020 Bristol’s population was estimated at 465,866. 2  Core Cities UK is a policy and advocacy alliance of 11 cities including Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, and Sheffield.

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Building on the approach of New Cinema History (Maltby, 2011), this chapter focuses on processes of film culture associated with exhibition and reception. While in the UK there have been a few studies of individual independent cinema histories (e.g. Presence, 2019), there has been little work accounting for urban or city dynamics or through any comparative lens. Given this, the chapter draws on a mixed-methods approach with a combination of processes of analysis involving screen industry data, policy documents, funding reports on public funding for film exhibition, and semi-structured interviews with film audiences. The analysis draws on 100 semi-structured qualitative interviews with a wide range of film viewers from the north west and south west regions of England that were part of a bigger project called Beyond the Multiplex: Audiences for Specialised Film in English Regions, which examined audiences for non-mainstream film in four English regions (see Wessels et  al., 2021). While many of the interview subjects lived directly in Liverpool and Bristol, others lived across the wider regions and had a different range of proximities to the cities. The interviews were primarily conducted in person at public venues around the regions, including some cinemas and other cultural venues. Participants were recruited via a snowball sampling method and the interview transcripts were examined through an applied thematic analysis (Guest et al., 2014) that showed insights into people’s experiences and practices of watching film in specific locations and the various relations and interactions this involved (for a copy of all anonymised interview transcripts, the coding scheme developed through their analysis, and the socio-demographics of each participant, see Wessels et al., 2021). The chapter begins by introducing and contextualising film exhibition and consumption in England and the policy framework and investment processes related to public funding that aim to support and develop diversity within the film exhibition sector. Following this, the localised ecologies of film exhibition organisations in Bristol and Liverpool are compared to draw out a sense of the relations between different organisations and the different opportunities people living in those cities have to watch film theatrically. This is also considered in relation to the public funding that organisations in both these cities have attracted to support their work in developing new audiences or supporting independent film exhibition more generally. These insights set the scene for the analysis of the audience interviews that outline the views of those who watch films in these cities and what they feel this contributes to their sense of place. The chapter speaks to current debates around audiences, place, and film policy in the UK as well as the value placed on the diversity of film culture outside London. Simultaneously, these insights are of wider value for the understanding of changing conceptions of contemporary film culture, film consumption, and film audiences.

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Uneven Film Exhibition and Film Audience Policy in England The development of localised film cultures in Bristol and Liverpool is inherently connected to and shaped by wider developments in the film industry, media ownership, investment, and film policy both nationally and internationally, as well as social and economic conditions more generally. There have been evident inequalities in the range of film exhibition provision for audiences in different parts of England for many years and London has a significantly greater range of film provision than many other English cities (see the BFI and the UK Film Council’s Statistical Yearbooks, published since 2002, BFI, 2021). Despite there being generally broad provision of mainstream cinema through multiplexes, there are a range of inequalities in non-mainstream film including independent cinemas and film festivals across England (see Merrington et  al., 2021). Although there are a small number of cities with a relatively broad range of film exhibitors such as Manchester, Sheffield and Newcastle, most northern towns in England are limited to multiplex mainstream cinema, with limited permanent independent provision beyond this (Merrington et  al., 2021). This pattern is mirrored in film consumption in England, where generally, cinema attendance is higher in the south of England than in northern England (DCMS, 2018). At a national policy level, these issues were recognised and acknowledged by the Film Policy Review Panel, an independent panel of film industry experts established to review government film policy, that in 2012 published an independent report called A Future for British Film. It Begins with the Audience…. To counter some of these geographic disparities in film exhibition, the Film Policy Review Panel recommended a greater focus on developing audiences at a local level. The report called for the creation of a new network that could “provide direct funding for the co-ordination of clusters of local cinemas and film societies across the Nations and Regions of the UK” (DCMS, 2012, p. 91). In response to this recommendation the BFI, as the lead organisation for film in the UK, created the Film Audience Network (FAN), composed of regional and national Film Hubs. These were a new set of regional organisations that were given resources by the BFI with the goal of meeting the objectives of the Film Policy Review Panel’s report to diversify film watching and develop new audiences for non-mainstream film (BFI, 2012). The success of the Film Hub programme led the BFI to increase the budget and responsibilities for the network in the BFI 2022 strategy, which would run from 2017 to 2022. In the process, the allocation of small awards for distribution and exhibition activities was given to the Film Hubs. Overall, the network had a budget of £15m for the four-year period and was given the task of “providing a comprehensive geographic reach across the UK with the aim of increasing the breadth and depth of film available to audiences” (BFI, 2018). While this was a welcome development for regional and national film exhibition outside London, the BFI still retained significant control and financial decision-making power over all other budgets related to audience development, including the

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Image 2.1  The Futurist Cinema (previously the Picture House), Lime Street, Liverpool, 1938

£30.4m “Audience Development Fund” for larger programmes and events (BFI, 2018). While the BFI provided this funding via the National Lottery for film programmes and events, there was no direct support available for cinema development or capital funding to create or expand new cinemas. The regional and national Film Hubs were given a remit of working to support the interconnection and development of existing film exhibitors in each location but had no specific remit to address gaps in provision. While there has been ambition at a national policy level since the Film Policy Review Panel to seek to address uneven opportunities for audiences in England and the wider UK, the gaps and uneven patterns persist. This can be seen in detail by comparing the local film exhibition ecologies in Liverpool and Bristol (Image 2.1).

Comparative Local Film Exhibition Ecologies in Bristol and Liverpool Bristol is the largest city in the south west region of England. Across the region as a whole there are 380 cinema screens in 88 venues (BFI, 2020). By population this equates to 6.9 cinema screens per 100,000 people; this means the

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south west region has the highest number of cinema screens per person outside London (where there are 7.7 screens per 100,000 people) (BFI, 2020). Of these screens, 259 are located in multiplex chain cinemas, such as those run by large multinational corporations including Vue, Cineworld, and Odeon. The remaining 121 cinema screens are located in what the BFI calls “traditional and mixed-use cinemas” (BFI, 2020). These are generally cinemas that might be single screen independent cinemas, community cinemas, or cinemas that are part of larger shared use culture and arts venues such as arts centres that also use the same spaces to host theatre or music events. By contrast, Liverpool is the second largest city in the north west region of England, where Manchester is the largest city by population. Across the region there are slightly less cinema screens per person than in the south west—480 cinema screens in 73 venues, 6.7 screens per 100,000 people (BFI, 2020). A total of 412 cinema screens are located in multiplex chain cinemas, with 68 in traditional and mixed-use cinemas. Therefore, at a regional level the south west and north west are relatively similar in their range of cinemas and screen types, although the south west has significantly more traditional and mixed use cinemas. As well as being the largest city in the south west, Bristol dominates the region in terms of film exhibition.3 Bristol has various competing large-scale multiplex cinemas, each with 10-plus screens located in different areas of the city. This includes a branch of Cineworld, two venues from the Showcase chain, and two venues from the Vue chain. There are also smaller commercially operating cinema chains in the city including a three-screen Odeon, a three-screen branch of the smaller regional chain of Scott cinemas, and a branch of Everyman again with three-screens and generally catering to a higher-spending leisure consumer than the wider market of the multiplex chains (see CTA, 2021). In terms of commercial, multiplex chain cinemas run by multinational companies Liverpool has similar brands to Bristol, and is generally well served (see CTA, 2021). There are competing branches of the national chains such as Showcase, Cineworld, Odeon, and Vue (located across the water in Birkenhead). In addition, there are also branches of the smaller and growing chains such as The Light Cinema (New Brighton) and a new branch of Reel Cinemas opening in Kirby in 2023 (Reel Cinema, 2021). As with Bristol, Liverpool also has a four-screen branch of the Everyman chain of upmarket cinemas and Liverpool has a branch of the Picturehouse chain of cinemas (owned by Cineworld); this is located with the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT), a publicly funded gallery with a focus on new technology and digital culture in the city centre. In many ways, therefore, at the mainstream commercial end of the film exhibition spectrum Liverpool and Bristol appear very similar, both have a broad range of multiple, competing branches of national cinemas—primarily competing on location, consumer experience, and price, rather than the 3

 Explore the data visualisation “Mapping independent film exhibition” for further information.

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content they show. It is at the other end of the film exhibition spectrum where there is real distinction between the two cities. Beyond the commercial, mainstream venues, Bristol has a rich and broad ecology of independent film exhibition organisations, made up of cinemas, festivals, programming collectives, and film production companies. Importantly, it has two key independent standalone venues that focus on cultural, rather than commercial, cinema—the Watershed and The Cube—these operate on different economic and social models. The Watershed was founded in 1982 and declared itself “Britain’s First Media Centre” (Watershed, 2021) as well as the first “full-time multi-screen independent cinema outside London” (Presence, 2019, p.  803). Presence locates the origins of the Watershed in British Film Institute’s Regional Film Theatre scheme that was established in the mid-­1960s to develop the availability of film to audiences across the UK (Presence, 2019). The Watershed has three screens and is a charity and social enterprise with a focus on “cultural cinema” (see Cosgrove, 2012). It is still supported financially by the BFI as well as being the lead organisation for Film Hub South West—the regional development agency set up by the BFI to develop film exhibition locally. The Watershed is part of a group of UK cinemas predominantly based in large urban centres that still operate today and have legacy connections to the BFI’s Regional Theatre Scheme, including Broadway in Nottingham and Tyneside in Newcastle, but without an equivalent in Liverpool. The Cube is a single-screen arts venue set-up in 1998; it is run entirely by volunteers and does not receive external funding (Cube, 2021). Run as a non-­ hierarchical, radical, and DIY space, The Cube has similarities to a small handful of other cinemas in the UK, such as the Deptford Cinema in Lewisham (London) or the Star and Shadow Cinema in Newcastle which operates on a similar model (see Wallers, 2020). There are also organisations in Bristol such as Arnolfini that, although primarily associated with contemporary visual arts, also screen films. Bristol also has an independent video rental shop, 20th Century Flicks, with its own small screening space. The contemporary ecology of independent film exhibition in Liverpool is not as broad or established as in Bristol. In Liverpool there are no central independent venues with long and established histories such as the Watershed or The Cube that are found in Bristol and Liverpool does not have a cinema that is part of the Europa Cinemas’ network of cinemas that screen non-national European films (Europa Cinemas, 2021). While outside of Liverpool city centre, and across wider Merseyside, there are small community cinemas, film societies, and film clubs that engage local audiences including Woolton Picture House, Plaza Community Cinema, and the Lucem House Community Cinema in St. Helens, these tend to focus on community programmes rather than culturally diverse cinema programming. Beyond this, Liverpool’s cinema ecology is almost entirely made up of chain cinemas that are programmed from outside the city. This means the city has not built up expertise in the way Bristol has in independent cinema management and programming. However, Liverpool does have a history of independent film exhibition. The Merseyside Film

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Institute was founded in 1934 and ran for 60 years (see MacDonald, 2019). In the late 1980s and 1990s the Video Positive Festival, a biennial festival of video art was the largest UK event of its kind in the UK (see Cipullo & Newman, 2010). Video Positive was produced by Merseyside Moviola (founded in 1985), the organisation that would later change its name to become FACT in 1997 (Cipullo & Newman, 2010; Clayton, 2012). FACT opened a purpose-­ built cinema, exhibition, and event space in 2003. However, the cinema element of FACT was contracted to City Screen (now the Picturehouse chain of cinemas) to run, rather than being managed independently along with the rest of the building’s exhibition and events programme. At the time City Screen was a growing chain of independent cinemas expanding north from a base in Cambridge and London, known for having an “older, more highbrow audience” (Kollewe, 2012). City Screen began in 1989 as an alternative, in programme and experience, to the rise of the multiplexes, but the chain would later be sold to one of the UK’s largest cinema corporations, Cineworld, in 2012. In recent history there have been a number of initiatives, events, and organisations that have sought to develop independent film exhibition in Liverpool; these include Empty Spaces Cinema, Big Adventure Cinema, and the work of Cinema Nation, a research and development agency for film exhibition that produces the annual Scalarama programme of special events and screenings. But the grass-roots development in Liverpool has failed to materialise into long-term, sustainable, and established independent venues or organisations. One notable project was called Liverpool Small Cinema, which ran as a not-­ for-­profit independent community cinema from 2015 to 2017. The cinema project was set up by artist collective and community interest company Re-Dock, with the purpose of creating “a new city-center grassroots film exhibition facility” (Kilick, 2017, p.  2). The project was enabled by a landlord offering space rent-free in a property. A group of volunteers then converted the space into a 54-seat cinema and was run by volunteers and open to the community to programme. The building was eventually put up for sale, and the cinema unable to operate within the space has no alternative but to close. Ultimately, Liverpool Small Cinema was both enabled by (through free rent) and closed by the ongoing process of Liverpool city centres’ regeneration and gentrification. Many saw the Liverpool Small Cinema as an “outstanding success” that brought a new energy to community cinema exhibition in the city and served Liverpool’s “audiences’ appetite for diverse cinema” (Independent Liverpool, 2017). Although it received small grants from the BFI, it did not have sufficient scale of support to grow beyond its original formation. Similar organisations such as Star and Shadow Cinema in Newcastle and The Cube in Bristol had to turn to crowdfunding and grant funding to buy new buildings when they were faced with closure, with the Star and Shadow Cinema being supported by finance from Newcastle City Council (Wallers, 2020) and The Cube turning to crowdfunding to raise the £185,000 to purchase its building to ensure its independent future (Cube, 2014).

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As well as a divergence in independent venues, programmed and managed locally, one of the most obvious differences in the film exhibition cultures of Liverpool and Bristol is the number and range of film festivals hosted in each city. Interlinked with the independent venues across Bristol are a great number of film festivals spanning different film genres and styles, from slapstick to radical film. While in Liverpool there are only a few, small, irregular, or short-lived festivals, in Bristol, some of these film festivals are independent organisations such as Encounters—a short film festival that began in 1995. Others are festivals that are organised and programmed by the key venues such as the Watershed who run Cinema Rediscovered, focused on celebrating archive screenings and new restorations. Then there are festivals with specific geographic focuses such as Bristol Palestine Film Festival or Afrika Eye Film Festival, founded in 2005 to celebrate African cinema and culture. One of the only established festivals that have been regularly supported by the BFI and are associated with Liverpool is Abandon Normal Devices Festival or AND Festival. AND was established in 2009 as a collaboration between FACT in Liverpool, folly (a now closed media arts organisation in Lancaster) and what is now known as HOME in Manchester, a mixed artform cinema, theatre, and exhibition space (Merrington, 2009). The festival was originally focused on showcasing new cinema digital culture and while the first edition took place in Liverpool it relocated to Manchester and now operates as a roaming festival across north west England beyond, with fewer direct connections to Liverpool. Again, with the evolution of AND Festival away from Liverpool, versus the concentration and growth of film festivals in Bristol there is a pattern emerging, that while new cinema cultures have emerged in Liverpool they have not become established and nurtured within the city over the long-term as is the case in Bristol. This was further exemplified in 2017 when Bristol was designated a UNESCO City of Film, a permanent global status that recognises the city’s achievements as a world leader in the field of film and the moving image. Although unrelated to film, Liverpool’s UNESCO heritage status was removed from the city because of its approach to urban regeneration and development (Halliday, 2021). Beyond film exhibition, both Bristol and Liverpool are also a growing base for film and television production. Channel 4 opened a creative hub in Bristol in 2020 (Channel 4, 2020) and the city is the largest BBC Studios production base outside London (Pipe, 2021). Bristol is also home to successful production companies such as Oscar-winning Aardman Animations or the BAFTA-­ winning Early Day Films. Liverpool has invested in a new £54 million film and television studios regeneration project, Littlewoods Studios, hoping the investment will lead to jobs and economic growth for the city (LCR, 2020). Clearly Liverpool city council sees economic investment in the film industry as an important area of growth for the local economy but perhaps has not supported the film exhibition ecology of the city with the same focus. Tracing public investment in film exhibition is another means to compare the film exhibition cultures of Liverpool and Bristol and provides a further

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insight into how they have developed differently. Organisations in both cities can receive grant funding for film exhibition projects directly from international initiatives such as Creative Europe, national organisations such as BFI, or via the one of the regional Film Hubs that the BFI established to support local film exhibitors. Film Hub South West is led by the Watershed cinema in Bristol and therefore Bristol is already at the centre of film exhibition support initiatives in the wider region. Liverpool city comes under the remit of Film Hub North, which is responsible for film exhibition development across three northern English regions: the North West, the North East, and Yorkshire and the Humber. Film Hub North is run by two organisations: HOME in Manchester and Showroom Cinema in Sheffield. Previously, Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle was a partner in Film Hub North but there has never been a Liverpool-based organisation forming part of the administration of the support agency. Examining grant funding between 2011 and 2018 shows a significant difference in the amount of public investment in Liverpool and Bristol (see Wessels et al., 2021 for all data). In Bristol organisations such as Afrika Eye regularly received film festival funding (between £5K and £8K annually) for their programmes (Wessels et al., 2021). Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival has regularly received Creative Europe (around 30K EUR annually) funding and BFI film festival funding (around £70K annually). The Slapstick Festival regularly received film festival funding (around 15K annually). But the largest recipient of public funding by a significant margin in Bristol is the Watershed. The cinema has received grants from many different funds for programming and audience development from the BFI over this period but also as the lead Film Hub organisation for the south west. In total over £2 million in grants from the BFI since 2011. What is important to note is that most of these organisations that receive BFI and other grant funding have an essential relationship with the Watershed, as the building is the host for film festival programmes and contributes to the development of new initiatives in the city that utilise the organisation’s knowledge and expertise. Over the same time, only a few organisations in Liverpool received grants for film exhibition projects. Cinema Nation received BFI grants for Scalarama (around £30K) and Liverpool Small Cinema (around 5K), community cinema’s such as Lucem House benefitted from the BFI Neighbourhood Cinema scheme for around £5K and so did Re-Dock. Relative to Bristol, public funding for film exhibition is significantly underrepresented in Liverpool. This is predominantly because there are fewer established independent organisations in Liverpool that can bid for international, national, or regional funding. Examining the ecology of different film exhibitors in each of these cities shows that both cities have developed a broad commercial mainstream cinema sector, competing on location and experience rather than programme. Yet in terms of independent exhibition, cultural cinema, and public funding Bristol has grown in new venues and organisations, while in Liverpool despite some community and grassroots activity, the city’s population remains relatively underserved. While this analysis has shown there

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Image 2.2  Facade of the Lime Street redevelopment in Liverpool, depicting the historical reference panels designed by Anthony Brown. (Source: Peter Merrington, 2022)

are differences at a structural level in each city, it is also important to understand the implications of this for audiences, their film watching, experience, and sense of place (Image 2.2).

Film Audience Perspectives To understand the relation between the ecology of venues set out above and the audiences for film in each city this next part of the chapter considers how those audiences themselves conceived of their relationship to film exhibition. From this it is possible to see how people’s sense of place is influenced by the different types of film exhibition they encounter in each of these cities. Comparatively analysing semi-structured interviews with film audience members in each of these cities builds and reinforces the picture developed from looking at the ecology of organisations in each city to give us a richer understanding of their localised and urban film cultures. Starting with Bristol, this section traces the views of those living in the city and its surroundings through questions about film watching and its relationship with where the participant lived. Most interviewees in Bristol attended more than one cinema, even if they were loyal to a particular one. There were several factors that shaped cinema choice for those interviewed, such as the proximity to their home or they were

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based on the programming or the experience the cinema offered. Generally, the way that the film exhibition culture of Bristol was framed by the interviewees was through a sense of choice—through a variety of options to watch different types of films, in different types of venues and with different types of cinema experience. This sense of choice was something that was celebrated, as Nadine (25–34) put it, I think Bristol is great… I live in a really arty liberal… City… Which has not only several multiplex cinemas but also an art cinema.… And a cultural hub. And a volunteer cinema.… That shows, you know, weird and wacky wonderful things that I can program if I want to… So I’ve got like huge access, you know, I’ve got really, really, open access, because of where I live.

In some cases, this breadth of choice of different ways to watch films in the city was also linked to a wider understanding of Bristol’s social and cultural identity more generally. Justin (35–44) considered Bristol to be a “diverse city” in this sense. This was not just linked to the overall diversity of film exhibition but specifically associated with particular cinemas in the city. The Watershed and The Cube were consistently picked out by interviewees as offering something different to audiences. Albert (18–24) expressed his enthusiasm for the Watershed but also linked his experience of watching films there and at The Cube, and the audience’s taste at those two venues with a wider sense of Bristol as a city more generally. I mainly, just watch everything at the cinema.… At the Watershed, ’cause the Watershed is amazing… I feel like I’ve never wasted my time going to the Watershed… Bristol as a whole is really good for film because I think.… It’s quite like a fancy place really.… Like where like people don’t.… Turn their nose up at a like four-hour workshops about expanded cinema.

Albert (18–24) here offered a particular connection between Bristol’s identity as a city, in some way “fancy” and his experience of audiences’ openness to what he considered challenging or difficult film for an audience to experience, in this case “expanded cinema” as an example of a particular element of what could be called the high art of film culture. Not everyone embraced the breadth and diversity of the city’s film exhibition culture. For some such as Mary (65+), although she had been to the Watershed twice, she did not feel it showed the kinds of film she was interested in. For others, such as Kyle (18–24) visiting independent or community cinemas was not particularly important and their film watching as it predominantly revolved around the mainstream commercial venues “like Vue cinema or… Cineworld” or watching at home on “Sky and Netflix.” Other audience members considered the wider types of experience they were looking for in attending the cinema beyond just the programme. Pearl (55–64) attended multiple types of cinemas in the city—“we go multiplex and

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also… Watershed….” The appeal of the multiplex for Pearl was a sense they showed the latest films and gave the audience a larger number of different films to watch at any one time: “I like going to multiplexes because you have got a wider choice, well you have got more up-to-date… choice.” Ultimately for Pearl cinema going was primarily associated with socialising and entertainment for, it was, as she put it “a night out.” Other interviewees considered their film watching differently and in particular associated the Watershed with offering an experience to the audience that was more than social and more than entertainment—as in specifically cultural or educational. Miriam (45–54) watched films at a variety of locations: “we go to… mainstream cinemas. And we go to independent cinemas such as the Watershed in Bristol. And then, I watch films at home.” But when asked what her experience of the Watershed was, she described it as “more intimate” than the multiplex experience, and that because they have different types of films and “sometimes they have… panel discussions” for her “there is more to think about and to kind of reflect upon” when she watched a film at the Watershed. The Watershed was viewed as not only providing audiences the opportunity to see different films, but also experience them in a richer, more thoughtful way. For those who watch films at both multiplex venues and the Watershed there was a clear distinction between them. Nadine’s (25–34) account exemplified this further: “I will go and see new stuff in the cinema, usually, at Watershed. It’s very rare that I actually go to a multiplex.… I just not that interested in what they showed… And I think I [would] just much rather support the Watershed.” While the Watershed was seen to offer a different experience to Bristol’s multiplex cinemas, interviewees viewed The Cube as taking this differentiation even further, offering a radically different experience to audiences and even challenging what some audiences perceived to be cinema experience more generally. For Albert (18–24), The Cube offered audiences something unique and different to mainstream cinema experience, “yeah, I’d say that about The Cube that I feel like I’m like doing something… I’m not like going to the cinema, I’m just like going to The Cube…. This is a good thing.” This sense of independence and differentiation was also something that Judith (55–64) strongly identified with in her experience of The Cube, “my choice of cinema venue in Bristol is The Cube… it is more my type of place, you know, there’s no airs and graces, you can just go as you are, you know, people don’t expect you to dress up.” But while this sense of informality and openness appealed to audience members like Judith, for others this was challenging. While Miriam (45–54) was an advocate for the “intimate” experience of the Watershed, she did not find the same comfort in her experience of The Cube: “I found the whole venue very uncomfortable. I found that it’s quite sort of, I don’t know, untidy,… It doesn’t provide me the pleasant night out.” Despite this she acknowledged that the venue was significant for the city and that there were audiences with Bristol who had a strong attachment to the venue: “But, I guess… they have their regular audiences who… absolutely love going there, so maybe it’s

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just.…Well, everybody is different and… I think it’s that diversity of kind of what… people like.” This sense of identification, attachment, and belonging to venues in the city was something that was evident with the independent venues such as the Watershed and The Cube. This can also be seen in how these independent and locally run venues were discussed as participating in the development of a wider film culture within Bristol. In reference to film festivals in Bristol, Silvester (45–54) noted that “it’s all around the Watershed.” Here the Watershed was viewed as the centre point for film in the city, where new events, festivals, and different types of programmes were created. The interviews with those who watched film across Bristol gave a picture of a city that was confident in its diverse cultural expression through film, a city that provided multiple ways to watch and experience film. As a “diverse” city for film exhibition there was a sense that the film exhibition culture of the city reflected the interviewees’ views of the cultural identity of the city more generally. The venues that stood out in these interviews as shaping this sense of place and cultural identity most significantly were the independent venues such as the Watershed and The Cube. While not universally appreciated or attended, these venues were generally seen in some sense as unique or rare, relative to the wider south west region, and generally understood as a positive element of the cities’ wider cultural identity. The interviews with film watchers in Liverpool presented a different picture of the city and its wider cultural identity to those in Bristol. While in Bristol most interviewees were generally positive about the film exhibition ecology and culture in the city, in Liverpool the picture was more complicated. Although there is a range of mainstream multiplex venues in Liverpool, beyond this there is what one interviewee described as a “problem in Liverpool” (Giles, 35–44) with any kind of film exhibition that differs from this. There was an acknowledgement from those interviewed that Liverpool was a culturally rich city in many ways—but in relation to film exhibition this did not extend in particular to independent film culture in the city—the film culture that was central to shaping Bristol interviewees sense of place. For a number of interviewees, the Picturehouse-run cinema at FACT was viewed as Liverpool’s most independent or art house cinema—as in some way an alternative space to what the more mainstream chains showed. As Geoffrey (25–34) explained, “I used to go to the FACT which is the Art House cinema in… Liverpool. My friend… and I went after school. And that just tended to be whatever was on to be honest.” There was an idea in a small number of interviews, as with Geoffrey, that because the Picturehouse chain cinema was located within the FACT building, it was run by FACT as an independent organisation and not as part of a national chain as this account from Lisa (35–44) showed: “I used to go a lot to FACT… I went to FACT because it was like… the kind of independent thing in Liverpool.” Given the Picturehouse at FACT was viewed in Liverpool as the place to watch independent or art house film, it therefore also took on a role in shaping

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the Liverpool film watchers interviewed sense of the identity of independent or art house film more generally. Henry (25–34), who explained his taste in terms of the way his girlfriend described it—“she always says, ‘I like to watch films that are thinky’”—was a regular audience member at the Picturehouse at FACT. As Henry explained, “we used to go to the cinema quite a lot. But we would tend to gravitate around FACT and what FACT are showing, so that would often kind of dictate a little bit about what you can see.” Henry went on to note that the Picturehouse at FACT “tend to show the mainstream films,” and he also liked to watch these at the Odeon. But what had come closest to aligning with his film taste and the types of films he liked to watch was the programme of the Liverpool Small Cinema. As he explained, “there used to be a small cinema in Liverpool… Which would show films weekly, and they tended to be kinds of films I would like to watch or wanted to watch. But unfortunately, that has now closed.” Liverpool Small Cinema was the closest the city came to a venue with a similar ethos and programme as that of The Cube in Bristol. But as is clear from Henry’s account the closure of Liverpool Small Cinema meant that there was less alignment between his film taste and the programmes of the venues in the city. Ultimately, when asked to reflect on his views about the opportunities to watch films in Liverpool, Henry concluded, “there’s less choice, I guess, in terms of going out to watch films at [the] cinema… I think that’s maybe something lacking in Liverpool.” A similar position was described by Lisa (35–44), when asked her opinion of the cinema provision in Liverpool and the surrounding areas she laughed and said, “it’s a bit poor.” Lisa was aware of the Picturehouse at FACT and described it as having “a different philosophy” and she pointed out the community cinemas such as the one in Woolton village, but as she noted, generally geographic provision was patchy, “I live in Sefton.… There’s nothing going on in Sefton.” When asked to consider the reasons for her views on film exhibition provision Lisa attributed this in part to the role of the city council. As Lisa said, “I think… first is like… how much the City Council looks after culture… it’s not enough… I’ve been in Liverpool for 21 years… I’ve seen how Liverpool has changed… like… when it was Liverpool 2008 [European Capital of Culture].” She went on to link this to the wider approach taken to urban development in the city centre; it is not enough… doing a big complex Liverpool One [Shopping centre]… full of luxury… in terms of culture, there are things going on, there are events going on in terms of cinema…, but [these] lack… support from the City Council.… I do believe people want to see film, but there is no money for these people, there is no help.

Ultimately, Lisa (35–44) felt there was a need to bring “more cinemas into Liverpool,” but it is also the case that when new organisations or initiatives have been established in the city, such as Liverpool Small Cinema, they have

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not, for whatever reason, been sustained and grown in the same way similar organisations have developed in Bristol. In the Liverpool interviews participants reflected on historic cinemas and organisations in a way that was less common for those speaking about film culture in Bristol. Just as Henry was nostalgic for the experience he had had at the Liverpool Small Cinema, another interviewee Jake (65+) felt a similar way about an older and also no longer active organisation, the Merseyside Film Institute. “We used to be in a film club years ago. We used to see lots of films, the old foreign films with subtitles but… there isn’t a film club anymore… it was [the] Merseyside Film Institute, [a] tiny little film theatre in the Bluecoat, [a] historic building in central Liverpool.” For Jake, the value of the Merseyside Film Institute was rooted in more than just the opportunity to watch different films; it was also in the wider experience it provided as a space for social gathering. As he continued, “and the artsy sort of people used to go and see artsy sorts of films, and it was a bit of an event. It doesn’t exist anymore.” The Merseyside Film Institute was established in 1933 and was a key part of the emergence of the film society movement that developed in Britain around that time (see MacDonald, 2019). By the mid-1960s it had over a thousand members, and operated as Liverpool’s primary art cinema focused on world cinema, screening two films each night, five nights a week. The Institute was run by volunteers throughout its history (Bluecoat, 2017), until the mid-1990s when it closed after 60 years of operation. Jake remembered his experience of the institute fondly, but never found a cinema to replace it in Liverpool: “I suppose, the only place sort of arthouse is like FACT in Liverpool. I’ve been there a couple of times. My wife didn’t like it… didn’t have that really cosy feel of the Merseyside Film Institute [where you] used to bump into… all your mates.” The Picturehouse at FACT again comes up in Jake’s account as Liverpool’s primary alternative cinema venue, but as he notes, it did not have the same value for him and his wife in being both a place that showed a broader range of films than the mainstream but also a valuable social space within the city for like-minded people to connect through their shared interest in film. Through comparing the accounts of different film watchers in both these cities, a picture of the localised and urban film cultures of Bristol and Liverpool is established. In Bristol the differing characteristics of film exhibition influenced people’s sense of place, in reflecting their views of the identity of Bristol as a city that had a broad and diverse cultural identity. In Liverpool the picture was harder to discern as interviewees could both be satisfied in their provision of mainstream film through a variety of consumer experiences and feel the city was lacking choice in film programming and experience. What stood out in comparing these two sets of interviews was the degree to which interviewees in Liverpool looked to the past for examples of a diverse film culture, whereas those in Bristol firmly rooted this in their contemporary experience.

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Conclusion The differences of localised film exhibition in Liverpool and Bristol do not come down to any single reason that can account for either the success of a city like Bristol to develop a broad independent film exhibition culture or Liverpool to fail to do so. People matter, expertise matters, investment matters, support from local authorities matters, local cultural and economic priorities matter, audiences and the energy and passion they bring matter all in shaping, maintaining and developing local film cultures. Yet cultural institutions and local ecologies such as those shown in Bristol do not pop up, out of nowhere, fully formed. They are evidently the result of historic and complex processes involving relations of policy, people, money, imagination, and collaboration that play out over many years. It would perhaps be easy to dismiss the distinction between these two cities as simply down to differences in their relative level of deprivation, but this would be unfair. Bristol has significant internal inequality, with areas of the city that are some of the most deprived in the country (Bristol City Council, 2019). Despite its higher level of deprivation, Liverpool has a significant cultural sector in theatre, art, music, and museums and it hosted the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) in 2008. It also has a range of national museums and galleries considered as some of the most substantial outside London, as well as leading organisations in the visual arts such as Tate Liverpool and the Liverpool Biennial and a large cultural tourism sector. In addition, there are other cities with levels of deprivation not that dissimilar to Liverpool that have established and maintained localised independent film exhibition cultures such as Manchester, Nottingham, and Newcastle, where there are all independent cinemas. In Bristol, the Watershed is at the centre of film culture in the city in a way that has a multiplier effect on wider film culture, as it attracts additional funding for festivals and events that in turn support a wider ecology of professionals in the city and develops audiences’ engagement with film more broadly. It is also able to advocate for independent film exhibition in the city with the local authority and development agencies, and host and shape organisations such as Film Hub South West. There is no comparable organisation to this in Liverpool and as a result the city has not benefitted from an expanded film culture in the same way as Bristol. Whereas in Bristol, over decades organisations have grown and been sustained, in Liverpool they have closed, changed or shifted away from film exhibition. The arrival of the City Screen/Picturehouse cinema at FACT may have looked to many on the surface as the establishment of an independent cinema in the city—but it cannot be compared to the role the Watershed has played in supporting the development of local film exhibition cultures in Bristol. Yet Liverpool still hosts a series of small-scale, itinerant, and grass-roots cinema programmes and events in the city—showing there is a potential audience and space for growth in this area.

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A comparative analysis such as this is not only valuable in providing a lens on how the urban film culture of individual cities has developed, but it raises questions about the role of national film policy in developing film provision in underserved cities. The Film Policy Review Panel (DCMS, 2012) already pointed to many of the issues associated with the uneven development of UK film exhibition. And the BFI’s investment in the Film Hubs has been a step in the right direction, but this analysis shows there is clearly a need for a coordinated and strategic approach to developing new film exhibition provision in underserved areas that works closely with local authorities. Acknowledgements  This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/P005780/1]—“Beyond the Multiplex: Audiences for Specialised Film in English Regions.”

References Arts Council England. (2018). National portfolio organisations 2018–22. Retrieved November 2, 2021, from https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/national-­ portfolio-­2018-­22/more-­data-­2018-­22 BBC. (2020, September 7). Watershed’s revamp underwritten by Bristol City Council. BBC News Online. Retrieved November 2, 2021, from https://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/uk-­england-­bristol-­54054969 BFI. (2012). Film forever: BFI plan for 2012–17. Retrieved September 29, 2020, from https://www2.bfi.org.uk/about-­bfi/policy-­strategy/film-­forever BFI. (2018). BFI2022 Financial plan. Retrieved September 29, 2020, from https:// www.bfi.org.uk/strategy-­policy/policy-­statements/bfi2022/financial-­plan BFI. (2020). Statistical yearbook 2020. Retrieved September 29, 2020, from https:// www.bfi.org.uk/industry-­data-­insights/statistical-­yearbook BFI. (2021). Statistical yearbooks. Retrieved September 29, 2020, from https://www. bfi.org.uk/industry-­data-­insights/statistical-­yearbook Bluecoat. (2017). My bluecoat: Gerry Donaldson & Ken Davies. Merseyside Film Institute. Retrieved November 2, 2021, from https://mybluecoat.org.uk/my-­ bluecoat-­stories/gerry-­donaldson-­ken-­davies-­merseyside-­film-­institute/ Bristol City Council. (2019). Deprivation in Bristol 2019. Retrieved November 2, 2021, from https://www.bristol.gov.uk/files/documents/1905-­deprivation-­inbristol-­2019/file Bristol City Council. (2021). Equalities statistics briefing note July 2021. Retrieved November 02, 2021, from https://www.bristol.gov.uk/documents/20182/ 33904/Equalities+Statistics+for+Bristol+what+is+available+and+where+to+get+i t+20+Oct+2020.pdf/32e0a0c7-­5338-­0e9d-­96fd-­6f906c8286b2 Channel 4. (2020, January 16). Channel 4 Creative Hub in Bristol opens for business. Retrieved November 2, 2021, from https://www.channel4.com/press/news/ channel-­4-­creative-­hub-­bristol-­opens-­business Cipullo, A., & Newman, K. (2010). We are the real time experiment: 20 Years of FACT. Liverpool University Press.

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Clayton, J. (2012). The art of regeneration: The establishment and development of the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, 1985–2010 [Doctoral dissertation, University of Liverpool]. https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/8413 Corecities. (2021). About us. Corecities UK.  Retrieved November 2, 2021, from https://www.corecities.com/about-­us Cosgrove, M. (2012, January 16). A manifesto for independent cultural cinema. Watershed. Retrieved September 29, 2020, from https://www.watershed.co.uk/ articles/a-­manifesto-­for-­independent-­cultural-­cinema CTA. (2021). UK Cinemas: England. Cinema theatre association. Retrieved November 2, 2021, from http://www.ukcinemas.org.uk/cinengland.html Cube. (2014). The film that buys the cinema. Retrieved November 2, 2021, from https://cubecinema.com/cgi-­bin/ftbtc/ftbtc.pl Cube. (2021). About the Cube and volunteering. Retrieved November 2, 2021, from https://cubecinema.com/pages/about/cube DCMS. (2012, March 12). A future for British film: It begins with the audience…. Retrieved September 29, 2020, from https://www.gov.uk/government/ publications/a-­future-­for-­british-­film-­it-­begins-­with-­the-­audience-­report-­on-­the-­ film-­policy-­review-­survey DCMS. (2018, April 26). Taking part focus on: Film. Department for Digital, Culture Media & Sport. Crown. Retrieved September 29, 2020, from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/703167/April_2018_Focus_on_film_report.pdf Europa Cinemas. (2021). Europa cinemas map. Retrieved November 2, 2021, from https://www.europa-­cinemas.org/en/cinemas/map Guest, G., MacQueen, K., & Namey, E. (2014). Planning and preparing the analysis. In G.  Guest, K.  MacQueen, & E.  Namey (Eds.), Applied thematic analysis (pp. 21–48). Sage. Halliday, J. (2021, July 21). UNESCO strips Liverpool of its world heritage status. The Guardian. Retrieved November 2, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/uk-­ news/2021/jul/21/unesco-­strips-­liverpool-­waterfront-­world-­heritage-­status Independent Liverpool. (2017, April 25). A small cinema closes at the end of the month. Retrieved September 29, 2020, from https://independent-­liverpool.co.uk/blog/ its-­not-­goodbye-­forever-­its-­only-­goodbye-­for-­now-­a-­small-­cinema-­closes-­at-­the-­ end-­of-­the-­month/ Kilick, A. (2017). Building a small cinema: Resisting neoliberal colonization in Liverpool. Architecture_MPS, 12(1), 1–16. Kollewe, J. (2012, December 6). Cineworld buys Picturehouse. The Guardian. Retrieved September 29, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/dec/06/cineworld-­buys-­picturehouse LCR. (2020, July 31). £17 million funding boost for Littlewoods Studios. Liverpool City Region. Retrieved November 2, 2021, from https://www.liverpoolcityregion-­ca. gov.uk/17-­million-­funding-­boost-­for-­littlewoods-­studios/ Liverpool City Council. (2020, March). The index of multiple deprivation 2019: A Liverpool analysis. Retrieved November 2, 2021, from https://liverpool.gov.uk/ media/1359213/imd-­2019-­liverpool-­analysis-­main-­report.pdf Liverpool City Council. (2021). Demographics headline indicators. Retrieved November 2, 2021, from https://liverpool.gov.uk/council/key-­statistics-­and-­data/headline-­ indicators/demographics/

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MacDonald, R. L. (2019). The appreciation of film: The postwar film society movement and film culture in Britain. University of Exeter Press. Maltby, R. (2011). New cinema histories. In R.  Maltby, D.  Biltereyst, & P.  Meers (Eds.), Explorations in new cinema history: Approaches and case studies (pp. 1–40). Wiley-Blackwell. Merrington, P. (2009, October 2). Abandon Normal Devices (AND) festival report. Rhizome. Retrieved September 29, 2020, from https://rhizome.org/editorial/2009/oct/02/abandon-­normal-­devices-­and-­festival-­report/ Merrington, P., Hanchard, M., & Wessels, B. (2021). Inequalities in regional film exhibition: Policy, place and audiences. Journal of British Film and Television, 18(2), 198–222. Pipe, E. (2021, May 28). Bristol’s world-renowned Natural History Unit to relocate. B24/7. Retrieved November 2, 2021, from https://www.bristol247.com/news-­ and-­features/news/bristols-­world-­renowned-­natural-­history-­unit-­to-­relocate/ Presence, S. (2019). ‘Britain’s first media centre’: A history of Bristol’s Watershed cinema, 1964–1998. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 39(4), 803–831. Reel Cinema. (2021). Forthcoming venues. Retrieved November 2, 2021, from https:// reelcinemas.co.uk/forthcoming-­cinemas Wainwright, O. (2021, July 21). Liverpool has been vandalising its waterfront for a decade—It’s shocking UNESCO didn’t act sooner. The Guardian. Retrieved July 21, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/jul/21/ liverpool-­unesco-­world-­heritage-­status-­stripped Wallers, C. (2020). Star and Shadow Cinema and before: Radical screening culture in Newcastle upon Tyne. In S.  Presence, M.  Wayne, & J.  Newsinger (Eds.), Contemporary radical film culture: Networks, organisations and activists (pp. 203–212). Routledge. Watershed. (2021). Mission and history. Retrieved November 2, 2021, from https:// www.watershed.co.uk/about-­us/mission-­history Wessels, B. et al. (2021). Beyond the multiplex: Film audiences data platform. University of Glasgow and University of Sheffield: The Digital Humanities Institute. Retrieved September 20, 2021, from https://www.beyondthemultiplex.org

CHAPTER 3

Cinema-Going in Turkey between 1960 and 1980: Cinema Memories, Film Culture, and Modernity Hasan Akbulut

Introduction: Examining the Audience Framework in Cinema Studies

and a Methodological

Although the number of studies focusing on the audience in the field of cinema studies is fewer than text-centred studies, it is known that audience research began in the 1920s, and the majority of these studies are based on a passive audience understanding. For example, audience research in the United States started in the early 1920s with the assumption that cinema had negative effects on children, youth, and women (Stokes & Maltby, 2001, p. 3), triggering the censorship and control of films. In a change to this perspective based on psychological concepts, Emilie Altenloh pointed to a different approach in audience research with her sociological work (1914/1977), which she conducted with cinema-goers in Mannheim, Germany, as early as 1914. According to Gripsrud, “Altenloh’s study suggested “cinema functions as a social space for experiences and forms of communication that are different to other public spaces” (Gripsrud, 1998, p. 207). However, this study was soon forgotten, and approaches that treat the audience as a social entity only re-emerged from the 1980s onwards. The New Cinema History approach, which emerged after the

H. Akbulut (*) İstanbul University, Faculty of Communication, Department of Radio, TV and Cinema, İstanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Treveri Gennari et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38789-0_3

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prevailing approaches conceiving film audiences as textually inscribed constructions (Gripsrud, 1998; Stokes, 2012, as cited in Gelly & Roche, 2012; Biltereyst & Meers, 2018, p. 22), shifted its focus away from the content of films “to examine the cinema as a site of social and cultural exchange” (Maltby, 2011, p. 1). Within this new trend, developed by the contributions coming from history, social geography, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, anthropology, memory studies, urban history, and digital humanities, techniques such as ethnography and oral history have “allowed new insights into the historical reception of films and confirmed the vital role of oral history for a better understanding of cinemagoers” (Treveri Gennari, 2018, p. 40). New Cinema History studies, which create a synergy through combining diverse methods and methodologies (Biltereyst et  al., 2012), can be identified in four interrelated fields of study: exhibition, reception, social composition and discourses, and finally cinema-going as a social practice (Allen, 1990, pp. 349–354; Biltereyst et al., 2012, p. 693). This chapter is based on the tradition of research, focusing on the act and experience of cinema-going as a social phenomenon. As Biltereyst et  al. (2012, p.  696) stated, various techniques and indicators were used to study the experiences, practices, and memories of cinema-going within specific contextualised locations within this wide field. Annette Kuhn, who examined the meaning of cinema for its audience in a broader context in her book An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (2002), inspired the perspective of this chapter. According to Kuhn (2002, p. 2), “a cinema culture is in any case shaped by the contexts and the manner in which films are consumed, and by the people who consume them.” In order to understand the cinema culture of the 1930s in Britain, she prefers to learn their experiences directly from their own stories and asks the question of “how do cinemagoers interact with cinema?” which is also the main question of this research. Kuhn’s interest is to reveal “the broader connotations and feelings mobilised by filmgoing” (Dhoest, 2004). Kuhn’s memory work looks at the narratives and testimonies of the generation of the period when going to the cinema was an ordinary part of daily life. This work draws on the data of a research project entitled “Cinemagoing as a Social and Cultural Practice: An Oral History Study on Audience Experiences in Turkey” (Akbulut, 2018), which is designed to explore the culture of cinema-­going in Turkey between 1960 and 1980 through oral history interviews with the audience.1 The focus of this study is organised around the question of: “how is cinema-going in 1960s and 1970s Turkey described/ remembered as an experience by the audience?” This chapter focuses on the audience experiences in the period between 1960 and 1980  in Turkey, and how these experiences vary according to location, age, and education level of the audience. During the data collection period (2016–2018), 100 adults (50 women and 50 men) living in Istanbul, Ankara, Kocaeli, and Antalya who went 1  This research, conducted between 2015 and 2017, was supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK). I thank TUBITAK for its support.

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to the cinema between 1960 and 1980 were interviewed. These four cities were selected because they represent industrialism, the development of cinema and modernity, and for practical reasons. Because the interviewees had previously lived in different cities between 1960 and 1980, data gathered on their cinema experience consisted of 33 cities. In other words, data on the cinema experiences of the interviewees are not limited to Istanbul, Ankara, Kocaeli, and Antalya. At that time Turkey had only 67 cities, so the ratio of the cities included in the study corresponds to 51% of all cities in the country during that period. For the oral history, the interviews were conducted in semi-structured forms to keep the conversation focused on cinema culture through a “subject oriented/episodic” approach (Thompson, 2000). The research, in which oral data were analysed narratively and thematically, provides insights into the audiences’ past cinema experiences and their patterns of cinema-going, while including a comparison in terms of the experience of cinema-going in the big city centres and provinces. In order to offer a comprehensive understanding of the audience’s cinema-going experiences, a general and brief discussion on Turkey’s historical, social, cultural, and ideological structure precedes the analysis of cinema memories.

A Brief History of Turkey: Political and Cultural Climate in Turkey The Republic of Turkey, which was founded in 1923 after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, aimed to become a Western country. The founding cadres of the country, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, abolished the caliphate and sultanate, established a Republic based on democracy, and initiated radical practices to build daily life on a secular axis. These efforts, through a Westernised education, were aimed at educating a majority of people who were illiterate. In this context, the Latinised Turkish alphabet was adopted instead of Arabic letters, which were difficult to read and write; schools were restructured, Halkevleri (People’s Houses) and Köy Enstitüleri (Village Institutes) were established for science-based community development and education. People became acquainted with cinema through film screenings, including Halkevleri. These efforts are described as “modernization” and “enlightenment” in literature (Parla, 2005; Mardin, 1971; Ahmad, 2003a, 2003b). Kemalists, as indicated by Feroz Ahmad (2003a, p. 84), “wanted to accomplish both modernization and modernity, by radically reforming their traditional, patriarchal society” and during this period, “knowledge or science was defined as the best guide of life” (Ahmad, 2003a, p.  84). “Modernization involves both the management of society based on the nation-state, capitalism and industrialization, as well as the formation of a free individual self on the basis of secular and rational mind at the level of social self” (Keyman, 2005, p. 41). For this reason, Şerif Mardin (1971, p. 209) regards the 1923 Turkish Revolution as “primarily a revolution of values.” This modernisation effort, which was conceived as an

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“enlightenment movement,” continued until recently, sometimes in a strong way, and sometimes in a weak way; however, it has also brought together the tendencies and movements against it; thus Turkey’s social, cultural, and ideological history has been shaped by the struggles surrounding modernisation. This struggle, begun during the era of Atatürk, has evolved by military coups until now. The 1960s started with a military coup against the government that came to power after the death of Atatürk and imposed some practices against his actions. Although this rising was a military coup, as seen in the oral history interviews, some call it a “revolution.” On May 27, 1960, the soldiers captured political power, but it was the intellectuals who turned it into a “revolution of the intellectuals” (Ahmad, 2003b, p. 120). The new constitution, prepared by academics, expanded political rights and freedoms, and planned development efforts with new state institutions, accelerating economic, social, and cultural development. The 1960s are considered as the years that the modernisation projects’ results were seen partially in the daily life practices. Interviewee Oğuz Onaran’s ̇ (b. 1935, Izmir) statement, “the 1960s was the Renaissance of Turkey,” supports this view. Most of the interviewees stated that great importance was attached to education, reading, and development at that time. These developments were also experienced in the field of cinema as those were the years when the numbers of the domestic films, active cinema halls and number of spectators were at their peak. The popularisation of cinema in Turkey started after the 1950s, and the Turkish cinema industry had its heyday during the 1960s. This period is remarkable for the history of Turkish cinema in three aspects: (a) the opening of new cinema theatres and, accordingly, an increase in film screenings; (b) an increase in audience numbers; and (c) the rise of domestic film production. The 1960s could be described as a “spectator cinema” because of the high attendance of audiences whose expectations and preferences shaped the functioning of the local cinema sector. At that time, cinemas opened almost everywhere in Turkey; in cities, towns, and villages, and films were screened in places such as barns or churches where there were no cinemas yet. This period is defined as the Yeşilçam2 era in Turkish cinema history. The interviews with the audience of the period confirm that Yeşilçam in particular and cinema in general were public entertainment. However, this popularity of cinema declined sharply towards the 1980s due to political and military tensions, widespread access to television, and the inability to institutionalise the domestic film industry. The military coup on September 12, 1980, banned all kinds of social, cultural, and political activities that could be considered dissident and almost turned the country into an open prison. Between 2015 and 2017, when the research was conducted, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) had been in 2  Yeşilçam is the name of a street in Istanbul where the headquarters of film companies were located in the past, and it also denotes the narrative and stylistic features of films with a common film production style of that period.

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power since 2002. The attempted military coup on July 15, 2016, coincided with the period in which the research was conducted. In this respect, military coups and the tensions between modernisation efforts and counter-political movements that drew their reference from religion and traditions, have had a significant impact on the cinema-going practice and on making sense of this experience in Turkey.

Audiences’ Perception of Cinema from Dream Palaces to Flea-Ridden Cinemas Cinema experience encompasses all kinds of viewing experiences that people have while watching movies in the cinema theatre. The relationship of the audience with the cinema varies depending on gender, geography, location, educational and economic levels, and social environment. The profile of the audience in this research has a remarkable variety. These variations can be better understood when the socio-demographic, economic, and educational profiles of the interviewees are addressed. As of 2017, when the study was completed, the ages of participants ranged between 50 and 88 with an average age of 68. It is noteworthy that 88% of the interviewees define themselves as middle class and 54% are university graduates.3 Despite the small number of interviewees who are primary school graduates (7%), the education level of the interviewed group is high (10% secondary school graduates, 29% high school graduates). The professions of the interviewees are also varied. The most common professions are listed as: academics (14), housewives (11), teachers (10), labourers (10), tradespeople (6), bankers (4), journalists (4), engineers (4), actors (3), military service (3), cinema theatre owner (3), and civil service (3). Strikingly, most of the interviewees have professions with the status of worker or civil servant which provides governmental payments. At that time, it was a general trend to choose professions such as being a teacher, academic, nurse or soldier, which are considered as a “state job” and the reason was a quest for the guarantee of employment and a fixed salary. Thirty per cent of the interviewees were born in three big cities, Istanbul, Ankara, or Izmir, but some of them describe their birthplace as a ̇ town. For example, at the time of her birth, Hacer Çevik’s (b. 1932, Istanbul) ̇ birthplace, Silivri, was a small town in Istanbul; Özden Cankaya’s (b. 1946, ̇ ̇ Izmir) birthplace Ödemiş was a town in Izmir. Therefore, in this research the concepts of city and rural countryside (town/provincial) have been used to indicate both the regional difference between the east and the west of the 3  The rate of those who define themselves as lower and upper class is 6%. However, middle class conceptions appear to be in a fairly wide range. In the 1960s, the interviewees who went to a private school used a private service and lived in their own two-storey houses in the city centre, and the participants who had a limited income and said that “we lived without needing anyone” defined themselves as middle class. It can be said that the fact that class understanding/consciousness was not sufficiently developed and that it was considered a shame to display wealth in those periods was also effective in this understanding.

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country, and the difference between the city centre and the suburb district within the same cities. In this case, Istanbul and Izmir are developed cities located in the west of Turkey, but their towns can show rural characteristics. Similarly, the towns of Antep are defined as rural, although it is also a developed city in the southeast of Turkey. The narratives of the interviewees clearly show the variety of film screening environments between 1960 and 1980 and the differences in discourses stemmed from this diversity. However, on the one side, in the famously dynamic streets (like Istiklal Street in Istanbul, and Kızılay district in Ankara) there exist glamorous cinema theatres or “dream palaces” with their unique architectural styles and historical structures, and on the other side, in the neighbourhoods there remain jerry-built screening venues and open-air cinemas with only four high walls and wooden seats. The analysis of the interviews shows that besides their architectural and historical textures, cinema theatres are also remembered with the urban life in which they are located, and as public spaces that provide opportunities for receiving news, learning, talking about social and economic problems, and gossiping. The research identified 135 cinema theatres in 33 different cities whose names were remembered by the interviewees. The analyses point out that in the 1960s and 1970s, the perception of cinema in society was mainly entertainment-oriented. Fifty-nine per cent of the interviewees see cinema as an entertainment; 16% see it as a means of socialising; 4% see it as a learning and self-improvement tool. In addition, cinema is perceived as a means of escape and identification, as well as an activity, which is made just due to the lack of alternative events. However, these perceptions are not mutually exclusive; they are often intertwined. Cinema primarily means entertainment for audiences from urban and rural backgrounds. It is seen that interviewees’ cinema-going experiences in Beyoğlu and Istiklal Street in Istanbul and Kızılay in Ankara have an important place in their memories. However, this entertainment turns into a ceremonial event for some audiences living in the city when it is practised in central cinemas. When it takes place in district cinemas, it is narrated as a detail that enlivens ordinary daily life. For example, Ahmet Er (b. 1944, Kocaeli), who was a rural citizen studying at a military school, watched movies in the heart of Istanbul, Beyoğlu, and defined it as “a culture with its venues and dressing practices,” while watching and having fun in neighbourhood and summer cinemas in his childhood and youth. Similarly, Fevzi Disanlı (b. 1942, Disan/Macedonia), who had a low-income, draws attention to the distinct difference between the district and central cinemas, and sees the experience of cinema-going in Beyoğlu as an elite and highbrow activity. Thus, depending on the socio-economic and educational levels of the interviewees and the cinema theatre visited, the duality of cinema as an entertainment/culture emerges. The interviews indicate that these two conceptions arise not in the form of a sharp distinction, but according to the position of the subject, and the location of the cinema theatre. For example, while describing the historical textures and architectural features of the cinemas in Beyoğlu with admiration, Fevzi Disanlı who lived in a

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suburb of Istanbul at that time, emphasises that “only elite people in suits, educated and intellectuals, artists would go to Beyoğlu cinemas.” However, it is understood that young people from the suburbs, like him, could go to Beyoğlu and control their behaviour and attitudes according to “distinguished” places and people. Therefore, for the interviewees living in the outskirts of the city, “going to Beyoğlu” is coded as a fascinating urban experience that is rarely lived. Disanlı’s narrative constructs the central cinemas as a concept unique to a modern city, with its historical texture, sound system, decor, elegant ladies and gentlemen, and well-educated people with distinguished professions. This intertwining structure indicates that cinema is conceived as the city, the city centre, urban entertainment and, as will be explained later, modernisation. It is noteworthy that non-Muslims find a place with a positive reference in the memoirs of cinema audiences in Istanbul. Although the majority of the interviewees, who describe themselves as middle class, see cinema as entertainment, they consider the cinema experiences of non-Muslims as an expression of “high culture.” They are defined as distinguished, modern audiences with their stylish clothes, behaviour, foreign language skills, and the practice of watching ̇ movies in tranquillity. Yasemin Yalın’s (b. 1957, Istanbul) memories about the practice and experience of film watching create the distinction between elite cinemas and audiences and public cinema by attributing elegance and decency to the districts where Greek and Armenians lived and to their cinema viewing practices. Yasemin Yalın, whose cinema experience is concentrated between Caddebostan and Bostancı on the Anatolian side of Istanbul, describes these two districts and their cinemas as follows: Ozan Cinema in Caddebostan, there were always summerhouses there. Since there were always more non-Muslims coming to the summerhouse. More decent people … Ozan Cinema was different.… More cultured people, because foreign movies are coming, you don’t see it until you read it because it is original. But on the other hand, you cannot go to Yıldız Cinema in Bostancı in winter; either there are fleas or something. Because all kinds of people come, because it’s cheap there.… It’s simpler, common cinema. I call it folk cinema. (Yasemin Yalın, b. ̇ 1957, Istanbul).

A comparison of two districts, two cinema theatres, and two types of audience in the same city shows that the audience’s perception of cinema can vary according to the district and the cinema theatre. A similar distinction is seen in the memories about Ankara cinemas. However, what emerges in these memories is a comprehension of cinema as a practice of modernisation.

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Cinema-Going in the Capital: Learning Modernisation and Performing it ̇ In comparison with Istanbul, which had been the capital city of empires for centuries, Ankara, a new town arising from the barren Anatolian steppes, as the capital of the young Turkish Republic, is a city constructed in accordance with the aforementioned political and ideological modernisation discourses. These discourses also appear in the cinema memories of the audience. Particularly, cinema-going and cinema itself are recounted as an experience about the city and modernisation, especially for the audiences from Ankara whose family is of urban origin, wealthy, and well educated. The founding cadres of modern Turkey designed the capital Ankara as a city while making a series of reforms in dressing, alphabet, measurement units, and education, in order to accomplish modernisation. When the city became the capital in 1924, it developed along the Yenişehir-Çankaya line from Ulus to the south. Cinemas and theatres opened on this route have made Kızılay a cultural axis. The identity of Ankara as a modern city is also prominently emphasised in cinema memories of the interviewees. Some interviewees, whose parents were civil servants such as educators, bureaucrats, and soldiers, went to cinemas and cultural centres on this axis and experienced cinema as a culture. Tülin Tayşioğlu (b. 1955, Ankara), who grew up in one of these families, says that this civil servant class was of very high quality and they were involved in all kinds of activities in Ankara at the time. Ayşe Çığ (b. 1954, Konya), an educated and urban interviewee who went to see the films at the Büyük Cinema, Ulus Cinema and Ankara Cinema when she was aged between 13 and 18 years old, describes Ankara of the period as “a city of culture”: “People would go to the cinema and theatre, read books and share their experiences with each other, moreover they felt obliged to be aware of such things.” The widespread prevalence of this kind of understanding, especially among the interviewees who believe in enlightenment and modern education and who practise professions such as teachers, academicians, soldiers and doctors, is remarkable. For the interviewees with this conception, the experience of the cinema-going is also expressed as a part of a broader acculturation process in which high culture and modernisation are performed. Besides the cinema-going experience, activities such as going to classical music concerts, opera, ballet, and theatre performances are also seen as important for the process of acculturation. For example, Gönül Hatay Eren (b. 1937, Konya), a young university student in Ankara in the 1960s, said that when she was a student, she was walking destitute after classes for attending to the classical music concerts organised at English Cultural Centre (The Turco-British Association TBA), German Cultural Centre (Goethe-Institut Turkei), and Büyük Cinema. The audience of the period makes a certain distinction between the modern, exclusive cinemas opened in the Kızılay district on the Yenişehir-Çankaya route of the newly established city and the neighbourhood cinemas. She also said that she preferred the cinemas in Kızılay district, because of their quality, and that she hesitated to go to the

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cinemas in other districts showing domestic movies, “because lowbrow people went there.” It is noteworthy that in this narration, “highbrow audience” is identified with foreign films, while lowbrow or common audiences are aligned with domestic films. At that time, there was a clear tendency among educated and wealthy people to underestimate domestic films. Ayfer Çekiç (b. 1950, Eskişehir), whose father was a soldier, expressed this as follows: “It was not perceived as a good behaviour to watch Turkish movies at that time. I mean, we wouldn’t like to watch Turkish movies, we used to disdain them.” Thus, the audience, who aspired to become modern like Ayfer Çekiç, mostly attended the screenings of films imported from the West and regarded this as a necessity for being modern. Going to elite cinemas or watching non-Turkish films in cinemas seems to be a practice that both expresses and satisfies the desire to be Western and modern. Similarly, Münevver Eminoğlu (b. 1958, Konya), whose father is a soldier, said that foreign films were shown in the “primitive conditions” of military garrisons in Anatolia. Although foreign films were shown in a “primitive” way in military film theatres in the east of the country, it is understood that the important thing is commitment to the Western and modern practices. Therefore, it can be said that the experience of cinema-going identifies the audience through the film theatres they went to and the films they watched. The memories of the audience in the 1960s highlight the strong relation between modernisation and experience of cinema-going in Turkey. According to Ben Singer (2001), as a new technology of reproduction, representation, and perception, cinema was not only a contingent part and a consequence of modernity, it was also a vital component of modernisation – an emblem and a catalyst of modern life characterised by a culture of novelty, shock, distraction, and thrills. Cinema memories indicate that cinema in Turkey is also conceived as a component of such modern life. Moreover, this situation is not unique to metropolitan areas. Researchers also state that modernisation processes are observed in non-metropolitan areas as well as in metropolitan areas and that cinema plays an important role in this process (Allen, 2006, p. 62; Biltereyst, 2013, p. 22). Şükrü Argın (b. 1961, Manisa), who spent his childhood in the western Anatolian town (Akhisar/Manisa), stated that when he went to the cinema for the first time in primary school years, he watched the “film machine” (projection) more than the film itself because he was fascinated by the technique of the cinema. Years later, when he went to the Elhamra Cinema in Izmir, which was a metropolitan city, he saw the lodge there for the first time and was fascinated. The technique of the cinema that fascinated him and the atmosphere of the magnificent cinema theatres indicate that cinema is perceived as a modern and urban experience. “At the same time, whatever was on screen, cinema provided a way to practise modernity as it constructed a modern mass public” (Moore, 2011, p.  264). Francesco Casetti (1999, p.  58) also emphasises the role of cinema in this modernisation experience by highlighting that “cinema joins a cross-border and cross-cultural public to an easily accessible language.” According to him, cinema

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presents the references of the socialization and urbanization of the large masses of people who came to cities from rural areas with the early industrialization. While performing this function, cinema undertakes a task that no other art branch has achieved to this degree, combining modernity and popularity. (Casetti, 1999, p. 58).

The narratives about the experience of cinema-going in the 1960s and 1970s in Turkey provide examples of different modernity forms. In this respect, these narratives are heterogeneous rather than homogeneous, and, as Biltereyst (2013) emphasises, class, district, and neighbourhood play an important role in this difference. In her study of the emergence of modern cinema audience in colonial Java, Dafna Ruppin states the following: Going to the cinema provided audiences with an education in modern things, whether in the content of films representing modernization, progress, industry, and urbanization, or in the form of encountering the technology itself and of patronizing the increasingly modern venues that housed them. (Ruppin, 2017, p. 475).

Some cinemas in Ankara, with their physical structure, decorations, and atmosphere, have been loaded with such a function for the audience. Büyük Cinema, giving a pleasant feeling of coolness as if “entering a temple” (Gönül Hatay Eren, b. 1937, Konya) with its large chandelier, wall decorations, red carpets, well-kept and comfortable leather chairs, and where those romantic pieces of the 1960s played, remains the most remembered by the audience who went to the cinema in Ankara for a certain period of time. Ayfer Çekiç described the ornaments of women in folkloric clothes made by the painter Turgut Zaim on the ceiling of the Büyük Cinema as “a modern image that accompanies herself” and said that such modern things are very important in her own life (Ayfer Çekiç, 1950, Eskişehir). On the other hand, ̇ Inci Demirkol (b. 1953, Ankara) constructs this folkloric ornament in a completely Western mythological discourse as follows: “They are three sisters in mythology. These are both the daughters of the moon god and also the uses [trying to remember the Moses or Muses (Mousai), the muse of nine sisters from Greek mythology]. I loved looking at them” (Images 3.1 and 3.2). It can be said that the founding ideology of Turkey, which aimed at modernisation and Westernisation, was effective in the perception of folkloric ceiling decoration in a central cinema as a modern image. As explained above, the founders of Turkey wanted to modernise all aspects of daily life and cinema was considered to be one of them. Thus, various cinema practices and conceptions have emerged. According to the data, the cinemas in the city were divided into centres and districts, and this distinction divided the audience into “elite and commoners.” However, analyses have also shown that the cinema experiences of the audience are shaped by the city, neighbourhood, and cinemas where the film is shown, as well as the class origins and educational levels of the audience.

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Images 3.1 and 3.2  Büyük Cinema in Ankara and its folkloric ornaments. (Source: https://galeri3.arkitera.com/index.php/arkiv-­2/proje/buyuk-­sinema-­ankara, March 21, 2017)

According to this, not only the elites, but also the spectators from the suburbs, can go to the central cinemas by paying attention to their clothing and behaviour. Memories of cinema-going in rural areas have pointed to how modern and traditional practices have interjected and hybridised.

Cinema-Going in the Rural: Experiencing a Social Event, Colouring Routine Life, and Learning to Modernise Cinema in the rural means experiencing a rare social event and enlivening routine life as well as entertainment. As Hasan Özgen (b. 1947, Muğla) put it, “the absence of a collective entertainment other than visiting a neighbour, chatting, playing some traditional games and performing imitations, for the rural people who continue their daily routine” is effective in the perception of cinema as entertainment. Cinema is an important social event that fulfils this need for collective entertainment. Adnan Özerler (b. 1955, Karaman) narrated that “cinema-going in Karaman, a town in Central Anatolia, was one of the four biggest social activities, such as going to the bathhouse, going to the wedding, and having a pilgrimage meal at the houses of pilgrims, and thus it was seen as a “big event” in the 1960s.” Cinema-going in rural areas such as small towns, provinces, and villages also provides space for entertainment, but the rare occurrence of the experience increases its impact. For example, Hüseyin Seçmen (b. 1937, Tekirdağ), who lived in a small city like Isparta in the 1960s, likened the general interest of people to the cinema in those years to a kind of “going to the fair”: “People used to go to the fair every year, once a year. Then one would tell about those fair memories for a year. Cinema was a phenomenon that people awaited, like a fair, but not often joined.” The interest in cinema is so great that cinema-going is vital for some audiences. Hüseyin Çimrin (b. 1946, Antalya), who lived in Antalya, which was a small city at that time, expresses this interest with the following sentences: “Cinema was everything. I can say that people would say ‘we have earned our cinema money today’,

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instead of ‘we have earned of bread money’.” In some small towns cinema is such a powerful social event that, in some narratives, it is experienced as an axis that exists at all hours of the day, by which life is arranged almost accordingly. For example, Hülya Avkın (b. 1955, Gaziantep) said that she went to the cinema with her mother or siblings during the day and with her father at night in the town of Nizip in Gaziantep, where she spent her childhood. Thus, cinema fulfils a function that embraces spectators of different ages and genders at different times of the day in an Anatolian town and adjusts the rhythm of daily life in the town. However, cinemas in the small towns and rural areas are not as splendid as in the cities. The cinemas in Göksun (Maraş), the town where Meryem Oskay (b. 1950, Antalya) was born, and in Başkale (Van),4 where she worked as a nurse, are the cinemas “where chairs and benches are in a poor condition.” Han Cinema in the town of Şükrü Argın (b. 1961, Manisa) is a cinema converted from an old barn: “of course, there is no lodge there. Completely dry chairs, wooden chairs.” But he remembered them as a fascinating place. The fact that the names of these jerry-built film theatres are generally “Palace, Pleasure, Star or Luxury” makes them the signifier of absence and desire through their names. The names of the halls that conceal the absence are like the expressions of the “luxury” and the desire for a modern urban life that the audience and theatre owners see in the movies. The interviews reveal that these rural cinemas (especially in the villages) overwhelmingly show domestic films and that for men and women, separate films are selected in the screenings. In rural areas with more than one cinema hall, and when there is a women’s matinée, that hall exhibits more romantic movies, while the other one screens more adventure films for men. Again, according to the oral history interviews, ticket prices are not fixed and vary according to the districts, cinemas, and sessions. In the morning sessions preferred by those without money, films are watched for almost half the price. There is also a difference between cities and rural areas in the way films are announced to the audience. In cities, films are announced by posters placed on the door of the cinema theatre and by advertisements in newspapers and magazines. In rural areas, diversity is noticed in this regard. As Şükrü Argın (b. 1961, Manisa) remembered, the audience is informed about the film to be screened by cards that provide information about it, placed on a pick-up truck or horse carriage in the town centre, posters placed on donkeys in the villages, or town criers wandering in coffeehouses or announcements made by the municipality. Sabahat Adalar (b. 1954, Adana) recalled that in Adana, films are announced as: “Bring your handkerchiefs and sheets for sad movies. Don’t forget to bring your extra underwear for funny movies!” The interviews reveal that one of the ways for the audience to reach the cinema in rural areas is travelling cinemas. One per cent of the interviewees remember that they have watched movies in travelling cinemas. The first 4

 Maraş is a city in Southern Anatolia; Başkale is a town in eastern Turkey.

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acquaintance of people with cinema in some parts of Anatolia and especially in remote places was realised through travelling cinemas. Travelling cinemas, introducing people to the magical world of cinema, mostly show domestic and a few foreign films. Thus, cinema, both in the city and in the countryside, introduced the audience to a number of innovations and produced specific cultural and social interactions.

Cinema in Practices of Everyday Life: Telling Films through Performance and Blending Cinema to Tradition Cinema memories point out that the experience of cinema-going is blended with tradition and produced new practices in everyday life. As Thompson (1995) emphasises, cinema as a modern medium transformed the spatial and temporal constitution of social life; in this way, it has shaped new forms of action and interaction in both our intimate and public spaces. Interviews can be shown as an example of “how cinema began to assume the roles of other, more traditional social and cultural institutions in society, and how people began to organise their lives according to this environment” (Pušnik, 2015, p. 64). Pušnik (2015, p. 62) says that “cinema with its film program also began to reproduce and circulate new symbolic forms that started to transform living tradition into symbolic content, and film culture increasingly permeated our everyday living experience.” The most interesting of these arrangements caused by cinema is the articulation of cinema to some traditional practices. Although this was mostly produced by the experiences of cinema-going in rural areas, it may also emerge from the experiences in the city centre, as seen in some interviews. One of these new practices is that audiences recount the movie they watched to their relatives (mothers, sisters, aunts) who were unable to attend the cinema, as Hanife Neşe Ürel (b. 1954, Ankara) and Ertuğrul Cömert (b. 1945, Ankara) did. Ertuğrul Cömert said that he enthusiastically talked to his friends about the movie he watched and made them curious about how it ended. Sezer ̇ Akarcalı’s (b. 1954, Izmir) story about his mother, who was chosen as the person to be sent to the cinema from the crowded family because she explained the film better to others, provides a striking example of this phenomenon. My mother is a wonderful woman, her rhetoric is excellent, so to speak… They would always send my mother to the cinema, because my mother adds her own dream world to the film, the film is dimensioned in a different way and everyone would prefer to watch my mother rather than going to the cinema, and my mother loved to go to the cinema and the more she told the story, the more she ̇ had the right to go. (Sezer Akarcalı, b. 1954, Izmir).

According to Bülent Şık (b. 1966, Adana) the person most able to describe a movie by re-enacting it for 25–30 minutes is highly regarded by his friends.

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The audience-narrators can be seen as contemporary relatives of dengbej5 and travelling storytellers in Eastern cultures with a strong oral literary tradition. By narrating the films, the audience performs them by translating the audio-visual into the language of words. Telling films seen in cinema to a group that has never been to the cinema through oral culture is a common practice and has fulfilled an important function in preparing the audience for cinema, developing cinematic literacy, and creating their expectations. Pušnik (2015, p.  64) states: “Rather than just selling individual films, cinema is best understood as having sold and cultivated a habit, a specific human practice, a certain type of social experience that was formed during the consumption of this medium.” This social experience is varied and varies according to the age, gender, location, the educational and cultural capital of the audience. Thus, cinema provides a suitable social space for different experiences. Geraghty (2000) also states that the cinema audience is very heterogeneous and the way they use cinema as a social space is very diverse. Such an experience is the hybridisation of cinema in a country that has adopted modernisation by articulating verbal narrative with traditions. Cinema-going, especially in rural areas, brings the traditions and rituals to the atmosphere of cinema in local contexts and also produces hybrid forms and practices in everyday life. For example, Hülya Avkın (b. 1955, Gaziantep) talked about the practice of inviting people to the cinema as a form of courting in Antep, the southeast side of Turkey. Usually, the engaged couples on that side would not go to the cinema themselves, families would take them; for example, the boy’s mother took the bride and bride’s family to the cinema. It was a treat. On the way, she buys plenty of dried fruits, 10–15 people are seated in such a queue, and a handful of dried fruits are distributed to everyone and strangers around. (Hülya Avkın, b. 1955, Gaziantep).

This anecdote provides an insight into how rituals and practices associated with marriage are articulated into everyday life through the cinema experience, enabling the reproduction of the traditional. Thus, cinema-going becomes localised as a ritual that accompanies relationship processes such as marriage in Gaziantep, and becomes a part of this traditional practice. This phenomenon suggests that cinema, in a sense defined by Rothenbuhler (1998), is experienced as a ritual communication. According to Rothenbuhler (1998, p.  53) the ritual “is one of the strongest forms of communicative effectiveness,” and “the whole mediated communication should be understood in a ritual form.” “Ritual is a communication device for uniting the ideal and the material, the general and the particular, the cosmic and the ordinary, the past and the future, the structures of history and the happenings of individual lives” (Rothenbuhler, 5  Dengbej are performative storytellers who tell stories by singing and playing in Anatolia and Mesopotamia. Michael Chyet (2003) defines it as “reciter of romances and epics.” In this respect, the dengbej is similar to the troubadours in Europe.

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1998, p.  64). The ritualisation of cinema by attaching it to a tradition also combines the past and present, the tradition that is particular and the experience of going to the singular cinema. Pušnik says that we can think of cinema communication as a ritual phenomenon and cinema-going as “ritual ways of doing things” (Rothenbuhler, 1998, p. ix) or as “ritual creation of community” (Jontes, 2009, p.  816). Cinema, which is the invention of modernity, assumes the ritual function in the performance of the traditions of marriage and fun. As a modern media device “cinema became an important part of people’s interaction rituals, which served as “symbolic activities for participation in some larger order of meanings” (Rothenbuhler, 1998, p. 83). From this point of view, it can be said that the experience of cinema-going in the city and in the rural areas is related to modernity and modernisation.

Conclusion: Cinema-Going as a Modernisation Experience and Performance The analysis of the experience of cinema-going in Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s points out that, for interviewees, the function of cinema-going was to learn about modernity in a modernising society and to experience it. The analysis revealed that cinema-going was defined as a culture and the performance of this culture had certain criteria. The experience of cinema-going is seen as part of a broader acculturation process in which high culture is learned. Cinema-going as a culture means learning to be urban, modernising, learning to modernise, and performing it. In other words, these memories show that the experience of cinema-going in Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s was recalled within the framework of historical and ideological discourses about modern Turkey’s establishment, as Ahmad (2003a, 2003b) and Mardin (1971) conceptualised. Modernisation is a distinctive discourse that shapes cinema memories. As seen in most of the interviewees’ narratives, the experience of cinema-going provides a suitable framework for the construction or performance of a modern individual identity. As William Lowell Randall (2014) emphasised, we construct our identity by telling stories. But our narrative performance is shaped by the context in which we live rather than by the actions of a fixed self. In other words, “performativity contextualizes narrative within the politics of discourse, that is, institutionalized networks of power relations, for example, medicine, religion, the law, the media, the family” (Langellier, 1999, p. 151). According to Langellier (1999, p. 151), in this respect, identity is a performative struggle. In this research, it is seen that the narrative performance of cinema memories is shaped by the sociopolitical context of Turkey. For the low-income and less educated participants, cinema-going is narrated as an experience where modernity is learned through both the practice of cinema-­ going and the movies watched. On the other hand, especially for the more educated, high-income, and urban audiences, cinema-going is perceived as a component and means of practising the contemporary understanding of

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civilisation set out by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, performing modernity, and exhibiting a distinguished culture. In this conception, cinema-going is described as a ritual consisting of acts such as choosing the film, dressing up carefully, eating and drinking in certain distinguished venues, sitting in the lodge as a family, and watching the film according to etiquette. While the analysis reveals that cinema is conceived as entertainment, culture, and socialisation, it also points out that the performance of this culture takes place in different ways depending on the location of the film theatre and the type of film. Furthermore, by analysing Turkey’s cinema culture in the 1960s during the context of the 2010s, the research emphasises how the modernisation paradigm shaped the interviewees’ memories of cinema, thus underlining the strong relationship between modernisation and experience of cinema-­ going. Nancy Huggett (2002, p. viii) argues that cinema-going is a mediating strategy by which people make sense of themselves, their lives, and their relationships with others. Our research emphasised the mediation that the experience of cinema-going plays in understanding, desiring, and performing modernity in Turkey, pointing to the hybrid and ritual forms of communication in which the traditional and the modern are articulated in this process.

List of the Interviewees Mentioned in the Text Adnan Özerler (Male, 1955, Karaman). Ahmet Er (Male, 1944, Kocaeli). Ayfer Çekiç (Female, 1950, Eskişehir). Ayşe Çığ (Female, 1954, Konya). Bülent Şık (Male, 1966, Adana). Ertuğrul Cömert (Male, 1945, Ankara). Fevzi Disanlı (Male, 1942, Disan/Makedonya). Gönül Hatay Eren (Female, 1937, Konya). ̇ Hacer Çevik (Female, 1932, Istanbul). Hanife Neşe Ürel (Female, 1954, Ankara). Hasan Özgen (Male, 1947, Milas/Muğla). Hülya Avkın (Female, 1955, Gaziantep). Hüseyin Çimrin (Male, 1946, Antalya). Hüseyin Seçmen (Male, 1937, Çorlu/Tekirdağ). ̇ Demirkol (Female, 1953, Ankara). Inci Meryem Oskay (Female, 1950, Antalya). Münevver Eminoğlu (Female, 1958, Konya). ̇ Oğuz Onaran (Male, 1935, Izmir). ̇ Özden Cankaya (Female, 1946, Izmir). Sabahat Adalar (Female, 1954, Adana). ̇ Sezer Akarcalı (Male, 1954, Izmir). Şükrü Argın (Male, 1961, Manisa). Tülin Tayşioğlu (Female, 1955, Ankara). ̇ Yasemin Yalın (Female, 1957, Istanbul).

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References Ahmad, F. (1993/2003a). The making of modern Turkey. Routledge. Ahmad, F. (2003b). Turkey: The quest for identity. Oneworld. Akbulut, H. (2018). Kültürel ve Toplumsal Bir Pratik Olarak Sinemaya Gitmek: Türkiye’de Seyirci Deneyimleri Üzerine Bir Sözlü Tarih Çalışması. TÜBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey). Project No: 115K269. https://search.trdizin.gov.tr/tr/yayin/detay/617486/ Allen, R. C. (1990). From exhibition to reception: Reflections on the audience in film history. Screen, 31(4), 347–356. Allen, R. C. (2006). Relocating American film history: The ‘problem’ of the empirical. Cultural Studies, 20(1), 48–88. Altenloh, E. (1914/1977). Zur Soziologie des Kino: Die Kino-unternehmung und die sozialen Schichten ihrer besucher. Spamerschen Buchdruckerei. Biltereyst, D. (2013). Cinema, modernity and audiences: Revisiting and expanding the debate. In K. Aveyard & A. Moran (Eds.), Watching films: New perspectives on movie-­ going, exhibition and reception (pp. 17–32). Intellect. Biltereyst, D., Lotze, K., & Meers, P. (2012). Triangulation in historical audience research: Reflections and experiences from a multi-methodological research project on cinema audiences in Flanders. Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, 9(2), 690–715. Biltereyst, D., Maltby, R., & Meers, P. (2012). Cinema, audiences and modernity: New perspectives on European cinema history. Routledge. Biltereyst, D., & Meers, P. (2018). Film, cinema and reception studies: Revisiting research on audience’s filmic and cinematic experiences. In E.  Di Giovanni & Y. Gambier (Eds.), Reception studies and audiovisual translation (pp. 22–41). John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.141.03bil Casetti, F. (1999). Inside the gaze: The fiction film and its spectator. Indiana University Press. Chyet, M. (2003). Kurdish-English dictionary. Yale University Press. Dhoest, A. (2004). A review. Particip@tions, 1(2). https://www.participations. org/01-­02-­07-­kuhn.pdf Gelly, C., & Roche, D. (2012). Approaches to film and reception theories. Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal. Geraghty, C. (2000). British cinema in the fifties: Gender, genre and the ‘new look’. Routledge. Gripsrud, J. (1998). Film audiences. In J. Hill & P. C. Gibson (Eds.), The Oxford guide to film studies (pp. 202–211). Oxford UP. Huggett, N. (2002). A cultural history of cinema-going in the Illawarra (1900–1950) [Doctoral dissertation, University of Wollongong]. http://ro.uow.edu.au/ theses/246. Jontes, D. (2009). Rumena grožnja: vzdrževanje novinarske avtoritete prek razprave o tabloidizaciji. Teorija in praksa, 46(6), 812–825. Keyman, F. (2005). Şerif Mardin’i Okumak: Modernleşme, Yorumbilgisel Yaklaşım ve Türkiye. In A. Öncü & O. Tekelioğlu (Eds.), Şerif Mardin’e Armağan (pp. 37–63). ̇ Iletiş im Yayınları. Kuhn, A. (2002). An everyday magic: Cinema and cultural memory. I.B. Tauris. Langellier, K. M. (1999). You’re marked: Breast cancer, tattoo, and the narrative performance of identity. In J. Brockmeier & D. Carbaugh (Eds.), Narrative and iden-

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CHAPTER 4

“A United Stand and a Concerted Effort”: Black Cinema-going in Harlem and Jacksonville During the Silent Era David Morton and Agata Frymus

Introduction As virtually all other elements of American public life, cinema-going of the silent film era was structured along a strict colour line. Most scholarly work on the early cinemagoers in the cities of the Northern hemisphere concentrates on class (Ross, 1998), religion (Thissen, 2012), femininity (Hansen, 1991; Anselmo, 2015, 2017)—and often the overlap of these aspects of identity (Stamp, 2000; Stead, 2016; Fee, 2017)—as a marker of difference amongst audiences. Nevertheless, race had a tangible impact on the experiences of cinemagoers (Regester, 2005); perhaps nowhere this is as evident as in the context of the United States. Racial prejudice was rampant across the country, yet, segregation worked according to different principles depending on the specific locality. In the Jim Crow states, racism was integrated in the letter of law, making separate facilities for Black and white customers a legal requirement. This meant two arrangements: one, in which mainstream cinemas would select part of the auditorium as designated for “coloured” patrons only; and

D. Morton University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. Frymus (*) Monash University Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Treveri Gennari et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38789-0_4

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second, in which a theatre would be open to only one type of racial audience. The former, however, was less common outside of the major urban centres. Jacqueline Najuma Stewart’s (2005) work, for example, excavates a rich entertainment culture of Chicago’s Black Belt during the first three decades of the twentieth century. In her essay on historical cinema-going in North Carolina, Charlene Regester (2005, p. 113) deftly illustrates that “cinemas catering specifically to African American audiences were not readily available or easily accessible.” Most often than not, cinema-goers would be relegated to an inferior seating on the balcony, referred to, variously, as “buzzard roost,” “peanut gallery,” or even “n**** heaven,” all terms emphasising its racialised character (Lee, 2008, p. 66; Joseph, 2015, p. 19). On rare occasions, and in the absence of this architectural feature, partitions were raised to physically separate members of the audience. Although segregation was also a fact of life in the Northern states of Illinois and New York, the practices associated with it were not institutionalised to the same extent as they were in the Southland. For example, the state of New York passed a legislation that made discrimination based on “race, color, creed” a civic offence in 1909 (New York State, 1997, 324; Carlson, 2017, p. 60). The law was amended further four years later, when theatres were listed explicitly as desegregated spaces. Even so, the rule was hardly followed. On the contrary, Black Americans attending film screenings in New  York were routinely consigned to balcony seating. If challenged, the ushers and managers used elaborate tactics to maintain the status quo, making sure no Black patron sat next to a white one (Frymus, 2022). Explaining that all seats are reserved or tearing the admissions before viewers could find their seats were particularly common. Many trailblazing film scholars, including Stewart (2005), Regester (2005), Cara Caddoo (2014), and most recently, Allyson Nadia Field (2015), have written persuasively about the opportunities and obstacles inscribed in the African American film culture of the silent era. By 1910, as Stewart (2005, p. 115) maintains, at least 100 venues nationwide were geared towards Black audiences, presenting a mixed programme of photoplays and live performance. This chapter draws on archival records—fire insurance maps, and articles from the Black weeklies—as well as the established scholarship to zoom on the history of Black cinema-going in two urban settings: Harlem, New  York, and Jacksonville, Florida. In doing so, it aims to capture some of the ways in which African Americans made sense of, and fought against, racist mistreatment. This comparative study sets out to be part of the New Cinema History, as applied by Daniel Biltereyst and Phillippe Meers’s (2011, p. 81), emphasis on empirical research into specific cinematic cultures through investigating the “global conditions of production, of technical information and craft and of the multiple and interconnected organizational cultures that characterize the film production industry.” Comparing the cinema-going experiences of African Americans in Harlem and Jacksonville during this pivotal moment in American film history helps to fulfil Richard Maltby’s assertion that historical studies of film should function as “a quilt of many methods and localities” (Maltby, 2011,

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p. 34). Judith Thissen’s (2019, p. 125) assertion that “microstudies of local cinema practices should not obscure the importance of a better understanding of long-term trends and development across space and time” further reinforces the necessity of comparative microhistories. In other words, this cross-regional study on Black audiences’ interaction with film exhibition during this pivotal moment in the development of the American film industry illuminates insights on a neglected, yet essential, stitch to the collective quilt of historical film studies. What makes the comparison between Harlem and Jacksonville particularly productive is the fact that the law differed vastly between these two locations, since access to Black leisure was naturally more limited in Jacksonville. In framing cinemas as primarily physical sites, this chapter places historical Black audiences in a wider context of social history. Through tracing the parallel lived experiences of African American cinemagoers in a Southern city that experienced a massive Black exodus during the 1910s and 1920s, and a Northern city that had become a haven for refugees who had fled from Jim Crow and Ku Klux Klan violence, we can achieve a broader comprehension of Black film culture during the silent era. It is also a way of addressing the potential limitations of local micro-studies; or, to borrow from Judith Thissen’s (2019, pp. 124–125) observation, to counteract “the danger inherent in local history that it has a tendency to look for ever more empirical data and details, rather than for larger explanatory frameworks.” While the comparative model of enquiry remains underutilised when it comes to Black cinema-going, it allows us to contextualise our findings into a broader field of general history. It is useful in breaking away “from the insularity of the local case study” (Thissen, 2019, p. 125).

Black Cinema-going in Harlem, New York City To fully grasp the characteristics of Black cinema-going during the period, it is necessary to provide some wider, demographic context. The tremendous cultural impact of the Northbound flow of African Americans, which reached its peak between 1910 and 1940, has been a subject of numerous historical studies (Marks, 1989; Griffin, 1995; Brown, 2007; Boustan, 2017). This mass exodus, referred to as the Great Migration, invariably changed the racial and socio-cultural landscape of the American city. Indeed, the scale of Black migration redefined not only what it meant to be an urbanite in the early twentieth century, but also what it meant to be a Black American, feeding into the discourses of racial uplift and appropriate public behaviour. Chicago’s Black community, with its entertainment, reformers, and vibrant cultural production, has been a particularly rich site for academic exploration (Grossman, 1989; Carbine, 1990; Stewart, 2005; Baldwin, 2009; Luckett, 2013; Chatelain, 2015; McCammack, 2017). Thus, the various aspects of Black film engagement during the first two decades of the century were transfigured in the wake of the Great Migration.

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While this accelerated Black mobility played a role in shaping the practices of cinema-going, it is equally important to note that African Americans were well aware of the moving pictures, even before relocating to the city. Although rural areas in Florida might have lacked specialised screening venues, local churches or Black community institutions often organised film screenings. In her insightful study Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and Building of Modern Black Life, Caddoo explains that, while Harlem offered unparalleled entertainment options across the colour line, Black film culture flourished outside of major settlements too. Indeed, “by the time most African Americans began packing their bags for the industrial North, cinema already figured into their sensibilities,” Caddoo (2014, p. 10) writes. The beginnings of Black film exhibition in New  York City are tied closely to the mounting numbers of Black tenants in Harlem, the area which—prior to 1914—had a rather modest African American population. The gradual shift from a predominantly white neighbourhood to the eponymous centre of Black America was a result of three interlinked movements. Firstly, and most notably, many of the newly arrived were escaping the horrors of racial violence of the South, hoping for a better future in the metropolitan North. Secondly, other Black newcomers were already citydwellers, as they made a much less arduous journey to Harlem from lower parts of Manhattan, such as Greenwich Village (Greenberg, 2014). Adding to these internal movements was the increasing immigration from Jamaica, Montserrat, and Barbados. As a result, the dispersed Black populace of New York City grew by 30,000 or as much as 50000 between 1914 and 1920 (Cruse, 1967, p. 71; Corbould, 2009, pp. 6–7). It is hardly surprising, then, that theatre managers sought to capitalise on these demographic shifts. The first cinema in Harlem that courted Black cinemagoers, Lincoln, opened for business in the end of 1909. Re-adapted from a small nickelodeon, and capable of seating approximately 300 patrons, the establishment was representative of other independent theatres operating all across Manhattan. At the outset, Lincoln specialised in moving pictures, but its programme soon incorporated Blackface and variety performance. Shortly after—probably in a matter of months—Harlem’s cinematic topography was enriched by another establishment, the Crescent theatre, situated on the same building block, on the 135th Street (Mr. Elmore Gives His Gold, 1915; Mrs. Downs Lincoln, 1927). The influential Black commentator Lester A. Walton (1910, p. 6) wrote about the Crescent with awe, describing it as a desegregated space where “white and colored sat side by side, elbowing each other.” While the Crescent’s presence on the map of Harlem’s entertainment proved short-lived, as it closed only six years later, other moving picture houses appeared quickly to meet the demand. A larger, 1500-capacity theatre, Lafayette, commenced operating as a desegregated space in 1913. An advert in the Black periodical New York Age from February of that year used egalitarian terminology—“Our Doors Are Open to All”—to promise viewers equal treatment, regardless of their skin tone (Advertisement, 1913).

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While the scholarship on early film exhibition in Harlem tends to focus on either Crescent, Lincoln, or Lafayette—with the former attracting undoubtedly the most attention (Latham & Griffiths, 1999; Freeland, 2009)—avid film fans were limited exclusively to these three venues. A closer look at the fire insurance map dated to 1916 shows that upper Harlem had the total of ten theatres—Crescent, Franklin, Lafayette, Lincoln, Lenox, Odeon, Majestic, Mystic, in addition to two unnamed ventures—at least eight of which were licensed to screen feature films (Frymus, 2022, p. 207). Although the question whether they were open to Black cinema-goers remains unanswered, it is not outside of the realms of possibility; after all, they operated in the area with the highest concentration of African Americans in the metropolis. Turning away from their custom would not have been feasible for small cinema owners, who were highly reliant on local trade. Furthermore, independent exhibitors often navigated between their racial policies and financial viability, adapting to the wider phenomena  affecting New York City and its inhabitants. What we mean by it is that attitudes towards racial patronage were often transformed overtime by customer capitalism, and in response to public pressure. Odeon theatre constitutes a notable example of these overlapping processes. While the venue started its existence as a white-­ only movie house in 1911, it turned into a racially inclusive space by 1925. At the time of its opening, African American residents were concentrated around the area close to 135th Street. By 1925, the predominantly Black district stretched between south 127th and north 145th Street, across Fifth to Eighth Avenue (Robertson et al., 2010). The change in demographics certainly influenced the management of cinemas in structuring their racial policies. Typically, as the number of Black Harlemites continued to grow, so did the number of cinemas that welcomed them (Frymus, 2022, 2023).

Black Resistance in Harlem Stewart (2005) and Davarian Baldwin (2009, p. 166) are persuasive in embedding Black cinema-going within broader parameters of urban modernity, migration, and Black uplift. In her elaboration of the history of public Black leisure in Chicago, Stewart (2005, p. 151) notes that African Americans arriving from the South frequently found the lack of tangible, architectural symbols of segregation both enthralling and confusing. In Chicago, as much as in New York City, they were not reminded of racial indiscrimination by theatre entrances inscribed as either “white” or “colored.” The fact that segregation bared little mark on the topography of the metropolis does not mean, however, that it was non-existent. Rather, new Black urbanites had to learn how to make sense of more indirect and frequently more elaborate forms of prejudice they encountered in the public sphere (Image 4.1). The journalists writing for the Black press were invested in exploring regional discrepancies, consequently supporting cinema-goers in navigating this treacherous terrain. For instance, in an article from 1917, Lester Walton (1917, p. 6)

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Image 4.1  Building of the Alhambra theatre in Harlem, which housed a Blackoriented cinema in the 1920s. (Source: Agata Frymus, 2019)

instructed New York Age readers that, in the process of asserting their citizenship, they need to be aware of the affordances of the State law. He referred to the practice of seating Black audience members separately from the more convenient spaces occupied by white customers. It is nearly impossible, he reasoned, for cinephiles in the South to protest the practice, considering that the theatre managers are simply abiding by the Jim Crow laws. The residents of Harlem, however, were in a decidedly better situation from their Southern counterparts. Here, an act of protest was not merely a possibility; Walton saw it as a moral obligation in the pursuit of racial inclusion: “the colored theatregoers of each town must fight their own battles against discrimination as they best see fit; for their mode of procedure, after all, will be governed by local conditions.” The article was one of many appeals that encouraged African Americans to confront cinema managers and ushers who refused to treat them with respect. Considering the law that is “decidedly in their favor,” Black New  Yorkers “cannot afford to be silent” (Walton, 1917, p.  6) and actively seek social justice. In practice, fighting against individual cinemas with racist seating policies was an arduous, and generally risky process. On occasion, middle-class individuals with sufficient financial means did resort to legal action. In 1923, Black media outlets eagerly reported on the case of Henry B. Delaney, a Caribbean dentist

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who sued the management of Alhambra theatre, located in the upper portion of Harlem. This was not the first time that Alhambra entered the spotlight for segregationist policy either, as its treasurer was arrested for racial discrimination three years before (Alhambra Theater Treasurer, 1920, p. 6). According to the coverage, Delaney and his wife were asked to move to the balcony, even though they had already paid for orchestra seats. Aware of the violation, Delaney sought a compensation of $500 in damages; yet, his case was dismissed by the judge, citing lack of sufficient evidence (Colored Dentist Loses Suit, 1923, p. 1). Such decisions were recognisably common, linking lawsuits waged against discriminatory institutions by African Americans in the first three decades of the twentieth century. In her work on Black film culture during the period, Caddoo (2014, p. 120) observes that public pronouncements and lawsuits were almost universally targeted at “unfair ticketing and seating practices.” Most often than not, the proprietors of Northern movie houses enforced routine procedures to separate the races; if brought to justice, they would conceal their systemic nature by blaming them on individual members of staff. Black periodicals such as Chicago Defender, New York Age, and New York Amsterdam News served as a prolific arena where readers could, firstly, make sense of the Black lived experience—and the continuous racism inscribed in it— but where they could also voice their personal concerns. According to Carrie Teresa (2019, p. 6), they held substantial political power, constituting “one of the few sites where [B]lacks controlled the conditions of looking.” In “a period of disenfranchisement, segregation, and violence,” Teresa (2019, p. 14) continues, these publications tirelessly advocated Black interests “by publishing stories that emphasized race pride, self-help, and community cohesiveness.” Letters published by the editors commonly criticised dominant paradigms, pointing to specific businesses and venues that were either worth supporting, or, on the contrary, better left avoided. In discussing instances of discrimination and asking for an open boycott of specific commercial ventures, Black Americans gained a powerful tool of resistance. The central role of weeklies such as the New York Age in the creation of Black counter publics is even more evident if we consider the limited avenues of resistance available to African Americans at the time. In 1928, one disappointed film fan, Mrs Strickland, asked her fellow city dwellers to steer away from picture houses operated by Loew’s (Loew’s Theatres Charged with Jim Crow, 1928, p. 1). Recounting her upsetting visit to Victoria, one of their Manhattan cinemas, the letter addresses Black cinema-­ goers who “should not enrich” mainstream cinemas with their admission fees, and instead opt for coloured theatres “where our presence is desired and appreciated and where we are assured of the justice, equality and respect that is justly due us as American citizens.” Placed on the nexus of civil defiance, commercial power, and politics of uplift, such commentary focuses on the impact of individual action in negotiating progress. By shedding light on discriminatory practices at Loew’s, the author of the letter is “talking back” (Hooks, 1989) and reclaiming her cinema-going for herself and other Americans of colour (Image 4.2).

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Image 4.2  Headline of the New York Age article outlining racist mistreatment experienced by Mrs Strickland (Loew’s Theatres Charged with Jim Crow, 1928, p. 1)

Jacksonville’s LaVilla There is a four-block strip that runs through the heart of Jacksonville’s LaVilla neighbourhood that served as an essential centre of Black cultural life in the city during the early twentieth century. Nicknamed “the Harlem of the South,” Ashley Street existed as an integrated theatre district prior to the advent of the unapologetic segregationist administration of Governor Napoleon Broward (1905–1909). During Broward’s tenure as governor, he helped escalate the white-supremacist takeover of the Jacksonville City Council in 1907 (Davis, 2009). Despite the extreme political disenfranchisement experienced by Jacksonville’s African American community, LaVilla became ground zero for the Florida Movement, a dramatic civil rights campaign that set out “to defeat

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white supremacy, economic oppression, and one-party rule,” not just in Florida, but across the nation (Ortiz, 2005, p. ix). For its part, Ashley Street boasted a vibrant music and entertainment scene intermingled with a sharp sense of political advocacy and organising. It was here that Harlem renaissance luminaries such as Florida natives James Weldon Johnson, John Rosamond Johnson, and Eatonville’s Zora Neal Hurston joined with the mother and father of jazz: Ma Rainey and Jelly Roll Morton. A decade before Memphis’ Beale Street became the home of the blues, or New York’s Lenox Avenue sparked the Harlem Renaissance, in Jacksonville the dynamic blues and jazz performances in LaVilla’s Colored Airdome helped set the trend. According to Ennis Davis of the Florida Times Union, the abiding influence of the neighbourhood in African American life can be clearly seen with a simple historical revision: “LaVilla has been called the Harlem of the South, when it’s Harlem that should be called the LaVilla of the North” (Davis, 2017). Ashley Street’s lively music scene and café culture helped connect LaVilla directly into the pulse of a national network of African American activists and entertainers. The Colored Airdome on West Ashley Street boasted an open-air audience capacity of 800 seats, the theatre was advertised as providing screenings and performances “Exclusively for Colored People,” and offered its audiences “positively the largest, grandest and coolest theater exclusively for colored people in the entire Southland” (Jacksonville Evening Metropolis, 1909, p. 6). Next to the Colored Airdome was Frank Crowd’s Bijou Theatre. The Bijou is significant in that it was arguably the site of one of the first feature film screenings in Florida. The Vitagraph Company’s The Life of Moses (J. Stuart Blackton, 1909), with its extended 50-minute running time, was considered among one of the first feature-length photoplays to be exhibited. Crowd’s Bijou Theatre also was where the Kalem Company unveiled one of its first productions, The Artist and the Girl (Sidney Olcott, 1909), in June 1909 (Image 4.3). In segregated Jacksonville, this special exhibition intended for Crowd’s exclusively African American clientele demonstrates the significant early cultural capital that Ashley Street’s entertainment district had on the city’s burgeoning motion picture industry. There was innate tension during this time between Jacksonville’s film producers and exhibitors experienced from proposed Sunday Blue Laws and the collective ire directed towards the cinema by way of the pulpit and politicians. Since Sundays were typically the only day off for most sharecroppers, it was the goal of political leaders to ensure that time was spent at church and not on “idle vices” such as the cinema. This in turn caused theatre owners, especially in segregated LaVilla, to tread lightly when advertising to audiences. Such caution was all for good reason. Throughout the decade of 1900, as movie houses first appeared in Florida, conservative reactionaries increasingly took hold of key political offices at the state and local level in Florida, their efforts toward implementing social controls that later would become the bulwark of the Jim Crow era. A report from Florida Agricultural Commissioner Benjamin E.  McLin did not mince words when describing cinema-goers as being “of the lowest order; socially, they are

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Image 4.3  1913 Sanborn map illustrating the location of the Colored Airdome and Globe Theatre at West Ashley and North Broad Streets

without recognition.” He goes on to remark that the gatherings held at such venues “are the breeders of socialism and anarchism and are enemies of all forms of government control” (Mayo, 1928, pp. 37–38). Such an attack on film exhibition served as a “dog whistle” used by the state’s white supremacist leadership appeal to the economic and social anxieties that their constituents faced amidst the state’s influx of immigrants and growing urban population of Black-­majority cities such as Jacksonville. Responding  to the increasingly heated political rhetoric, in a May 1909 interview with the Jacksonville Evening Metropolis, Frank Crowd expressed the need for caution that showmen and exhibitors carefully had to manoeuvre to prevent a concerted crackdown on his business from either city or state political leaders. In this candid interview with a white owned press, Crowd focused on the virtues of his venue over its vices by remarking on the “moral quality” of his audiences. He extolled that his marked-up price of a ten-cent admission cost (and five cents for women and children) would help ensure his audience were surrounded by an environment of “refined, substantial, and wholesome amusement.” He also advertised special colourised versions of the films he exhibited with the slogan, “The moving pictures are colored by hand, the management so by nature” (Jacksonville Evening Metropolis, 1909, p. 6). Despite his efforts towards reframing his theatre within the confines of “moral uplift,” Crowd faced increased competition from the new Colored

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Airdome. Crowd decided to close the Bijou in 1909 and reorganise his holdings. Down but not out, Crowd invested $25,000 into the theatre, adding new inclined floors, a balcony, private boxes, and an all-tungsten lighting system and rechristened his establishment the Globe Theatre. Crowd’s revamped Globe contracted with the Russell-Owens Stock Company, a broad network of Black stock performers that toured across the country. The Globe was considered so important to the Russell-Owens circuit and other travelling performers that it was remarked to be the “anchor to the southern [vaudeville] road shows,” and would become an important starting point in the careers of up-and-coming jazz virtuosos, Ma Rainey and Louis Armstrong, among others (Pickrell & Davis, 2020). Ultimately, the crown jewel of Ashley Street’s entertainment district was the Strand Theatre, which opened in June 1915, “amid the glare of blazing lights, a blaring of brass bands and a crowd in gala attire” (Smith, 2006, p. 96). The Indianapolis Freeman reported that at the premiere Strand patrons, “lined Ashley Street, and pushed and surged like a rolling sea” (Smith, 2006, p. 96). Unfortunately, by the time the Strand opened, the emerging market dynamic of a segregated social reality had already made its impact on the entertainment profession. This shift in the industry soon attracted white entrepreneurs such as H.S. Walker, who formed the Strand Amusement Company. With his deep pockets and connections to white-owned “combines” (organised theatrical circuits), Walker was able to tap into a broad network of travelling stock companies, musicians, and film distributors to ensure that the Strand outperformed any of its rivals on Ashley Street (Smith, 2006, p. 74). With the opening of the Strand, Walker had led the charge toward seizing ownership of LaVilla’s stages and from the hands of local Black owners to white-owned cartels. Increased pressure by Jacksonville’s women’s clubs to ban theatrical exhibitions and issue Sunday blue laws against motion picture exhibitions caused many of the Black-owned theatres in Jacksonville to buckle under financial and political pressure. By 1915, the Colored Airdome had been run entirely out of business by its competitors and its owners disappeared from the public record. Frank Crowd’s Globe Theatre experienced a similar decline. After the Russell-Owens Stock Company disbanded in 1916, it too closed its doors (Pickrell & Davis, 2020). In addition to the changes in theatre ownership that took place across LaVilla during the mid-1910s, Florida had experienced a drastic demographic change of its African American population as the Great Migration began. In 1916 alone, over 12,000 African Americans had left Florida to find better working conditions and wages in the North (Ortiz, 2005, p. 140).

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“A Lily-White Syndicate Tough on Black Asses” Takes Over Ashley Street The deteriorating social and political conditions for Black Floridians had a profound impact on the continued viability of the businesses along Jacksonville’s Ashley Street. The competition between the Colored Airdome and Globe Theatre helped local audiences acquire increasingly “sophisticated” tastes in the films they requested. In the void left after the disappearance of Ashley Street’s Black-­ owned theatres, a consortium of primarily white theatre owners took to laying claim to Jacksonville’s African American exhibition sector. Meanwhile, Jacksonville’s demographics had started to shift drastically as an influx of white migrants from Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama. At the same time in 1916 alone, nearly 12,000 African Americans had left Florida to find better working conditions and wages further North. James Weldon Johnson, who had himself fled Jacksonville in 1901 after surviving an attempted lynching, expressed that with more Florida Blacks following in his footsteps northward, he “was impressed with the fact that everywhere there was a rise in the level of the Negro’s morale. The exodus of Negroes to the North … was in full motion; the tremors of the war in Europe were shaking in America with increasing intensity,” and that “all these forces had a quickening effect that was running through the entire mass of the race” (Ortiz, 2005, p. 140). A deciding factor in the sudden mass exodus of African Americans and influx of white settlers to Florida coincided with the inauguration of Sidney Catts as governor in 1917. During his insurgent third-party campaign for the Prohibition Party, this self-­ anointed “Cracker Messiah” openly defended to his supporters the necessity of lynch mobs and regularly engaged with publicly antagonistic and heated exchanges with civil rights organisers and the NAACP (Cassanello, 2013, pp. 138–139). In response to increased crackdowns by so-called “anti-vice crusaders,” activist and voting rights organiser Eartha White formed the Jacksonville Colored Citizens Protective League as a means of protecting the social and economic gains achieved by the city’s leading entrepreneurs and business leaders. Although theatrical spaces such as Ashley Street’s entertainment had consistently served as sites of individual expression and agency for Jacksonville’s African American community, during the Sidney Catts administration, entertainment venues would take on new dimensions of significance in Black Floridians’ resistance to Jim Crow. One of the most dramatic acts of resistance against the pernicious racism of the Catts administration occurred at Jacksonville’s Duval Theatre on July 16, 1918, at an “Encouragement Meeting” organised by the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce. The purpose of the event was intended to celebrate the financial contributions that spectators along the Ashley Street theatre district had recently made toward placing Liberty Loan subscriptions, Red Cross drives, and War Saving Stamp programs (Ortiz, 2005, pp.  147–149). One of the leading benefactors for Black Jacksonvillians, business leader Abraham Lincoln Lewis, Florida’s first Black millionaire initiated the proceedings. Governor Catts was invited to deliver the

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keynote address of the evening upon the urging of his advisors to “make amends” with the state’s rapidly departing African American population. Instead, Catts rose to the podium and proceeded to express his extreme disdain for the overt displays of African American patriotism that had emerged from the evening’s proceedings and descended into one of the most notorious public diatribes in Florida history. James Weldon Johnson who was in attendance that evening recalled: Governor Catts began bullying the gathering. He told African Americans to get jobs, stop loafing, and cease selling bootleg whiskey. Catts boasted: “You are looking into the face of the most powerful man in Florida,” and warned them that he was going to force them to work harder.… He also stated that if he were a Negro he would be ashamed to be a brown one or a yellow one, he would be ashamed to be anything but a black one. (Ortiz, 2005, p. 149)

When the governor finished, the leader of Jacksonville’s Black Liberty Loan Committee, Joseph Haygood Blodgett, publicly repudiated the incendiary remarks made by the state’s highest office holder. According to James Weldon Johnson, Blodgett “went on to tell the Governor why so many of the faces he looked into were brown and yellow; and he told him why so many Negroes had left and were leaving the State and about lynching and ‘Jim Crow’ cars and political inequalities” (Ortiz, 2005, p. 150). Eyewitnesses remarked that Catts, blinded with rage, then sprung from his seat and shook his fist at the man considered one of Jacksonville’s most respectable businessmen. He “declared that Blodgett was assailing him, had insulted him, and made him the butt of ridicule. The man who had bragged during his election campaign that he had ‘killed a nigger’ sensed a challenge to white supremacy in Blodgett’s rebuttal” (Ortiz, 2005, p.  150). Before matters could escalate any further, the mixed audience at the Duval Theatre rose from their seats and started to sing My Country Tis of Thee, and the meeting was dismissed. This heated encounter between Governor Catts and Jacksonville’s Black business leaders at the Duval Theatre “Encouragement Meeting” would go on to have significant and ultimately tragic consequences for Black Floridians. With little economic protections or opportunities for legal recourse, a concerted effort was soon made by the governor’s political allies coordinated with the Jacksonville City Council to raise property appraisals on Black-owned theatres, the site of the most well-­ coordinated resistance, and sought to price exhibitors out of business. The deteriorating social and political conditions for Black Floridians had a profound impact on the continued viability of the businesses along Jacksonville’s Ashley Street. In the void that had been left by the disappearance of Ashley Street’s Black-owned theatres, a consortium of primarily white theatre owners took to laying claim to Jacksonville’s African American theatrical industry. Within two years of the infamous 1918 “Encouragement Meeting” most of Ashley Street’s theatres were subsequently bought out by the emerging Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA), which had primarily white shareholders

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and a majority of white theatre owners (Smith, 2015, p. 161). In 1920, a white TOBA officer and theatre owner from Savannah, W. J. Stiles, purchased the abandoned Strand Theatre. Stiles added the Strand as the southernmost stop along the TOBA circuit, as he worked to establish the theatre as the centrepiece of cultural life in LaVilla. In need of both home-grown talent and entertainers familiar with the cultural atmosphere along Ashley Street, Stiles coordinated with S.A. “Buddy” Austin, a Jacksonville native and seasoned vaudeville comedian on the TOBA circuit. Austin had come to Jacksonville initially to find work in the Afro-American Life Insurance Company, but soon was swayed to purchase a stake in the Strand. He had previous managerial experience as a travelling showman, and prior to coming to Jacksonville had worked an extended engagement as a stage manager at Bailey’s 81  in Atlanta (Smith, 2015, pp. 161–162) (Image 4.4). This unlikely partnership between the white businessman Stiles and Austin as the Strand’s manager was a refreshing exception to other theatres along the TOBA circuit. For most theatres under the TOBA banner, its profits remained firmly in the hands of its primarily white owners. A January 1921 editorial published in Billboard describes the organisation as “a ‘Lily White’ syndicate of houses and managers whose patronage is Negro” (Sampson, 2014, p. 32). The disparity between the revenue received by TOBA’s white officers and the work

Image 4.4  Crowd gathered outside the Strand Theatre in Jacksonville, June 1915

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demanded of its performers soon gave the organisation’s acronym another meaning within Black vaudeville circles as being “Tough on Black Actors” or, more frequently, “Tough on Black Asses” (Smith, 2015, p.  161). Under Austin’s direction as manager, the Strand became one of the most profitable theatres along its circuit (Smith, 2006, p. 99). The Strand would go on to play a central role in Jacksonville Black life during the 1920s and established itself as among the most important stopping points in the South for African American performers and aspirational film exhibitors in search of new lucrative audiences (Work, 1922, p. 305). In 1922, Austin coordinated with Stiles to incorporate the Strand Amusement Corporation in Jacksonville, “with a capitalization of $100,000 for the purpose of owning and operating theatres, motion picture houses and producing motion pictures” (Nelson, 1980, p. 461). Hoping to take advantage of the recent dismantling of the city’s former production studio facilities, Austin and Stiles set out to purchase the properties of Jacksonville’s former production studios for bottom-dollar prices. Ultimately the Strand Amusement Corporation hoped to capitalise on the increased interest Black audiences had expressed towards motion pictures by exploring options to establish a motion picture production studio solely dedicated to the production of race movies. Currently, there are no surviving correspondences between either W.J. Stiles or Buddy Austin to indicate how far either man had gotten in negotiating the purchase of studio space; also, there is no record of any film produced by Strand.

Conclusion The first two decades of the twentieth century presented a gruesome climax to a period of African American history that had been marred by political ostracisation, racial violence, segregation, and the rise of reactionary white supremacist organisations such as the Guardians of Liberty and Ku Klux Klan. These events signalled the Great Migration, as hundreds of thousands of African Americans fled the South to Northern urban neighbourhoods such as New York’s Harlem (Baldwin, 2009; Marks, 1989; McCammack, 2017). At the same time, African Americans who remained in Southern cities such as Jacksonville took part in a carefully coordinated campaign through protest and non-violent direct action as seen in the Florida Movement (Ortiz, 2005). In their own distinct capacities’ cinema theatres were featured front and centre of the social and political maelstrom of early twentieth century racial politics. During this time, Northern cities grappled with the mass arrival of displaced African American refugees, while increasingly draconian political and legal restrictions placed on leisure and movement of Black life in the Jim Crow South turned the neighbourhood cinema theatre in the North and South alike into a space where Black voices could be heard and used as a means of political protest to fight against unjust, unfair, and unequal treatment. This case study into the contrasts and continuities African American cinema-­ goers experienced in both a Northern and Southern urban environment during

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the first decades of the twentieth century is a call for further study into the ways in which community organising and local politics ultimately shaped how films were exhibited in various regions in the United States. Such an approach demonstrates the ways in which historical cinema-going, even when constricted to a specific timeframe and a racial group, needs to be engaged with on a much more granular, highly localised level. As the legacy of Ashley Street faded into memory and the lost opportunity of a working collaboration between national theatrical syndicates and community-based exhibitors fell by the wayside, so too did hopes of Jacksonville’s African American community to have agency over the films they saw on-screen. This chapter can be seen as a “Tale of Two Harlems,” each impacted by the changing social and political atmosphere for African Americans living in the United States during the early twentieth century. Harlem provided Black cinema-­goers with a landscape of commercialised amusements vastly different from the one they would experience in Jacksonville, or the American South as whole. The State law gave them much more room to manoeuvre between the racist outlook of the business owners and their own sense of civic duty. Black women and men continuously carved out their own spaces where they could cultivate various forms of resistance. Meanwhile, the theatres that lined LaVilla’s Ashley Street—“the Harlem of the South”—were a site of equally effervescent and fascinating African American culture, even if the producers and consumers of this culture faced a set of unique obstacles. Despite Jacksonville’s regressive racial politics, the city also gave rise to a vibrant and dynamic race entertainment industry that mounted a monumental campaign against the malicious stereotypes expressed through minstrelsy on the stage. While maltreatment, as Ibram X. Kendi (2014, p. 539) explains, has followed Black Americans “from Florida and Georgia and the Carolinas to New York City,” they did not let it define them; if anything, it was the opposition to that maltreatment that animated their lives. Acknowledgements  Part of this work pertaining to Harlem, authored by Agata Frymus, was produced as part of Black Cinema-Going project, funded by the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, Marie Skłodowska Curie grant agreement no. 792629.

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Smith, P. D. (2006). Ashley Street blues: Racial uplift and the commodification of vernacular performance in LaVilla, Florida, 1896–1916. Master’s thesis, Florida State University. Smith, P.  D. (2015). A cultural history of the first jazz and blues communities in Jacksonville, Florida, 1896–1916. Edwin Mellen Press. Stamp, S. (2000). Movie struck girls. Women and motion picture culture after the Nickelodeon. Princeton University Press. Stead, L. (2016). Off to the pictures: Cinema-going, women’s writing and movie culture in interwar Britain. Edinburgh University Press. Stewart, J.  N. (2005). Migrating to the movies: Cinema and black urban modernity. University of California Press. Teresa, C. (2019). Looking at the stars: Black celebrity journalism in Jim Crow America. University of Nebraska Press. Thissen, J. (2012). Early cinema and the public sphere of the neighbourhood meeting hall: The longue durée of working-class sociability. In M. Braun, C. Keil, R. King, P. Moore, & L. Pelletier (Eds.), Beyond the screen: Institutions, networks, and publics of early cinema (pp. 297–306). Indiana University Press. Thissen, J. (2019). Cinema history as social history. Retrospect and prospect. In D. Biltereyst, R. Maltby, & P. Meers (Eds.), The Routledge companion to new cinema history (pp. 123–133). Routledge. Walton, L. A. (1910, January 6). Mission of Crescent Theatre. New York Age, p. 6. Walton, L. A. (1917, January 4). Better seating accommodations in theatres. New York Age, p. 6. Work, M. N. (1922). Negro year book: An annual encyclopedia of the Negro, 1921–22. Negro Year Book Publishing Company.

CHAPTER 5

Exhibition of National and Foreign Films in Six Mexican Cities During the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema: The Year of 1952 José Carlos Lozano, Blanca Chong, Efraín Delgado, Jaime Miguel González, Jorge Nieto Malpica, and Brenda Muñoz

From the late 1930s through the early 1950s, Mexico experienced the so-­ called Golden Age of Cinema in which hundreds of movies were made and exported to Latin America, Spain, and the United States. During the 1940s, a

J. C. Lozano (*) Texas A&M International University, Laredo, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] B. Chong Universidad Iberoamericana, Torreón, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] E. Delgado • J. M. González De La Salle Bajío University, León, Mexico e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] J. N. Malpica Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas, Tampico, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] B. Muñoz Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila, Saltillo, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Treveri Gennari et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38789-0_5

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total of 626 Mexican films were produced, while in the 1950s that number grew to 894 (Amador & Ayala Blanco, 1982, 1985). Mexican movies were extremely popular both in their own country and all over the region, and Mexican actors like Pedro Infante, Dolores del Río, Jorge Negrete, María Félix, Pedro Armendariz, Cantinflas, among many others, became as famous and admired by Latin American cinema-goers as any Hollywood star. This huge popularity of Mexican films, however, did not displace US productions. In the 1940s, 2864 American films were released in Mexico (over 2000 titles more than the number of national ones) and accounted for approximately half of the gross theatres’ revenues (Paxman, 2008, p. 303) and while in the 1950s the number of US films decreased to 2352, that figure was still significantly higher than the total number of Mexican features released during the same decade. The popularity of national films, however, was higher in the provinces than in the capital, as discussed later. This chapter analyses the programming of Mexican and American films in six Mexican provincial cities during 1952: León, Monterrey, Saltillo, Tampico, Torreón, and Veracruz. Based on the newspaper movie listings for 52 days1 (one per each week of that year), the analysis explores and compares the number and type of productions exhibited in the six cities during that year, as well as the movies with the highest number of screenings. This comparative approach, infrequent in the context of Mexican cinema studies, looks to contribute to a more integral understanding of historical exhibition patterns in the Mexican province and to redress the long-time held focus on the capital by film and cinema scholars (Zavala, 2009). Analyses of audiovisual media flows have been very common in comparative media studies for several decades, focusing on trends and imbalances on the local vs regional vs international supplies of contemporary television programs and films. This chapter will lean on this robust academic tradition to get insight on the specific historical patterns, similarities, and differences of film programming in these six Mexican cities in the context of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema.

The Golden Age of Mexican Cinema The so-called Golden Age of Mexican Cinema has been widely studied by Mexican (Ayala Blanco, 2017; Castro Ricalde, 2014; De la Vega Alfaro, 2000; García Riera, 1969; Martínez de la Rosa, 2011; Mino Gracia, 2019), and 1  The decision to include only one day per week of the year in the sample was not based on the periodicity of changes in the cinema venues’ programs, but on the limited human resources available to do the study. Most theatres at the time would change programs every two or three days, not every week. The sample of 52 days, thus, is representative of the type of films exhibited in the six cities but does not represent a census of all titles screened during the 365 days of 1952. The year of 1952 was selected because it was the only one for which movie listings were available in newspaper archives of the six cities.

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international film scholars (Fein, 1996; Mora, 1982; Noble, 2005; Paxman, 2008; Ramirez Berg, 2015). While there is a heated debate among these and other scholars about the exact years covered by this period, it is clear that even today this historical phase is “regarded with affection” by Mexican audiences, and that its main stars and movies became “myths and icons” that “occupy a privileged position in cultural memory, a collection of fragments which in their diversity coalesce to signify Mexican identity at the moment of heightened nationalism” (Noble, 2005, p. 2). While for some highly respected film scholars like García Riera (1969) the Golden Age of Mexican cinema lasted only the years of the Second World War, for others, like Monsiváis (1994), this period covers from the mid-1930s (where the first Mexican films travelled to Latin America and became great hits) to the late 1950s when despite the decrease in quality and the recurrence of basic formulaic stories and formats, the number of films produced in Mexico was the highest ever (Amador & Ayala Blanco, 1985; De la Vega Alfaro, 2000; Fein, 1994; Paxman, 2008). The scholars mentioned above have extensively explored both the emergence and the decline of the Mexican film industry during this period, so there is no need to provide here another historical review of the period. From governmental nationalist policies and aggressive and consistent subsidies to the arts from the mid-1930s through the 1950s, to the help of the United States during the Second World War in terms of raw film and technical assistance; from generous public subsidies to film unions blocking new directors and technicians from getting into the industry, and the full return of Hollywood to the Latin American market after the war, the history of the Mexican Golden Age has been comprehensively documented.

Growth of Cinema Theatres in the 1940s and 1950s During and after the Mexican revolution (1910–1918), thousands of Mexicans living in rural areas started to migrate to the cities, due to the disruption and upheaval coming with the conflict. In the following three decades, because of the accelerated modernisation and growth of the industrial and service sectors in big cities, rural migration to urban areas intensified. The migration was so intense that by the 1950s, for the first time in Mexico’s history, “a greater percentage of the country’s people lived in urban rather than rural localities” (Stevens, 1968, p. 76). Mexico was becoming more modern and cinema, as in many other parts of the world, was helping audiences to become acquainted with modernity and to learn how to behave in urban areas (Noble, 2005; Serna, 2014). By the early 1940s, exhibition of films in Mexico’s large cities had become the most popular form of entertainment (Tuñón, 1998), reaching around 70% of total ticketed entertainment expenditure in Mexico City (Paxman, 2008, p.  304). From around 730 cinemas in 1935 (Fein, 1994, p.  113), Mexico grew to 1400 permanent cinema theatres in 1945 (Noble, 2005), and to 2100 by 1958 (Paxman, 2008, p.  387). Exhibition of films, accordingly, grew significantly.

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Cinema venues were already popular in Mexico during the 1920s. In 1930, according to the Motion Pictures in Mexico, Central America, and Antillas Yearbook (cited by Vidal, 2008, p. 23), Mexico had 830 theatres (136 with equipment for sound). However, construction and opening of cinema theatres experienced a boom in the late 1930s, with the increased popularity of Hollywood talkies before the Second World War and with cinema-going becoming the most popular form of entertainment for national audiences. The Mexican market grew so fast and in such a consistent manner that it became of almost equal importance as Italy and Canada to US film exports (Paxman, 2008, p. 280). In contrast with the United States and other countries where big regional or national theatre chains were the norm during the late 1930s (Gomery, 1992; Lozano, 2019), in Mexico theatres were scattered geographically in relatively small chains or small groups of two to three cinemas. One example of the latter was a small number of theatres owned by American expatriate William Jenkins through different Mexican partners in Central Mexico. A former owner of sugar cane plantations in Puebla and investor in many other ventures, Jenkins had developed crucial contacts and friendship with the Mexican local and national elite of politicians and businessmen. By the late 1930s, he was buying or constructing cinema theatres in his city of residence (Puebla), as well as in neighbouring states like Veracruz and Oaxaca (Paxman, 2008). By 1940 he had six theatres co-owned with or managed by different Mexican partners.

First National Theatre Circuits In 1941 a private-public bank was founded: the Banco Cinematográfico. The bank was an attempt by the Mexican government, in association with private companies and entrepreneurs, to support the production, distribution, and exhibition of motion pictures. Soon after the bank’s creation, a local chain of theatres in Mexico City owned by another US expatriate, Theodore Gildred and Jenkins as one of his partners (with 12.5% participation), grew to 20 movie houses by leasing some other venues and adopting the name of Compañía Operadora de Teatros (COTSA). By acquiring additional shares owned by Banco Cinematográfico and Banco de Comercio, Jenkins managed to get majority control of COTSA in 1944. Now in control of this circuit, Jenkins and his Mexican partner Manuel Espinoza Yglesias added to it the theatres they already co-owned in Puebla, Oaxaca, Toluca, and Guadalajara, making it the largest movie chain in the country. By the end of 1944 Jenkins controlled a total of 60 theatres between COTSA and the venues managed separately by his other Mexican partner Gabriel Alarcon. By 1946 that total increased to over 80 theatres, and by 1950 to between 122 and 232, depending on whether leases and affiliates were counted (Paxman, 2008, p. 309). By 1953, the group oversaw more than 400 theatres all over Mexico. These totals reflect not only COTSA’s venues, but also the theatres grouped on a second independent circuit also owned by Jenkins and

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his partner Alarcón: the Cadena de Oro circuit, formerly owned by the radio mogul Emilio Azcárraga, who was forced to sell to Jenkins and Alarcon first six of his largest theatres and then all of his Cadena de Oro chain during the first half of the 1950s (Paxman, 2008, p. 358). With this growth and power, the Jenkins group was able to negotiate very favourable terms with film distributors and to force small chains and independent theatres owners to sell them their venues. By the early 1950s, the two circuits had made local and regional exhibitors all over Mexico to sell their theatres to them or to affiliate them to any of their two chains (Paxman, 2008, p. 313). Also, the group carried out controversial exhibition strategies, like giving very short premieres to newly released films (and then programming re-­ runs of the same titles) to avoid the high percentage of the box office theatres had to pay to producers in the case of premieres (Paxman, 2008, p.  355). COTSA and Cadena de Oro would also exert pressure on distributors, signing exclusivity contracts for major movies and blocking independent theatres from getting the most popular and attractive films, including the Mexican ones. A third theatre chain was the one owned by former Mexico’s president Abelardo L. Rodriguez: Cadena del Pacífico, with 65 movie houses, most of them located in the Northwestern part of Mexico (Trujillo, 2019; Paxman, 2008, p.  311). By 1957, this chain would transfer to Jenkins and Alarcon’s Cadena de Oro circuit. A fourth circuit, located in Northeastern Mexico and owned by the Rodriguez brothers of Monterrey (the third largest city in the country), had over 40 theatres in Nuevo Leon and the neighbouring states of Tamaulipas and Coahuila. Founded in 1904, this powerful regional group would be taken over in 1947 by the Cadena de Oro circuit, as an additional proof of the quasi-­ monopolistic control of Mexican film exhibition by Jenkins and his group (Paxman, 2008, p. 354). During the 1940s, theatre owners retained 50% of the box office, distributors about 20%, the government (through taxes) 15%, and the remaining 15% was for the producers of the national movies exhibited (Paxman, 2008, p. 305). This seemed to still be the case in 1952. From 1950 to 1952, the Mexican film industry released 314 movies, a much higher number than the combined 256 titles from 1940 to 1944, the assumed peak of the so-called Golden Age (Martínez de la Rosa, 2011, p. 38). Around 1947, Mexican film producers, worried about the return of full competition by Hollywood after the war, decided to opt for low-budget formula productions set in working-class urban settings, favouring simplistic and moralistic plots about urban “poor but decent and hard-working” characters, both in dramas and in comedies, or contradictory views on the brothel-cabaret genre in which a poor girl from a rural area travels to the big city and ends up singing or dancing in a cabaret (De la Vega Alfaro, 2000, pp. 166–170). By the early 1950s, this strategy was in full swing. Mexican productions per year were up, but the quality was low.

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Exhibition of Movies in the Mexican Provinces According to the Census, Mexico had 25.8  million inhabitants in 1950. As discussed above, the country had experienced a strong migration from rural areas to the larger cities during the last three decades and thousands of people were trying to adapt to the increased urbanisation and modern practices of these towns. While Mexico City was by far the largest city in the country with over three million inhabitants (Séptimo Censo General de Población, 1950), there were some other cities with relatively large populations including three of the ones discussed in this study: Monterrey and Torreón in the north, and León in the centre (see Table 5.1). Even smaller cities like the remaining three mentioned in this paper (Veracruz, Tampico, and Saltillo) were at the beginning of the 1950s attracting rural population and experiencing strong modernisation processes (Kehoe & Meza, 2013). These six locations in the Mexican provinces, as was the case in most of the nation’s urban areas, had a good number of cinema theatres (see Tables 5.1 and 5.2). As the largest city of the six, Monterrey had the highest number of theatres in 1952: 21. Most of the spacious and beautifully decorated cinemas were located in the downtown area, like the Reforma (3240 seats), the Monterrey (3243), the Florida (2050), the Encanto (1885), and the Elizondo (1792). All these theatres belonged to Jenkins and Alarcon’s Cadena de Oro, who had forced the powerful regional Rodriguez Circuit of Monterrey to transfer their control to them in 1947 (Paxman, 2008). In Torreón, three movie palaces were the most prominent: the Royal (4000 seats), the Martinez (3000), and the Nazas (2300). There is no information available yet about the number of seats of movie palaces in the rest of the cities included in this project, but they must have been similar to the ones in Torreón. Most of them, by 1952 or by the end of that decade, were owned or affiliated to the Jenkins, Alarcon, and Espinoza Yglesias’ circuits.

Table 5.1  Cities included in the study by population, number of theatres, and percentage of migrants City León, Guanajuato Monterrey, Nuevo León Saltillo, Coahuila Tampico, Tamaulipas Torreón, Coahuila Veracruz, Veracruz Total

Population 1950a

# of theatresb

Percentage of migrants in the state

157,343 339,292 98,603 96,541 147,233 107,434 946,446

4 21 3 10 8 6 52

4.2 18.4 19.8 30.1 19.8 8.1

Mexican Census, 1950

a

Movie listing in local newspapers. Many more theatres not advertising in the local newspapers (like neighborhood venues) may have existed in each of the six cities b

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Table 5.2  Percentage of US and Mexican screenings per city and theatre 1952 City

U.S. Mexican Total Screenings City %

%

%

León Coliseo

23

77

100

78

Hernan

59

41

100

61

Isabel Vera

41 25

59 75

100 100

76 61

Total 37 Monterrey Alameda 42 (1940) America 18 Araceli 96 (1948) Autocinema 100 Aloha Bernardo 8 Reyes (1929) Brasil 30 Eden (1927) 30

63

100

278

58

100

112

82 4

100 100

104 89

0

100

82

92

100

109

70 70

100 100

56 82

97

3

100

114

98

2

100

100

62

38

100

95

58

42

100

78

27

73

100

96

9

91

100

106

75

25

100

79

46

54

100

104

71 45

29 55

100 100

35 80

98 92

2 8

100 100

48

52

100

Elizondo (1945) Encanto (1937) Escobedo (1929) Florida (1942) Lirico (1920) Maravillas Monterrey (1947) Palacio (1930s) Principal Reforma (1948) Rex (1937) Rodriguez (1923) Rosita

#

U.S. Mexican Total Screenings %

%

%

#

42

58

100

26

35

65

100

80

12 86

88 14

100 100

66 62

77 26 30

23 74 70

100 100 100

66 65 57

70 25

30 75

100 100

94 67

76

24

100

66

49

51

100

649

94

6

100

132

39

61

100

130

48

52

100

99

19

81

100

113

52

48

100

92

88

12

100

16

53

47

100

102

56

44

100

103

53

47

100

787

Veracruz Díaz Mirón

56

44

100

87

96 108

Reforma Salvatierra

72 6

28 94

100 100

85 18

99

Variedades

62

38

100

79

Tampico Alcázar (1921) Alhambra (1920) Altamira Encanto (1944) Florida Isabel Politeama (1916) Reforma Tamesí Tampico (1944) Total Torreón Cine Laguna Cinelandia (1946) Cinelena Martinez (1930) Modelo (1937) Nazas (1952) Princesa (1919) Royal (1923) Total

(continued)

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Table 5.2 (continued) City

Zaragoza (1923) Total Saltillo Cine Royal Cine Saltillo Cinema Palacio (1941) Total

U.S. Mexican Total Screenings City %

%

%

#

46

54

100

106

57

43

100

1930

43 61 83

57 39 17

100 100 100

378 380 370

62

38

100

1128

U.S. Mexican Total Screenings %

%

%

#

Veracruz

46

54

100

26

Victoria Total

43 56

57 44

100 100

42 337

The majority of movies exhibited in Mexican theatres since the late 1910s were from the United States.2 In contrast, only 30 Mexican narrative films were made between 1896 and 1915, due in part to the lack of cameras and film as well as a lack of capital to invest in this new industry (De la Vega Alfaro, 1991, p.  20). From 1916 to 1922, the period right after the end of the Mexican Revolution, the production of national narrative features reached 70 (10 films per year), with filmmakers following the newly established tradition of the Mexican Revolution’s national cinematography based on rural scenery characteristic of the numerous documentaries about the armed conflict (De la Vega Alfaro, 1991, p.  22). From 1923 to 1930, however, Mexican production decreased significantly to only 40 features, due to a dramatic increase in Hollywood movies coming to Mexico in exchange for military and technological aid to stabilise the country (De la Vega Alfaro, 1991, p.  23). With the advent of sound, the demand for films in Spanish became huge and Hollywood was unable to satisfy Latin American audiences with its hybrid productions in which they tended to mix all sorts of Spanish-language accents (Gunckel, 2008). By the mid-1930s, Mexican films started to proliferate based on several reasons: the demand for Spanish-language talkies; the return to the country by Mexican technicians, photographers, producers, actors who had been trained in Hollywood but that had difficulties finding jobs there due to the great recession of the early 1930s; and the public policies of the Mexican federal government promoting national culture and entertainment. In addition, the subtitling of Hollywood films made Mexican audiences, especially the ones in the provinces, to prefer national productions (Fein, 1996, p. 565). A report done in 1937 by US officials on film exhibition in Mexico, cited by Fein stated: 2  According to Serna (2014, p. 26), up to 1915, cinema theatres typically featured some combination of Italian and French films. By the late 1910s, however, American films, specifically serials, became increasingly popular while the distribution of films from Europe affected since the First World War decreased even more, resulting in US films monopolising Mexican screens by the early 1920s.

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It is estimated that although almost nine times as many American feature films as national feature films were exhibited during 1937, the American films earned only 36.01 percent of the total gross rental for all films shown throughout Mexico, as compared to 41.46 percent for nationally produced films. (Fein, 1996, p. 171)

At the end of the 1930s, Mexico was producing between 35 and 42 movies per year (Amador & Ayala Blanco, 1977, p. 275). The early 1940s are considered the real Golden Age of Mexican cinema, but the number of national features made during the 1950s, despite the decrease in quality and the recurrence of basic formulaic stories and formats, was the highest ever (Amador & Ayala Blanco, 1985; De la Vega Alfaro, 2000; Fein, 1994; Paxman, 2008). The next section discusses the programming of Mexican and American films in six Mexican cities during the year 1952: León, Monterrey, Saltillo, Tampico, Torreón, and Veracruz.3 Based on the newspaper movie listings for 52 days (one per each week of that year) on each city, the analysis explores and compares the number and type of productions exhibited in the six cities, as well as the most popular movies. The year selected for this chapter, 1952, was typical of the early 1950s: high production of low-quality national films (98 features), and even higher number of Hollywood new releases (294 titles), a quasi-­ monopoly in the exhibition of foreign and national movies, and an increasingly fast urban growth in the six sampled cities.

Popularity of Mexican Films Critics agree that by the late 1940s, and despite the increasing number of productions, the quality of Mexican films had drastically diminished (Fein, 1996; Noble, 2005; De la Vega Alfaro, 2000). Looking at the origin of pictures exhibited in 1952 in the six cities, one would be tempted to believe quality was not an issue for their audiences. While Hollywood productions represented 62% of total film releases in Mexico City during that year versus only 21% represented by national films (Amador & Ayala Blanco, 1985), Table 5.3 shows that Mexican movies accounted for 40% of total screenings in our six cities, while Hollywood films represented 50%. In some of the cities, like Tampico and León, screenings of Mexican films even surpassed Hollywood screenings.4 It is not completely clear why Mexican films were much more popular in these six cities than in the capital of the country, but one reason may be that the population outside of Mexico City had a more local and nationalist

3  These six cities were included because each had a research team affiliated to the Screen Culture in Mexico network. 4  Our data for Saltillo, located in Northeastern Mexico, and an hour away from Monterrey, seems to be an anomaly. This may be either because only first-run movie palaces advertised in the local press or due to a tight control of local exhibition by chains favouring Hollywood movies.

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Table 5.3  Number of screenings of films in 1952 by country of origin in cinema theatres of six Mexican provincial cities Country USA

León

107 32.7% México 191 58.4% UK 7 2.1% Spain 11 3.4% France 2 0.6% Italy 6 1.8% Argentina 2 0.6% Other Lat Am 1 0.3% Philippines, India, Japan 0 0.0% Other European countries 0 0.0% Unidentified 0 0.0% Total 327 100%

Monterrey Saltillo Tampico Torreón Veracruz Total 1194 51.7% 895 38.7% 57 2.5% 25 1.1% 27 1.2% 19 0.8% 17 0.7% 7 0.3% 1 0.0% 3 0.1% 65 2.8% 2310 100%

762 58.2% 458 35.0% 44 3.4% 16 1.2% 12 0.9% 4 0.3% 4 0.3% 4 0.3% 4 0.3% 0 0.0% 2 0.2% 1310 100%

342 42.3% 357 44.1% 22 2.7% 31 3.8% 7 0.9% 16 2.0% 18 2.2% 8 1.0% 1 0.1% 3 0.3% 4 0.5% 809 100%

448 46.2% 409 42.2% 18 1.9% 15 1.5% 9 0.9% 12 1.2% 1 0.1% 0 0.0% 0 0.0% 2 0.2% 56 5.8% 970 100%

206 50.1% 161 39.2% 12 2.9% 11 2.7% 0 0.0% 5 1.2% 3 0.7% 1 0.2% 0 0.0% 0 0.0% 12 2.9% 411 100%

3059 49.8% 2471 40.3% 160 2.6% 109 1.8% 57 0.9% 62 1.0% 45 0.7% 21 0.4% 6 0.2% 4 0.1% 139 2.3% 6137 100%

outlook, in comparison with the more cosmopolitan Mexico City audiences5 (as explained by Fein, 1996, p. 171). It is important to note that in each of the cities included in this study we missed an undetermined number of small theatres located in the working-class barrios6 or in downtown areas which would not advertise in the local newspapers. Since these modest venues were even more likely than the big palaces to screen Mexican films, it could be argued that the latter were even more popular in these cities than what the tables reflect. There were, however, some important contrasts within the six cities. While Saltillo, Coahuila, located in the Northeast region of the country, was the city 5  According to our Screen Culture network’s database, the percentage of screenings in Mexico City was significantly lower for Mexican productions (26%) than in the six provincial cities included in our study (40% on average). The illiteracy rate for the country as a whole in 1950 was 44.2%, according to the VII Census. 6  The reliance of this analysis on newspaper listings due to the lack of local or regional archives with data about this kind of venues and their programming makes it difficult to calculate the number of theatres missing in our study. In the case of Monterrey, the availability of digitalised City Hall historical proceedings allowed us to identify 46 “Terrazas” (small cinemas with no roof operating in working-class neighbourhoods) during the 1940s and 1950s. In Torreón, at least 15 neighbourhood theatres were identified during the 1940s and 1950s, some of them exhibiting pictures in church yards (Chong et al., 2014, p. 76).

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with the highest percentage of US screenings (58%) and the lowest number of screenings for Mexican films (35%), León, Guanajuato, located in the central region of Mexico, showed the opposite tendency, with Mexican films accounting for 58% of total screenings vs only 33% for US films (see Table 5.3). One of the likely reasons for this significant difference between the two cities may have been their literacy rate. While only 55% of the population in Guanajuato (Leon’s state) knew how to read and write around 1950, the literacy rate in Coahuila (Saltillo’s state) was 84%, the highest for the six cities (Salgado Porcayo, 2022). Literacy was important because at that time Hollywood movies, except for animated children’s films, had to be screened with subtitles, dubbing being prohibited by the Ley Nacional de la Industria de Cinematografía passed in 1949 to make national films more competitive (Chaume, 2021; Iglesias, 2009). Monterrey’s and Torreon’s high literacy rates may also have played a role in the high number of US screenings (see Table 5.3). A second reason explaining the observed differences between the six cities may be the geographical location of each of them. Maritime ports like Veracruz and Tampico, for example, may have had a more cosmopolitan outlook among their inhabitants or higher accessibility to foreign films. In Veracruz, a city with a similar low literacy rate as Leon’s, Hollywood movies had a higher number of screenings than Mexican ones. Tampico, the other maritime port, had the highest number of screenings of non-American foreign features, also most likely due to its location and its consequent access to films from other countries. Demographic density, of course, was also an important factor. Large cities like Monterrey had many more cinema venues than smaller ones, thus becoming more attractive for distributors and more successful in getting the most recent national and foreign releases. There may be an alternative explanation for the high number of Mexican movies exhibited in the six cities: distribution and/or exhibitors’ practices adopted to pay lower fees or get higher percentages of the box office. The fact that exhibitors kept a higher share of the box office in the case of Mexican films (Paxman, 2008, p. 305) could have influenced their availability and programming patterns in the six cities.7 Regardless of the reasons explaining a higher or lower number of US and Mexican screenings within the six cities, however, it is clear that national films were more popular on the screens of these provincial towns than on Mexico City’s theatres, where Mexican films accounted for only 21% of total 1952 releases (Amador & Ayala Blanco, 1977). Evidence from the memories of Mexican cinema-goers in the six cities about these years shows that they had strong emotional bonds and fondness for Mexican films and stars independent

7  Most analysts and historians of 1950s Mexican cinema, however, point out the neglect of national films by Mexican exhibitors to the point of withholding new Mexican films from circulation (or “canning” them) due to the limited exhibition facilities and their preference to screen Hollywood films (Mora, 1982; Fein, 1996).

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from any cold and practical factors taken into account by distributors and exhibitors (Chong et al., 2016, p. 151; Lozano et al., 2017). Programming Comparison. In the six cities included in the analysis, some theatres would alternate Hollywood and Mexican movies in their programming while others tended to exhibit mostly one or the other (see Table 5.2). In Torreón, Coahuila, for example, the Modelo theatre, founded in 1937 and located in the historical downtown area, offered during the 52 days of the sample 48 screenings of Hollywood films and 44 screenings of Mexican ones. In the same city, however, 124 of the Laguna theatre screenings were for US films and only 8 for national films, while in the Martinez theatre, an old and beautiful movie palace inaugurated in 1930 (Chong et al., 2014, p. 71), 92 of its screenings were Mexican productions vs only 21 US films. The same situation happened in the rest of the cities. In Monterrey, the largest of the 6 cities, 44 screenings in the Cine Reforma (5400 seats) were of Mexican films and 36 of American ones; 111 screenings in the beautiful downtown palace Elizondo were for US movies, while only 3 were for national productions, while in the popular Bernardo Reyes and Maravillas theatres, most of their screenings were Mexican films. In each of the six cities, thus, screenings of Mexican films were higher or lower in different theatres and some venues would show preferences for US or for Mexican films while others would program a mix of the two, reflecting their patrons’ socio-demographic characteristics, with upper-class, well-educated cinema-goers being more likely to attend Hollywood screenings in the big palaces (Noble, 2005, pp. 76–77).

Mexican and US Films with the Highest Number of Screenings Mexican Films As Table 5.4 shows, most of the films with the highest number of screenings in the six cities were Mexican, except for Tampico. Mexican movies were included overwhelmingly in the top ten titles screened in each city, with Leon and Saltillo including only one US feature in their list, Monterrey only two, and Torreón and Veracruz only three. The only exception was Tampico, with not so recent US titles like Bomba, the Jungle Boy (Ford Beebe, 1949), Dallas (Stuart Heisler, 1950), The Enforcer (Bretaigne Windust & Raoul Walsh, 1951), Abbot and Costello meet the Killer, Boris Karloff (Charles Barton, 1949), An Ideal Husband (Alexander Korda, 1947), and Deadline at Dawn (Harold Clurman & William Cameron Menzies, 1946). Mexican and American titles were different for each city, with some few exceptions, reflecting the lack of a centralised and updated distribution system for the provinces, as well as a generalised lack of access to the newest releases, as reflected by an abundance of second- or third-run titles released one to three years before. Programming in

Saltillo

Tampico

10 Baile mi rey (Dance my King! Roberto Rodríguez, 1951)

8 Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff (Charles Barton, 1949)

3 ¿Qué te ha dado esa 13 Si yo fuera Diputado 10 Bomba, the jungle mujer? (What has that (If I were a boy (Ford Beebe, woman done to you? Representative, 1949) Ismael Rodríguez, Miguel 1951) M. Rodríguez, 1952) 3 Lucha libre (The 12 El derecho de nacer 9 Dallas (Stuart magnificent beast, (The right to be born, Heisler, 1950) Chano Urueta, 1952) Zacarías Gómez Urquiza, 1952) 3 David and Bathsheba 11 ¿Qué te ha dado esa 8 Inmaculada (Henry King, 1951) mujer? (What has that (Immaculate, Julio woman done to you? Bracho, 1950) Ismael Rodríguez, 1951) 3 El derecho de nacer 11 Amar fue su pecado 8 The Enforcer (The right to be born, (Sin of love, Rogelio (Bretaigne Zacarías Gómez A. González, 1951) Windust, Raoul Urquiza, 1952) Walsh, 1951)

Monterrey

All about Eve (Joseph 2 Cartas a Ufemia L. Mankiewicz, 1950) (Letters to Ufemia, José Díaz Morales, 1952)

Los enredos de una gallega (The entanglements of a Gallega, Fernando Soler, 1951) Vuelva el sábado (Come back on Saturday, René Cardona, 1951)

La hija del engaño (Daughter of deceit, Luis Buñuel, 1951)

Anillo de compromiso (Engagement ring, Emilio González Muriel1951)

León

4 En carne viva (Open wound, Alberto Gout, 1951)

5 The Tiger Woman (Spencer Gordon Bennet, Wallace Grissell, 1944) 5 Perdición de mujeres (Women’s downfall, Juan Orol, 1951) 5 El derecho de nacer (The right to be born, Zacarías Gómez Urquiza, 1952) 5 Con todo el corazón (With all the heart, Rafael E. Portas, 1951)

Torreón

Table 5.4  Mexican and foreign titles with most screenings in each of the cities in 52 days of 1952

3

6 Dos caras tiene el destino (Destiny has two faces, Agustín Delgado, 1951) 5 El mar y tú (You and the sea, Emilio Fernández, 1952)

(continued)

4 Si yo fuera Diputado 3 (If I were a Representative, Miguel M. Rodríguez, 1952) 4 ¿ ¿Qué te ha dado esa 2 mujer? (What has that woman done to you? Ismael Rodríguez, 1951)

3

4

8 El derecho de nacer (The right to be born, Zacarías Gómez Urquiza, 1952)

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Deadline at dawn (Harold Clurman, William Cameron Menzies, 1946) Nosotras las sirvientas (We, the maids, Zacarías Gómez, 1951)

9 Paraiso robado (Stolen 8 Paradise, Julio Bracho, 1951)

Con todo el corazón (With all the heart, 1951)

8

9 Mujeres sin mañana (Women with no future, Tito Davison, 1951)

8

4 Abie’s Irish Rose (A. Edward Sutherland, 1946)

2

2

4 Los huéspedes de 4 Bunco Squad (Herbert 2 la Marquesa I. Leeds, 1950) (Marquesa boarding house, Jaime Salvador, 1951) 4 Mi esposa y la 4 Cárcel de mujeres 2 otra (My wife (1951) and the other one, Alfredo Crevenna, 1952) 4 The phantom 4 Corazon de fiera 2 rider (Spencer (1951) Gordon Bennet, Fred Brannon, 1946)

Arroz amargo 4 La justicia del (Bitter rice, Lobo (Wolf’s Guiseppe de Santis, justice, Vicente 1948) Oroná, 1952)

8

Veracruz

4 Jungle Raiders 4 Five Fingers (Joseph (Lesley Selander, Mankiewicz, 1952) 1945)

An Ideal Husband (Alexander Korda, 1947)

Torreón

8

Tampico

Note: Titles in bold are for US films. Titles in bold and italics are for non-US foreign films. All other titles are for Mexican films

Doña Clarines (Madame Clarines, Eduardo Ugarte, 1951)

Saltillo

2 Gendarme de punto 10 Dos caras tiene el (Neighborhood destino (Destiny has Policeman, Joaquín two faces, Agustín Pardavé, 1951) Delgado, 1951) 2 ¡Mátenme porque me 10 El ceniciento muero! (Kill me (Cinderella Man, because I’m dying! Gilberto Martínez Ismael Rodríguez, Solares, 1952) 1951) 2 Si yo fuera Diputado 10 Los Tres Alegres (If I were a Compadres (The three Representative, happy compadres, Miguel Julián Soler, 1952) M. Rodríguez, 1952)

Monterrey

2 Alice in Wonderland (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, 1951) El mártir del Calvario 2 El beisbolista fenómeno (The martyr of (The amazing baseball calvary, Miguel player, 1951) Morayta, 1952)

Aventuras de un nuevo rico (Adventures of a new rich man, Rolando Aguilar, 1950) Canta y no llores (Sing, don’t cry, Alfonso Patiño Gómez, 1949)

Amar fue su pecado (Sin of love, Rogelio A. González, 1951)

León

Table 5.4 (continued)

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the six cities, thus, tended to favour Mexican films over US films, but new releases were scarce. Since the advent of talkies, English-language movies had not fared well in Mexico’s provinces: “The more provincial the Mexican audience the less popular were Hollywood’s English-language films” (Fein, 1996, p.  55). Cultural proximity could be seen as the most likely reason for these patterns in movie exhibition. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the less cosmopolitan and the less income and education audience members had the stronger preference for national motion pictures. Theatres in the provinces tended to screen a bigger percentage of national pictures than theatres in Mexico City, where Hollywood films were more popular (Fein, 1996). According to Paxman (2008, p. 389), more than 40% of Mexico City’s screen time in the late 1940s “was devoted to national features, and not because of quotas but due to public demand.” Table 5.4 shows that by 1952 this was the case in the provinces, although not in the capital of the country anymore. In that year, while national films accounted for only 26% of total screenings in Mexico City, according to our Cultura de la Pantalla network’s database, in provincial cities like the ones included in this study that percentage was between 14 and 31 percent points higher. Mexican productions with the highest number of screenings in 1952 were mostly set in urban, working-class settings, in contrast with the main national movies of the late 1930s and early 1940s based on the comedia-ranchera genre, with its idyllic depictions of rural towns, haciendas, and charros. As explained by de la Vega Alfaro (2000, p. 167), by the late 1940s Mexican producers and directors had discovered a popular low-budget formula: plots about urban working-class characters “paying homage to the economically disadvantaged social sectors of the big cities.” This formula was still popular in 1952. Many of the Mexican productions in the list of most exhibited films were urban comedies and dramas with working-class characters as the main protagonists. The movie with the highest number of screenings in any of the six cities during 1952 was El derecho de nacer (The Right to Be Born, Zacarías Gómez Urquiza, 1952), based on a Cuban radionovela (radioplay) about a black maid in Santiago fleeing to Havana to protect the son of her young mistress, who had him out of wedlock. Released in Mexico City in June 1952, this drama would break box office records staying engaged for seven straight weeks in Cine Orfeon (Agrasánchez, 2006, p. 130). That was also the case in Monterrey, Saltillo, Torreón, and Veracruz, as per its number of screenings (see Table 5.4). Other movies with high number of screenings were Mexican comedies with top actors Cantinflas, Tin Tan, and Pedro Infante, also based on urban settings: Si yo fuera Diputado (If I Were a Representative, Miguel Delgado, 1952), El Ceniciento (Cinderella Man, Gilberto Martínez Solares, 1952), and Qué te ha dado esa mujer (What Has That Woman Done to You?, Ismael Rodriguez, 1951). The only comedia ranchera, Cartas a Ufemia (Letters to Ufemia, José Díaz Morales, 1952), starring Pedro Infante and Lalo Gonzalez Piporro, had ten screenings in Monterrey and some few screenings in Saltillo and Torreón,

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reflecting the scarcity of national productions based on that genre by 1952. Exhibition of specific films in 1952 in these six provincial Mexican cities, thus, favoured national urban dramas and comedies over Hollywood films, as reflected in the total number of screenings for the top Mexican and US films listed in Table 5.4, despite the disproportionate number of US new releases over Mexican ones during that year at the national level: 294 vs 98, according to Amador and Ayala Blanco (1985, p. 356). Actors with the most appearances in Mexican movies exhibited in the six cities were Pedro Infante, Jorge Mistral, German Valdes Tin Tan, Pedro Armendariz, and Luis Aguilar (see Table 5.7). The exhibition of particular films in each of the six cities, however, was far from homogeneous. Cities with the highest population and the highest number of theatres like Monterrey had also the earliest releases and the highest number of screenings for new releases like El derecho de nacer and David and Bathsheba (Henry King, 1951). Saltillo, despite being much smaller than Torreon and Veracruz and despite having just three theatres listed in the local newspaper, ranked second in screenings for those two films, most likely due to Saltillo cinemas being managed from Monterrey by the same powerful cinema chain: The Jenkins Group. In cities like Leon, in contrast, there was no record of a single screening of these titles. The reason is not clear, but it may have to do with a lower economic relevance of the local market or less leverage of the local distribution/exhibition company, the Montes Circuit (González et  al., 2019), to get the blockbusters of the year. Not being part of any of the Jenkins’ chains (COTSA or Cadena de Oro), the Montes Circuit may not have had access to the top 1952 releases, as suggested by the low number of screenings (or the total lack of them) for the top ten Mexican and US films in the other five cities (see Table 5.4). At any rate, and as explained in the introduction, recent migrations from rural areas to these small- to medium-sized cities, plus other factors related to the lack of cultural and educational infrastructure (in contrast with Mexico City), may have contributed to the popularity of Mexican films. As discussed above, an alternative explanation, however, cannot be ruled out: the possibility of this striking difference in the patterns of exhibition of Mexican films between the capital and the provinces depending mostly on distribution and exhibition interests and not on cinema-goers’ preferences. The year of 1952 was when the federal government, worried about the “canning” of Mexican films by distributors, launched the Plan Garduño, a plan providing higher subsidies and financing to national films and attempting to restrict the importation of foreign films (Noble, 2005, p. 17). It is not clear whether the canning of Mexican films was a widespread phenomenon in the country or if it was mostly restricted to Mexico City, where the massive number of cinema-goers and theatres (81 in 1952 according to Amador & Ayala Blanco, 1977) may have allowed for more lucrative deals with the Hollywood distribution companies, thus favouring US screenings. Were mostly old Mexican films being exhibited in these provincial cinemas due to a widespread canning of newer national productions? Were exhibitors favouring second- and third-run Mexican titles to get major cuts

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from the box office? Was the high number of screenings of national films due to their popularity among audiences? A combination of these three factors? It is hard to tell based on the current evidence, but it seems plausible that the best answer was the latter. US Films The US production with the most screenings in any of the six cities during the sample days of 1952 (see Table 5.4) was David and Bathsheba (Henry King, 1951), with eleven screenings in Monterrey, four in Saltillo, two in Tampico, and one in Torreón.8 With a population of 98.2% Catholics in the 1950s, it is no wonder films like David and Bathsheba would be extremely popular in Mexico. In fact, the US 1950 blockbuster Samson and Delilah (Cecil B. DeMille, 1949) also had 12 screenings in our provincial cities during the 52 sampled days, despite not being a recent release. US animated features like Alice in Wonderland (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, & Hamilton Luske, 1951), according to federal regulations, were the only foreign films that could be dubbed into Spanish, making them more appealing to Mexican provincial cinema-goers with lower levels of literacy. Despite this, and perhaps reflecting the box office failure at the time of this particular animated movie in other countries, Alice in Wonderland was screened only in highly literate Monterrey (nine screenings) and Saltillo (eight screenings), two cities apparently considered as one single market by the Jenkins group due to their geographical proximity. Many of the US films screened the most in our sampled cities (with the exception of Monterrey) were pretty old (see Table 5.4), reflecting the same structural limitations of these provincial cinemas to get the new blockbusters available in Mexico City. As discussed above, four of the six American films with the highest screenings in Tampico were from the second half of the 1940s. The Hollywood films with the highest number of screenings in Torreón, similarly, were several years old: The Tiger Woman (Spencer Gordon Bennet & Wallace Grissell, 1944), Jungle Raiders (Lesley Seleander, 1945), and The Phantom Rider (Spencer Gordon Bennet & Fred C. Brannon, 1946). None of the US films in the top ten list of the six cities was from 1952. In fact, as Table 5.5 shows, around 42% of all US movies screened in Leon, Tampico, and Veracruz during 1952 were 1940s productions (or older in some instances). Percentages of old Hollywood movies were also significant in Saltillo and Torreón, with 32–34% of screenings devoted to films from the 1940s or older. Monterrey, due to its size and its number of theatres, was the city with the lowest screening of old US movies: 20% were from the 1940s or older (see Table 5.5). Actors with the most appearances in Hollywood movies exhibited in the six cities were Susan Hayward, Patricia Neal, Errol Flynn, Kirk Douglas, and Ruth Roman (see Table 5.7). 8  The film is not included in Table 5.4 for Saltillo, Tampico, and Torreón because it did not make it into their ten titles with the highest number of screenings.

Total

1952

1951

1950

1940s

Monterrey 1920s–1930s

Total

1952

1951

1950

1940s

León 1920s–1930s

City/ years

0 0.0% 21 12.2% 45 26.2% 69 40.1% 37 21.5% 172 100%

1 0.1% 89 10.7% 174 21.0% 445 53.7% 120 14.5% 829 100%

17 1.6% 198 18.5% 198 18.5% 539 50.4% 118 11.0% 1070 100%

México

5 5.0% 38 37.6% 21 20.8% 36 35.6% 1 1.0% 101 100%

US

18 0.9% 287 15.1% 372 19.6% 984 51.8% 238 12.5% 1899 100%

5 1.8% 59 21.6% 66 24.2% 105 38.5% 38 13.9% 273 100%

Total

Total

1952

1951

1950

1940s

Tampico 1920s–1930s

Total

1952

1951

1950

1940s

Saltillo 1920s–1930s

City/ years

27 9.2% 97 33.1% 74 25.3% 73 24.9% 22 7.5% 293 100%

19 2.7% 207 29.7% 115 16.5% 268 38.5% 88 12.6% 697 100%

US

7 2.3% 17 5.6% 42 13.7% 125 40.8% 115 37.6% 306 100%

0 0.0% 22 5.3% 47 11.3% 142 34.2% 204 49.2% 415 100%

México

Table 5.5  Number of US and Mexican films by year of production and by city

34 5.7% 114 19.0% 116 19.4% 198 33.1% 137 22.9% 599 100%

19 1.7% 229 20.6% 162 14.6% 410 36.9% 292 26.3% 1112 100%

Total

Total

1952

1951

1950

1940s

Veracruz 1920s–1930s

Total

1952

1951

1950

1940s

Torreón 1920s–1930s

City/ years

16 8.6% 63 33.9% 55 29.6% 41 22.0% 11 5.9% 186 100%

28 6.8% 112 27.3% 96 23.4% 131 32.0% 43 10.5% 410 100%

US

1 0.7% 14 9.7% 14 9.7% 59 41.0% 56 38.9% 144 100%

4 1.1% 70 19.0% 84 22.8% 157 42.5% 54 14.6% 369 100%

México

17 5.2% 77 23.3% 69 20.9% 100 30.3% 67 20.3% 330 100%

32 4.1% 182 23.4% 180 23.1% 288 37.0% 97 12.5% 779 100%

Total

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Screenings and Release Dates for the Top-Gross US Films of 1951 and 1952 The few Hollywood blockbusters released during 1951 and 1952 in the United States that were included in the programming of our provincial cities’ theatres reached their screens between four and twelve months later than their release in their original country. High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952) and Show Boat (George Sidney, 1951) reached the screens in some of these cities only 4.5 months after their US release, while the first screenings in any of these cities for The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Henry King, 1951) and Captain Horatio Hornblower (Raoul Walsh, 1951) took 12 months (see Table 5.6). However, in most cases, these delayed dates were not that different from the first screenings of the same blockbusters in Mexico City. According to Table 5.6, most of the twenty top-­ gross films in the US for both years were released in at least one of the six provincial cities during the same month or at the latest two or two and a half months later than in the capital of Mexico. The fact that most major releases in the United States reached these provincial cities around the same time that they were screened in Mexico City suggests that the high number of screenings for old Hollywood movies reported in Table  5.5 were more about the box office cut exhibitors would get from second- or third-run movies than about limitations in the geographical reach of Mexican distributors. While it is clear that the most screened US movies and their stars were an important part of the screen culture of the six cities’ inhabitants as reflected in the memories of cinema-goers in some of these cities (Chong et  al., 2016; Lozano et al., 2018), it is unclear whether many of the other Hollywood films shown in these cities were as interesting and impactful on local audiences as the major films or whether they were scheduled in the theatres only because of the block booking policies of the US and regional distributors in Mexico or as fillers (in the case of old productions). Whether this was the case or not, our oral histories in the six cities reflect a clear recognition of and admiration for the major Hollywood stars of the period at a par with the popularity and fascination with Mexican major stars.

Foreign Films In comparison with the high number of national and Hollywood films, the exhibition of non-US foreign films was not that common in the cinema theatres of these six towns. Combined, the number of screenings of foreign films represented only 10% of the total for that year, with British and Spanish films being relatively the most popular within that percentage (see Table  5.3). Monterrey, due to its population size and number of theatres, was the city with the highest number of non-US foreign screenings (156), followed by Tampico (106), which as an important seaport may have had a more diverse geographical supply of films. As in the case of Hollywood films, Leon was again the city screening less non-US foreign films, with only 29 screenings in the 52 sampled days.

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Table 5.6  Top-gross films in the United States in 1952 and 1951 by release dates in Mexico City and the six Mexican cities during 1952 Rank Film title 1952

US Release

Mexico City Release

1

May, 1952

Dec 18, 9 1952

Torreón (2), Veracruz (1)

Dec 25, 1951

Dec 25, 3 1952

Monterrey (2) Dec, 1952 (Monterrey)

July 30, 1952 Sep 14, 1952 April 11, 1952

Sep 26, 1952 July 1953 Oct 15, 1952

Torreón (1), Dec 13, 1952 Monterrey (1) (Torreón) None

2

3 4 5

6 7

8

9

The Greatest Show on Earth (Cecil B. de Mille, 1952) The snows of Kilimanjaro (Henry King, Roy Ward Baker, 1952) High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952) The Quiet Man (John Ford, 1952) Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1952) The world in his arms (Raoul Walsh, 1952) Million dollar Mermaid (Mervyn LeRoy, 1952) Invasion, USA (Alfred E. Green, 1952) Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs (William Cottrell, David Hand, Wilfred Jackson, 1937)

Dec 10, 1952

Monterrey (2), Torreón (1) None

May, 1953

1

Mexico City Release

Date of first screening in sampled cities

Dec 21, 1952 (Torreón)

Oct 25, 1952 (Monterrey)

None

None

Feb 13, 1952 (re-release)

US Release

2

4

Oct 9, 1952 May 2, 3 1953 Dec 4, 1952 June 10, 2 1953

1951 Film Title

Quo Vadis? (Mervyn LeRoy, Anthony Mann, 1951) David and Bathsheba (Henry King, 1951)

Weeks Screenings in in Mex the Six City Mexican provincial Cities

None

Weeks in Mex City

Screenings in the Six Date of first Mexican provincial screening in Cities sampled cities

Dec 25, Aug 6, 1951 1952

5

None

Aug 10, Dec 21, 1951 1951

4

Monterrey (13), Saltillo (4), Tampico (2), Torreón (1), Veracruz (1)

Feb 8, 1952 (Tampico)

(continued)

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Table 5.6 (continued) 1951 Film Title

US Release

Mexico City Release

Weeks in Mex City

Screenings in the Six Date of first Mexican provincial screening in Cities sampled cities Saltillo (4), Monterrey (3), Tampico (1) Saltillo (4), Monterrey (2), Torreón (1) Saltillo (4), Monterrey (3), Tampico (1), Veracruz (1) Monterrey (5), Torreón (1), León (1) Saltillo (4), Monterrey (2), Tampico (2)

Feb 9, 1952 (Monterrey)

3

Show boat (George Sep 24, Sidney, 1951) 1951

Dec 25, 1951

2

4

The African Queen (John Houston, 1951) A Streetcar named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951)

March 21, 1952 Sep 19, 1951

Oct 31, 1952

3

May 2, 1952

3

Strangers on a train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951) Captain Horatio Hornblower (Raoul Walsh, 1951) Across the wide Missouri (William A. Wellman, 1951) Call me Mister (Lloyd Bacon, 1951) The Great Caruso (Richard Thorpe, 1951) An American in Paris (Vincent Minelli, 1951)

June 30, Dec 7, 1951 1951

2

April 10, 1951

Jan 31, 1952

2

Oct 21, 1951

April 30, 2 1952

Saltillo (4), Monterrey (3), Torreón (2)

July 5, 1952 (Monterrey)

April 8, 1951

July 18, 1951

Monterrey (1), Veracruz (1)

April 5, 1952 (Monterrey)

Monterrey (4), Saltillo (4), Torreón (1) Monterrey (5), Saltillo (4)

January 19, 1952 (Torreón)

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

May 10, Oct 17, 1951 1951

4

Nov 11, April 9, 1951 1952

3

Nov 30, 1952 (Torreón) May 3, 1952 (Monterrey)

Feb 9, 1952 (León) April 12, 1952 (Monterrey)

June 21, 1952 (Saltillo)

Source for rankings: https://www.the-­numbers.com/market/1951/top-­grossing-­movies; https://www.the-­ numbers.com/market/1952/top-­grossing-­movies

Spanish Films. Since the early 1930s, Mexico and Spain had tried to form a commercial bloc able to compete with Hollywood for the box office in the Spanish-language world (García Pastor, 2016). In response to the Spanish-­ language talkies produced by Hollywood to try to keep its dominance in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula after the advent of sound, representatives of the Spanish, Mexican, and Argentinian film industry, among others, organised a conference in Madrid to establish production, distribution, and exhibition agreements able to promote the exchange of films among their countries. During the 1930s, this agreement facilitated the exhibition of 28 Spanish films in Mexico and 39 Mexican films in Spain (García Pastor, 2016, p. 172). The second conference would happen in 1948, in the context of a consistent popularity of Mexican films in Spain and the increase of Mexican productions

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starring Spanish actors, as well as Spanish productions featuring Mexican stars. While these efforts never achieved the original goals of making Spanish and Latin American productions more competitive versus Hollywood films in each of the countries’ market, the exhibition of Spanish films in Mexico and the inclusion of Spanish stars in Mexican films were nonetheless relatively important in 1952. Spanish films exhibited the most in the six cities’ theatres during that year were mostly two to three years old (79 screenings out of 109), with only two screenings for movies from the current 1952 year. The most exhibited Spanish film in the six cities (eight screenings) had Mexican superstar Jorge Negrete in the lead: Teatro Apolo (Rafael Gil, 1950), about a Mexican businessman who falls for a Madrid’s chorus girl who wants to become a Zarzuela dancer in the early twentieth century. Some other Spanish pictures with Mexican stars in the lead were La Corona Negra (Black Crown, Luis Saslavsky, 1951), and La noche del sábado (Saturday Night, Rafael Gil, 1950) starring Mexican diva María Félix. However, films from this country with Spanish actors like Jorge Mistral and Fernando Fernán Gómez were also popular, as per the number of screenings in the sampled cities. In fact, Mexican actress María Felix had the highest number of appearances within Spanish movies, with Amparo Rivelles (a Spanish actress who worked 20 years in Mexico) in second place, Spanish actress and director Ana Mariscal in third, and Mexican celebrity Jorge Negrete in fourth place, tied with Fernando F. Gómez (see Table 5.7). British Films. Although marginal in comparison with the number of Hollywood and Mexican screenings, British pictures were third in the number of screenings in the six cities with 160, significantly above Spanish ones (see Table 5.3). Very few UK titles had a large number of screenings, except for two movies with Stewart Granger as the lead: Saraband for Dead Lovers (Basil Dearden, 1948), exhibited several times in Monterrey, Torreón, and Saltillo, and Blanche Fury (Marc Allegret, 1947), exhibited in Monterrey, Torreón, Saltillo, and Tampico. Hotel Sahara (Ken Annakin, 1951) and Captain Horatio Hornblower (Raoul Walsh, 1951), a Warner Bros movie with Gregory Peck in the leading role, were the two other British films with the highest number of screenings. Actors with the most screenings in the six cities in British films were Stewart Granger in first place and her partner in Saraband (Basil Dearden, 1948) the French actress Françoise Rosay in second. Other actors with the most appearances in British productions were Valerie Hobson, Marlene Dietrich, and Trevor Howard (see Table 5.7). The low number of screenings for British films may be understandable if the number of releases of British films in Mexico City during 1952 is considered: 22 (Amador & Ayala Blanco, 1985, p. 356). However, this number was a significant improvement over the nine British films released during the previous year in the capital of the country (Amador & Ayala Blanco, 1985, p. 356). The 22 films were mostly two to four years old, with only one having been released in the United Kingdom during 1952 (Stolen Face, Terence Fisher, 1952). The British films screened in the six provincial cities were on average older than the

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Table 5.7  Most popular actors in six Mexican cities by country of origin of films and number of screenings: 1952 U.S.

1032 México

Susan Hayward

54

Pedro Infante

Patricia Neal

53

Jorge Mistral

Errol Flynn

49

Kirk Douglas

48

Germán Valdés “Tin Tan” Pedro Armendáriz

Ruth Roman

44

Luis Aguilar

Gregory Peck

43

Abel Salazar

Jeff Chandler

42

Miroslava

Steve Cochran

37

Marga López

Gary Cooper James Mason

36 34

Humphrey Bogart Van Johnson

33

Arturo de Córdova Adalberto Mtz Resortes Fernando Soler

33

Gloria Marín

Virginia Mayo Johnny Weissmuller Tyrone Power

33 32

Rosa Carmina Antonio Badú

32

Emilia Guiu

2556 United Kingdom

191 Spain

186 Stewart 29 María Félix Granger 138 Françoise 12 Amparo Rivelles Rosay 119 Valerie 11 Ana Mariscal Hobson 118 Marlene 9 Fernando Dietrich F. Gómez 113 Trevor 8 Jorge Negrete Howard 109 Gregory Peck 7 Ma de los A. Morales 102 Virginia 7 Fernando Rey Mayo 94 Ann Blyth 6 Carmen Gonzalez 92 Ann Todd 6 Jorge Mistral 90 Anouk Aimee 6 María Rosa Salgado 89 Jane Wyman 6 Nini Marshall 89 Moira Shearer 79 Peter Ustinov 78 Tyrone Power 77 Yvonne De Carlo

158 11 10 9 8 8 8 7 6 6 6 6

6 Rafael Durán

6

6 Roberto Font 6 Rossano Brazzi

6 6

6 Alfredo Mayo

5

ones exhibited in Mexico City. In Monterrey, for example, nine screenings out of the total 57 screenings of British films were for pictures produced between 1936 and 1947 while 30 were for films produced in 1950 and 1951. All British films with the highest number of screenings in the six provincial cities had also been released that same year for the first time in Mexico City. Other Countries. Screenings of films from foreign countries other than Spain and the United Kingdom were scarce in the movie houses of the six cities. The number of screenings of films originating in France, Italy, Argentina, etc. combined, represented less than 3% of the total number of screenings during the 52 days of 1952 (see Table 5.3). The close links of Mexican exhibitors (controlled on the most part by the Jenkins and Mexican partners chains) with the US local distributors (Fein, 1996, p. 621) as well as the lack of familiarity of Mexican audiences with European or Latin American films due to their low historical availability accounted for the scarce number of screenings for non-US films in these cities.

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Conclusion This chapter discussed the programming of Mexican and American films in six Mexican provincial cities during 1952: León, Monterrey, Saltillo, Tampico, Torreón, and Veracruz. The analysis explored and compared the number and type of productions exhibited in the six cities during that year, as well as the movies with the highest number of screenings. From a media flows perspective, 1952 allows us to see the coexistence of a transnational flow of films (mostly from Hollywood) and a significant counterflow of national movies. Theatres in these six provincial cities, during this period, seem to have provided their audiences with a balanced mix of US and Mexican films despite the drastically uneven number of national releases versus American ones in 1952, reflecting the popularity of national contents among viewers who were less cosmopolitan and literate than their Mexico City’s counterparts. Hollywood movies, however, seemed to be as popular as Mexican ones if we assume a correlation between programming and consumption. Hollywood films represented on average 50% of all 1952 screenings in the six towns, suggesting a high consumption of American films by these provincial audiences. Our forthcoming analysis of the oral history interviews with seniors from these six cities will allow us to discern whether Hollywood films were as preferred and cherished by cinema-goers as Mexican films, something that seems likely, but for now, we can only refer to programming data and not to the actual consumption and appropriation of either US or Mexican productions. According to our analysis, the titles with the highest number of screenings in the six cities were mostly Mexican productions set in urban, working-class settings, featuring urban working-class characters from the economically disadvantaged social sectors of the big cities. These plots, while popular among audiences with low SES, would eventually diminish the appeal of national films among the middle classes, resulting in a clear distinction of preferences among the former and the latter. Films from countries other than the United States were scarce in 1952, representing together only 10% of all screenings in the six cities. This percentage was lower than the percentage represented by non-US foreign releases in Mexico City from 1950 to 1952 (15–18% of all new releases) (Amador & Ayala Blanco, 1985), reflecting perhaps that provincial audiences were also less interested in foreign films than their Mexico City’s counterparts. The United Kingdom and Spain were by far the countries represented the most in the small number of screenings devoted to foreign films. The relative popularity of Spanish films in the six cities, however, was not only because of cultural proximity but also due in part to Mexican most famous actors and actresses starring in them, like Jorge Negrete and María Felix, or Spanish actors who also worked in Mexican films, like Amparo Rivelles, and Jorge Mistral. In the case of the screening of UK films, a long third place in the sampled cities after Hollywood and Mexican shows the small percentage seemed to be more a

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supply than a demand problem, if we look at the low number of British films released in Mexico City during 1952 (5) and 1952 (22). This comparison of the programming of films in six provincial cities in Mexico is only a first step to contribute to a more integral comparative understanding of historical exhibition patterns in the Mexican province and to redress the long-time held focus on the capital by film and cinema scholars. More cities should be included (especially from the South of Mexico) and other historical periods considered in future studies to have a clearer picture of the historical peculiarities in the screen culture of Mexicans living outside the capital. Only then the history of cinema venues and cinema-goers in the small and medium-­ size towns outside Mexico City will be fully known and understood.

References Agrasánchez, R. (2006). Mexican movies in the United States. A history of films, theaters and audiences, 1920–1960. McFarland & Company. Amador, M.  L., & Ayala Blanco, J. (1977). Cartelera cinematográfica 1930–1939. Filmoteca UNAM. Amador, M.  L., & Ayala Blanco, J. (1982). Cartelera cinematográfica 1940–1949. UNAM. Amador, M.  L., & Ayala Blanco, J. (1985). Cartelera cinematográfica 1950–1959. UNAM. Ayala Blanco, J. (2017). La aventura del cine mexicano en la época de oro y después (1931–1967). UNAM. Castro Ricalde, M. (2014). El cine mexicano de la edad de oro y su impacto internacional. La Colmena, 82, 9–16. Chaume, F. (2021). Historia de la traducción audiovisual. Portal digital de historia de la traducción en España. Retrieved March 9, 2023, from https://phte.upf.edu/ hte/siglo-­xx-­xxi/chaume/ Chong, B., Lozano, J. C., & Meers, P. (2014). El cine en Torreón, Coahuila en sus orígenes y durante los procesos de urbanización y modernización de la ciudad. Anuario CONEICC de Investigación de la Comunicación, 21, 59–87. Chong, B., Ornelas, J. L., Solís, J., & Flores, J. I. (2016). Las audiencias de cine en Torreón, Coahuila, México, durante las décadas 1940–1960. Global Media Journal Mexico, 13(25), 140–158. https://gmjmexico.uanl.mx/index.php/GMJ_EI/article/view/259 De la Vega Alfaro, E. (1991). La industria cinematográfica mexicana. Perfil histórico-­ social. Editorial Universidad de Guadalajara. De la Vega Alfaro, E. (2000). The decline of the Golden Age and the making of the crisis. In J. Hershfield & D. R. Maciel (Eds.), Mexico’s cinema: A century of films and filmmakers (pp. 165–191). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Fein, S. (1994). Hollywood, U.S.-Mexican relations, and the devolution of the “Golden Age” of Mexican cinema. Film-Historia, 4(2), 103–135. Fein, S. (1996). Hollywood and United States-Mexico relations in the Golden Age of Mexican cinema. Doctoral dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.

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García Pastor, A. (2016). Relaciones entre el contexto cinematográfico español y el latinoamericano. Estudio del cine mexicano de los años 40 visto a través de la revista primer plano. Historia Digital, 16(27), 165–238. García Riera, E. (1969). Historia documental del cine mexicano. Ediciones Era. Gomery, D. (1992). Shared pleasures: A history of movie presentation in the United States. University of Wisconsin Press. González, J. M., Delgado, E., Ortega, J., & Meers, P. (2019). Exhibición y programación cinematográfica en León, México desde la perspectiva de la nueva historia del cine (1940 A 1970). Global Media Journal México, 16(30), 28–44. https://rio. tamiu.edu/gmj/vol16/iss30/2/ Gunckel, C. (2008). The war of the accents: Spanish language Hollywood films in Mexican Los Angeles. Film History: An International Journal, 20(3), 325–343. Iglesias, L. A. (2009). Los doblajes en español de los clásicos Disney. Doctoral dissertation, Universidad de Salamanca. Kehoe, T., & Meza, F. (2013). Crecimiento rápido seguido de estancamiento: México (1950–2010). El Trimestre Económico, 80(318), 237–280. Lozano, J. C. (2019). Exhibiting films in a predominantly Mexican-American market: The case of Laredo, Texas, a small USA-Mexico border town, 1896–1960. In D. Biltereyst, R. Maltby, & P. Meers (Eds.), The Routledge companion to new cinema history (pp. 254–268). Routledge. Lozano, J. C., Biltereyst, D., & Meers, P. (2017). Naive and sophisticated long-term readings of foreign and national films viewed in a Mexican northern town during the 1930–60s. Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas, 14(3), 277–296. https:// doi.org/10.1386/slac.14.3.277_1 Lozano, J. C., Meers, P., & Biltereyst, D. (2018). The social experience of going to the movies in the 1930s–1960s in a small Texas border town: Moviegoing habits and memories of films in Laredo, Texas. In D. Treveri Gennari, D. Hipkins, & C. O’Rawe (Eds.), Rural cinema exhibition and audiences in a global context (pp.  155–170). Palgrave Macmillan. Martínez de la Rosa, E. (2011). Modernización, reutilización, abandono o extinción: Las salas cinematográficas y la exhibición en México. Undergraduate thesis, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco. Mino Gracia, F. (2019). Crisis, censura y búsquedas de la industria del cine mexicano en los años cincuenta. El caso de Sombra Verde de Producciones Calderón. Historia Mexicana, 69(1), 57–92. Monsiváis, C. (1994). A través del espejo: El cine mexicano y su público. Ediciones el Milagro. Mora, C. J. (1982). Mexican cinema. Reflections of a society 1896–1980. University of California Press. Noble, A. (2005). Mexican national cinema. Routledge. Paxman, A. (2008). William Jenkins, business elites, and the evolution of the Mexican state: 1910–1960. Doctoral dissertation, University of Texas at Austin. Ramirez Berg, C. (2015). The classical Mexican cinema: The poetics of the exceptional Golden Age films. University of Texas Press. Salgado Porcayo, R. (2022). El analfabetismo en México 1895 al año 2000. Portal Político del Ciudadano. Retrieved March 9, 2023, from https://www.inep.org/ index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4&catid=8&Itemid=101

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Séptimo Censo General de Población 1950. (1950, June 6). INEGI. Retrieved March 9, 2023, from https://www.inegi.org.mx/programas/ccpv/1950/ Serna, L. I. (2014). Making cinelandia. American films and Mexican film culture before the Golden Age. Duke University Press. Stevens, R.  P. (1968). Spatial aspects of internal migration in Mexico, 1950–1960. Revista Geografica, 69, 75–90. Trujillo, G. (2019). Tan cerca de Hollywood. Cine, televisión y video en Baja California. Universidad Autónoma de Baja California. Tuñón, J. (1998). Mujeres de luz y sombra en el cine mexicano: La construcción de una imagen (1939–1952). Colegio de México. Vidal, R. (2008). Los inicios del cine sonoro y la creación de nuevas empresas fílmicas en México (1928–1931). Revista del Centro de Investigación, 8(29), 17–28. Zavala, L. (2009). Los estudios sobre cine en México: Un terreno en construcción. Asociación Argentina de Estudios sobre Cine y Audiovisual. Retrieved March 9, 2023, from http://asaeca.org/Actas/CONFERENCIA_ZAVALA_Tandil.pdf

CHAPTER 6

Comparing Aspects of Regional and Local Cinema Differentiation through Perceptions of Cinema-going in Post-socialist Bulgaria Maya Nedyalkova

“Don’t worry! The lights will go out now, so that we can see the films better.” This forewarning preceded the screening of select short films during the 2021 edition of the Meetings of Young European Cinema Festival in Sofia. The pictures were created by school students from small towns and villages in Bulgaria through a limited film education programme and showcased to their peers.1 As the festival organisers later explained, it was usually necessary to reassure their young audiences, most of whom had never been to the cinema before, that there was no power cut and that turning off the lights was the standard practice at a film screening. Moments like these highlight in tangible terms the shift in film-viewing experiences across particular audience segments in post-socialist Bulgaria. This chapter compares the differentiated contemporary cinema infrastructure across  The initiative is part of CinED—an international film education programme, funded by the Creative Europe / MEDIA programme of the European Union, “Support for film education.” Its objective is to help European youths aged six to nineteen discover European cinema. In the Bulgarian case, the programme is run by the arts and cultural events organisers, Arte Urbana Collectif, with the aim to help children from underprivileged backgrounds, who might struggle with the official curriculum, learn about filmmaking as well as re-engage at school. 1

M. Nedyalkova (*) Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Treveri Gennari et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38789-0_6

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six national regions in the context of exhibition changes taking place not only in Bulgaria but also across Eastern Europe. Despite a recent overall rise in the number of cinema screens in the country, the concentration of the market in large high-priced urban venues, screening predominantly Hollywood content, has made cinema both less accessible and less attractive to certain groups of spectators. Cinema-going transformed from an inclusive, low-cost, popular everyday activity during socialism to an exclusive special occasion that fewer people can now afford in terms of finances and, sometimes, time. The current emphasis of the Bulgarian cinema industry on optimising profitability often proves at odds with local views on accessibility, measured by perceptions of ticket price, ease of going to the cinema and film-related information flows. Comparing accounts of respondents from different localities and across the six regions within the country serves to illustrate preoccupations with social value, programming strategies and disparities in  local provisions. By triangulating official statistical data with viewer perceptions and experiences, defined by age, location and, sometimes, gender and socio-economic status, this comparative study uncovers overlooked voices addressing systemic inequalities across Bulgarian cinema exhibition. Shifting between a micro and macro focus helps to expose issues in post-socialist cinema culture developments that transcend national borders and suggests the need for collaborative thinking in the name of local audiences.

Literature and Sources This chapter answers the call of Biltereyst and Meers (2016) for more comparative perspectives on cinema cultures, systematically looking beyond temporal and spatial confines to address overarching tendencies or unique phenomena in film reception, investigate dis/similar patterns and test explanatory hypotheses. In addition to regional and local comparisons within the country, this literature review and subsequent analysis address broader links between the Eastern and Western European contexts of cinema-going. Analysing viewer experiences often appears secondary to reflecting on film texts, national policies, famous actors, auteur styles and industry developments not only in Bulgarian but also in Eastern European academia. In this way, this chapter forms part of a still limited but valuable body of scholarship. During state socialism, researcher and publicist Emil Lozev and his team at the Bulgarian National Scientific and Information Centre for Culture conducted two representative sociological studies (respectively, in 1972–1973 and in 1980–1981) titled “Cinema and Spectators.” Their aim was to examine the socio-demographic structure of domestic cinema audiences, the way spectators communicate with cinema and their feelings towards and expectations of film art (Panicherski, 1982, p. 36). More recently, for his microhistory of film distribution, exhibition and reception in the city of Plovdiv, Kostov (1999) utilised autoethnography, oral history interviews with early film professionals/ enthusiasts and archival research to triangulate official print media sources with

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local memories of cinema-going and film culture. In a similar qualitative turn, Anisimovich (2019) combined textual and contextual film analysis, focus groups with members of the audience and interviews with local filmmakers in order to analyse social, economic and political issues shaping identities in Bulgaria post-socialism. Her work is valuable for investigating the ideological underpinnings of contemporary Bulgarian pictures and the active interpretative functions of local audiences in making sense of their messages. Concerned with audiences but through a positivist perspective was Donev’s monograph (2018) on the recent shifts in Bulgarian film production, distribution and exhibition. It brought together film studies with sociology and economics, drawing on official attendance statistics and box office dynamics to outline from an empirical perspective the factors contributing towards a film’s popularity and viewer success in Bulgaria. Outside of these examples, a large proportion of Bulgarian film studies treat audiences predominantly as imagined constructs. As Christie (2012, p. 11) points out, the problem with this approach is that viewers could be credited with “preferences and responses which are mere hypotheses, or projections of the author’s assumptions and prejudices.” The views and experiences of contemporary Bulgarian audiences have largely remained confined to online forum commentaries, occasional journalistic pieces and rare interactive film popularity rankings in the media.2 This side-lining of the voices of viewers in research implicitly creates a top-down approach to local film culture, undermining the value of audience opinions and preventing critical dialogue on established industry structures, protocols of operation and onscreen representations. Eastern European cinema scholarship presents similar issues. Most English-­ language works, which otherwise usefully reflect on exhibition developments after the end of the Cold War, do so in the context of production and national cinema studies. Audience experiences are largely missing from most accounts. For instance, Hames’ (2000, pp. 66–67) and Hanzlík’s (2017) report on the Czech Republic’s transition from a stated-controlled to an open-market film industry, during which Hollywood came to dominate local distribution and exhibition, amidst a general drop in cinema attendance and in the number of cinema theatres. To differentiate and increase interest in cinema-going, Czech independent venues, specialised film events and multiplexes alike focused their efforts on “eventisation” and the explicit targeting of different audience segments. As part of a study on the similar transformation of distribution practices in Poland post-1989, Adamczak (2020) briefly discusses local market concentration, which resolved “cinema-distributor power plays” through the integration of Hollywood subsidiary distributors and newly established multiplex 2  An interactive popularity ranking—“Lachenite obuvki na balgarskoto kino” (“Bulgarian Cinema’s Patent Leather Shoes”)—was organised by the Bulgarian National Television (BNT) in 2015 to commemorate the centenary of the production of the first Bulgarian film, Balgaran e galant (The Bulgarian Is Gallant, Vassil Gendov, 1915), and allow viewers to vote for their favourite local feature. Similar initiatives for Bulgarian animated and documentary films followed shortly.

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chains. This resulted in block-booking screens and a significant change in cinema-going perceptions, with a practical and ideological shift towards consumption, entertainment and pleasure. Konecny (2017) succinctly details analogous developments in post-Soviet Moldova, where less than ten full-time cinema theatres remain open, most of which based in larger cities and screening Hollywood or Russian content. The relatively high ticket prices and frequent practice of dubbing in Russian discourage young people from attending, so internet piracy proves a popular alternative. Speaking of alternative exhibition strategies, Kayhan Müldür (2021) and Çam and Şanlier Yüksel (2021) examine the history and subsequent re-invigoration of open-air film screenings across Turkish urban localities. Ethnographic audience observation provides valuable insight into the nostalgia and community-building which these alternative exhibition spaces appear to foster. Papadimitriou and Grgić’s (2020) edited volume on contemporary Balkan cinema—with chapters on Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia and Turkey—also traces (among other topics) the infrastructural difficulties of reaching local audiences in the respective national exhibition sectors, often dominated by Hollywood products and multiplex chains. Alternative forms of film screenings, the proliferation of film festivals as well as educational and audience development initiatives have proved essential for diversifying the cinema offer and opportunities for engagement in the Balkan region. Finally, in a rare mixed-method study of Estonian film audiences, Kauber (2022) examines expectations and perceptions of cinema-going in relation to different viewing environments in local art house and multiplex venues. His study draws comparisons with Western audience investigations on the importance of sociality, eventfulness, space, going offline and technical conditions while also highlighting the role national films play in stimulating local cinema attendance. These studies provide an insight into the changing exhibition landscape after the end of the Cold War in Eastern Europe, of which Bulgaria proves an indelible part. My interest in contrasting regional and local film cultures was also informed by similar work conducted in Western Europe. For instance, Biltereyst and Van de Vijver (2016) explore the link between urbanity, the hierarchy of spatial structures and sustainable cinema exhibition in Flanders, and practically explain the concentration of multiplex and art-house cinemas in cities through the central-place theory, which views urban centres as main providers of goods and services to the surrounding region. A network of independent commercial cinemas is, instead, found across regional centres and smaller cities in Belgium. My analysis was further inspired by Merrington et al. (2021), who challenge a fixed territorial understanding of regional inequality in film exhibition provisions across Northern and Western England. Their research reflects on the audiences’ sense of place and geographic relationship with cinema as well as on the development of unique film exhibition ecologies across distinctive settlements. The authors point out that the UK is subject to market consolidation and intense commercialisation (similar to the briefly discussed Eastern European

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context) with regional screen density developing disproportionally and the capital London as well as the South region benefitting the most. There is an impulse to support the devolution of decision-making to UK regions, in line with the need for localised interventions, but cultural inequalities and wider social, economic and political situations still inform viewers’ accounts and experiences. In addition, the studies by Irandoust (2017) on cinema-going in Sweden and Cuadrado-García et al. (2018) on Spanish film-goers provided a useful overview of film-specific, socio-economic, situational and demographic factors understood to influence viewer demand, motivations and barriers to cinema-going, which, in turn, serve to shape theoretical and practical approaches to audience segmentation.3 So, my study forms part of reflections on the development of the regional and localised film cultures across Europe with regard to market and viewer dynamics. This overview reveals that the case of Bulgaria is not unique. A number of studies outline a similar shrinking and centralising exhibition landscape across Eastern and Western Europe with little programming variety beyond Hollywood but efforts by state and independent organisations put into alternative exhibition strategies. In this chapter, I examine in further detail changing notions of cinema accessibility through the perspective of Bulgarian viewers across different regions and localities. This geographical comparative dimension stands in contrast to most previous work in the field of Eastern European cinema. The findings are further contextualised with regard to the comparative experiences of viewers according to select demographic characteristics (most prominently age and location, but occasionally also gender and socio-economic status). Reflections on differentiated regional infrastructure and viewer segmentation further evoke supra-national comparisons. Useful sources, in that respect, prove publications by the Bulgarian National Statistical Institute (NSI), the Bulgarian National Film Center, European Union’s MEDIA Salles project and the European Audiovisual Observatory.

3  Irandoust (2017) demonstrates the importance of gender, age, educational attainment, income, marital status, critical reviews, word of mouth and willingness to pay in shaping demand for cinema-­going. Cuadrado-García et al. (2018) uncover the influence of education, film popularity, film quality, social interaction and mood for motivating cinema-going, and the effects of programming, venue features, place, competing activities, financial restrictions and free time on barriers to access. This chapter focuses predominantly on the role of age and place in shaping perceptions of accessibility to cinema venues. I discuss the place of sociality, critical reviews, film quality, programming strategies, the appeal of genre and national cinema in more detail throughout other parts of my larger project.

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Method This chapter stems from a large-scale mixed model study of contemporary Bulgarian film viewers, inspired by the interdisciplinarity of the New Cinema History movement (Maltby, 2011).4 I combine parallel qualitative and ­quantitative approaches across all phases of the research process (Tashakkori & Teddlie, 1998, pp. ix–x). I triangulate data sources, theories and methods to uncover how audiences interact with and are influenced by general media developments and structures. This methodological pluralism is favoured by Schrøder et al. (2003, p. vii), who advocate for combining reception research and audience surveys, among other complementary tools, for exploring social and cultural meaning processes and practices. The authors develop and apply the concept of discursive realism to audience research, which explains the decisive role played by language and discourse in gaining an insight into audiences. Schrøder et  al. (2003, p.  45) acknowledge that research findings are interpreted “versions” of reality but argue for the need for generalisation in order to uncover consistent and “truthful” accounts, which help us understand shared experiences of media consumption. This attitude to audience research flexibly combines exploration with hypothesis-testing, with the implied understanding that social and cultural phenomena are, in a way, constructed alongside the process of observation.5 By adopting a realist approach, I acknowledge the subjectivity of the individual viewer perspective but find reflecting on it useful in uncovering essential truths about the experiential reality of film exhibition and consumption in Bulgaria. The end goal is to begin to democratise the understanding of current film industry developments and facilitate productive dialogue between policy-makers, film professionals, critics and scholars, on the one hand, and film viewers, on the other. Through a geographical comparison, based on the location and size of the different settlements explored, as well as attention to the participants’ different demographic characteristics, this chapter illustrates the need for differentiated understanding when exploring notions of cinema-going accessibility and value. Data collection activities took place during the summer of 2018 and secured 580 valid survey questionnaire responses (either online or in paper format) across 75 settlements and 86 focus group participants from 18 settlements of diverse sizes and locations across Bulgaria. Heterogeneous groups were targeted across a vast geographical spread, but the participants were ultimately recruited through convenience sampling and were self-selected volunteers. As a result, the sample dataset was skewed, compared to the general population in the country and to previous cinema-goer statistics (see Table  6.1). The 4  The project “Turning (your) back to audiences? Glimpses into shifting cinema-going and film consumption patterns in Bulgaria” was funded by the British Academy between 2017 and 2021. It aimed to investigate the experiences, habits and preferences of contemporary Bulgarian film viewers, their expectations of new Bulgarian cinema and their ability to access audiovisual products. More information can be found on the official website: https://bulgarianfilmaudiences.org/. 5  So, while realist and empiricist enquiries can be similar in implementation, the findings are interpreted with different ontological underpinnings in mind.

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Table 6.1  Comparison between general population and cinema-going statistics in Bulgaria (as adapted from NSI reports), the questionnaire sample dataset and the demographics of the focus group participants General population

Gender

People who attended the cinema once or more in 2016

Men: 50.07%; Women: 49.93% Age 80: 5% 36.03%; 55–64: 15.4% Education: Higher: 19.6%; Higher: Further: 43.4%; 61.83%; Primary: 13.9%; No Further: education: 23.1% 31.44%; Primary or lower: 6.73% Occupation: Managerial, specialist: Employed: 7.66%; Technical, 58.83%; admin, service or Unemployed: military: 11.3%; 20.03%; Skilled: 6.85%; Economically Unqualified: 3.3%; inactive: Retired: 3.11%; 21.14% Student: 13.53%; Unemployed: 5.02%; Persons not in the labour force: 49.23% Settlement Very small (+ Cities/towns: size villages): 38%; Small: 74.68%; 10%; Medium: 18%; Villages: Large: 4%; Very large: 25.32% 30% Ethnicity Bulgarian: 84%; − Turkish: 9%; Roma: 5%; Russian: 0.10%; Other: 1.9% IT skills (self-­ assessed) Internet access preference

Men: 48%; Women: 52%

−

−

−

−

Questionnaire respondents

Focus group participants

Men: 32.7%, Women: 67.3%

Men: 21%; Women: 79%

16–25: 42%; 26–45: 38%; 46–65: 17%; 66+: 3%

16–25—37.2%; 26–45—16.3%; 46–65—30.2%; 66+—16.3%

Higher: 55.9%; Further: 28.7%; Primary: 15.4%; No education: 0%

−

Managerial, specialist: 30%; Technical, admin, service or military: 23%; Skilled: 4%; Unqualified: 2%; Retired: 4%; Student: 34%; Unemployed: 3%

−

Very small (+ villages): 5%; Small: 13%; Medium: 26%; Large: 7%; Very large: 49% Bulgarian: 98%; Turkish: 0.4%; Roma: 0.6%; Russian: 0.4%; Other: 0.6% 5–30%; 4–38%; 3–24%; 2–5%; 1–2%; 0–1% PC, laptop, tablet: 60%; Phone: 37%; Smart TV: 2%; No access at home: 1%

Very small—3%; Small—13%; Medium—37%; Large—29%; Very large—17% −

− −

(continued)

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Table 6.1 (continued)

Hobbies

General population

People who attended the cinema once or more in 2016

Questionnaire respondents

Focus group participants

−

−

Arts, learning, − creativity: 47%; Quiet pastimes: 7%; Socialising: 15%; Physical/travel: 11%; Online: 15%; Other: 5%

majority of the questionnaire respondents were women (67.3%), relatively young (16−25 years old: 42%), well-educated (55.9% with higher education), employed at highly qualified positions (30%) or still students (34%), living in very large settlements (49%), of predominantly Bulgarian ethnic origin (98%), with high self-assessed IT skills (68%), using a personal computer, laptop or tablet when browsing the internet (60%) and interested in arts, learning and creativity, in terms of hobbies (47%). The focus group participants were similarly unevenly distributed, with the prevalence of younger people (16−25 years old: 37.2%), women (79%) and participants coming from medium-sized (37%) and large (29%) settlements.6 In order to understand how viewers in different parts of the country perceived access to cinema-going, it is essential to provide some administrative context as well. Officially, the Bulgarian territory is divided in two large regions: Northern and Eastern Bulgaria, on the one hand, and South-Western and South-Central Bulgaria, on the other.7 These districts are further comprised of six smaller planning regions—Northwestern (NW), Northern Central (NC), Northeastern (NE), Southeastern (SE), Southwestern (SW) and Southern Central (SC)—which are split into 28 provinces and 265 municipalities (see Image 6.1). The regions are formally and informally differentiated according to landform, population numbers, local industries and developed infrastructure. Generally speaking, the North is a more mountainous, less populated and poorer area with more adverse weather conditions than the South (where the capital Sofia also lies). In terms of geographical spread, the majority of questionnaire respondents lived in the SW (40.5%) and SC (17.3%) planning

6  According to an amendment to the Bulgarian Spatial Development Act in 2009, settlements are classified as very small when they have under 10,000 dwellers, small—between 10,000 and 30,000 inhabitants, medium—between 30,000 and 100,000 residents, large—between 100,000 and 200,000 citizens and very large, when they have a population of over 200,000. 7  As classified by the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) introduced by the European Union in 2003.

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Image 6.1  Map of Bulgarian regions and planning regions, as classified by NUTS Table 6.2  Spread of questionnaire and focus group participants according to planning regions, as classified by NUTS Planning regions Location of questionnaire participants Location of focus group participants

NW

NC

NE

SE

SC

SW

10.2% 2.3%

5.5% 4.7%

9.8% 2.3%

16.7% 53.5%

17.3% 14%

40.5% 23.3%

regions, whereas most focus group participants came from the SE (53.5%) or SW (23.3%) regions (see Table 6.2). While the findings of this project might not be representative for the whole of the Bulgarian population or consistently reflect cinema-goer profiles, the dataset and focus group discussions prove valuable for analysing film-viewing tendencies across a large geographical area of the country, featuring particularly engaged and outspoken viewers. Indeed, the participants professed high interest in film (whether seen in cinemas or not), recounted their film-related experiences enthusiastically and reflected in quite some depth on their varied engagement with different film-viewing practices.8 Thus, the study provides a useful starting point for uncovering certain personal, communal and regional 8  When asked to evaluate on the Likert rating scale the statement “I am generally interested in films and cinema,” 70% of the questionnaire respondents marked “Strongly agree” and a further 20% responded with “Agree.” The majority of these respondents also used the free-text box at the end of the questionnaire for their reflections on the state of Bulgarian cinema. Similarly, focus group discussions often overran in time, due to the desire of the participants to share their views.

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aspects which cannot be practically reflected in formal statistics on cinema-­ going. It also offers a valuable case study of how audiences in Eastern Europe reflect on their experiences of changing film exhibition structures post-socialism. In the questionnaire, the respondents were asked to rate on the five-point Likert scale (from “Strongly disagree” to “Strongly agree”) the following statements: “Cinema tickets are too expensive nowadays”; “If I feel like going to the cinema, I can easily do so”; and “In general, I feel well-informed about what films are screened in my town/area.” During the focus groups, the participants were encouraged to reflect on open-ended questions, such as: “What, for you, is the perfect place for watching films?”; “How do you learn about new films?”; “What does going to the cinema mean to you?”; “What makes you/could make you go more often?” and “Imagine and describe the next Bulgarian cinema theatre.”9 The aim was to learn about the participants’ relationship with cinema, their perceptions of the cost of cinema-going, the influence of location and other factors on ease of access as well as the ability to obtain information and participate in communications about film. Microsoft Office Excel and IBM SPSS Statistics were employed for describing and inferring from quantitative data and QSR NVivo—for qualitative coding of emergent themes.10 Before I proceed to discuss the results, however, it is essential to provide some context for the factors shaping the development of Bulgarian and, by extension, Eastern European film exhibition post-socialism.

The Development of the Post-socialist Exhibition Landscape During the years of state socialism (1944−1989), the Bulgarian film industry was nationalised and vertically integrated. The state had invested in expanding the exhibition infrastructure and, by the 1980s, the number of cinemas in the country exceeded 3000. The majority were single-screen, not particularly luxurious in terms of setting and located in rural areas (NSI, 1990, p. 423). Due to state censorship, their programming consisted of predominantly ideologically safe films. Still, cinema-going was a popular and frequent pastime, with annual attendances nearing 100 million in the 1980s (NSI, 1994, p. 270). While the state agenda of catering to viewers from smaller settlements contributed to a sense of accessibility and inclusivity (a point to which I come back later in the discussion), internal government communication suggests that most of these

9  The questions were adapted from the projects “Opening Our Eyes: How Film Contributes to the Culture of the UK” (2011), “Mediating Cultural Encounters through European Screens— MeCETES” (2013−2016) and “European Cinema Audiences: Entangled Histories and Shared Memories” (2018−2021). 10  One-way ANOVA and Tukey post hoc tests were applied to analyse differences of questionnaire respondents’ opinions, as shaped by the size of the settlement in which they lived.

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venues operated at a loss (Statulov, 2021).11 With the changeover to democracy, new laws on monopoly and free trade, and the tumultuous socio-­economic crises which followed, the vertically integrated system was dismantled and the state-owned exhibition network found itself in decline. Donev (2018, pp. 199–204) details the manifold reasons behind the closing down of Bulgarian cinemas between 1995 and 2004. Firstly, the majority were in a poor general condition, with the lack of upkeep and modernisation a result of the low average ticket price (reportedly, between 0.33 and 0.37 US dollars outside of Sofia versus 2 US dollars in other Eastern European territories and 4.5 US dollars in the rest of Europe). By 1988 only 227 cinemas—most of which in larger towns and cities—were turning a profit and that number dropped further in the 1990s. At the same time, newly formed private distribution companies, representing the big Hollywood studios, protested the programming policies of the still state-owned company Sofia Film, which controlled the most financially lucrative part of the exhibition market. These private distributors set their sights on entering exhibition in order to maximise their profits but needed to minimise the investment risks of building multiplexes. In tandem with real estate companies looking for cheap properties in desirable locations and banks securing credits for the building of new cinemas, they systematically lobbied for and took part in the privatisation and closing down of the old venues. Meanwhile, Bulgarian audiences were affected by multiple financial crises and unprecedented inflation, which decreased their buying power and disposable income and intensified urbanisation patterns. The increased availability of new technologies (such as cable and satellite TV, video and the internet) further diminished the popularity of cinema-going. Consequently, cinema attendances dropped consistently with every passing year until they reached their lowest—1.9 million—in 2000 (NSI, 2004, p. 423). In the 2000s, cinema-going slowly began to recover. Donev (2018, p. 204) credits the re-invigoration of attendance and increase in profits with the establishment, expansion and appeal of the cinema chains linked to the big distribution companies Alexandra Films and Forum Films. Indeed, after the first Arena multiplex opened in 2003, followed shortly by the launch of the first Cinema City venue (part of an Israeli network catering to Central and Eastern Europe) in 2006, annual attendance numbers grew and stabilised at 4.5 to 5.5 million, in the five years prior to the pandemic (Bulgarian National Film Center, 2018; NSI, 2022a).12 The accompanying consolidation of the domestic exhibition market and change in programming were palpable.  Even though there is evidence for the building of new cinema theatres in (unofficially) racially segregated neighbourhoods throughout the country during state socialism, I am making no claims with regard to the experiences of minority groups, as this is beyond the scope of the study sample. Recruiting more participants from underrepresented groups would form an important query for future research, increasing the theoretical value and practical usefulness of the findings. 12  The rise in popularity of new Bulgarian productions in the 2010s also contributed to renewed interest in cinema-going. 11

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Between 2003 and 2018 the number of cinema venues dropped from 146 to 69, while the number of cinema screens increased from 200 to 226. The overall seating capacity decreased from 52,865  in 2003 to 38,952  in 2018 (NSI, n.d.-a). This shift suggests an investment in a high number of small halls within a given venue, in order to maximise the amount of screenings per day and minimise loss from empty seats, while creating an exclusive environment inside. The updated and luxurious atmosphere predetermined a rise in the average ticket price. It increased to 4.80 euro—a significant jump from what was reported in the 1990s. Even though Bulgaria consistently remains the poorest country in the European Union, the average ticket price climbed higher than that across Central and Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean Rim, which at the time stood at 3.42 euro (Media Salles, 2020). This increased annual box office earnings from 13.7 million leva (6.9 million euro) in 2003 to 46 million leva (or 23 million euro) in 2018 (NSI, n.d.-a). While improving the profitability of exhibition business, the prohibitive influence such a price hike had on certain cinema-goers is reflected later in this chapter. The increased integration between distributors representing Hollywood studios and local exhibition structures, consistent with developments in the rest of the Eastern European region, predictably influenced programming as well, with US productions forming over 80% of the average number of new releases and that of cinema screenings (NSI, n.d.-b). A slightly greater diversity could be seen in select venues in Sofia, Varna, Plovdiv, Targovishte and Kavarna, which formed part of the Europa Cinemas network (Bulgarian National Film Center, 2018, p.  48).13 To uncover further local specificities, a nuanced comparison across regions and places proves essential. At the end of 2017, there were clear concentration patterns in the Bulgarian film exhibition infrastructure (see Image 6.2). The Southwestern region featured the highest number of cinema venues and screens. Sofia proved an outlier and inflated the statistics of the region, with its fourteen cinemas and 101 screens. The Northeastern region had the second highest number of cinemas and screens, followed closely by the Southeastern. The Northern Central region had slightly more screens and less venues than the Southern Central. The lowest number of both cinemas and screens was in the Northwestern region (see Table 6.3). This differentiation echoes the findings by Merrington et al. (2021) on the privileged position of the capital city and immediate region surrounding it with regard to cultural investment and development. In line with Biltereyst and Van de Vijver’s (2016) application of central-­ place theory informing spatial hierarchies of cinema exhibition, there were variations in cinema offer, according to the size of the different Bulgarian settlements. Twenty-nine out of the 56 cinemas were located in very large or large cities and a further 19—in medium-sized towns. Only eight venues were available to residents in small or very small settlements. Unsurprisingly, the 13  An initiative by Creative Europe / MEDIA Programme and French National Centre for Cinema and the Moving Image supporting non-national European cinema.

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Image 6.2  Cinema venue and cinema screen clusters across settlements in the six Bulgarian planning regions, as outlined by the Bulgarian National Film Center at the end of 2017 Table 6.3  Number of cinemas, multiplexes (with six or more screens) and screens across the six Bulgarian planning regions, according to data from the Bulgarian National Film Center at the end of 2017

Total number of cinemas Of which multiplexes Total number of screens

NC

NE

NW

SC

SE

SW

6 1 18

11 2 27

6 0 9

9 3 12

6 3 26

18 8 106

multiplexes concentrated in Sofia, Plovdiv, Varna, Ruse and Burgas—the largest cities in the country—generated over 70% of the box office takings. Even though the majority of venues in Bulgaria at the time were single-screen and small miniplexes (with two to three screens), most of the profits were generated by the multiplexes (with six or more screens), located in large urban areas (Bulgarian National Film Center, 2018). As previously mentioned, the case of Bulgaria is not unique within the Eastern European context. A recent report by the European Audiovisual Observatory reveals that Eastern European countries account for 20% of the European Union population but only have access to 11.9% of all the screens in the Union. So, while the formative influences on the development of cinema post-1989 are similar across Eastern and Western countries, in the Eastern part

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of the continent exhibition structures need further growth. Average admissions per capita in Eastern Europe are well below the EU average, which is likely due to the lack of venues in certain, mostly rural areas—as is the case in Bulgaria, Latvia, Romania and Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Eastern European countries 87.4% of the population have at least one cinema within the suggested catchment area of a driving time of 30 minutes. However, countries such as Bulgaria and Romania display a notable polarisation, with a significant share of the population having access to just one screen (24.14%), and an equally significant share of cinema-goers enjoying access to more than 100 screens (24.36%) (Talavera, 2018, pp. 11, 16, 20). So, this uneven development of the cinema network and consolidation of the exhibition business around more populous and profitable regions significantly affects other post-socialist states as well. Talavera concludes that the region relies heavily on monoscreens, usually located in the centre of cities. This does not, however, imply that most cinema tickets are sold for monoscreens, as there is no direct link between accessibility of a type of theatre and its level of admissions. It may well be that multiplexes in suburban areas are accessible to fewer people in a given territory, but that the level of admissions is much higher than that for monoscreen theatres. (Talavera, 2018, p. 38)

This contradiction between the accessibility and profitability of cinema, exemplified across Eastern European countries, remains at the heart of long-lasting debates about the cultural and business value of the arts, more generally, especially in relation to justifying state financing and legislative support. As illustrated in the following section, this tension implicitly informed the perspectives of the participants in my research who discussed both the social significance of access to cinema and the need for financial sustainability of the sector.

Survey Questionnaire and Focus Group Findings Perceived Cost of Cinema-going Questionnaire and focus group participants evaluated the current pricing strategies of local theatres and reflected on their implications. The majority of survey respondents (50.7%) felt that cinema tickets were too expensive and, given that the average ticket price in Bulgaria was higher than the average for the Central, Eastern and Southern European regions, such opinions were unsurprising.14 There were differences across participants from the six planning regions. The largest percentage of questionnaire respondents who thought that cinema ticket prices were too high came from the NW region (64.4%). In comparison, only 45.5% thought so in the SW region—the lowest rating given across all six regions. This result is likely linked to the fact that a significant  Mean = 3.47, Standard Deviation = 1.288.

14

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number of respondents from the SW region lived in Sofia and earned more, on average, than their counterparts across the country and, particularly, in the North West (NSI, 2022b). There was a significant difference between the groups of the different settlement sizes as well.15 Participants coming from medium-sized towns were significantly more in agreement that cinema tickets were too expensive than respondents from small-sized settlements.16 It is possible that the latter were more likely to be commuters, employed in larger cities, and, thus, earning more than participants from medium-sized towns. This could also be a testament to the differentiated development of film exhibition and changing perceptions of what cinema should be. Perhaps participants from medium-sized settlements found that the cinemas available to them were too expensive in comparison not only to their standard of living but also to what they were offered in terms of viewer experience. That was the case with a female focus group participant, aged 46–65, from the medium-sized town of Kazanlak (in the SE planning region) who considered affordability when reflecting on what going to the cinema meant to her: Well, [it’s] a holiday, because it happens rarely. For me, it’s a pleasure.… A special occasion. I go [there] in high spirits. But the tickets are expensive, in my opinion… if they are just a little cheaper. They lower the prices every day.… Yes, the day before changing the programme.… But [it depends on] at what time it’s on, because you have to go to Stara Zagora … but, yes, if [tickets] were cheaper, I would go more often.

The perceived high ticket price rendered cinema a special occasion for this participant. She deliberated on the added cost and time of commuting to the cinema in a nearby large city but when asked about the monoscreen venue in her hometown, she did not appear very interested in attending. Her opinion had to do with the fact that Latona Cinema Kazanlak, part of a mini-chain in mostly medium-sized towns, had a small seating capacity (only 50 seats), was situated in a neighbourhood far away from the city centre and featured predominantly children and young adults programming. Even though the ticket price there was somewhat lower than that in the nearby Cinema City in Stara Zagora—an average of 7.50 leva (or 3.84 euro) versus 8.95 leva (or 4.56 euro)—she believed the ideal cinema experience would include a more luxurious setting and greater choice. Bearing in mind that the majority of medium-­ sized settlements in Bulgaria were served by either Latona or the similar Kinopolis17 small chain, this could mean that viewers there found the tickets to be inadequately priced for the experience offered, especially in comparison to larger, more luxurious and only slightly less affordable venues. This finding corresponds with Adamczak’s (2020) observation (in the context of Poland)  The result of one-way ANOVA testing (F(4.575) = 3.2, p = 0.013).  As determined by a Tukey post hoc test, p = 0.007. 17  A local venture, re-branded to CineLand in 2020. 15 16

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that cinema-going came to epitomise heightened consumption, entertainment and pleasure post-socialism. Still, general pricing strategies proved a point of contention between this particular participant and her male counterpart, aged 26–45, from Kazanlak. When she suggested that 5 leva (2.50 euro) would be accessible and still allow filmmakers to recuperate their costs, he countered that the ticket price should be 2–3 leva (1.02–1.53 euro), arguing that a higher number of tickets sold would make up for the difference in price. A similar point was raised in the very large city of Burgas (in the SE planning region), where a 26- to 45-year-old male focus group contributor explained that he could afford to go to the cinema, went often and thought that filmmakers should be appropriately remunerated but also that cinema “needs to be an accessible element for the population … whether you are rich or poor.” The majority of viewers acknowledged the need for sustainable profits in the film business but often reached the conclusion that cinema was a cultural good for the many and, as such, should be made more accessible. Some outliers in this context were the self-professed film buffs who took part in the research. For instance, a 26- to 45-year-old male from the medium-­ sized town of Kyustendil (in the SW planning region) imagined as the ideal Bulgarian cinema an exclusive, luxurious and extra comfortable theatre with gourmet food, cocktails and special gifts for collectors. He was happy to pay a high price (two to three times the current average) to “receive special treatment” but doubted that many of the Bulgarian viewers would appreciate a cinema experience of enhanced quality when they had to spend so much money for it. Pricing strategies and views on accessibility proved points of contention which implicitly indicated the influence of age (often linked to changing personal circumstances). While only 48% of respondents aged 16–25 agreed that cinema tickets were too expensive, that percentage consistently increased across the older age groups, reaching 60% for those aged 66+. In general, older research participants had more expenses and dependents to pay for when visiting the cinema, remained more critical of the perceived value for money and drew comparisons with their experiences during socialism, when cinema-going cost significantly less. To begin with, a male focus group participant, aged 46–65, from the very small town of Tran (in the SW planning region), which had no cinema anymore but was in close proximity to Sofia, talked about the added cost of travelling to the cinema with his family. A 46- to 65-year-old female focus group member from the medium-sized town of Pleven (in the NW planning region) was similarly upset about how much it cost to take a family of three or four to one of the two small miniplexes in her hometown. The older focus group discussants also raised the question of value for money. A female participant, aged 46–65, from the large city of Stara Zagora (in the SE planning region) wondered about the high cinema ticket price, given the “stupid” blockbuster summer programming and the fact that she could spend the same amount on a

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quality book, theatre play or concert, where she perceived less risk of disappointment and more opportunities for immediacy and live contact. Undeniably, the homogenous, Hollywood-dominated programming across most venues discouraged some participants from attending. The older age group appeared more discerning in that respect. Three female discussants, aged 46–65, from Kyustendil admitted that they were also selective and preferred to see Bulgarian, European or independent American films to big studio productions. Lastly, many of the older generation reminisced about how cheap cinema used to be. A female participant, aged 66+, from the very small town of Kalofer (in the SC planning region) contemplated: Everyone says that there is an outflow from cinema because tickets are expensive. They used to be dirt-cheap, such were the times. Bigger towns don’t tend to notice the prices [nowadays] because people earn well there. Whereas here, people can’t [afford to] go buy [even] bread.

Coupled with the fact that in 2018 the average pension per pensioner in Bulgaria was less than 200 euro per month, it was unsurprising that cinema ticket prices proved prohibitive for viewers aged 66+ (the smallest of the cinema-­going segments), who often remembered cinema-going during socialism with nostalgia. So, the location, age and socio-economic circumstances of the participants played an important role in shaping perception of cinema ticket price. Perceptions on Ease of Access to Cinema The cost of cinema-going was not the only factor shaping engagement. Encouragingly, 73.6% of the questionnaire respondents reported that they could easily go to the cinema, if they felt like it.18 This was a promising finding, given the general shrinking of the exhibition network post-socialism. It corresponded with European Audiovisual Observatory data that 75.2% of the Bulgarian population was served by cinema theatres within a catchment area of a 30-minute drive, confirming the appropriateness of the adopted measurement of accessibility (Talavera, 2018, p. 23). Though all groups scored 60% or higher, it was, again, participants from the SW region (82.1%), who found it the easiest to go to the cinema. The abundance of venues concentrated in Sofia likely contributed to increased perceptions of accessibility in the region. In contrast, participants from the NC and NW regions found it the most difficult to attend the cinema when they wished to, in line with the low cinema and screen density of the two regions. Furthermore, viewers from large and very large settlements thought it was significantly easier to go to the cinema when

 Mean = 4.07, Standard Deviation = 1.235.

18

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they felt like it, in comparison to everyone else.19 Such a finding correlates with the concentration of large multiplexes (and some independent venues with more diverse programming) in urban centres, making cinema significantly easier to access for the local population. The location of the settlement and the cinema density in the area were factors in qualitative responses on ease of going to the cinema as well. As a male survey respondent, aged 46–65, from the medium-sized town of Veliko Tarnovo (in the NC planning region) wrote in the free-text box at the end: “We need more cinema theatres and more meetings with film artists, actors, directors, scriptwriters and cameramen.” As apparent in this comment, the cinema density was implicitly equated with local cultural activity and opportunities for engagement with creators. Another questionnaire respondent, a 16- to 25-year-old male from the very small town of Devin in the mountainous SC planning region, complained: “Unfortunately, there is no theatre/cinema in Devin and, because of this, I can’t go to the cinema often, because the closest cinema is 50 kilometres away.” While it might not seem like a great distance to drive to the closest cinema in Smolyan, the journey would, in fact, take over an hour, due to the particular terrain and irregular alternative transport. So, the landscape, size of the settlement and limited infrastructure precluded certain participants from accessing the existing exhibition network on a more consistent basis. Another point, frequently raised during the focus group discussions was the time commitment involved in going to the cinema. As a female participant, aged 16–25, from the small town of Karlovo (in the SC planning region) admitted: You have to put some time aside in order to go to the cinema. It happened to me, I had tickets … 4 tickets, I think.… And I could watch whichever film I wanted in half a year’s time. I ended up throwing them away because I had absolutely no free time to go … which was a pity. I thought: “I will finally go!” but … we had plans to go and they fell through at the last moment. It takes time.

This particular participant was one of the lucky few who, despite living in a small town, had access to a local cinema without the need to travel. Still, time proved an issue. While younger people found it more difficult to coordinate their schedules and activities in organising group outings, the older (and usually female) viewers had to negotiate work and house chores. A 46- to 65-year-­ old female participant from the very large city of Sofia reflected: I would like to go specifically with the purpose [to watch a film] and not… whilst I’m cleaning these lentil seeds to [meanwhile] watch that film [on TV] … to go, 19  As determined by one-way ANOVA testing (F(4.575) = 6.8, p = 1 June 1941 < 1 February 1943 BAN UK & FR & USA >= 1 February 1943 BAN UK & USA

< 9 August 1940 BAN UK >= 9 August 1940 BAN UK & USA

< 9 August 1940 BEFORE BAN >= 9 August 1940 < 2 March 1943 BAN USA >= 2 March1943 BAN USA & PL

< 1 January 1941 BEFORE BAN >=1 January 1941 BAN UK & USA

Period 2

Period 3

Period 4

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Table 15.4  Supply and demand of German films in the four cities City

Country

Brno Brussels Krakow The Hague

Germany Germany Germany Germany

Period 1 supply 33% 17% 58% 39%

demand 31% 23% 59% 41%

Period 2 supply 44% 38% 73% 74%

demand 41% 38% 72% 77%

Period 3 supply 59%

demand 49%

92%

90%

Period 4 supply 57%

demand 54%

The shades indicate a higher (grey cells with black numbers in bold) or lower (black cells, with white numbers in bold) demand than supply

demand for German films was consistently higher than supply. This seems to point at a continued preference for German films already present before the war (Pafort-Overduin, 2011). In the first period, demand for German films seemed to be slightly higher than supply in Krakow. This number is deceiving when we closely inspect the programming data. Then it becomes clear that in the first period there had already been an attempt to ban Polish and American films. Until 20 September 1939, only Polish and American films were screened. The last Polish film was screened until 25 October, while the last American film was in the repertoire until 3 November 1939. The first German film was screened on 21 September 1939, and the first Austrian film appeared on 23 September 1939. From 4 November 1939, Krakow audiences could only see German and Austrian films (or films in co-production with these countries). From 7 December, in response to low audience attendances, the German occupiers probably closed the cinemas to reorganise as on that day the cinema advertisements in the press stopped appearing. To lure back audiences, the first cinema that reopened on 28 December 1939 showed a Polish film. It seems that the introduction of German and Austrian films in place of Polish and American ones was the first attempt— let us add straight away: an unsuccessful one—to impose German culture on a Polish audience. In the francophone capital of Brussels, there was no real attempt to restrict the availability of French film productions. This explains why Brussels was the only city where German films did not dominate supply and instead French films ruled. It is even conceivable (but this requires thorough quantitative research into the pre-war situation) that French films increased their market share in French-speaking Belgium during the German occupation, because there were no longer (French dubbed) American films on the market. Although the numbers dropped slightly, still 49% of film supply was produced in France. Demand for French films was accordingly high in Brussels and even slightly exceeded supply. Apparently, the French orientation of Brussels was taken into consideration since, unlike in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium (Flanders), film exhibitors in Brussels were allowed to screen German productions and films from other regions in French dubbing. In Flanders, which was considered ‘Germanic’, German films had to be shown in the original version and foreign films were preferably screened in German dubbing. Alfred Greven, who headed

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Table 15.5  Supply and demand of doemstic films in the four cities City

Country

Brno Brno

Czechoslovakia Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

Brussels Belgium Krakow Poland The Hague Netherlands

Period 1 supply demand

Period 2 supply demand

Period 3 supply demand

16% 3%

22% 7%

10% 10%

6% 29%

11% 14%

7% 29%

0.4% 15% 6%

0.3% 14% 9%

2% 18% 5%

1% 21% 3%

0%

0%

Period 4 supply demand 10% 14%

7% 22%

The shades indicate a higher (grey cells with black numbers in bold) or lower (black cells, with white numbers in bold) demand than supply

the Continental production firm in Paris, made sure that his German-financed but French-spoken films premiered in some of Brussels’ finest cinemas (Vande Winkel, 2017, 2020). Films from other countries (Italy, Germany) probably also owed part of their ‘Belgian success’ to the availability of French-dubbed versions. In the other cities, French films were absent (Krakow) or only made up a very small part of total supply and demand. Brno audiences had to deal with a ban on French films for almost three and a half years. The distribution of domestic films was also under pressure, with the most severe measures in Krakow where, in March 1943, all Polish films were banned (Table 15.5). In none of the other cities something similar happened. Preference for national productions is clear in The Hague and also fits in a trend already visible in the 1930s (Pafort-Overduin, 2011). However, after January 1941, demand diminished. Most of the Dutch films were shown in both periods, and 90% were produced before the war. Although some of the films would still be screened after the war broke out, it is possible that cinema-­ goers got tired from watching the same films. There were not enough new Dutch films available to cater to the preferences of Dutch audiences. Only one new Dutch fiction film was produced during the war, but that did not perform particularly well. In Brno, demand for films produced in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was high and its share consistently exceeded supply. Whereas the films produced in the country to which it belonged until March 1939 dropped in both supply and demand. This decrease was, to an extent, forced by a regulation applied since 1942 and limiting the share of re-runs per year to 30% in each cinema (as explained above) (Havelka, 1946, p. 37). Brno clearly had the most idiosyncratic market. Like in Krakow, French movies were banned and its population did not seem to care much for German films as their demand never exceeded supply. Although the demand/supply ratio was very well balanced for most of the periods under consideration, there was an exceptional deviation in the third period in Brno, when choice was further limited after the full ban of American, British and French movies. Demand for domestic production significantly exceeded supply in all periods, but in the second period it even tripled. Moreover, Brno was the only city where supply of domestic films retained a high share (between a fifth and a fourth) on the

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market. This exceptionality is related to the high level of production of the domestic film industry that could be maintained during the war. In the Netherlands and Belgium, film production had never been high and dropped to almost zero during the war (van Gelder, 1995, pp.  55–59; Thys, 1999). Poland had fostered a vital productivity during the 1930s that ranged from ten to 27 features a year, but during the war only seven Polish films were completed, production of which had begun before the war (Jewsiewicki, 1967, pp. 93, 181). Whereas in these three countries the numbers dropped dramatically to about 1 to 1.5 films per year during the war, in the Protectorate still 116 films were produced (Klimeš, 2011, p. 120; Havelka, 1940, pp. 20–26).

Conclusion This comparative study shows that the different policies were implemented at different speeds in different regions. Although in all countries the complete film exhibition, distribution and production was put under Nazi control, it became clear that the different national and local cultures were taken into account and that regulations and practices were adapted accordingly. In Brussels this meant that still a large portion of French films could be shown, and in Brno it meant that domestic production could maintain a relatively high output. Our research shows that audiences made eager use of the opportunity to choose films with which they felt a greater cultural affinity and loyalty. The fact that despite all curtailing measures demand shows exactly a preference for those (Czech and French) films suggests that it was no coincidence that the deviation of the general measures was tailored to fit local preferences. In other words, the German occupational forces were aware of those preferences. By censoring all films and by adding a short German culture film and a German newsreel to the film programming, the “right” ideological power of film was (hoped to be) safeguarded. In the Netherlands and Poland, German films obtained a virtual monopoly position, and the population, simply put, had the choice between either no longer going to the cinema or choosing from the predominant German-­ language film offerings. In the Netherlands, a preference for German films was evident during the occupation and even contributed to a phenomenal increase in cinema attendance. In Krakow, the opposite was true. Although the numbers in the first period seem to indicate a slightly higher demand for German films, the programming information revealed that Polish audiences showed a resistance against German films by staying at home when only German films were allowed. After the first period, this lesser demand for German films is clearly shown in the data. The results presented are the initial results of our investigation into cinema-­ going during the Second World War. They focus on the framework that was created by the German occupying forces to regulate film exhibition, distribution and production and a first impression how within this framework audiences could still show preferences for films from certain countries. The next

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step would be to compare local film preferences. How well did national products in these curtailed markets? Which films were shown in all four cities, and how did they perform in each of them? German films dominated the market, but which ones were popular in all four cities and how can we explain that? And the inverse: why would some titles show great variance in popularity across the cities? We can expect that in these cases specific cultural preferences will become even more visible.

Appendix Supply and demand all cities City

Country

Period 1

Period 2

Period 3

Period 4

Supply Demand Supply Demand Supply Demand Supply Demand Brno Brussels Krakow The Hague Brno Brussels Krakow The Hague Brno Brussels Krakow The Hague Brno Brussels Krakow The Hague Brno Brussels Krakow The Hague Brno Brussels Krakow The Hague Brno Brussels Krakow The Hague

Austria Austria Austria Austria

4% 5% 11% 5%

1% 3% 12% 6%

2% 3% 4% 4%

1% 1% 1% 2%

5%

4%

0%

0%

1%

1%

1%

3%

2%

2%

0%

0%

1%

2%

2%

5%

3%

4%

5%

6%

Austria (nach Anschluss) Austria (nach Anschluss) Austria (nach Anschluss) Austria (nach Anschluss) Belgium Belgium Belgium Belgium

1%

3%

3%

5%

0% 1% 0% 0.2%

0% 0.6% 0.0% 0.2%

0% 2% 0% 2%

0% 1% 0% 1%

0%

0%

0%

0%

Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakia

16% 0% 0% 0.4%

22% 0% 0% 0.3%

8% 0.1% 0% 0.7%

4% 0.0% 0% 0.3%

11%

9%

0%

0%

France France France France

3% 35% 0% 6%

3% 34% 0% 5%

0% 49% 0% 2%

0% 51% 0% 1%

0%

0%

0%

0%

Germany Germany Germany Germany

33% 17% 58% 39%

31% 23% 59% 41%

44% 38% 73% 74%

41% 38% 72% 77%

59%

49%

92%

90%

Great Britain Great Britain Great Britain Great Britain

4% 1% 0% 2.5%

4% 0.7% 0% 3.0%

0.3% 0% 0% 0%

0% 0% 0% 0%

0.4%

0.2%

0%

0%

4%

3%

2%

3%

0%

0%

10%

7%

1%

2%

57%

54%

0.1%

0%

(continued)

327

15  CINEMA-GOING IN GERMAN-OCCUPIED TERRITORY IN THE SECOND WORLD… 

(continued) City

Country

Period 1

Period 2

Period 3

Period 4

Supply Demand Supply Demand Supply Demand Supply Demand Brno Brussels Krakow The Hague Brno Brussels Krakow The Hague Brno Brussels Krakow The Hague Brno Brussels Krakow The Hague Brno

Brussels

Krakow

The Hague Brno Brussels Krakow The Hague Brno Brussels Krakow The Hague Brno Brussels Krakow The Hague

Hungary Hungary Hungary Hungary

0% 1% 0% 0.2%

0% 0.5% 0% 0.1%

0% 0.5% 0% 0.6%

0% 0.1% 0% 0.4%

0%

0%

0.4%

1%

Italy Italy Italy Italy

1% 1% 1% 2%

0.3% 0.7% 0% 3%

3% 4% 1% 6%

2% 7% 0% 8%

6%

6%

2%

3%

Netherlands Netherlands Netherlands Netherlands

0% 0% 0% 6%

0% 0.0% 0% 9%

0.2% 0% 0% 5%

0.1% 0% 0% 3%

0.3%

0.3%

0%

0%

0.3% 0% 15% 0%

0.1% 0.0% 15% 0%

0.2% 0% 18% 0%

0.2% 0% 21% 0%

0%

0%

0%

0%

3%

7%

10%

29%

13%

27%

0%

0%

0.4%

0.2%

0%

0%

0%

0%

0%

0%

0%

0%

1%

1%

0% 0% 0% 1%

0% 0% 0% 2%

0.3% 0.3% 0% 1%

0.4% 0.0% 0% 1%

2%

2%

0%

0%

USA USA USA USA

34% 41% 13% 37%

31% 38% 9% 29%

31% 2% 0% 0.6%

19% 0.2% 0% 0.3%

0.4%

0.1%

0%

0%

Other Other Other Other

0.3% 0% 0% 0.4%

0.1% 0% 0% 0%

0.2% 0.3% 1% 0.1%

0.3% 0.2% 1% 0.2%

1%

0.3%

0.4%

1%

Poland Poland Poland Poland Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia Scandinavia Scandinavia Scandinavia Scandinavia

1%

1%

8%

6%

0.3%

0.0%

0%

0%

14%

22%

2%

1.2%

1%

0%

1%

0.4%

328 

C. PAFORT-OVERDUIN ET AL.

References Anon. (1939, November 20). Verordnung über die Errichtung einer Treuhandstelle für das Generalgouvernement. 15 November 1939. Verordnungsblatt des Generalgouverneurs für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete, 6, 36 Barten, E. (2021). Jan Teunissen, the self-proclaimed ‘film czar’ of the German-­ occupied Netherlands (1940–1945). In P. Skopal & R. Vande Winkel (Eds.), Film professionals in Nazi-occupied Europe. Mediation between the national-socialist cultural “new order” and local structures (pp. 197–220). Palgrave Macmillan. Bryant, C. (2009). Prague in black: Nazi rule and Czech nationalism. Harvard University Press. Bundesarchiv Berlin. (n.d.). Bundesarchiv Berlin, R 109-I (Universum Film AG) / Bavaria-Filmkunst GmbH/ Aulandsabteilung/ 1613 Centraal Bureau voor de statistiek. (1941). Bevolking en oppervlakte der gemeenten van Nederland op 1 januari 1940. CBS. Centraal Bureau voor de statistiek. (1949). Bevolking en oppervlakte der gemeenten van Nederland op 1 januari 1946 en 1947. CBS. Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek. (1951). Statistiek van het filmwezen 1950. CBS. Chwalba, A. (2002). Okupacyjny Kraków. Wydawnictwo Literackie. CINEMA. (1942a, April 1). p. 9 CINEMA. (1942b, June 15). p. 4 Cinema Context. (n.d.). Film in the Netherlands from 1986: An encyclopedia of film culture. Retrieved March 15, 2022, from https://www.cinemacontext.nl Czesany Dvor ̌áková, T. (2011). Idea filmové komory. Č eskomoravské filmové ústředí a kontinuita centralizac ̌ních tendency ve filmovém oboru 30. a 40 [Doctoral dissertation, Charles University]. Czesany Dvor ̌áková, T., & Mohn, V. (2021). How to mediate the Bohemian-Moravian film culture? Role of Sudeten German historical agents in the protection of local culture during occupation. In P. Skopal & R. Vande Winkel (Eds.), Film professionals in Nazi-occupied Europe. Mediation between the national-socialist cultural “new order” and local structures (pp. 119–145). Palgrave Macmillan. Dibbets, K. (1980). Bioscoopketens in Nederland. Ekonomiese koncentratie en geografiese spreiding van een bedrijfstak, 1928–1977 [Master’s thesis, University of Amsterdam]. Doležal, J. (1996). Č eská kultura za protektorátu. Školství, písemnictví, kinematografie. Národní filmový archiv. Film v Begii. (1943). Filmový kurýr, 17(13), 6 Garncarz, J. (2021). Begeisterte Zuschauer. Die Macht des Kinopublikums in der NS-Diktatur. Herbert Von Halem Verlag. Haags Gemeentearchief. (2020, June 5). Het dagelijks leven tijdens WO II. Haags Gemeentearchief, archief Leidschendam-Voorburg. Retrieved March 15, 2022, from https://haagsgemeentearchief.nl/ontdek-­de-­stad/verhalen-­van-­de-­stad/ het-­dagelijks-­leven-­tijdens-­wo-­ii Haracz kinowy. (1944, December 13). Goniec Krakowski, p. 3 Haupt, H.-G., & Kocka, J. (2009). Comparative and transnational history. Central European approaches and new perspectives. Berghahn Books. Havelka, J. (1940). Č eské filmové hospodářství 1939. Knihovna Filmového kurýru. Havelka, J. (1942). České filmové hospodářství 1941. Knihovna Filmového kurýru, Praha Havelka, J. (1946). Filmové hospodářství v zemích c ̌eských a na Slovensku 1939 až 1945. Č eskoslovenské filmové nakladatelství.

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Sedgwick, J. (2020). From POPSTAT to RelPOP: A methodological journey in investigating comparative film popularity. TMG Journal for Media History, 23(1–2), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.18146/tmg.776 Semilski, J., & Toeplitz, J. (1987). Owoc zakazany. Kinematograf. Skopal, P. (2016). Zpívat a tančit s okupanty. Recepce německých filmů v Protektorátu Č echy a Morava. In P. Skopal & L. Č esálková (Eds.), Filmové Brno: De ̌jiny lokální filmové kultury (pp. 183–203). Národní filmový archiv. Skopal, P., van Oort, T., & Vande Winkel, R. (2020, June 5). Movie theatres in wartime (virtual meeting). Online workshop. Retrieved April 5, 2023, from https://www. create.humanities.uva.nl/events/movie-­theatres-­in-­wartime/ Skopal, P., & Vande Winkel, R. (2021). Film professionals in Nazi-occupied Europe. Mediation between the national-socialist cultural “new order” and local structures. Palgrave Macmillan. Spiker, J. (1975). Film und Kapital. Der Weg der deutschen Filmwirtschaft zum nationalsozialistischen Einheitskonzern. Verlag Volker Spiess. Štábla, Z. (1989). Data a fakta z dějiny čs. kinematografie 1895–1945: Sv. 3. Československý filmový ústav, Praha. Stahr, G. (2001). Volksgemeinschaft vor der Leinwand? Der nationalsozialistische Film und sein Publikum. Verlag Hans Teissen. Statistický lexicon obcí v zemi moravskoslezské. (1935). Orbis Szarota, T. (1988). Okupowanej Warszawy dzień powszedni. Studium historyczne. Czytelnik. Szturm de Sztrem, E. (1939). Mały Rocznik Statystyczny. Główny Urza ̨d Statystyczny. Thys, M. (1999). Belgian Cinema / Le cinéma belge / De belgische film. Ludion. Úprava kinematografických poměrů ve Velkém Brně. (1940). Filmový kurýr, 14(45), 1 van Gelder, H. (1995). Hollands Hollywood. Alle Nederlandse speelfilms van de afgelopen zestig jaar. Luiting-Sijthoff. van Oort, T., & Noordegraaf, J. (2020). The Cinema Context database on film exhibition and distribution in the Netherlands. A critical guide. Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 5(2), 91–108. https://doi.org/10.116 3/24523666-­00502008 Vande Winkel, R. (2011). German influence on Belgian cinema, 1933–45: From low-­ profile presence to downright colonisation. In R. Vande Winkel & D. Welch (Eds.), Cinema and the swastika. The international expansion of Third Reich cinema (pp. 72–84). Palgrave Macmillan. Vande Winkel, R. (2017). Film distribution in occupied Belgium (1940–1944): German film politics and its implementation by the ‘corporate’ organisations and the Film Guild. TMG Journal for Media History, 20(1), 46–77. https://doi. org/10.18146/2213-­7653.2017.280 Vande Winkel, R. (2020, November 17). Cinema in occupied Belgium (1940–1944). Retrieved March 15, 2022, from https://www.cinema-­in-­occupied-­belgium.be/ Vande Winkel, R. (2021a). Rekordeinnahmen und Kassengift. Die UfaAuslandsabteilung und der deutsche Filmexport im Zweiten Weltkrieg. In P. Stiasny, J. Kasten, & F. Lang (Eds.), Ufa international. Ein deutscher Filmkonzern mit globalen Ambitionen (pp. 126–143). Edition text + kritik. Vande Winkel, R. (2021b). Jan Vanderheyden and Edith Kiel: ‘Leading’ the Belgian film sector while taking orders from the German Propaganda Service. In P. Skopal & R.  Vande Winkel (Eds.), Film professionals in Nazi-occupied Europe. Mediation

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between the national-socialist cultural “new order” and local structures (pp. 87–117). Palgrave Macmillan. Vande Winkel, R., & Welch, D. (2011). Cinema and the swastika. The international expansion of Third Reich cinema. Palgrave Macmillan. Wanda. (1940, October 10). Goniec Krakowski, p. 7 Welch, D., & Vande Winkel, R. (2011). Europe’s new Hollywood? The German film industry under Nazi rule, 1933–45. In R. Vande Winkel & D. Welch (Eds.), Cinema and the swastika. The international expansion of Third Reich cinema (pp.  1–24). Palgrave Macmillan.

PART III

Global Encounters: Introduction

The final part, ‘Global Encounters’, pushes the comparative mode to ultimately a global viewpoint including chapters on intercontinental cases outside of the European and North American centrifugal perspectives within New Cinema History to reveal patterns in the worldwide film distribution, exhibition and experience. The comparative endeavour is often even more challenged by the lack of (archival, systematic) material or a geographical, cultural or linguistic denominator that allows researchers to use common data standards and protocols. The chapter by James Burns compares the rise and fall of cinema-going in Durban (South Africa) and Trinidad (the Caribbean) from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1980s. Comparing two cinema ecosystems—and their devoted cinema communities from South Asian descent—from regions that have received relatively little scholarly attention, Burns researches historically significant similarities in the foundations of these two cinema cultures and reveals important contrasts which are related to colonial economic and legal policies. Parallelly, Indian films and entrepreneurs catering to the South Asian market, were both key in driving the remarkable popularity of the movies, booming the cinema industry especially after the Second World War exerting a profound effect on ideas about culture and identity for South Asian communities and allowing migrant cinema-goers to reimagine their historical and cultural roots. Yet the varying political climates ultimately put both cinema cultures on different paths constricting South Asians from expanding their cinema businesses or allowing substantial growth, influencing film offer and cinema audience composition. Caroline Damiens, Mélisande Leventopoulos, Morgan Corriou and Nefeli Liontou research and compare in their chapter the particular community building at the cinema of the multicultural territories of Soviet Siberia, colonial Tunisia and post-Ottoman Greek Macedonia by focusing on the trajectories of cultural intermediaries—a cultural worker, an exhibitor and a distributor—and their networks and the relationships they cultivated with their cinema audiences. By researching the phenomena of cultural homogenisation

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and coexistence between multiple groups outside of metropolises of Western modernity drawn from archival fieldwork, the authors decentre historical audience studies and explore a broad array of collective political and social practices that emerged within cinema cultures, challenging the idea of a homogenous national audience. Despite the scarcity of sources, the authors research the networks of these cultural agents at the junction of the market and the audiences, and outline different movements between intermediaries and communities. Unhindered by the search for a universal empirical rule or general law Damiens, Leventopoulos, Corriou and Liontou argue that the best method of comparing the incomparable is not to focus on historical cinema cultures but to attempt to observe social processes through the historical sources. Yazmín Echeverría and Marina Moguillansky’s research on German films in Argentina and Ecuador in the years leading up to the Second World War is a comparative study of the circulation of German film production considered propaganda films. German cinema had an important presence, collaborating to spread the Nazi political, economic and cultural project. The comparative perspective is unique as both countries have very different distribution and exhibition markets. The authors first consider the use of sources and the methodological implications of comparing the exhibition of Nazi films in two very different countries, as one had a more developed film industry in the former, while the other had a more receptive configuration. The authors then focus on the varying distribution patterns of censored films linking the film culture to reigning political and cultural climates in both countries and major cities. The chapter thus offers a first view on the role of Nazi cinema in Latin America. The concept of the cultural mediators transgressing linguistic, disciplinary and geographical boundaries re-emerges in the chapter on the networks of exchange among Ibero-American film clubs by Ainamar Clariana-Rodagut and Diana Roig-Sanz. Going beyond national frameworks to consider other units of analysis, the authors introduce a gender perspective and propose a comparative and decolonial approach by applying five concepts considered key to applying a global approach to any discipline: space, scale, time, connectivity and agency. The chapter then reflects upon these concepts through researching by means of digital tools the emergence of film clubs in Latin America, Spain and Portugal between 1924 and 1958—argued as more peripheral objects of study, challenged by methodological issues discussed. The chapter seeks to bolster the analysis of multiple cultures, connections and interactions in the cinema cultures of the Global South. Pablo Suárez-Mansilla and Ventsislav Ikoff use the digitalised writings of cultural broker and film critic José Maria Podestá to meticulously dissect cinephilia and understand intercultural transfers in cinema cultures from Uruguay to Spain. Film criticism and non-commercial programming thrived in film circles and clubs in the 1920s and 1930s, yet due to their inefficiency were not sustainable in Uruguay. By following the evolution of early writing on cinema in the Uruguayan periodical press, Suárez-Mansilla and Ikoff unearth a typology of publications and reveal the connection to European ideas of film as art.

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Tying critics from across Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Madrid and Buenos Aires, this case study on the trajectories of film critics entwines a network of pan-Hispanic cinephilia and argues for the entangled histories of transnational topics in film history. In the final chapter of the third part on ‘Global Encounters’ Dalila Missero researches transnational cinema-going memories by analysing more than 30 in-depth interviews with an intergenerational group of Latin American women living in Barcelona and Milan. Focussing on gendered discourses about proximity, distance and belonging, Missero explores the interplay of past and present experiences of cinema-going evoking multiple cinematic cultures transcending a single territorial inscription. The chapter starts off theoretically considering reflexivity and transnationalism in the study, and directing methodological coherence. Transnational memories of cinemas and film clubs and the life narratives in the second part of the chapter function as an illustration of the role of reflexivity and transnationalism in the act of remembering. Looking at these micro movements of migrant memories, the chapter illustrates that memories of experiences of cinema-going at cine clubs and arthouse venues contribute to build specific understandings of cultural value and taste, which intersect with processes of migrant identity formation.

CHAPTER 16

Cinema-Going in the South Asian Diaspora: Indian Films, Entrepreneurs and Audiences in Trinidad and Durban, South Africa James Burns

When I visited Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, in 2004, I was greeted on my drive in from the airport by a giant billboard advertising the Bollywood Music Awards, which were being held that night in the capital. I had come to work on a project about the history of cinema in the British empire before 1940, after having done similar research in archives in several former British territories. My book was focused on the role of the cinema in the lives of imperial elites before the Second World War. But the billboard reminded me of the enduring cultural significance of cinema in Trinidad long after the empire had wound down. Years later I had a similar experience when I travelled to Durban, South Africa. There too I found a dynamic South Asian film-going community that had recently blossomed after years of being dormant under Apartheid.1 In these two former British colonies, separated by thousands of miles, the imperial connection had nurtured similar histories of cinema for audiences from South Asian backgrounds, that stood in contrast to the experiences of their immediate neighbours, as well as to their fellow subjects across the empire. 1  Post-Apartheid South Africa has hosted many Indian music and cinema awards ceremonies, including the South Africa India Film and Television Awards and the International Indian Film Academy Awards.

J. Burns (*) Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Treveri Gennari et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38789-0_16

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Recent scholarship informed by the New Cinema History has focused on local studies of cinema-going outside of the European and North American metropoles (see, for example, Fair, 2018; Maingard, 2017; Ruppin, 2020; Kaya, 2020). At the same time, scholars in this volume and elsewhere have argued for the value of comparative studies which can illuminate key factors that informed the trajectory of cinema histories and reveal patterns in the global distribution and exhibition (see van Oort & Whitehead, 2020). This chapter addresses both of these issues by comparing two cinema ecosystems from regions that have received relatively little scholarly attention. In emphasising the agency of non-Western actors in these communities, this chapter seeks to contribute to a growing body of scholarship focused on cinema-going beyond the metropole. In doing so, it draws attention to cinema markets which were largely dominated by movies from South Asia rather than from Hollywood. The experience of audiences throughout the South Asian diaspora has been the subject of a good deal of scholarly attention within the field of Film Studies (see Gopal & Moorti, 2008). But it has remained relatively neglected by the more empirically oriented field of New Cinema History. This chapter compares the rise and fall of cinema-going in Durban and Trinidad from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1980s. These histories have a great deal in common. Both territories had large communities descended from Indian indentured servants. In both colonies, these immigrants found themselves ruled over by a small settler elite, and living alongside a large community of poor black subjects. After the Second World War, these South Asian communities became avid consumers of films from India, which were shown in cinemas built and operated by South Asian merchants. Fuelled largely by the enthusiasm of these film fans, Durban and Trinidad developed among the most robust cinema cultures in the empire. By 1960, Trinidad had many more cinemas per capita than British Caribbean territories such as Jamaica, and Durban’s cinemas per capita outstripped that of most African cities. Indeed, in both territories, cinema construction and cinema-going were expanding rapidly in the late 1950s and 1960s at precisely the same moment that they were declining dramatically in the United Kingdom (see Manning, 2020, p. 91). But Indian films provided much more to audiences in Durban and Trinidad than entertainment: they offered a cultural connection to an imagined Indian homeland that profoundly informed ideas about history and identity. This comparison also reveals important contrasts which are related to colonial economic and legal policies. While the cinema histories for peoples of Indian descent followed remarkably similar paths in these two territories until the early 1960s, they began to diverge as Trinidad became an independent nation in 1962, while racial segregation became increasingly restrictive after South Africa became a republic in 1961. Thereafter, cinema-going thrived in Trinidad, just as legal restrictions in South Africa began depressing the industry. Thus, a comparative history illuminates significant similarities in the

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foundations of these two cinema communities, as well as the political environments that set them on divergent trajectories. Today, it is estimated that there are eleven million people in the Indian diaspora, and comparative works could be done on similar communities (Mishra, 2001, p. 235) in Fiji, Malaysia, Guyana or other regions of large South Asian immigration. But this chapter focuses on Trinidad and Durban because there exists a critical mass of scholarship on cinema-going in these two regions that allows for nuanced comparative study. Much of the local scholarship on cinema in Trinidad and Durban is based on oral histories, which capture the voices of cinema enthusiasts and shed light on their experiences. South Africa has a rich scholarship on cinema-going that traces its roots to the pre-WW2 pioneering work of Thelma Gutsche. Over the past two decades, this literature has been substantially supplemented by local studies of cinema-going in the District Six area of Cape Town, and the Durban region of Natal in particular (Jagarnath, 2004; Maingard, 2017). In a similar vein, several scholars working in Trinidad have produced histories of popular culture and cinema-going, most notably Lynn Macedo (2002), Stephen Stuempfle (2018) and Primnath Gooptar (2014a, 2014b). My own work on imperial cinema-going explores the experiences of the peoples of Trinidad and Tobago within the context of neighbouring territories of the British West Indies (Burns, 2020). However, none of this scholarship is focused specifically on the experiences of South Asian communities in these respective communities. Nor does it place the story of local audiences within a wider context of the global South Asian diaspora. South Asian emigrants spread throughout the British empire during the nineteenth century as steam transportation and imperial expansion encouraged commercial agriculture across the globe. Labour migration from India began in earnest in the wake of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833. Between 1833 and 1917, South Asian indentured servants were transported to Malaya, Mauritius, Guyana, Natal, Trinidad and Fiji. While some labourers signed contracts to work in the colonies of other imperial powers, the vast majority found work within the British Empire.

Durban One of the earliest sites of Indian immigration was the British colony of Natal, whose capital of Durban was settled in the early nineteenth century. Durban’s tropical climate on the Indian Ocean coast of Southern Africa made it a desirable location to grow sugar cane, and the first plants were introduced in 1849. Between 1860 and 1905, more than 150,000 Indians emigrated to Durban (Richardson, 1982). Most were from the Northeastern Indian regions of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Orissa; from the Gujarat region around Mumbai; and from the Southern Tamil- and Telegu-speaking regions. These indentured workers were followed by so-called passenger Indians, Muslim merchants who were drawn to Durban and other cities along the East African littoral, as well as the island of Mauritius by commercial opportunities. Durban became a key port in

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Image 16.1  Durban cinema map circa 1970. The outlined area represents the borders of the Grey Street complex

the region during the South African War of 1899–1902, and its population tripled from 31,000 to 93,000 by the time of the creation of the South African Union in 1910.2 In 1900, the population of the city of Durban was dominated by Europeans, with many African workers commuting to the city centre from neighbouring townships. However, by the end of the Second World War, the demographics of the city were fairly evenly split between the self-identified black, white and Indian populations. The centre of the cultural and social life for the South African Indian community was the Grey Street complex, or ‘Casbah’, a block of streets in the heart of the port-city’s downtown. In the heavily segregated city, Grey Street was an island of South Asian settlement surrounded by a much larger white central business district. Outside of the Grey Street neighbourhood, the majority of the South Asian population lived in nearby townships such as Mayville and Chatsworth (Image 16.1). Moving pictures arrived in South Africa before the turn of the twentieth century. During the South African War (1899–1902), British troops stationed in Durban were treated to early picture shows. Durban was home to one of South Africa’s first permanent cinema, the Electric Theatre, which opened in 2  The South African War of 1899–1902 (also referred to as the ‘Boer War’) resulted after prolonged negotiations in the unification of the Southern African territories of Cape Colony, the Orange Free State, The Transvaal Republic and Natal into the South African Union in 1910.

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1909. According to film historian Thelma Gutsche (1972, pp. 95, 404), it was opened by an English company that operated several in the city. By 1913, the city of Durban had eight cinema venues (Lionae, 1913). The popularity of the cinema in South Africa grew rapidly during and after the First World War. Gutsche describes “the penetration of the cinema into the country” by the 1920s, where “going to the bioscope on Saturday nights had become a social custom deeply integrated in the life of both dorp and farming communities”. For the white rural farmers chronicled by Gutsche, moving pictures “furnished their only animating contact with the outside world” (Gutsche, 1972, p. 183). By 1918, the South African cinema industry was controlled by African Consolidated Theatres (ACT), which imported movies, built theatres and even produced their own films. ACT catered largely to the white population in Durban and throughout the Union. During the 1920s and 1930s, the company built cinemas all across South Africa, many of which rivalled in grandeur the ‘picture palaces’ going up at the same time in Europe and North America. While small local cinemas cropped up across the Union during the 1920s and 1930s that were not owned by ACT, the company’s control over film importation and distribution gave it an effective monopoly on the cinema business throughout all of British Southern and East Africa. During the early 1930s, ACT faced aggressive competition from a local chain called Kinemas. Over a period of several years, the rivals built new theatres at a furious pace, many of which featured brand new sound technology. Not long after ACT bought out their competitor, they faced a new threat from the American studio Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM). In the late 1930s, MGM built several cinema houses in South Africa, including the palatial Metro in Durban’s central business district in 1937. The result of this competition was a boom in cinema building for white audiences during the 1930s. A 1938 Durban city directory listed eleven cinemas in the city centre, all catering almost exclusively to the city’s approximately 50,000 ‘white’ citizens (Bagwadeen, 1983, p. 170).3 Gutsche’s study of South African cinema history before 1940 has little to say about cinema for non-European audiences. As she explains, “owing to their low wage level, the provision of special cinemas for non-Europeans could not be contemplated for many years” (Gutsche, 1972, p. 385). Early cinema venues for non-white audiences appear to have flown under the radar. But one of Durban’s first theatres was established in the Grey Street area of the city in 1909, a few months after the establishment of the city’s first cinema. The first cinema hall to cater to South Asian audiences was referred to as Rawat’s Bioscope after the owner and manager of the venue, Ebrahim Cassim Rawat. Rawat was born in Surat, India, around 1850 (Donaldson, 1940). Like many other cinema entrepreneurs in Britain’s empire, he was an established businessman before he invested in cinema entertainment. In his case the family ran metal goods stores in Durban and in neighbouring Pietermaritzburg. In 3  In 1943, there were 90,000 Indians in Durban out of a total population of 240,000 in Durban (Bagwadeen, 1983, p. 170).

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1909, Rawat began advertising his cinema in Durban’s Indian newspaper in both Gujarati and English. This was not a purpose-built cinema hall, but more likely a store-front nickelodeon similar to the small cinemas cropping up across the world. Despite the fact that it was later given the grander name of The Victorian Picture Palace, it was a spartan venue known for its hard wooden benches (The Growth of the S.A. Indian Cinema Industry, 1967, p. 66). In 1930, it was joined by a second cinema that catered primarily to Durban’s Indian population, the Orient, which opened on Prince Edward Street in the Grey Street district. The South African Commercial Directory for 1937 listed two cinemas for Indian audiences (Bramdaw, 1935, p. iv),4 and three years later there were four (Bramdaw, 1939, p. 5A). In 1939, the first cinema house (as opposed to a repurposed building) built by an Indian business was opened in the Mayville district to the west of Central Durban. This cinema, The Mayville, was followed shortly thereafter by the opening of the Avalon cinema, in the heart of the Grey Street neighbourhood. The Avalon was the first cinema catering expressly to people of colour in Durban (The Growth of the S.A. Indian Cinema Industry, 1967, p. 67). It was opened by two South Asian businessmen, AB Moosa and A.J. Kajee, and was their first venue in a chain that would grow to total eighteen cinemas for ‘non-­ Europeans’ that flourished throughout South Africa. The opening of the Avalon was significant because it provided an elevated experience for audiences who had become accustomed to the spartan conditions of Rawat’s Bioscope. As one observer described the Avalon during the 1950s: Indian owned, seating 1,200 people with Indians and Africans segregated. This is a first class theatre and the owners felt that the attitude of their public changed when they were offered a really good building. From being a cat-calling, ill-­ dressed, somewhat unruly crowd when they attended less elegant places, here they felt obliged to dress well and act in a more subdued manner. Audiences were approximately 40% African, 40% Indian, and 20% Coloured. (Barrett, 1955, p. 20)

Initially, these early cinemas showed old prints of the same films screened for white audiences. But in the early 1930s, the cinema owners began importing films from India. It is difficult to determine exactly when the first films from India became available in Durban. By 1938, the film journal FILMINDIA was regularly receiving correspondence from South African subscribers. But these correspondents made it clear that Indian films were off to a halting start in their country. A letter published in 1938 complained about the ‘age-old’ and ‘rotten’ Indian films that made their way into South Africa. The correspondent lamented this situation, as “there are more Indians in South Africa who have never been to India and would love to know something really authentic about India” (Filmindia, 1938, p. 11). In that same year, an editorial in FILMINDIA 4  The South African Indian Commercial Directory (1936–1937) shows ‘Bioscopes: Durban’ as ‘Royal Picture Palace’ (A.C.T) and Victoria Picture Palace (A.C.T. Ltd.).

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discussed the problems that the Indian film industry faced in getting their films circulated in the Union of South Africa. One issue was the high customs duties in the Union: As a result of these blood-sucking restrictions and conditions, Indian films in South Africa very rarely find a way, although this is an important province well populated by Indians, who are unfortunately prevented from enjoying film-­ entertainment which as a matter of fact, has become a sheer necessity in all countries. (Exploitation of Indian film outside of India, 1938)

Many bureaucratic and logistic challenges would plague the circulation of Indian films throughout Durban’s cinema era. The Mayville, opened in 1938, is credited with being the first cinema to focus on showing films from India. The key figure in its history is Amulakh N. Goshalia, a businessman from Rajkot in Kathiawad, Northern India, which was home to many of the successful ‘passenger Indians’ who dominated commerce in the Grey Street area (Essa, 2019, p.  38). He ran Goshalia’s Music Saloon in Durban during the 1920s and 1930s. With the advent of sound films, his shop began selling soundtrack recordings. Thus, his venture into the cinema business grew logically from this trade. He imported the first film from India circa 1933 (Indian Views 1933, p. 11, as cited in Jackson, 1999, p. 201),5 and by 1942 was advertising his cinema as “the only all india picture house in South Africa” whose policy was to “exhibit Indian pictures which virtually BRINGS INDIA to the Indian people of this country” (The Leader, 1942, p. 6). As Historian Goolam H. Vahed has observed, thanks to Goshalia and others, “the cinema became a regular feature of Indian life in Durban and films were played to packed houses. Thanks in large part to the popularity of films from India, cinema became the ‘most popular form of entertainment from the 1940s’ for Durban’s South Asian community” (Vahed, 1995, p. 207). Like all public venues in the South African Union, the Durban cinemas had to be segregated. Venues for ‘Europeans’ did not admit South Asians, and censorship laws prevented many films from being screened to any but white audience. The Board of Censors approved some for screening to South Asian and coloured audiences, but not to ‘children and natives’. As the American Ralph Bunche described the situation during his visit to the Union in 1938, “when certain types of pictures are being shown at the two non-European houses, signs are put out stating that children and natives will not be admitted” (Bunche & Edgar, 1992, p. 290). Owners of Indian cinemas were required to have segregated seating, though this proved difficult to enforce (Sharma, 2016, p.  85). The Avalon held performances at special times of day for African

5  See Jackson (1999, p. 201) who cites ‘Indian Views’, 23 June 1933, p. 11, to support the assertion “Indian talkies had joined imported Indian records as the most significant sources of recreation and Indian cultural renewal”.

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audiences, while all of the cinemas maintained entrances, seating and bathrooms for the different ‘races’. In the decades following the Second World War, several merchant families invested in new cinema houses in the predominantly South Asian areas of the city. These venues had “melodious sounding names such as the Sha Jehan, Shahrezad, Natraj, Naaz, Luxmi, Ajanta and Rani” which drew on the South Asian heritage of the target audiences (The Growth of the S.A. Indian Cinema Industry, 1967, p. 69). Several families came to dominate the Durban cinema industry. In addition to Kajee and Moosa, Goshalia and Rawat, there was the Bodasing family, which had made money in transportation and sugar cane production before they bought the Victoria Picture Palace and Raj cinemas in central Durban, and the Rajab family, who established a successful furniture factory before venturing into the cinema business by opening the Raj Mahal in the Stanger township. In 1956, the Rajab brothers opened the Shah Jehan cinema with seating for 2100 in central Durban, called at the time “the largest cinema entertainment facility in South Africa” (Sharma, 2016, p.  85). The seven Rajab brothers went on to open the opulent Shiraaz in 1968. This 700 seat venue was “strikingly impressive in its Persian architectural style and appeal, with world class features. ‘Bioscope’ goers would come just to watch the curtain open before the movie began” (Sharma, 2016, p.  85). The brothers opened their last cinema, the Isfahahn, in 1976. The Rajab venues not only screened films, but also hosted artists such as South African Jazz singer Mariam Makeba and American soul artist Percy Sledge. As the government’s publication for Indian affairs wrote in 1967: Indian entrepreneurs do indeed deserve credit for taking the lead in providing entertainment for all non-whites of the Republic and it is significant that of the 13 Indian cinemas in and around Durban only one is operated by a White company. All the rest are independently owned and managed by Indians. (The Growth of the S.A. Indian Cinema Industry, 1967, p. 69)

The heart of the cinema-going world was the Grey Street Casbah, where the movies were but one of many cultural markers that gave the area a distinctively South Asian flavour. As a journalist from India described it in the late 1950s: For the visitor from India Durban is interesting because it is the home of many thousand Indians, and the Indian quarter, with its familier (sic) sounding signboard, its mosques and temples, its cinemas showing Indian films, loudly played Indian music and prominence of saries (sic), looks like any bit of India. (Aksahvani, 1958, p. 4)

By the end of the 1960s, cinema-going among people of South Asian descent in Durban had risen markedly since the end of the Second World War. In 1938, there were twelve cinemas in the city and its environs, only two of which admitted customers of South Asian background. By 1972, there were at

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least 39 cinemas in the Durban area, one-third of which catered largely to South Asian audiences.6 An account of Durban Indian life published by activist Fatima Meer in the late 1960s described the social significance of the cinema. The cinema is the most popular outlet, and each week about 100,000 Non-­ Whites, mainly Indians attend the dozen Indian owned cinemas in and around Durban, where seating capacity varies from 600 to over 2000. Twenty five percent of the attendance takes place over the weekend, most cinemas having three and many, four performances on a Saturday. While half of the cinemas show exclusively Indian pictures, usually with Hindustani dialogue, only one is restricted to featuring English medium pictures. Indian pictures have longer runs, two to three weeks being common, English medium pictures rarely run for more than a week. (Meer, 1969, p. 100)

Several South African scholars have underscored the profound cultural impact of these films on the South Asian community. Historian Vashna Jagarnath, in a series of essays on cinema in Durban, has emphasised film as a conduit for ideas and fashions from India. In her words, the Grey Street cinemas provided “a communicative tool that allowed for the passing on of ideas from India” and “a vehicle that created economic growth which was vital for the maintenance and transformations of notions of Indian identity” (Jagarnath, 2004, p. 173). Elsewhere she has argued “an important influence on the development of Indian identity as well as ideas and imaginings of India itself was the Indian film. It is usually an overlooked contribution to Indian culture in South Africa, but a vital one” (Jagarnath, 2004, p.  207). Tashmica Sharma, in her thesis on the Grey Street neighbourhood, argues that these films revived ephemeral connections with the motherland, for the majority for whom (sic) a trip was unaffordable. The combination of cultural apparel, song and dance all gave cinemagoers a momentary connection with their motherland which left a lasting impression in the minds of those who watched it. (Sharma, 2016, p. 90)

As Durban scholar Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed (2019) recently observed that “from the 1950s to the 1980s, Indian films, or Bollywood, were the chief means by which Indian South Africans kept in touch with the motherland. Bollywood was more than entertainment”. In a similar vein, a journalist recently ascribed to these films a “positive impact for retention of vernacular languages and became a source of religious and moral education” (Devan, 2014). But these South Asian audiences did not solely consume Indian films, which could be difficult to get consistently. The government of India was a leading critic of the Apartheid government, and an ardent supporter of the UN boycott against South Africa after 1963. While this stance was motivated by their support for Durban’s Indian population, it made the importation of films from 6  Cinemas listed in Braby’s Natal Directory, Including Zululand, Griqualand East and Pondoland, 1972 (Durban, A.C. Braby).

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South Asia more expensive, as they made their way into the country through circuitous routes. Thus, the South Asian audiences became fans of movies coming from other world regions.7 Fatima Meer (1969, p.  114) described the young Indian audiences of the 1960s who “have fallen under the sway of the modern pop cult. Elvis, the Beatles, and Cliff Richard are hot favorites who often share the corrugated wall of the living room with the venerated deities and Indian film stars”. The cinema is popular with the young men; but for most young girls it is a rare luxury which occurs once in three or six months. Many declared James Bond (Meaning Sean Connery) to be their favorite actor. One young Hindustani girl working in a factory and stranded with a child fathered by a married Tamil boy, sports his tattoo on the one hand and on the other a tattoo of Devil-may-car Hindustaini actor, Dev Anand. Thick set, sultry Sivaji Ganesa of the South Indian films, however, reigns as overall favorite. The young boys may model themselves on the Beatles, but their beauty queens are drawn from the Indian screen, and it is their pictures that are found to be most common, framed or pasted on walls. (Meer, 1969, p. 115)

In contrast to the South Asian areas, there was not an active cinema-going culture in the adjacent black neighbourhoods of Durban. Lacking the capital of these South Asian entrepreneurs, and given the restrictive censorship and segregation policies of Apartheid, black members of the Durban public had limited access to the cinema. As one scholar observed in 1986: The contemporary cinematic map of South Africa is a legacy of apartheid, during which black people could not attend white cinemas and there were very few cinemas in areas designated for black people. Even today there are only two cinemas in SOWETO, which has a population of two million. (Dovey, 2009, pp. 57–58)

While cinema loomed large in the intellectual imagination for many black South Africans, their access to the medium in Durban was largely channelled through the Indian cinemas run largely for Indian audiences (Nixon, 1994). Black citizens were also subject to greater censorship than South Asians, as by the end of the 1950s, the government had passed legislation limiting ‘Bantus’ from sitting amongst Asian and coloured audiences. If cinemas like the Avalon wanted to sell tickets to African customers, they had to be in separate afternoon shows with no whites or Asians in attendance (Nixon, 1994, p. 172). Segregated viewings were permitted at larger venues that could provide separate entrances, exits and toilets. Thus, only the largest theatres could afford to reserve seats for African customers during peak hours (Nixon, 1994, p. 172). This was not the intention of the cinema owners—indeed as one scholar has remarked, “the owners of the various cinemas aimed at attracting the African, the Coloured as

7

 See Fair, 2018 on popularity of martial arts films in Tanzania.

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well as the Chinese market” (Jagarnath, 2004, p. 171). But expense and censorship laws limited the access of black audiences to the movies. Apartheid also prevented the cinema owners from expanding their businesses outside of the carefully segregated townships and Grey Street area. Several laws, including the 1950 Group Areas Act, began a process of dispossessing tenants and land-owners from South Asian neighbourhoods such as Mayville, Cato Manor and Clairwood. In the summer of 1958, thousands of people from these neighbourhoods were forced to vacate their homes. The Group Areas Act forced the Avalon chain to sell properties in newly identified ‘white’ areas at a substantial discount, ultimately leaving the original cinema in the Durban Casbah as their only property. And as new commercial developments were planned in Durban—some of which had cinemas for white audiences—Indian investment was not allowed. Meanwhile, ACT and its successor companies—20th Century Fox after 1949, and Ster Kinecor after 1971—continued developing cinemas across the nation from 1960 to 1980, with unfettered access to build in any region of the country. The opening of the Isfahahn in the Grey Street complex in 1976 was the tail end of the building trend that had begun during the Second World War. Increasingly hemmed in by Apartheid policies, and with the importation of films becoming increasingly difficult because of international sanctions, cinema-­ going declined as a popular form of public leisure for Durban Indians by 1980. It was replaced for many families by television, which had begun capturing cinema audiences in the US and Europe shortly after the Second World War, but which only reached South Africa in 1974. The slide was accelerated by home video, which contributed to the closing of cinemas all across the developing world in the 1980s. The arrival of video cassette recorders in the 1980s “dealt a major blow” to the Indian cinema houses (Khan, 2016, p. 188). In the 1990s and early 2000s, new multiplexes built by corporations such as Ster Kinecor and Nu Metro, all located in high-end shopping malls, dealt “the final blow to small scale Indian owned cinema” (Khan, 2016, p. 188). Ironically, it was the unravelling of Apartheid that ultimately ended the cinema culture of the Grey Street Casbah. From the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 to his becoming South Africa’s first democratically elected president in 1994, Durban was beset by intense political violence (Essa, 2007, p.  307). This, coupled with the relaxation of legal segregation, created social instability that led to a flight of consumers and businesses from the Grey Street neighbourhood. According to one informant: People preferred to remain at home, trading the giant screen for smaller television images. The compensation was relative safety from the grime and crime of the city. Indian cinema finally cashed in its chips with the closure of the Raj, Avalon, Albert, Esfahan (sic) Shah Jehan, Shiraz and finally Topaz and Sabena. Seventy years after its birth, this tiny piece of Bombay ceased to exist. (Essa, 2007, p. 307)

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Image 16.2  Durban’s Victoria Picture Palace n.d. (Source: The Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre, University of KwaZulu/Natal, Durban)

The story of cinema-going among Durban’s South Asian audiences is one in which a handful of entrepreneurs built an industry among an audience that was largely ignored by the country’s dominant cinema chain. This audience boomed in the post-war era, brought into the cinemas by the opportunity to see films from India, but staying to become consumers of films from across the world. In the decades following the Second World War, the cinema became a crucial social and cultural component of life for Durban’s Indian population, in a way that was quite distinct from that of their Zulu-speaking neighbours. But Apartheid and changes in global media flows in the 1980s ultimately ended this cinema world (Image 16.2).

Trinidad Much of this story is paralleled in the Caribbean country of Trinidad, a small island lying seven miles off of the coast from Venezuela. In 1900, the island’s South Asian population was about the same size as the Afro-Trinidadian population,8 much as in Durban the South African Indian population was roughly equal to the indigenous Zulu peoples. While both territories were segregated, in Trinidad this segregation was largely dictated by economics. By 8  The population of Trinidad descended from enslaved Africans has been referred to as ‘Afro-­ Trinidadian’ and ‘Creole’.

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Image 16.3  Cinemas in Trinidad circa 1970. Note the cluster of cinemas along the island’s west coast, where most immigrants from South Asia settled

the turn of the twentieth century, most Trinidadians of South Asian descent lived segregated in rural towns where they continued the agricultural work their ancestors had been brought to do decades earlier. The capital of Port of Spain was an area of largely Afro-Trinidadian neighbourhoods, though the island’s European plantocracy, and expatriate European businessmen, lived in the city along a small community of South Asian merchants (Image 16.3). Trinidad’s early cinema history had a similar trajectory to that of Durban. At the turn of the twentieth century, travelling cinemas from North America began visiting the island. In 1911, the first permanent cinema was established in the capital of Port of Spain, and by 1918 there were several theatres catering to colonial elites. In that year, The Trinidad Argus noted that despite the wartime privation, the citizens of Port-of-Spain continued spending money on the cinemas, which “are springing up everywhere” (The Trinidad Argus, 1918). During the 1920s, a cinema chain, called the British Colonial Film Exchange (BCFE), established a monopoly in Trinidad similar to that of ACT in South Africa. This chain was started by an American expatriate, George Rosenthal, and a merchant from British Guyana named William Humphreys. One of their first new cinemas was the Empire in Port of Spain Trinidad, built in 1925 at a cost $100,000, and which was described as the premier cinema house in the

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British West Indies (Trinidad and Tobago Yearbook, 1925, p. 65). During the 1920s, the British Colonial Film Exchange extended their circuit to neighbouring colonies, including the luxurious Empire cinema on the island of Barbados, which still stands in the capital of Bridgetown. The grandeur of their cinemas in Port of Spain and Bridgetown reflected the company’s strategy which sought to manage a handful of expensive venues in urban centres that catered to the region’s elite. The British Colonial Film Exchange had a great deal in common with African Consolidated Theatres. Like ACT, the BCFE controlled cinema-going over several British territories by monopolising film importation and distribution. Like the ACT, the BCFE initially focused on providing entertainment for elite audiences, and built high-end cinemas that drew respectable members of the public. As was the case with the ACT in Durban, in the late 1920s, the British Colonial Film Exchange also found itself confronted with competitors. Initially, this challenge came from the American studio MGM, which, as it had in South Africa, attempted to build its own theatres in Trinidad in the 1930s. But a far greater challenge came from South Asian entrepreneurs who focused on providing entertainment to poorer customers in rural towns and villages, which were predominantly settled by the descendants of South Asian immigrants. There were several key figures in this story. Henry Teelucksingh was a merchant from the Trinidadian provincial town of Couva who built his first cinema there in 1916, and subsequently employed mobile film units that screened films throughout the countryside. During the early 1930s, he worked for the British Colonial Film Exchange, but quit to start his own rival company. Nur M. Gokool was another merchant who challenged the BCFE monopoly during the 1930s. He was the son of a wealthy Indian immigrant who had studied to become a physician in Britain before becoming enamoured with the cinema business. In 1932, he created the Globe cinema company and reached out directly to MGM for help in challenging the Humphrey’s monopoly. MGM helped him finance a new theatre called the Metro in the capital,9 but the following year, Gokool broke with them and renamed his theatre the Globe. Shortly thereafter, another Indian immigrant, Timothy Roodal, established a competing theatre, the Roxy, in Port of Spain. During the 1930s, these South Asian merchants fought a bitter trade war with the BCFE, which resulted in one case in which a rival was prosecuted for trying to burn down his flagship Empire theatre in Port of Spain. As it had in Durban, this competition triggered a building boom which meant, by 1940, the capital Port of Spain, with a population of about 80,000, supported nine theatres.10 9  The Colonial Film Exchange tried to block MGM’s entry into the market in court. See Battle for the films in Trinidad (1932, p. 23). 10  Compare this ratio of 81,000 people to nine cinemas in Port of Spain with Durban’s eleven cinemas which catered to the city’s 50,000 white inhabitants in 1938. These ratios are comparable with North American cities such as Toronto, which had one cinema per 5636 (500,000 pop., 112 cinemas) on the eve of the Second World War. See Gutsche (1972, p. 260).

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By 1940, most of the cinemas in Trinidad were located in the capital of Port of Spain, a city that did not have the rigid legal segregation of Durban. As one scholar observed: no cinema in Trinidad was located in any residential community that was reputedly and obviously white European, and there were few of these racially unmixed communities. The vast majority of cinemas were firmly located in non-white working class communities or at best on the borders of middle class and mixed elite residential communities. (Trotman, 2020, p. 157)

At the grand opening of the Roxy cinema in 1935, the creole politician Captain Cipriani said it “caters to every section of the community, the classes and the masses” (Trotman, 2020 p. 152). But that is not to say there was no segregation. As a scholar of Trinidadian cinema has put it: differentiation in admission prices for the different sections of the facility served to facilitate an informal system of segregation within the physical structure and layout of the cinema, which reflected class differences that often ran parallel to the race and colour differentiations in the colonial society. (Trotman, 2020, pp. 152–153)

But this informal segregation did not affect the abilities of South Asian entrepreneurs to dominate the entire market. Indeed, in stark contrast to developments in Durban, by 1940, South Asian merchants were well on their way to taking over the entire cinema business on the island. A key moment came when Gokool’s Globe cinema company purchased the BCFE and all of its cinemas. Thereafter, virtually every cinema owner on the island would be a member of the South Asian community. Though many of the cinema owners in Trinidad in 1940 were South Asian, their community did not frequent the cinema in significant numbers. Most of the cinemas in Trinidad in 1940 were in Port of Spain, which had a relatively small South Asian population. As in Durban, it was the arrival of films from India that began attracting the South Asian public into the cinemas. The first Indian film, Bala Joban (Baburao Patel, 1934), arrived in Trinidad in 1935, brought by engineer Ranjit Kumar. When the BCFE declined his offer to screen the film, he turned to the smaller theatre owners (Kumar, 1981, p. 12). While in South Africa it is unclear when the first film from India arrived, in Trinidad it was remembered as a significant cultural occasion. As one historian describes, the premiere of the film Bala Joban “awoke images of ‘the motherland’ (India) that had been dormant among the East Indians for a long time and aroused a higher level of ethnic consciousness in terms of East Indian identity and ‘Indianness’ among them” (Gooptar, 2014b, p. 100). Bala Joban was reputedly so successful that the print of the film became worn out by its repeated screenings (Gooptar, 2014b). After its premiere, “The local East Indian’s appetite for Indian movies and things Indian from the motherland had been tapped and there was no turning back on their demand for continued

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Indian movies and things Indian”. By the eve of the Second World War, these films were being shown regularly in small cinemas in the rural towns of Trinidad and Guyana.11 The cinema business received an enormous boost during the Second World War as large numbers of American soldiers were stationed in Trinidad. The GIs were relatively well-paid and injected disposable income into the local economy. The US Army also built bases with cinemas for the troops. This sparked a cinema-building boom which continued after the Second World War had ended. These new cinemas were all built by Indo-Trinidadian businessmen and were for the most part established in the areas of South Asian settlement of the colony, much as the new cinemas built after the Second World War in Durban were built in Indian townships and business districts. For example, Trinidad’s second largest city of San Fernando, 30 miles south of Port of Spain, an area of heavy South Asian settlement, went from having three theatres before the Second World War to eleven by 1960, all owned by South Asian businessmen. To the south, the provincial town of Chaguanas had only one cinema in 1940, but built five new ones in the fifteen years after the Second World War. Neighbouring Couva had one cinema before the Second World War, and built five more shortly afterwards, while the village of San Juan had no cinemas before the Second World War, but built six in the decades following. Overall, the number of cinemas on the island had gone from seventeen on the eve of the Second World War to approximately 90 by 1961, most of the growth coming outside of the capital. A map of these new venues demonstrates that they almost all were established in the central and southern regions of the island where the majority of Indo-Trinidadians lived (see Image 16.3). As was the case in Durban, in Trinidad the popularity of the cinema exploded among peoples of South Asian descent after the Second World War. However, while in Durban most patrons in the post-war era saw films in relatively large venues, outside of the capital of Port of Spain there were very few large cinema houses. Thus, it is difficult to estimate the size of the total cinema audience. The historian’s task is further complicated by the fact that these rural cinemas did little print advertising, relying instead on posters in front of the theatre and on travelling ‘mike men’ who were tasked with promoting films in their vehicles. Thus, many of them left only ephemeral traces in the historical record (Gooptar, 2020). But while the total numbers of audience members is uncertain, scholars from diverse disciplines have recognised the profound cultural impact of these films on Trinidad’s South Asian audiences. As the leading film historian of Trinidad has put it, “Bollywood movies have become the single most potent bond that joins together all Indians. … it gave them access to glamorous worlds and people who were not of Hollywood, and brought into their cultural 11  See The Memoirs of Bruce Watson, n.d. p. 97, for a description of the popularity of Indian films in Guyana in the late 1930s. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~nyggbs/RogerAustin/ TheMemoirsofBruceWatson.pdf

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practice a series of lively innovations in music and dance styles” (Gooptar, 2014b, p. 311). In her book on the global influence of Bollywood, musicologist Tejaswini Niranjana (2011, p. 60) speculates “the meaning of being Indian in Trinidad might have changed quite dramatically owing to the intervention of Hindi cinema and the spectatorial practices it initiated”. In his history of Hinduism in Trinidad, Alex Rocklin (2019, p. 19) observes “Indian language film distribution in Trinidad had profound effects on how Indian Trinidadians performed their identities as ‘Indian’”. In a similar vein, anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen has observed: The idea of Indianness in Trinidad—as Indo-Trinidadian cultural self-­ consciousness—evolved largely during the 1940s and 1950s. The part played by Indian cinema (most of the cinemas in Trinidad are owned by Indians) and the dissemination of popular Indian music through mass media have clearly been very important aspects of the emergent self-definition of Trinidadian Indianness confronting Indo-Trinidadians with images of India hitherto unknown. (1992, p. 171)

And as Trinidadian historian David Trotman (2020, pp. 159–160) asserts, the arrival of films from India “served to revitalize the community by facilitating a revival of withering practices, and a celebration and reaffirmation of those cultural aspects that had been under blistering negative attacks”. As one interviewee said, “Bala Joban made us proud of our culture. It made us proud to be Indian” (Trotman, 2020, p. 160). By the mid-1970s, there were close to 100 cinemas in the country. But by the end of that decade, cinema attendance began to decline rapidly, for many of the same reasons associated with its demise in Durban. The advent of rising urban crime and political unrest discouraged attendance at cinemas, particularly in towns and urban areas. A politically motivated fire-bombing of the Empire in Port of Spain was followed by threats to bomb cinemas in San Fernando (Macedo, 2002, p. 3). Thereafter, the popularity of cinema-going declined rapidly. By 1988, 90% of the nation’s households had televisions, and half had VCRs, and surveys indicated that more than half of the population never attended the cinema. This led to a shuttering of most movie houses by 1990. Those cinemas that did stay open stopped showing Indian films, as the popularity of the genre declined in the early 1980s. Whereas the country had imported 92 Indian films in 1981, the number dwindled to three by 1983. In the handful of cinemas that remained open, Indian films were replaced by American action films and Kung Fu films from Asia (Image 16.4).

Conclusion The history of cinema-going among audiences of South Asian descent had many parallels in Trinidad and Durban South Africa. Films from India, and entrepreneurs catering to the South Asian market, were both key in driving the remarkable popularity of the movies in both places. Indeed, the popularity of

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Image 16.4  Shah Jehan Cinema, Durban n.d. (Source: The Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre, University of KwaZulu/Natal, Durban)

cinema-going was much more popular per capita in these territories than in neighbouring colonies, because of the intensity of the enthusiasm of the South Asian communities. In both Durban and Trinidad, the cinema industry boomed after the Second World War when it was declining in other world regions. These commonalities invite comparison with other territories such as Guyana and Mauritius, which had similar histories and ethnic demographics. In both regions, cinema exerted a profound effect on ideas about culture and identity for South Asian communities. When the first films from India arrived in Durban and Trinidad, the vast majority of the South Asian audiences had never been to the subcontinent. In both areas, these films allowed audiences to re-imagine their historical and cultural roots. This starkly contrasts the experiences of black audiences in these two countries, for whom cinema images consistently denigrated or trivialised their history and culture. As a Trinidadian historian has observed, Indian films provided “a trove of images, attitudes, ideas, and morality Creole Trinidad would never know” (Ramcharitar, 2021). Yet differing political climates ultimately put the cinema on different paths. Apartheid policies in South Africa prevented South Asians from expanding their cinema businesses outside of the narrow parameters of their neighbourhoods. It also discouraged these cinemas from catering to black African audiences in significant numbers. Conversely in Trinidad, South Asian merchants purchased and built cinemas across the island in the decades following the Second World War that catered to anyone who could muster the price of admission. While the substantial growth in theatres favoured the areas of South Asian settlement, the black audiences of Port of Spain avidly attended films in

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cinemas owned by South Asian entrepreneurs. The influence of these urban cinemas can be seen in popular culture through the ‘panmen’, or steel drum bands, that flourished in Port of Spain from the late 1930s, many of which drew their names from popular films (Goddard, 1991, p. 245). These Afro-­ Trinidadian film fans eschewed Indian films for the most part, preferring Hollywood action and crime films in the early era, and martial arts films by the 1960s.

References Aksahvani. (1958, June 29). Produced by the Publications Division of the Government of India, New Delhi, p. 4. Bagwadeen, D. R. (1983). The question of ‘Indian penetration’ in the Durban area and Indian politics: 1940–1946 [Doctoral dissertation, University of Natal]. Barrett, M. M. (1955). How considerations of race affect cinemas, theatres and concerts in Durban. In A record of the proceedings of the first Natal Student Conference, Pietermaritzburg. The South African Institute of Race Relations, Johannesburg 1955. File AD1715-12-12.1.8 held at the Wits University Research Archive. Retrieved December 6, 2021, from http://historicalpapers-­atom.wits.ac.za/ south-­african-­institute-­of-­race-­relations-­sairr-­9 Battle for the films in Trinidad. (1932, June 20). The Jamaica Gleaner, p. 23 Braby’s Natal Directory, Including Zululand, Griqualand East, and Pondoland. (1972). A.C. Braby. Bramdaw, D. (1935). South African Indian WHO’S WHO and Commercial Directory 1936–37. A biographical sketch book with illustrations of South African Indian and an illustrated business directory. Natal Witness. Bramdaw, D. (1939). South African Indian WHO’S WHO and Commercial Directory 1938–40. A biographical sketch book with illustrations of South and Central African Indians and an illustrated business directory. Natal Witness. Bunche, R. J., & Edgar, R. R. (1992). An African-American in South Africa: The travel notes of Ralph J. Bunche, 28 September 1937–1 January 1938. Ohio University Press. Burns, J. M. (2020). Comparing historical cinema cultures: The case of the British West Indies, 1900–1945. TMG Journal for Media History, 23(1–2), 1–27. Desai, A., & Vahed, G. H. (2019). A history of the present: A biography of Indian South Africans, 1990–2019. Oxford University Press. Devan, Y. (2014, June 25). From popcorn bags to prayer books. Post. Retrieved November 30, 2021, from https://www.pressreader.com/south-­africa/post-­south-­ africa/20140625/282170764234578 Donaldson, K. (1940). South African Who’s Who 1940. Ken. Dovey, L. (2009). Cinema and violence in South Africa. In L. Dovey (Ed.), African film and literature: Adapting violence to the screen (pp.  34–62). Columbia University Press. Eriksen, T.  H. (1992). Indians in new worlds: Mauritius and Trinidad. Social and Economic Studies, 41(1), 157–187. Essa, E. (2007). Drawing the curtain: Indian cinema in the Grey Street complex. In R.  Pattman & S.  Khan (Eds.), Undressing Durban: Behind the tourist gaze (pp. 302–308). Madiba Publishers.

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CHAPTER 17

Cinema Intermediaries, Communities and Audiences (Soviet Siberia, Post-Ottoman Greek Thessaloniki, Colonial Maghreb) Morgan Corriou, Caroline Damiens, Mélisande Leventopoulos, and Nefeli Liontou

This chapter looks at intermediaries who have introduced or acted as agents of cinema in a particular community, linguistic pool or multicultural territory. We use a comparative approach to examine the trajectories of three cases—a cultural worker, an exhibitor and a distributor—their networks and the relationships they fostered with their audience community/communities. We also look at their indigenous/exogenous status within these communities, asking whether they are members of it or not, that is through cultural, religious, ethnic or racial ties. In other words, we examine how these intermediaries influence the process of community building at the cinema. This work is part (Translator: Đại Lâm Tait) M. Corriou (*) • M. Leventopoulos University of Paris 8 Vincennes—Saint-Denis, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] C. Damiens University of Paris Nanterre, Nanterre, France e-mail: [email protected] N. Liontou University of Paris 1 — Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Treveri Gennari et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38789-0_17

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of a larger research project, “Community Building at the Cinema: Towards a Decentred and Entangled History of Cinema-Going”,1 the aim of which is to examine audiences as shifting collectives beyond and within the confines of state borders. We pay particular attention to the bewildering diversity of social interactions that took place in specific sites. Through the interplay between cinema-going and community, groups are constantly reshaped and reinvented, and not only in response to films; the spectators’ cultural, ethnic, national and religious identities as well as the trajectories of the communities that frequent screening venues are affected by the cinema experience. To what extent does the cinema spectacle create a community? Should it be understood as a divisive element because of cinema’s subversive potential, or more as a consensual motor within these communities? How do audiences, specifically minority ones, form? Our aim here is to examine two types of processes side by side, and sometimes as a single unit: the phenomenon of cultural homogenisation, and that of coexistence, consensual or forced, between multiple groups within a single territory. To this aim, we explore a broad array of collective political and social practices that emerged within and on the margins of screening spaces. We are convinced of the need to challenge the idea of a homogenous national audience—one that, to a certain extent, tends to be conflated with the abstract notion of the “mass audience”. However, this implies rethinking the interactions between these audiences—collectives that were often reduced by scholars to a single (national) group of spectators—and the actors who distribute/ exhibit films. Despite the growing work of researchers on film distribution and exhibition at a global level,2 there remains vital work to analyse in a transnational perspective the social pathways of film circulation, their uses by a given community and how intermediaries propel and influence inter-community relationships within audiences. By intermediaries, we understand all the middle people (exhibitors, distributors, etc., or in the case of non-commercial cinema, cultural or clergy workers, film club organisers, etc.), who, enjoying an inter-­ position at the centre of the cinema network, stand at the junction between communities that receive cinema and the film market. We have deliberately chosen to consider the commercial and non-commercial sectors together, as cultural workers were also vital links in cinema circulation and exhibition (both in socialist and capitalist configurations—such as post-WW2 France—and decolonial ones—like 1960s Algeria), as well as being a fundamental and integral part of the cinema industry. We seek to work on a global level, by taking different spatial scales into account, with a specific focus on territories lacking a powerful film production industry. There is a need to “provincialize”—in the sense understood by Dipesh 1  A project jointly initiated by University Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis and University ParisNanterre, as well as the Musée du quai Branly, funded by the group of universities and institutions Université Paris Lumières through its 2021 funding programme and by the EUR ArTeC graduate school. As such, funding for this work was granted by the French National Research Agency, Grant no. ANR-17-EURE-0008. See also Corriou et al. (2021)). 2  See, among others (for the historical periods following early cinema): Mingant, 2022; Fair, 2018; Çam & Şanlıer Yüksel, 2020; Kaser, 2018.

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Chakrabarty (2000)—the amply-studied cinema theatres and audiences of New York and Paris. In this respect, this article takes up Robert C. Allen’s call to “decentre historical audience studies”, which suffers from a tendency to place the major metropolises of Western modernity at the centre of the historical narratives of cinema-going, what he refers to as “gothamcentrism” (Allen, 2008, pp. 20–33). Our aim here is to emphasise the idea that historical facts, in the field of cinema, are co-constructed: this “co-construction of social facts” (Minard, 2013, p. 26), that is integral to entangled historical processes, works here on two levels. Firstly, beyond any geographic criteria, understanding cinematographic phenomena implies taking into account how spectators receive cinema products, depending on their individual cultural and political trajectories. And then there is a second, purely geographic, level, because places lacking a powerful cinematographic industry contribute to shaping cinema as a “total social fact” (Friedmann & Morin, 1952)—as Edgar Morin, recycling Marcel Mauss’ concept, described cinema in the early twentieth century—due to the hybrid appropriations of films by their audiences. Thus, the relationship between audiences, screening dispositifs, middle women/middlemen and film texts is understood here through the prism of community, with cinema as the point of intersection.3 In other words, we examine here how “community building” is affected when facing a cinema screen. From this perspective, the different middlemen/middle women involved— distributors, exhibitors, projectionists and other cinema staff—can be understood as members of a collective that encompasses more than just the audiences: did these actors claim to belong to a specific community, were they recognised as such by spectators or were they regarded as exogenous? They are all active “cultural intermediaries”—a concept initially introduced by Pierre Bourdieu (1979) that refers to “the ensemble of individuals and organisations that ensure one or several situated roles between artistic creation and consumption by an audience” (Lizé et  al., 2014; see also Jeanpierre & Roueff, 2014) or, more generally, between production and reception. This notion implies “a shift away from unidirectional or transmission models of cultural production towards an approach that conceives of workers as intermediaries continually engaged in forming a point of connection or articulation between production and consumption” (Negus, 2002, p.  503). Thus, the concept of the intermediary allows us to go beyond the binary model of centre/periphery and producers/ receivers and “more broadly, any binary model (encoding/decoding, broadcasting/reception, importation/exportation, etc.) by underlining the active role of a third type of actor, neither producer nor receiver, or even both at the same time” (Rioufreyt, 2013, p. 35). We aim here to “rehabilitate the work of diverse and often silent mediators, without whom the confrontation 3  As defined by Werner and Zimmermann (2003, p. 15), the point of intersection lies “at the very heart of histoire croisée” and is the site “where events likely to affect the elements in their presence to various degrees may be produced, according to their resistance, permeability, or malleability relative to their environment”.

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between audience and image simply would not happen” (Grimaud, 2002, p. 82). What position does the intermediary occupy in cinema-going practices, especially in the context of collectives that are on the defensive, forced by a central power to pose the question of identity? What strategies allow them to develop their networks within and outside the community, in territories perceived to be at the margins (geographically, culturally, politically, etc.)? How does cinema exhibition fit into the professional trajectories of these individuals? The case studies we compare here are drawn from archival fieldwork in three multi-ethnic territories, each of which is built on a different local scale (city, colonial empire, region within a multinational state, but never the national scale per se): Soviet Siberia, multicultural post-Ottoman Thessaloniki, colonial Maghreb. We adopt a synchronic approach, with each case selected within a time frame that falls between the late 1920s and the early 1940s. Comparison is necessary because it helps “make connections between particular circumstances and developments which may otherwise have seemed marginal or unique” (Thissen, 2019, p. 125). In the age of transnational studies, one might think that heuristic comparison is no longer on the agenda, and indeed, Zimmermann and Werner stated as early as 2003 that comparison represented a stalemate for entangled history (Werner & Zimmermann, 2003, pp. 7–36; 2004). Yet, a new epistemological environment has recently expanded the comparative approach. Moreover, in the specific case of cinema history, it has long been considered a useful research tool, even if it is rarely implemented (see in particular Burns, 2020; Fuhrmann, 2020; van Oort & Whitehead, 2020). This is all the more valid for peripheral territories where we generally lack the archival material that would allow us to use common data standards and protocols, and compare across a broad time scale (in some cases, the data are so sparse that it is difficult to illuminate even very narrow chronological timeframes). Systematic comparison is even less possible in our case as there is no common geographical, cultural or linguistic denominator across these three territories (here, we are dealing with societies that are quite unconnected, in contrast with the “Cultura de la Pantalla Project” (Cinema City Cultures, 2021), to cite one example from the New Cinema History sphere). Furthermore, and in contrast with traditional comparative history, there is no strong nation-­ state paradigm to rely on. If qualitative comparison is no doubt our only option here, it is a choice we are committed to because of the potential we see in juxtaposing case studies that do not at a first glance appear to be equivalent to each other (Biltereyst & Meers, 2016, 2020; Biltereyst et al., 2019). Our goal is not to build a uniform empirical generalisation, or to oversimplify the uniqueness and incommensurability of historical events and processes. Rather, as historical sociologist George Steinmetz puts it, The dimension being compared would not necessarily be defined at the level of empirical events, which are indeed often unique and in some respects incommensurable, but at the level of the underlying causal mechanisms that interact in changing, contingent conjunctures to produce unique events. (Steinmetz, 2014, p. 413)

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Alexandra Putintseva: Cinema for Indigenous Peoples at the Heart of Soviet Social Mobility Between 1929 and 1932, the 308 indigenous inhabitants of the Nanai settlement Nizhnie Khalby in the Soviet Far East were able to enjoy regular film screenings, thanks not to the arrival of a commercial cinema, but to the establishment of a multipurpose space where, among a number of diverse annexe activities, films were projected. For many of the village’s inhabitants, this was a novel event. The intermediary who introduced cinema to the Nanai community was not a professional exhibitor, but a cultural worker: Alexandra Petrovna Putintseva, head of the Red Yurt of the Far East in the federal district of Khabarovsk. Here, rather than as part of a broader entertainment offer, cinema was included in a series of political activities, outside of the commercial sphere.4 Films were projected for “political enlightenment” purposes. A key notion in the early years of the Bolshevik state, political enlightenment (politprosvet) was part of the vast system erected by the party to instruct and disseminate social knowledge among the Soviet population. “Political enlightenment work” (politprosvetrabota) ranged from the “liquidation of illiteracy” to party schools and mass educational and cultural matters.5 Established in the late 1920s in Soviet Siberia, the “Red Yurt” was a type of political enlightenment facility set up for the indigenous peoples of the north of the USSR. Intended as a starting point from which indigenous societies could embark on the road to socialist modernity, the Red Yurts were part of a broader network of organisations primarily geared towards education and enlightenment. In line with the “indigenising” efforts typical of Bolshevism in the first years of the regime (Martin, 2001), these facilities were named after the Russian denominations for different indigenous habitats—the Red Yurt, Red “Chum”, Red “Iaranga” and so forth— depending on the target population. In sum, these facilities served as a physical manifestation of Soviet ideology in the taigas. Among the various documents in Putintseva’s personal archives is her field journal, which she wrote almost daily between 1929 and 1932, and the autobiography she wrote in April 1983.6 A vital aspect of the communist cadre 4  For the case of colonial Nigeria, Brian Larkin (2008, pp. 73–122) talks of “political ritual” to describe this type of event, which created a new mode of exchange between audience, film and film producers. 5  A network of party and state administrative organs oversaw what was referred to as the “cultural front”, amongst which the Main Committee on Political Enlightenment (Glavpolitprosvet, GPP) founded in 1920 and headed by Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia (David-Fox, 1996; Kenez, 1985). 6  This research is based on an archival collection at the Grodekov Museum in Khabarovsk. The Putintseva collection also includes print photographs, negatives on plate glass, administrative documents, linguistic notebooks and subsequent articles published by Putintseva. This entire collection provides us with a near-complete picture of the activities and daily life of the site, in particular its cinema screening activities. Much of this material was published under the supervision of Galina Teodorovna Titoreva, head of the ethnographic section of the museum in Khabarovsk: Putintseva, 2010, Khabarovskii kraevoi muzei I.I. Grodekova.

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selection process, the autobiography was a rite of institution that served as a kind of curriculum vitae.7 While we should of course handle this personal account with the usual precautions, as its purpose was above all to legitimate Putintseva’s work and career choices, it is nevertheless an invaluable document because it allows us to situate her cinema activities as well as her ties to the Nanai community within the broader perspective of her Soviet upward social mobility. For Putintseva, the Red Yurt was her very first opportunity to take on a supervisory position. Her nationality is not specified in the archives studied here, but she seems to have been Russian or of a different Slavonic nationality. Born on 7 July 1903 in Chita (Eastern Siberia), in her biography she describes herself as a bedniak, that is from a poor peasant family, in line with the new Soviet categories of social differentiation used for the peasantry.8 After high school, she was hired as a typist in several of the young Soviet state’s regional administrations in Chita, then in Vladivostok and Khabarovsk. During 1923–1924, through her work, she met Georgy Ushakov (a Soviet Arctic explorer) at the Directorate of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, and Vladimir Arsenyev (an officer-topographer for the Russian army, and explorer of Eastern Siberia) at the organisation Dal’riba (Far East Fishery). In her autobiography, she stresses the influence that these two celebrated Soviet figures had on her future choices and considered these encounters through professional circles to have sparked her desire to leave for the northern territories despite harsher working and living conditions. In 1927, she was sent to Sakhalin Island for the fishing season to work as a secretary-typist in a fish factory. It was through this experience in the North that she had her first encounter with indigenous peoples (the Nivkh), but above all it served as proof of her commitment to the communist project. In parallel, she requested admission to the USSR Communist Party (application made in 1926, approved as a candidate in 1927). On her return to Khabarovsk, following the Party line according to which one should only become a Bolshevik by choice (Studer, 2003), she did her best to find a position in the North and to take on a task that would be seen as challenging. When in 1929 she discovered through the press that the Central Committee had just decreed the organisation of nomadic enlightenment facilities for the peoples of the North in the Far East, she reported to the 7  Communist autobiographies are marked both by their effort to remain transparent as regards the author’s activist choices, and by a certain level of compromise when their subject strays from the communist ideal. Varying in format and length, the basic structure of this document is usually organised around a series of questions regarding the author’s identity (personal, family, professional), followed by other aspects of their activist work (training and cultural development, social responsibilities, sentences and criminal record) tied to their “party status” (Pennetier & Pudal, 1996). 8  The bedniak is a poor peasant who does not own a horse, and according to the Bolshevik scale is positioned higher than the batrak (defined as an agricultural worker) but lower than the seredniak (“average” peasant owning a small farm) and the kulak (rich peasant able to hire day labourers) (Lewin, 1965).

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Department of Women Workers at the local Territorial Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and asked to be posted to one (Putintseva, 2010, pp. 308–309). Thus, between September 1929 and 1932, Putintseva ran the Red Yurt of the Far East, which was active in three successive Nanai locations. The amount of responsibility this implied certainly bore its full weight in her admission to the CPSU in September 1930. First stationed in the Nanai village of Nizhnie Khalby between September 1929 and July 1930, the Red Yurt moved to the Kondon settlement in October 1930, then to Bolon in mid-1931, where it remained until August 1932. Its perimeter of action also included the indigenous settlements in the surrounding area. It is in this context that Putintseva took on the role of both cinema programmer and organiser. She arranged screenings, either at the Yurt itself (i.e. in the building that was used for the institution’s many activities such as political meetings, sewing classes for women and school for children), or in neighbouring villages during propaganda tours. The projection of films had to be served alongside a political film lecture—that is, they were supposed to be introduced with a political speech, the title cards had to be read and sometimes translated out loud, and, if possible, the films were accompanied by exhibitions, team games, performances and so forth (Drieu, 2012; Pozner, 2004). The screening of films was just one among many political enlightenment activities organised by the Red Yurt (including political meetings, conferences, public readings, discussions on diverse subjects), and was part of the cultural landscape of the “cinefication” (kinofikatsiia) campaign—a term formulated following the “electrification” (elektrifikatsiia) campaign (another modernisation tool) to describe the early Soviet efforts to expand cinema from urban areas to the countryside (Kepley, 1994; Sumpf, 2007). Through the creation of a nationwide cinematographic network, the cinefication project combined territorial conquest with the revolution and the imperative of modernity in new ways of living. The aim of this campaign was to spread access to the cinema, and for the Bolsheviks to signal a break with the old tsarist regime, when cinema had essentially been an urban pastime. By organising screenings in structures like the Red Yurt, they signalled their desire to blur the line between the city and the countryside, by extending the modern sensory experience of projection to those geographic, ethnic and cultural spheres traditionally excluded from the reach of cinema distribution (Damiens, 2023).9 If Soviet promoters saw cinema as a means for transforming the indigenous peoples into model citizens, it was also rapidly adopted by indigenous spectators themselves, who favoured its entertainment aspect. If, for the first screenings, the young political educator had to go round the village to gather spectators for the screening (like, for example, on 8 November 1929), they 9  Caroline Damiens, “Film Exhibition for Indigenous People in Soviet Siberia: ‘Cinema-coming’ and Political Enlightenment in the Red Yurt”, Early Popular Visual Culture (2023, 21(2), 189–207. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17460654.2023.2209939).

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very quickly began to come on their own. On 14 December, Putintseva noted that “now, hunters come in especially from the taiga for the cinema, just to see the films” (Putintseva, 2010, pp. 25, 33, 36, 38) (emphasis added). A little over two months later (the Yurt organised its first showing on 5 October 1929), the cinema spectacle had become an attraction for the indigenous peoples of the region. If, at the beginning, Putintseva had to drag people away from their daily activities, they were soon coming to the Yurt just to attend screenings: an audience was born. For Putintseva, film distribution was not just an end in itself: it was one among an arsenal of methods for the political enlightenment of the indigenous peoples, and part of her responsibilities within this new institution, the Red Yurt, which itself served as a stepping stone towards her career as a Soviet education cadre, as is evident from the subsequent steps in her professional trajectory. Thanks to her experience at the Red Yurt, and her acceptance as a Party member, she gained access to the special pedagogical structures for Party cadres set up with the aim of creating a proletariat intelligentsia (Fitzpatrick, 1979). In 1932, she left the Red Yurt (without being replaced) and went to Moscow and then to Leningrad for her studies. During her time at the Red Yurt, she was able to study the Nanai language, of which she became a specialist; in 1954, she defended a thesis on the Nanai language, its literature and folklore (Putintseva, 1954) before retiring in 1958, although she continued to return to the region to gather Nanai source material (Putintseva, 2010, pp. 310–314). What interests us here is that the cinema activities which marked the beginning of her career are absent from the rest of her biography. Alexandra Putintseva died not long after the dissolution of the USSR, on 23 February 1993, at 90 years old. Her life and professional and activist career espoused the Soviet century. Her trajectory is a classic example of that of a Soviet cadre of the era: with the “right” social background, having proven her commitment to the socialist project thanks to her post at the Red Yurt, she climbed the social hierarchy while benefitting from the Party’s educational institutions. Cinema is almost a side note in this trajectory. And yet, despite the short duration of her work in film exhibition, when taken within the context of the history of the cinema at the local level, it was a vital role: she introduced cinema and organised numerous “first screenings” in Nanai communities. During these projections, each of the two parties—the indigenous audience and the Bolshevik exhibitor—had its own vision of the cinema-going experience, which each shaped according to their own priorities and needs. To its Nanai audience, cinema was a new form of entertainment that they could separate from their political environment, while to Putintseva, it was one among several instruments within a broader toolkit, with underlying professional motives of social upward mobility. Despite this difference in interpretation, for Putintseva the experience of the Red Yurt and its cinema screenings deep in the taiga gave her direct access to Nanai language and culture, while working towards the creation of an indigenous intelligentsia. Indeed, for the rest of her

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life she maintained ties with the Nanai community, who affectionately referred to her as “Sura Putincha” (Titoreva, 2010).

Benico Segura, Jewish Entrepreneurship and Thessaloniki’s Mutating Cinema Audiences Benico Segura, alias Nicos Segura(s), was a cinema exhibitor in Thessaloniki. He was born into a Salonican Jewish family of eight in 1900. This section looks at how Segura was a commercial middleman whose community identity both diverged and mutated during the period under study. His dual relationship with the collective and the national allows us to apprehend the interactions between his professional career path as an intermediary and the radical reconfiguration of Thessaloniki’s cinema audiences. Thus, even though we possess almost no information on the exhibitor’s relationship with the latter, his trajectory can help us to envision the structural transformations they underwent. Segura began his career in Thessaloniki at a time when the city’s transition from a multicultural and multilingual Ottoman metropolis into a provincial city of the modern Greek State (annexed during the Balkan Wars in the autumn of 1912) (on this matter, see, among others, Keridis & Kiesling, 2020) was already well under way. Thus, the first part of Segura’s career of interest to us here unfolded during the city’s cultural homogenisation and gradual Hellenisation—a process which ended concomitant to the mass extermination of the majority of Thessaloniki’s Jewish Sephardic population by the Nazis. During the 1910s, when the Jewish Sephardic was the majority population of the city, the post-Ottoman transition led to particularly violent tensions. Between Zionists, socialists and integrationists, the community was divided on what posture should be taken vis-à-vis the Greek State.10 Indeed, in contrast with the city’s Ottoman era, Jewish religious identity increasingly ceased to be the decisive category of belonging and cultural difference for this population, and became a fluctuating point of reference in concurrence with city-based identity, nationality, class and ideology (Molho, 1988, p.  395; Naar, 2016, pp. 12–13). In 1920, a law laid the foundation for the organisation of the city’s Jewish community inside the Hellenic state. The development of Greek patriotic feelings and of a Hellenic citizen consciousness among Thessaloniki’s Jews during the interwar years remains the subject of debate among historians, and tends to be re-evaluated. Two of Benico’s six brothers, Leon and Pepo, both older than him, were already working in the cinema business in the early 1920s, perhaps even as early as the First World War. Between 1921 and 1928, while they were exploiting the winter theatre of the White Tower (part of the city’s fifteenth-century fortifications, which later became the symbol of Thessaloniki), cinema had already become a fully-fledged field of Jewish entrepreneurship in the city; what is 10  On the contemporary history of Thessaloniki, and of its Jewish community, see in particular: Mazower, 2005; Molho, 1997; Naar, 2016.

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more, Sephardic enthusiasm for cinema-going seems to have been particularly keen.11 However, it still remains unclear what potential ties there were between this entrepreneurial investment and the three brothers’ Jewish cultural identity in Thessaloniki’s context. It is important to stress once more that there was no single way to be a Salonican Jew in the interwar period; rather, there were multiple forms of social enrolment and belonging. This thus begs the question: To what extent did the Segura’s Jewish identity shape and interact with their professional activities in the field of cinema? Indeed, Leon’s daughter and the niece of Benico, Dora, recalled that in contrast with her maternal family, which continued to use Judeo-Spanish (Seg, 1970, pp. 12–13), her uncles spoke “the language of Homer” (Ginio, 2002) so well that their difference as Jewish exhibitors should not be taken as self-evident. Nevertheless, Leon, who was a committed actor in the Salonican cinematographic corporation—as evidenced for example by his involvement in the cinema owners’ strike of 1927 (Kinematografikos, 1927, p. 8)—was equally invested, according to his daughter, in the local Jewish community (Seg, 1970, p. 39). The fact remains that, at the turn of the 1930s, with the advent of sound cinema, the “Segura brothers”—as they were sometimes collectively known, to the extent that we cannot be certain whether there were two, three or four of them—juggled themselves between cinema theatres. In January 1931, Benico Segura and Elie Attas founded a company for the exploitation of the Attikon cinema. It was a local theatre building situated on the broad Avenue Egnatia, towards the city’s eastern industrial sector, which had been deemed unsafe and condemned a few months previously (Kinimatografikos Astir, 1931a, p. 12). Benico’s business partner, Attas, was a journalist at the Indépendent (a Jewish Francophone journal) who contributed three quarters of the initial capital.12 We know from the society’s founding papers that Attas delegated management of the cinema to his associate. We also know that the “Segura brothers” were identified as directors of this risky venture by the Greek cinematographic corporation’s journal Kinimatografikos Astir in April 1931 (Kinimatografikos Astir, 1931b, p.  14). However, few traces remain regarding Benico’s possible collaboration with his brothers. Therefore, to what extent did Benico work with Leon and Pepo, taking into account that from the 1920s he had been initiated to the exhibition profession by them? To what extent did their paths diverge towards the end of the 1930s, at a time when Benico’s brothers seem to have been increasingly disappearing from the cinema exhibition landscape? For Benico, should we understand that he distanced himself from whatever ties he had had to his Jewish community identity, considering that he married a Christian Orthodox woman in 1937? 11  Mélisande Leventopoulos, “Watching films in the city of ghosts. Communities and audiences in Salonica before and after its incorporation into the Greek state”, unpublished presentation at the conference “Researching Past Cinema Audiences”, Aberystwyth University, 23 March 2018. 12  Historical Archive of Macedonia, Thessaloniki (Istoriko arheio Makedonias, henceforward IAM), Archives of Thessaloniki’s Court of First Instance, ABE 644-AEE DIK 1.16, List of Acts of Incorporation and Dissolution of Shared Partnerships, 19 January 1931.

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By 1932, Attas and Benico Segura had launched a second cinema theatre, the Alcazar, within the grounds of the Hamza Bey Mosque—which, after the Ottomans left, had ceased to serve as a place of worship—followed probably in 1939 by a third, the Ilion,13 in the heart of the working-class Vardar district. Thus, the area around Vardar-Egnatia-Venizelou Street, long associated with a Jewish presence, became the epicentre of their cinematographic activities until the arrival of the Nazi occupiers. The cinemas were within walking-distance from each other, and you could even take a shortcut between the Ilion, near the Barra red light district, and the Attikon via Vardar Square, an important market during the interwar period for the impoverished suburban populations. At the corner between Egnatia Avenue and Venizelou Street, the Alcazar was more central, in a trading district of tanners, antique dealers and tailors, and close to Benico Segura’s home, on a street with many shops and buildings owned by Jews.14 The two associates thus remained geographically rooted at the margins of the city centre, among the working-class and middle-class sections of the Jewish population, who, in turn, rubbed shoulders with the refugee masses from Asia Minor. These two groups in Salonican society doubtlessly made up the principal clientele of the three cinemas, which were known for low ticket prices and a constantly renewed programme of talkies in comparison with the smaller local theatres. Moreover, these theatres were even sometimes reappropriated by their audiences such as the tobacco workers who used to gather at the Attikon. It was a popular public space in the 1930s for left dissident organisations, such as the communist party (KKE) (Tomanas, 1993, p.  11). This fact is, however, unlikely to be any indicator of the ideological leanings of the cinema exhibitors themselves, but rather of the close proximity of these sites to the tobacco factories. They were probably rented out for these activities. Nonetheless, we do not have any evidence in our sources. The Nazi Occupation, which began in April 1941, precipitated a reconfiguration in the cinema entrepreneurship sector, at a time when Attas was already living in Athens. As part of the growing enforcement of anti-Semitic policies, the Aryanisation of cinema theatres was decreed in August 1942.15 In October of the same year, Benico Segura was interned in the Pavlos Melas camp and was forced by the Nazi Press and Propaganda Agency (the local instance of the Propagandastaffel) to sell the Alcazar and the Ilion for a pittance—and without even notifying his associate—to a Greek Orthodox exhibitor from the town of Serres, at the time under Bulgarian occupation.16 Despite this, during the few weeks of his imprisonment, the cinemas remained open under the 13  IAM, Archives of Thessaloniki’s Court of First Instance, ABE 644-AEE DIK 1.16, List of Acts of Incorporation and Dissolution of Shared Partnerships, 1 April 1939. 14  See on this note: Thessaloniki’s Jewish Assets (n.d.). 15  IAM, Archives of Thessaloniki’s Special Court of Nazi Collaborators, EDD box 84, folder 1003, order published by Zensurstelle Propaganda-Staffel Saloniki, signed by Langhamer, 25 August 1942. 16   IAM, Archives of Thessaloniki’s Special Court of Nazi Collaborators, EDD box 84, folder 1003.

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supervision of Benico’s father-in-law, who was, in turn, obliged to hand the keys over to the exhibitor from Serres. From November 1942 onwards, the two cinema theatres were thus exploited by this beneficiary of Nazi policy as one of the first acts of plunder in this city—one that, to the best of our knowledge, seems to have been the unique case of Aryanisation in the city’s entertainment sector. Moreover, this spoliation happened very early in comparison with the large-scale acts of plunder of Jewish assets in Thessaloniki orchestrated by the administration of the Service for the Disposal of Jewish Properties (YDIP) from March 1943. One wonders what impact public segregation—as represented by the seizure of Benico Segura’s cinemas—had on the surrounding neighbourhoods. More precisely, this raises the question of its effect on the cinemas’ clientele during the crucial months following the traumatising and humiliating rounding-up of 9000 Jewish males between the ages of eighteen and 45 at Liberty Square (Plateia Eleftheria) on 11 July 1942, where they were registered for forced-­ labour assignments. This event is considered to be the first large-scale public anti-Jewish act in Thessaloniki, and Benico was one of those present. If the man, as we imagine him today, seems to have had a daily and embedded presence in these cinema theatres, to what extent were their regular spectators conscious of this change in management? What effect might this have had on their cinema-going practices, when we consider that for a year already, these theatres had been projecting a majority of German productions, including Jud Süß (Jud Süss, Veit Harlan, 1940) which, strangely enough, was projected at the Ilion while still under the direction of Benico Segura? How did those who had become a spectacle at Liberty Square interpret the disappearance of the cinema’s exhibitor? If these questions remain unanswered, we know that the intermediary as much as the Jewish spectators were excluded, and this exclusion in itself is doubtless the most obvious trace of a fate they—briefly—shared. While Benico was surviving partly through the charity of some of his colleagues, the Jewish inhabitants of Thessaloniki were deprived of cinema entertainment in February 1943, having been forbidden to use public transportation and appear at all public events. Albert Menasche (1947, p. 11), a prominent figure of the Jewish community, highlighted in his memoirs that it became impossible to enter, among other spaces, cinema theatres. Benico Segura witnessed the city being emptied of its inhabitants, but managed to survive the deportations to Auschwitz-Birkenau himself thanks to his mixed marriage, and conversion to Orthodoxy (at an unconfirmed date). Thus, by the time he returned to working in cinema exhibition, there were no more Jewish spectators left in the city. Besides, he was the only Segura brother to have never left Thessaloniki. After the Second World War, he was unsuccessful in suing the Greek Orthodox exhibitor who exploited his cinemas for his collaboration with the Nazis. However, this trial’s court files are a precious source material for us. Following this, he seems to have blended into the Greek population, while becoming professionally renowned to the national cinema

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corporation.17 Thus, Benico Segura bridged the gap, thanks to his economic activities, between two radically different space-times in the life of Thessaloniki’s cinemas. Nevertheless, in February 1959, he stood witness, this time as a Jew— despite his Christian conversion—at the trial of Max Merten, who had been the military administration counsellor to the commandment of the Thessaloniki-­ Aegean circumscription, and was the only German officer brought to trial for crimes against the Greek Jews by the Special Military Court for War Criminals.18

The Baidas: Defending an Arab-Speaking Public Sphere in the Maghreb In her recollections of the post-war Tunisian cinema industry, Marianne Benacin describes a curious figure, Édouard Khayat. Benacin writes that Khayat, a Lebanese distributor, was “eccentric, a little mystical, small, ugly and stingy”, who was in the habit of going into the screening rooms to count the spectators during screenings; sometimes, carried away by the Egyptian music, often very beautiful, he would clap his hands and dance in the dark hall, and the spectators would end up clapping in time along with him. (Sitruk-Benacin, 2010)

The distributor mocked in this passage, who fretted over frequent fraud by exhibitors, was in fact a member of the illustrious Baida/Bayda entrepreneurial family from Beirut. This family set up business in the Maghreb between the wars and participated in the expansion of an Arab-speaking public sphere in North Africa by introducing new media: the record, the radio and of course cinema. Egyptian films were the only Arabic-language fictions available to Maghrebi audiences, at a time when language appeared at the heart of all combats, constantly under attack as it was from the French occupying forces—to different degrees, whether in the Algerian departments or the Moroccan and Tunisian protectorates. If spoken Egyptian was far from commonly understood by the first cinema audiences, this did not seem to prevent the films from kindling a certain sense of common belonging, and projections were sometimes the theatre of political demonstrations. This Greek-Orthodox family entered into the record industry around 1907 to exploit the talents of the singer Farajallah Baida. The company was founded by two brothers, Farajallah and Jibran, who started out as lowly construction workers, and who partnered with their more educated cousins: Jibran (Gabriel), Butrus (Pierre) and Michel (Racy, 1976, p. 40). In the beginning, the vinyl records were recorded and pressed in Germany (Gronow, 1981, p. 270), and distribution of the Baidaphon/Baydafun label spread quickly throughout the Arab world, as well as among the Lebanese diaspora in Europe and the Americas  A reputation that is clearly tangible in issues of Kinimatografikos Astir from the 1950s.  Proceedings of the Max Merten Trial, Vol. I., Athens, 1959, pp. 155–160.

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(Racy, 1976, p. 40). The early 1930s saw the dawn of what Ali Jihad Racy has called “a new post-phonograph era”, at a time when record sales were declining throughout the world. This decline was accentuated by the popularisation of the radio and, in the Arab world, the development of Egyptian films, two new media for music (Racy, 1976, pp. 45–46). The Baidas were quick to seize upon this change, and even kindled it. They had signed the Egyptian singer Mohammed Abdel Wahab/Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab as early as the late 1920s. On Butrus’ death, around 1931, Abdel Wahab became a fully-fledged partner at Baidaphon (Racy, 1976, pp. 40–41). It is in this context that the family began to work in cinema production and distribution through their company Abdel Wahab Films/Aflam Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab. The Baidas benefitted from a network that they had been patiently building since 1907 throughout the Arab world, and even beyond. Their first film, Al-Warda al-­ bayda’ (The White Rose, Muhammad Karim, 1933), was a box-office success and marked the veritable rise of Egyptian cinema in North Africa. In this region, films were distributed by a nephew of the Baida brothers, Théodore Khayat, who emigrated to Morocco in late 1932. It seems probable that the French mandate established over Syria and Lebanon further opened the door to North Africa for the family (particularly Morocco), transforming the Baidas into “interlopers of Empire” (Arsan, 2014). Khayat set up a record-­ player and vinyl shop in Casablanca and approached Maghrebi artists for Baidaphon (Miliani, 2004, p.  46). In 1935, he entered the film industry in North Africa, through the firm Sodifilm. The company’s early success can be attributed to intermedia exchange: the Baidas set up a specific economy that created lasting ties between the music and film industry in the region. In a speech about “propaganda in Muslim lands”, an ex-member of the Directorate-­ General for Native and Southern Territory Affairs in Algeria underlined the talent of the team hired by Théodore Khayat, their clever advertising, “their intimate knowledge of their target audience” and their significant “financial means, which allowed them to pay up-front and gain the attention of cinema directors”.19 The Tunisian example allows us to reconstruct these networks in more detail. The contacts made by Michel Baida and Théodore Khayat during their travels to Tunisia were, indeed, closely followed by French intelligence services.20 There, they worked with Maurice Sitruk,21 a Jewish Tunisian exhibitor who gave them access to the Mondial on Thiers Street (today Ibn-Khaldoun), at the heart of the nocturnal district of Tunis where many of the city’s cinemas could be found, and where sandwich and sunflower-seed merchants, as well as 19  French National Archives, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine (Archives nationales, henceforward: AN), Premier Ministre, Organismes rattachés directement, Centre des hautes études sur l’Afrique et l’Asie moderne, no. 20000002-18: Delahaye, “La propagande en pays musulman”, 1941. 20  Nantes Centre of French Diplomatic archives, Nantes (Centre des Archives diplomatiques de Nantes, henceforward: CADN), Protectorat Tunisie, Service des renseignements généraux de Tunisie, Dossiers individuels, no. 1TU/701/2/148, “Théodore Khayat”. 21  On Maurice Sitruk’s biography, see: Corriou (2011, pp. 186–189).

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prostitutes, vied for the attention of passers-by (Pauvre Crainquebille!, 1930). At that time, Egyptian films had still not gained entry to the Palmarium, the prestigious palace on Jules-Ferry Avenue (today Habib-Bourguiba), although Sitruk managed to take it over in 1938, granting him a key position within the local cinema corporation. The screening of Egyptian films at the Mondial was described by Filmafric as an “ingenious idea [to] change its audience” (Filmafric, 1937). Indeed, the cinema drew a new Tunisian audience, little-­ familiar with city-centre European cinemas. The screening of Egyptian films thus became a means for colonised spectators to reconquer the urban space (Thompson, 2012). It participated more generally in the transformation of cinema-going practices by drawing a more family-oriented audience, especially for religious celebrations. When Let Love Live (Yahya al-hubb, Muhammad Karim, 1938) became a box-office success in early 1939, in the feminist and nationalist review Leïla Khélil Mamlouk (1939, p. 10) exclaimed, not without some condescension: “Let flops live!”, delighted to see that Egyptian films had initiated many Tunisian women to the cinema-going experience. Distributed by Sodifilm and projected at the Mondial, the film enjoyed lavish advertising in the Arabic daily press—even though they did not ordinarily publish showtimes—which stressed the ties between Abdel Wahab and the Baidaphon firm (see, for example, Al-Irada, 1939). One would assume that the arrival of Egyptian cinema opened the way for Muslim entrepreneurs largely absent from the cinema trade since its beginnings in French North Africa (see Corriou, 2011, pp. 82–132). In Algeria, The Song of the Heart (Unshuda al-Fu‘ad, Mario Volpe, 1932), the first Egyptian feature film to be projected in Maghrebi theatres in 1932, was distributed by the brothers Ahmed and Mohammed Mansali.22 However, it was the (Jewish and Christian) Arab-speaking minorities that soon became predominant in the importation and distribution of Egyptian cinema. This phenomenon is neither new nor surprising: the cinema industry in the Maghreb had principally been developed by men who were labelled neither as colonised nor colonisers, those “métis of colonisation”, “more or less hoodwinked, more or less beneficiaries”, so aptly described by Albert Memmi (2002, pp. 19, 41) in his Portrait du colonisé. In his work on the Lebanese Diaspora in French West Africa, Andrew Arsan has questioned this notion of middleman minority, sometimes used in a simplistic way in colonial studies. The focus on the intermediary activity tends to overlap with the idea of “semi-western firms”, “between the modern, capitalist economy of the European firms” and the “‘traditional’, inward-looking [indigenous] trade” (Arsan, 2014, p. 125). Indeed, this pattern does not fit with the sophisticated commercial organisation of the Baidas developing subsidiaries all across the Arab world. Were the Baidas rather “relay-men” (hommes-­ relais) connecting the Arabic-speaking and French-speaking spheres—a 22  The Mansali brothers were reputedly close to Sheikh Tayeb el-Oqbi/al-Tayyib al-‘Uqbi, member of the Algerian Ulama Association (AN, no. 20000002-18: Delahaye, “La propagande en pays musulman”).

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concept introduced by Kmar Bendana (1992, p.  70; 2002), who refuses to consider the two as a strict dichotomy? Once again, the Baidas do not properly fit the category, because their activities first developed within an Ottoman or post-Ottoman space that disappeared with the First World War, and the family principally positioned itself within the Arab cultural sphere. However, this does not mean that the Baidaphon catalogue was closed to the languages of non-Arab-speaking minorities (including Armenian, Greek, Turkish), as well as Hebrew (Wenz, 2020). The company thus vivified an Arab nation that transcended religious belonging. In any case, many Muslims were closely associated with the company, such as Abderrahmane El-Alamy, Sodifilm’s representative in Algeria. Was there a political angle to this cultural vision? Michel Baida was certainly the one who most piqued the interest, not to say obsession, of the French authorities. The graduate of a French medical school, married to a German Jew, he enjoyed a reputation as a poet and a man of letters.23 Operating from Berlin, he was regularly accused of espionage and of harbouring “Germanophile sentiments”.24 His travels to the Maghreb were closely monitored by the colonial authorities, and indeed in 1935, the Tunisian authorities asked him to leave the country.25 Rebecca Scales (2010) has pointed out the moral panic that the transnational circulation of Arab records and their nationalist hymns generated in French North Africa. Egyptian films, which regularly featured pan-Arab songs, such as The Green Flag Anthem in Tears of Love (Muhammad Karim, 1935), only served to intensify this.26 The supposed ties between Michel Baida and Shabik Arslan, despite the fact that the latter’s vision of an Arab nation was centred around Islam, were regularly underlined by the French authorities.27 If these new products inaugurated mass culture in the Maghreb, it is worth underlining that the exportation of Egyptian films to the Maghreb also mirrored much older pre-existing intellectual and artistic relationships. The Baidas disturbed the colonial film circuit in French North Africa that ran from Paris to Algiers, just as they disrupted the music industry by introducing a local actor into a trade run by Europeans.

 CADN, no. 1TU/701/2/148, “Théodore Khayat”: Intelligence, 23 January 1940.  Ibid. Michel Baida was accused of smuggling arms in Tunisia and Morocco. 25  AN, Intérieur, Fichier central de la Sûreté nationale, Dossier individuels, no. 19940434-31, “Michel Baida”: Letter from the Résident général de France à Tunis to the French Consul General in Cairo, 2 May 1936. 26  AN, Delahaye, “La propagande en pays musulman”, op. cit., Dumu‘ al-hubb, Egypt, Abdel Wahab Films, 1935. The film was distributed by Sodifilm. 27  CADN, no. 1TU/701/2/148, “Théodore Khayat”: Letter from the Tunis Chief of Police to the Director of Security Services in Morocco regarding military arms contraband in North Africa, 14 November 1934. 23 24

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Identifying the Key Actors That Bring Together Moving Images and Audience Communities Interactions between intermediaries and audiences are often difficult to single out in the archives, and are most often observable in negotiations between the former and the public authorities. Sometimes, these men and women are identified by the authorities as useful and/or dangerous intermediaries, while in other cases it is the intermediary who seeks to gain recognition of their rights before a state heedless of the pressures experienced by the cinema profession during the Occupation. At first glance, private archives do not seem to reveal the exact relationship these intermediaries had with audiences. Few archival sources allow us to observe their daily lives as the archives of Alexandra Putintseva do. Nevertheless, even her precious field journal is above all a document that she used to prepare the reports she regularly sent to her superiors: it bears no personal details, only remarks concerning her political enlightenment work with the indigenous peoples. For their part, distributors and exhibitors have also left few traces, and the Baida and Segura archives disappeared in the conflicts. It is worth underlining that even an archive that has been miraculously preserved, such as that of Régence Films, seems to say more about the company’s relationship with the colonial authorities than about what these distributors thought about Egyptian cinema audiences and how they sought to position themselves in relation to them (Corriou, 2023). As for public archives, they seem to provide a biased picture, as is the case for the colonial figure, where interactions with audiences are conveyed through the lens of the administration’s current obsessions. The legal archives that have allowed us to explore Benico Segura’s career in detail, recounted in the first person, in the context of a dearth of Greek archives where any study on exhibition and distribution is extremely arduous, do not allow us to gain a clear picture of cinema audiences. Nevertheless, these exceptional sources do reveal the dense network of collaborations and conflicts coursing through the Thessaloniki cinema corporation during the Occupation, and woven around the Sephardic exhibitor.28 Thus, the principal challenge of this joint research effort is to reconstruct the diversity of networks these intermediaries maintained, despite the scarcity of sources. Through such networks, we hope to understand the relationships that intermediaries fostered with the spectators who came to watch the films they screened or distributed, as well as how these agents interfered with their audiences’ sense of community belonging. Did they see themselves as “middlemen”, members of a collective formed around the cinema theatre, or rather as figures external to it? Were audiences aware of their existence, if so, how were they perceived? These three case studies have allowed us to outline different movements between intermediaries and communities. Some cases reveal a process of 28  Mélisande Leventopoulos and Nefeli Liontou are currently working on an in-depth study of Benico Segura’s trajectory during the Nazi occupation, which will appear in a forthcoming publication.

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community immersion, which is not necessarily determined by the community they originally belonged to. In the non-commercial sector, the Soviet cultural worker Putintseva, thanks to her work projecting films, contributed to creating a cinema network that covered the entire Soviet territory, even its furthest reaches—work that favoured the symbolic inclusion of minorities into the new historic community born out of the October Revolution. If it is difficult to ascertain the political trajectory of the Baidas in the Maghreb, due to the patent colonial paranoia in the archives, there is no doubt that this family’s activities can be read in terms of their commitment to building an Arabic-speaking public sphere. In Thessaloniki, the readiness with which Segura moulded his identity over the decades likely follows the city’s project of Hellenisation. Thus, he fed successive generations of working-class spectators with films, both Sephardic and refugees from Asia Minor, while they themselves were impacted by multiple cultural, social and political factors. Together, these factors implicitly contributed to diluting the community identities of these audiences, to the benefit of a local habitus tied to their immediate neighbourhood or urban space. Segura probably remained above all a Thessalonian, even after the Shoah maintaining strong ties with a Greek homeland perceived as hospitable, without looking towards Israel, as his brother Leon, who migrated there, did. In the case of commercial cinema specifically, we note that siblings were particularly important to these community ties. Siblings played an essential role in the local cinema industry, allowing a few ambitious companies to develop geographically on the scale of a city, country or region. For the Baidas, this commercial network was based on a family management model that connected different points in the Lebanese mahjar (diaspora). “Family capitalism” can be used as a development tool for international expansion, and was probably the only solution for successfully competing locally with American and European distribution companies. In the case of the Seguras, their work as a family network was focused at the level of the Macedonian city, principal scale of reference for the Salonican Sephardim, although it may have been coming apart even before the occupation. That said, the sources probably lead us to overemphasise Benico’s role in comparison with that of his brothers in the 1930s. In any case, it is possible that for Benico Segura, distancing himself from this family capitalism meant effacing his community ties, in contrast with his brother Leon who was invested in local Jewish community organisation in Thessaloniki. In her work on Tanzanian cities, Laura Fair (2018, p. 16) reminds us that “economic power came with communal obligations” and that the capitalist activities of local exhibitors and distributors cannot be understood in isolation from this community sociability. The ties between cinema intermediaries and spectator communities are thus further complicated by this dimension of sociability, which implies a relationship to audiences that is never totally determined by pure profit-seeking, nor strictly propaganda motives. Even when cinema is merely one accessory in a political education toolbox, sociability is integral to the relationship. The subsequent steps of Putintseva’s trajectory of Soviet upward mobility show that she remained attached to the Nanai community

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until the end of her life. More broadly, by looking at intermediaries, we are able to nuance the rigid dichotomy of producer and receiver, often understood as implicit to the transnational circulations of cinema. Indeed, in each of the cases studied here, all three actors were able to establish ties between community spheres: between different Arab-speaking spheres in colonial Maghreb, between indigenous Nanai and Russian cultures in a Soviet context, and between the Jewish and Greek Orthodox spheres in Thessaloniki between the wars and early in the Occupation. These actors were not merely cultural intermediaries, in the narrow and reductive sense of an aesthetic idea of culture; rather, they acted as relays between these cultures. What is more, thanks to their position at the centre of this relationship between the different communities and cinema, these intermediaries were active participants in the “dynamic constellation” (Grimaud, 2002, p. 82) that resulted in the encounter between moving audiences and images. Their role contributed de facto to shaping the reception of films by these audiences. At the same time, these exhibitors and distributors suffer from the “cultural disqualification” decried by Jean-Marc Leveratto (2003, pp. 17, 27); their work is primarily understood in economic terms, and rarely in terms of expertise, even less in terms of community expertise. In each of the three cases studied here, we have underlined the in-depth familiarity of these expert-intermediaries with their spectators: the tastes of Arab-speaking audiences thanks to two decades working in the record industry, or the habits of an audience local to a neighbourhood where Benico Segura was himself a resident. Even in the limited context of political enlightenment activities, Putintseva demonstrated her expertise in choosing the films most likely to attract reluctant Nanai spectators. Due to the empirical dissimilarities between these three case studies, comparison between them cannot (and should not) lead us to lay down a universal empirical rule or general law, and we should not work from the assumption that it would be possible to identify one. Steinmetz reminds us that: The movement of analysis [should] be ‘not from the particular to the universal, but from the concrete to the abstract (and back again).’ Analysis [should] seek to explain irreducibly singular and significant historical events in terms of causal mechanisms that combine in unpredictable, changing ways. (Steinmetz, 2014, p. 424)

We argue that, when confronted with case studies that at first seem incomparable (unconnected geographical areas, where the data are not equivalent and where standardisation of the data and protocols is unrealistic), the best method of comparison is not to focus on historical cinema cultures per se (issues of distribution, exhibition or reception). Rather, it seems more productive to attempt to observe social processes through the historical sources. These latter can reveal the fluctuations of diverse and intermingled social bodies in relation to distribution, exhibition and cinema-going, and help us to outline the collective movements within and beyond film screenings. In sum, in these regions

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where cinema is an imported product, we would probably do better to concentrate on how the cinema dispositif itself can contribute to shaping and reshaping both collective and individual identities.

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CHAPTER 18

German Films in Latin America and the Second World War: A Comparative Study on Argentina and Ecuador Marina Moguillansky and Yazmín Echeverría

German cinema had an important presence in Latin American countries until the beginning of the Second World War and collaborated with the diffusion of the Nazi political, economic and cultural project. The cultural diplomacy of the National-Socialist state played a significant role in promoting cultural transfers from Nazi Germany to Latin America, disseminating the attractive and popular cinema of the Universum Film-Aktiengesellschaft (UFA) film company. Although the German film industry had developed more slowly than the American one, it achieved a peak in growth and splendour during the period of the First World War. Thus, in 1917, the UFA was established to compensate for the decrease in films imported to Germany (Kreimeier, 1999; Witte, 2016). This initially private initiative later integrated all the pre-existing production companies. The UFA expanded its operations to 140 branches, agencies and cinema theatres across the world and became a global player (Fuhrmann, 2021). Recently, advances have been made in the research of the internationalisation strategies pursued by Germany and the important expansion of its cinema industry, achieved both in occupied and non-occupied countries (Vande Winkel

M. Moguillansky (*) National Council for Scientific and Technological Research, Santa Fe, Argentina e-mail: [email protected] Y. Echeverría National University of San Martin, San Martin, Argentina e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Treveri Gennari et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38789-0_18

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& Welch, 2007). However, until now there has been almost no published research on the role of Nazi films in Latin American countries.1 We still have little knowledge about the players and institutions involved, the kind of films exported and how the circulation of German cinema was affected by the war. In this chapter, we propose a first comparative look at the distribution of Nazi films in Latin America during the war and years preceding it. We address the cases of Argentina and Ecuador, focusing on the dissemination of German films considered to be Nazi propaganda. An American blockade introduced in 1942 restricted the activity of German film companies in Latin America, so there were hardly any new releases until approximately the 1950s. In the first section, we describe the theoretical and methodological framework of this chapter, based on the background of the New Cinema History and the insights of a comparative approach. In the second section, we contextualise the situation of Latin American cinema during the 1930s, the position of German films in the region and we address the exhibition of Nazi films specifically in Argentina and Ecuador. In the third section, we propose a comparative analysis of the situation in each country and formulate some further questions for future research.

New Cinema History and the Comparative Approach: Methodological Framework This study is inspired by New Cinema History and particularly by the perspectives of comparative approach. The pioneering work of Robert Allen (1990) proposing a film history from below, together with the later volume Explorations in New Cinema History (Maltby et al., 2011) laid the groundwork for the formulation of a new type of film history. This new history is characterised by displacing films as texts from the centre of attention and incorporating the social practice of going to the cinema, with its facets linked to distribution and exhibition (Maltby, 2006). This approach has already produced a considerable number of publications and is condensed in the recent volume The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History edited by Daniel Biltereyst et al. (2019). We are mindful that a comparative analysis is particularly “helpful when trying to understand larger trends, factors or conditions explaining differences and similarities in cinema cultures” (Biltereyst & Meers, 2016). In our case, the comparative perspective applied to the circulation of Nazi cinema in two different Latin American countries brings about certain common patterns and also allows us to better understand the influence of differentiating factors such as cinema’s infrastructure, the dominant actors in the business and the religious and political context.

1  The exception is the case of Brazil, addressed by Nazario (2007) in the mentioned edited volume by Vande Winkel and Welch (2007) and also Fuhrmann (2021) focusing on the UFA’s intent to create a Latin American branch.

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In Latin America, Octavio Getino (2005, 2007), Ana Rosas Mantecón (2017) and Clara Kriger (2009), among many others, have contributed to understanding the social practice of cinema-going and its political dimension in the main cities of peripheral countries where the cinematographic industries have endemically been subordinated to productions from United States and Europe. As Rafael de Luna Freire (2021) pointed out, there is still a need to decentralise the practice of cinema history to fully incorporate other regions, their specific problematics and their own historiographic productions. The comparative perspective highlights the need to define the scope of the concepts, the methodological tools and the frame of the research (Biltereyst & Meers, 2016). Theoretically, we distinguish between German films and Nazi propaganda films considering the manifest and underlying ideological contents of racism, imperialism, war and military glorification, even though some scholars have argued that Nazi ideology pervades all cinematographic production of the time (Kracauer, 1985; Hake, 2001). It is also important to acknowledge that, as Eric Rentschler (1996) points out in The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife, even in the Nazi propaganda cinema the political issues appear rather diluted, since it was above all a cinema of entertainment. For the purposes of this particular research, we will limit the scope of Nazi propaganda films to the titles included in two lists of censored films that are still in force. The research for this article was based on archival work on hemerographic sources both in Argentina and in Ecuador undertaken during 2019. We relied on two lists of Nazi propaganda films that have been and are still prohibited or must be only exhibited within a controlled environment. The first list of forbidden films was made by a military commission of the Allies in 1952, including 395 feature films, documentaries and short films (Kelson & Short, 1996). With time, the films were reviewed and some were later removed from the list: by 1953, there were 340 forbidden films produced between 1930 and 1945; by 1954, 275 films remained on the list; in 1977 the list had 176 films, and, by 1995, they were among 30 and 35 Third Reich films still banned. The second list was elaborated by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation of Germany, the institution in charge of preserving the national film heritage from 1890 to 1960, which owns the exhibition rights of almost all these films and their institutional custody. This institution drew up a more limited list, with 44 titles of films considered “reserved” for their racist content, for glorifying the war or for inciting violence. This list includes films from the largest German production companies such as UFA, Decla, Universium-Film, Bavaria, Terra and Berlin-­ Film. The films listed there can only be shown at events controlled by the foundation and the exhibitions are followed by a debate.2 The documentary Forbidden Films. The Modern Legacy of Nazi Film (Felix Moeller, 2014) has brought this situation to the public attention. 2  Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation. (n.d.). 49 Suchergebnisse. Retrieved June 11, 2019, from https://www.murnau-stiftung.de/movie_search?genre=22

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With the above-mentioned lists, archival work was conducted to investigate newspapers of the time such as El Comercio, El Telégrafo in Ecuador and La Nación in Argentina, as well as specialised film magazines such as Seminario de la Empresa de Teatros y Cinemas in Ecuador, and Heraldo del Cinematógrafo in Argentina between 1936 and 1943. We elaborated data matrices including information on German films released in Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Quito-­ Guayaquil (Ecuador) with details of their release date, cinemas, producer, distributor, days of permanence in theatres, propaganda of the films in newspapers and film criticism.

Latin American Cinema in the 1930s and the Exhibition of Nazi Films The development of an Ibero-American cinematography was made possible with the arrival of sound films. The sound opened the possibility of producing national films with cultural specificities through the incorporation of local music and folklore, which captivated and produced identification in the audiences. With sound film, the audiences could see films spoken in their own language, something undoubtedly valuable in countries where the majority of the population was illiterate. The success of Hispanic cinema undoubtedly occurred in countries such as Argentina, Spain and Mexico, which managed to progressively increase the volume of their productions and were easily marketed in several Latin American countries. In addition, they managed to position themselves as a benchmark of film quality, characterised by producing films with cultural affinity for the entire region and establishing a network of celebrities who were widely recognised in Latin America, Europe and Hollywood. While Brazil had its Belle Epoque in the first decades of the century, Argentine and Mexican cinema enjoyed a Golden Age in the 1930s. Between 1930 and 1940, around 170 films were produced in Argentina and approximately 30 production companies operated (Mateu, 2008). Argentine tango films became famous, featuring international stars such as Tita Merello or Libertad Lamarque. Mexico produced a total of 123 films in the same period of time, positioning ranchero melodramas as the national cinematographic emblem and fostering stars such as Antonio R. Fausto, Domingo Soler, Dolores Sepúlveda Camarillo, Consuelo Segarra and Raúl de Anda. Mexican cinema even had European figures such as the director Sergei Eisenstein who lived in Mexico between 1930 and 1932 when starting the film project ¡Que Viva México!, which was never finished. It should be noted that the cinema took on greater importance during the government of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940), who promoted numerous cultural and educational programs extolling indigenous traditions and national identity through subsidies for film production. Latin America was by that time an important and attractive market for both Hollywood and the UFA’s project. The North American and the German film

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industries were competing not only for the market share in terms of tickets sold but also for the dominant position as providers of film projectors, film stock and cameras. This commercial and industrial competition acquired an additional dimension with the upheaval of the Nazi regime: since then, the conflict would also become political and ideological. Both the United States and Germany understood that films were an important vehicle for their imaginaries of the desired world. The UFA cinema was an important vehicle for the diplomatic strategies deployed by the German government in Latin America. The annual release of foreign films shows the investment that German foreign policy made in this regard in the South American countries during the 1930s. German-language films were regularly exhibited in Latin American cinemas until the outbreak of the Second World War. Even during the war, most of the filmography exhibited in  local theatres was neither openly ideological nor contained references to political issues. In other words, not all German films released in Argentina and Ecuador during the Nazi period were propaganda films. Therefore, it is certainly difficult for researchers—as has been widely debated in academic interventions—to identify which films should be considered “Nazi propaganda” (Giesen, 2003; Rentschler, 1996; Jason, 2013). In order to achieve an objective parameter for this research, we cross-referenced the list of German films released between 1936 and 1943 with the two lists mentioned above (the Allies’ and Murnau’s) that contain titles considered dangerous and which remain banned from exhibition to this day.

Argentina German diplomacy in Argentina had the main objective of securing a privileged commercial position for the country’s companies, but since the beginning of the Third Reich they also intended to create a favourable opinion towards the Nazi regime. With this in view, the diplomacy relied on radio broadcasts, newspapers and cinema as effective cultural media to spread the Nazi ideology. The propaganda achieved a significant impact on the local German community, and more broadly, it is important to point out that the political context in Argentina was indeed favourable towards an independent position in terms of the international conflict almost until the end of the Second World War. Nevertheless, there were also exceptions: in Buenos Aires, a movement of opposition to fascism and totalitarianism emerged among liberal intellectuals (Bisso, 2005), which was echoed among the German immigrant community. The association Das andere Deutschland, the Pestalozzi school, the Cangallo Schule were institutions that resisted the imposition of Nazi ideologies (Friedmann, 2010). The cultural diplomacy of Germany in Argentina had several dimensions and strategies (Galván & Moguillansky, 2021). In most German schools, the Nazi military salutation was imposed. This makes sense in the framework of the process of Gleichschaltung (alignment) of the cultural, social, sporting and religious organisations of the German community around the world, by which

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Germany sought to extend its influence in the receiving countries of the German population. One of the main local agents to articulate the German propaganda strategy was the Landesgruppe Argentinien der NSDAP. Its objective was to ensure that those who had emigrated from Germany and their descendants became disseminators of National-Socialist ideas. This openly challenged the immigration project of the Argentine state, which was forced, in 1938, to take more direct measures against pro-Nazi German schools. During the 1930s, Argentina had around 1600 cinema theatres thus ranking first in Latin America, since Brazil had 1100 theatres and Mexico 700, according to Paranaguá (1996, p. 208). In Argentina, approximately 200 of these cinemas were located in the city of Buenos Aires. There was a circuit of elegant cinemas in the centre of the city (the so-called palace cinemas), where the most important premieres would take place, and there was also a myriad of neighbourhood cinemas that were more accessible and frequented by middle-­ class families.3 In this period, there was already a dominant presence of films spoken in English, with around 75% of movies coming from Hollywood (Getino, 2007). However, German films had a considerable presence, slightly higher than other European countries. An average of 20 German films were released in Argentina per year until 1942, which represented approximately 6% of all releases.4 According to our research in hemerographic archives, at least 15 Nazi propaganda films were released between 1936 and 1942  in cinemas in Buenos Aires. Some of those films were quite successful judging by their permanence in theatres, with 10 to 20 weeks on the bill. This was a high mark for the period; higher than the average length of time achieved by other releases. After 1939, with the outbreak of the Second World War, the premieres of German films declined, due to the breakdown of relations between some actors in the world of cinema in Argentina and their German counterparts, and also as a response to the pressure exerted by the US state department on the local film market. Since the 1920s, the main importer of European cinema in Argentina was Max Glucksmann, a Jewish immigrant of Austrian origin, who had an exclusive contract with the French company Pathé and who also had contacts with Germany. Around the 1930s, the most important distributor of German cinema became the Terra Cinematographic Company, under the direction of Adolfo Zicovich-Wilson, as it had a monopoly on UFA titles until the end of 1938 and also distributed most of the titles from Tobis, another German production company. Between 1935 and 1938, he brought to Argentina a total of 36 German films, of which eight would later be considered propaganda films. 3  The configuration of the cinema theatres was different in Buenos Aires, on the one side, and in Guayaquil and Quito, on the other. As the next section will discuss, in Ecuador there were no neighbourhood cinemas at that time. 4  According to our own reconstruction of the market through journalistic sources (Anuario Cinematográfico Argentino, Heraldo del Cinematógrafo and La Nación, 1935–1942).

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Another important distributor was the Sud América Cinematographic Company, founded by Atilio Liberti, which had been dedicated to the distribution of European films since the beginning of the century, and which during this period had the distribution contract for the films of the German company Terra Film AG, which was the producer, among others, of the films directed by Herbert Selpin and also those of Paul Heinz. Between 1936 and 1937 this distributor imported nine German films, three of which would later be banned. Other Nazi films were distributed by Nicolás Di Fiori, owner of many theatres and director of the distribution company Organización Cinematográfica Argentina (Peredo Castro, 2002, p. 135). According to Emeterio Díaz (1999), Argentina and Spain were, by that time, the non-­occupied countries showing more presence of Nazi cinema. Between 1936 and 1939, an average of 20 German films per year were released in cinemas in the city of Buenos Aires. This figure represented, at the time, around 5% of total releases, so more German films were released than Italian or French ones, since the latter accounted for 3% of releases in each case. Of that set of German films, a minority can be considered as Nazi propaganda according to the lists of “reserved” films mentioned previously. For the period examined, we found exhibition records in Buenos Aires of a total of 13 “reserved” titles, whose distribution is shown in the following Table 18.1. During 1936, there was a very important presence of German films in the theatres of Buenos Aires, with a total of 26 films, out of which eight titles correspond to later forbidden films. In particular, The Making of a King (Der alte und der junge König, 1934) had great success within the audiences, with a permanence of 29 weeks in different theatres (with some interruptions). The Table 18.1  Nazi propaganda films released in Buenos Aires from 1936 till 1942 Year

Title and director

1936 El viejo Rey (Der Alte und der Junge König, Hans Steinhoff, 1935) Los jinetes del África colonial (Die Reiter von Deutsch Ostafrika, Herbert Selpin, 1934) Juana, el húsar negro (Schwartzer, Jäger Johanna, Johannes Meyer, 1934) Rosas negras (Schwartze rosen, Paul Martin, 1935) Guillermo Tel (Wilhelm Tell, Heinz Paul, 1934)

1937 1938 1941 1942

La vida privada de Luis XIV (Liselotte von der Pfalz, Carl Frölich, 1935) Stradivarius (Stradivari, Géza von Bovary, 1935) El secreto de la embajada (Die Insel, Hans Steinhoff, 1934) Tanques de guerra (Verräter, Karl Ritter, 1936) Alarma en Pekín (Alarm in Peking, Herbert Selpin, 1937) Húsares de la muerte (Ritt in die Freiheit, Karl Hartl, 1937) Caballeros en el aire (Pour le mérite, Karl Ritter, 1938) Submarinos rumbo al oeste (U-boote westwärts!, GüntherTittau, 1941)

Source: Own elaboration based on Heraldo del Cinematógrafo and La Nación (1935–1942)

Producer Tobis Terra Film AG Terra Film AG UFA Terra Film AG Tobis Boston Films UFA UFA UFA UFA UFA UFA

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film was directed by Hans Steinhoff, who had also directed, the previous year, the film Hitlerjunge Quex (Our Flags Lead Us Forward, 1933), one of the most openly Nazi films. This film portrays the heroism of great male figures who made the history of Germany, participating in the subgenre of the “Fridericus films”, which had several versions during the 1920s and 1930s and was very popular in Germany. According to Sigfried Kracauer (1985) the Fridericus films could be considered a genre that responded to an authoritarian tendency in the German mentality, which seemed to prefer totalitarian order to chaos. The historian David Hull wrote that this film “used the most brutal aspects of the conflict between father and son, to emphasise the need to obey orders and other virtues appropriate to the Nazi regime” (Hull, 1969, p. 82). From 1937, we registered 38 German titles released in Buenos Aires, out of which two titles correspond to films later considered to be Nazi propaganda: Verräter (Karl Richter, 1936) and Alarm in Pekin (Herbert Selpin, 1937). The former seems to have been quite an important film and it had a good reception in Buenos Aires. It was promoted by advertising in the main journals of the city around its premiere date and was well received by entertainment critics, who highlighted the modernity of the images. The keys to the success of this film might be linked to the public’s interest in the war theme, the technical features in the images and the attraction of the stars. The protagonist was Lida Baarova, who was Goebbels’s lover, which was later disputed by Hollywood. During 1938, a total of 21 German films were released, of which only one was later considered to be Nazi propaganda: Ritt in die Freiheit (1937), which premiered on January 18 of that year, in the Ambassador cinema. Directed by Karl Hartl, produced by UFA and distributed by Cinematográfico Terra, it featured performances by Willy Birgel and Úrsula Grabley. Like others of the films already mentioned, it tells a story of a people’s uprising against oppression, in this case the 1830 uprising against the Russian Empire in Poland. In 1939, the outbreak of the war produced a sharp drop in the number of German films exhibited with only five titles. None of them correspond to the ideological films included in the lists. In 1940, there were 12 releases from Germany, again with no presence of propaganda films. As of 1940, the only companies that continued to import German films were the aforementioned OCA, and the UFA branch in Buenos Aires. The American boycott against companies that distributed German films was already underway, blacklists made businessmen fear that they would stop receiving the desired Hollywood productions, and German cinema began to have increased difficulties in reaching the screens. A particularly interesting conflict arose in October 1940 regarding the film The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin, 1940), which portrayed in a critical and satirical manner the figures of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. As the documented research of María Eugenia Druetta (2021) states, the German Embassy had already issued several complaints about English or American films that were considered as harmful towards the image of Germany, such as British Intelligence (Terry O. Morse, 1940) or Four Sons (Archie Mayo, 1940). The

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Argentinean Minister of Foreign Relations, Julio A. Roca had responded that the censorship should suppress scenes that could provoke dangerous situations with respect to the peace or good international relations of Argentina, which sustained a neutral position. But the situation escalated with The Great Dictator, probably because of the popularity of Charles Chaplin at that time. Not only the German Embassy but also the Italian Embassy presented complaints and demanded that the film should not be exhibited. The film was indeed censored and the press reacted critically in Argentina and also in the rest of the world, resulting in an international scandal. Only the Catholic press in Argentina commented on the issue approving the decision of censoring Chaplin’s film. Other countries from Latin America also including Ecuador, as we will see in the next section, decided to allow the exhibition of the film. During 1941, only six German films were exhibited. Among them, on 16 January 1941, the film Pour le mérite (Karl Ritter, 1938) was shown at the Alvear cinema. This film was considered Nazi propaganda since it portrayed the adventures of a group of German pilots from the First World War to the rise of Nazism, and has a tone that exalts nationalism and heroism, including an open call for German rearmament. It was considered by critics as a Zeitfilm, a militaristic film, which shows tanks, planes and troops at the front, portraying the heroism and positive attitude of the Germans. Hitler himself attended the film’s premiere in Germany, declaring that he considered it “the best film in contemporary history to date” (Tegel, 2007, p.  103). The film closes with Hitler’s proclamation to the peoples, on 16 March 1935, in which he announced the resumption of military conscription, thus breaking the Treaty of Versailles.

Ecuador During the Second World War, Ecuador was highly unstable politically. From 1930 to 1940, there were 14 different governments (Luna, 2001, p. 120). The situation was critical because of the invasion of the Peruvian army to the Ecuadorian territory in July 1941. Ecuador could not confront this situation on its own so it appealed to the intervention of other countries such as Brazil, Chile, Argentina and the United States to resolve the conflict diplomatically. At that time, the United States was already involved in the war, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. In response, they organised a united front of the countries of the hemisphere. From the US perspective, the Ecuadorian-Peruvian conflict threatened the alliance, so its greatest interest was resolving the border issue. During the presidency of Carlos Arroyo del Río, on 29 January 1942, Foreign Minister Julio Donoso Tobar signed the Protocol of Peace, Friendship and Limits of Río de Janeiro, in which Ecuador ceded to Peru more than 56000 square kilometres, the equivalent to almost half of its territory. Without a doubt, this was the most significant consequence of the Second World War for Ecuador.

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Although small, Ecuador had a structured Nazi movement organised around the German School and the Transocean news agency, which was in charge of reporting the German version of the war. Furthermore, its members were very closed and had considerable influence over the Ecuadorian government, especially after 1933—the year in which Hitler came to power as Chancellor—some Ecuadorian politicians were open sympathisers with the Nazi regime.5 In 1938, President Enríquez Gallo issued a decree declaring that Jewish competition was unfair and establishing that no “undesirable foreigner”6 would avoid legal regulations that could affect national development. Shortly after the announcement, it was established that all Jewish immigrants who were not engaged in industry and agriculture had to leave the country within 30 days. In February 1938, during the presidency of Aurelio Mosquera Narváez, the Immigration, Extradition and Naturalisation Law was announced, which restricted the entry of Jewish migrants to Ecuador with the exception of professionals dedicated to science, art or education. To make the Law effective, Chancellor Tobar Donoso issued a statement addressed to Ecuadorian consuls in Europe: “For the ethical, economic and moral future of the Nation, I recommend that you take the possible precautions and the utmost scrupulosity when granting the visa of a foreigner belonging to that race” (Gil-Blanco & Canela-Ruano, 2018, p.  216). In addition, proof of economic solvency was required and it was forbidden to issue tourist visas to Jews. In the same year, Ecuador would reach the pinnacle of diplomatic relations with Germany due to the work of Julio Tobar Donoso as chancellor who, in 1939, would be recognised with the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle awarded by the Nazi regime. Although the Nazi movement in Ecuador had strategic contacts, several groups of German and Jewish migrants also emerged with strong criticism against the Nazi regime and totalitarian governments, such as Movimiento Antifascista Ecuatoriano that had two communicational fronts: the newspaper La Defensa and Anti-Nazi, which were directed mostly by Jewish intellectuals residing in Quito. In Ecuador during the 1920s, cinema theatres were located in the largest cities in the country: Quito and Guayaquil, although there was a difference since Quito had only four cinema theatres that were part of an exhibition chain belonging to Jorge Cordobés (Granda, 1995, p.  40). Guayaquil had more exhibition companies, which owned around 20 cinema theatres. In 1921, the exhibition companies from Ecuador agreed contracts with American companies such as Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Fox Pathé of New York, Eclair and Warner Bros (Granda, 1995, p.  42), thus favouring an important flux of North American films in the country. Subsequently, going to the cinema was established as a common practice in the cities and some local newspapers incorporated new segments dedicated to cinema: El Telégrafo created the column 5  The government of General Alberto Enríquez Gallo (1937–1938), Aurelio Mosquera Narváez (1938–1939) and Carlos Alberto Arroyo del Rio (1939–1944). 6  Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Organ of the Ecuadorian Government (1938). Official registration, from October 1937 to August 1938, Quito.

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Table 18.2  Nazi propaganda films released in Quito and Guayaquil from 1936 till 1942 Year

Title

Director

1937 1938 1939 1940 1940 1940

Juana de Arco (Das Mädchen Johanna) Rosas negras (Schwarze Rosen) Los Húsares de la muerte (Ritt in die Freiheit) Patriotas (Patrioten) Romance Real (Die kleine und die große Liebe) ¡Volga, Volga! (Stjenka Rasin)

Gustav Ucicky Paul Martin Karl Hartl Karl Ritter Josef von Báky Alexandre Volkoff

Source: Own elaboration based on El Comercio, El Telégrafo (1935–1942)

“Teatros y Cinemas” and El Comercio published the column “Empresas de Teatros y Cinemas de Quito”, which provided information on movies schedules and costs, but did not publish any reviews of the movies. In 1933, one of the most famous theatres in Quito, the Teatro Bolívar, was inaugurated. It became the largest cinema in Ecuador, with 2500 seats following the North American style (Granda, 1995, p. 58). The newly opened Teatro Bolívar was the place chosen to host the opening screenings of the best foreign films, which would usually premiere there. After the success of its inauguration, it was soon followed by the proliferation of new theatres in Quito such as Atahualpa, Granada, Bolívar, Cumandá, Hollywood, México and Colón. Some of these theatres like Mexico, Granada and Hollywood were dedicated solely to the screening of adult films. Despite the fact that cinema theatres had increased during the 1930s in Ecuador, the distribution and exhibition chains were concentrated in North America, Mexico and Argentina. Moreover, the exhibition chains were located only in Guayaquil and Quito, restricting access to the cinema for rural towns and cities farthest away from these large cities. From the registry of the newspapers of the time published in the cities of Quito and Guayaquil, it was verified that in the period between 1935 and 1941, 41 films of German production were released in Ecuador, 30 films were screened in Guayaquil and 23 in Quito. Of these titles, six films appear as prohibited in the list mentioned above (Table 18.2): Joan of Arc (Das Mädchen Johanna, Gustav Ucicky, 1935), featured in Quito and Guayaquil in 1937, was recognised by the Nazi regime as “artistically valuable” and with “special political value”7 (Vande Winkel & Welch, 7  In 1934, the Film Law (Reichslichtspielgesetz) was created, which created distinctive categories for German productions: Institutional (1920); National Education (1924); Political and Artistic Value (1933); Special Political Value (1933); Special Artistic Value (1933); Political Value (1933); Artistic Value (1933); Cultural Value (1933); Valor for Youth (1938); National Value (1939); and Movie of the Nation (1939). Politically valuable films reflected the Party’s goals. This title was awarded not only to documentaries such as The Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens, Leni Riefenstahl, 1935) but also to films with a political message, such as the pro-euthanasia production Yo Acuso (Ich klage an, Wolfgang Liebeneiner, 1941). The combination of political and cultural value meant special quality and high credibility. Those of artistic value were understood from a cultural perspective and were awarded only to prestigious films and those reserved for export (Vande Winkel & Welch, 2007, p. 6).

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2007, p. 6). The film tells the story of Joan d’Arc and was set in France in the fifteenth century. Ucicky’s film had already been released in Buenos Aires in 1935 and had been criticised by the Catholic press at the time, because it was seen as an attack to the Catholic Church and also as a “a tendentious production, written and photographed with talent, and for that very reason more effective in serving its tendency” (De Franceschi, 1935, p. 105). Later, analysis of this film suggested that the character of Joan d’Arc could be considered the “first feminine incarnation of the Führer and a representation of its physical and spiritual heroism” (Fox, 2000, p. 24). In 1967, it was added to the list of banned Nazi propaganda films and its exhibition is still reserved. Black Roses (Schwarze Rosen, Paul Martin, 1935) was screened in Quito and Guayaquil in 1938. This movie was censored after the end of the Second World War to prevent the dissemination of Nazi propaganda. Black Roses is set in Finland when it was still part of the Russian Empire and tells the story of a Russian dancer who helps a Finnish colleague to fight against Tsarist agents, with the revolutionary dancer ending up giving her life for her beloved. The film is registered as a prohibited film of National-Socialist propaganda. In 1939, the American film Confesiones de un espía nazi (Confessions of a Nazi Spy, Anatole Litvak, 1939) was released in Ecuador. Soon after its release, the German diplomatic representatives in Quito requested the film be censored via a letter addressed to the chancellor, Tobar Donoso, who had been given, as mentioned above, the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle that same year: […] the intention of the aforementioned film is also to characterize the individual German, domiciled in a country foreigner, as an unreliable person, who spends his time conspiring against the institutions of the country that grants him hospitality, blindly obeying instructions given by certain mysterious organization abroad. […] The possibility that the presentation of the film in question could produce an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust, which would not exclude possible prejudice to innocent people, cannot be rejected. […] For this reason, a number of States, already in peacetime, have prohibited the showing of such a tape. Among these States are Chile, Peru, Argentina, Guatemala, Sweden, Norway, Holland, Luxembourg and Ireland. Such an attitude seems more justified in wartime. (Núñez del Arco Proaño, F., 2013, p. 55)

After receiving the letter, the government of Ecuador decided to stop the exhibition of the film in the country. In October 1940, the National Congress discussed the diffusion of National-­ Socialist ideology in Ecuador due to the discovery of a clandestine radio station run by Otto Heinrich Carstanjen, a German by birth who was naturalised

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Ecuadorian. It was suspected that the station contacted German submarines, and machine guns were discovered inside the facilities of the German School of Quito (Negrete, 2006, p. 128). In response to the proliferation of several Nazi movements in Latin American countries, the United States initiated one of the largest advertising campaigns in the entire region with the aim of neutralising the advance of Nazism through the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA). In Ecuador, the OIAA distributed 249,000 posters presenting “the Nazi threat” in the region in simple language and they were distributed mainly in educational and cultural centres. The most successful program of the OIAA consisted of screening films throughout the country, especially in small cities.8 According to reports from 1943, a total of 111 films were shown, including 27 news reels, 30 films on the war effort, 26 informational and 28 educational films, which were seen by around 250,000 Ecuadorians. Due to the fact that there were no cinema theatres in the smaller cities, the Coordinating Committee of the OIAA in Ecuador had to improvise by projecting the films in public squares and schools in rural territories. The OIAA campaign included signing special contracts with the main North American production companies: Warner Bros, RKO Radio Pictures, United Artists, Paramount Pictures, Columbia Pictures, Universal Pictures with the Company of Theaters and Cinemas, the distribution companies and owners of the largest exhibition chain in Quito. These contracts included short films and newsreels (Seminario de la Empresa de Teatros y Cinemas, 1940, p. 6), which ensured the predominance of American films in the busiest cinemas in the capital. By 1940, when the OIAA was screening thousands of pro-American films, eight German movies were released in Quito and Guayaquil, among them The Hussars of Death (Ritt in die Freiheit, Karl Hartl, 1937). Hartl’s movie was released in Quito in 1939 and in Guayaquil in 1940. This film is still classified as National-Socialist propaganda and considered reserved by the Murnau Foundation. Patriots (Patrioten, Karl Ritter, 1937) and Royal Romance (Die kleine und die große Liebe, Josef von Báky, 1938) were screened in Guayaquil in the same year. These films are also considered Nazi propaganda and their distribution is still controlled by the F. W. Murnau Foundation. Patriots recounts the betrayal committed against the German aviation officer who ends up at the mercy of a theatre group in French territory. Royal Romance narrates the romantic story of a stewardess who falls in love with a passenger. The passenger ends up being a prince who is already engaged to another woman, but when the prince learns from the stewardess’s illness, he gives up everything for her. In the same year, the movie ¡Volga, Volga! (Stjenka Rasin, 1936) by Alexandre Volkoff is released in Quito, and one year later in Guayaquil. In June 1941, Foreign Minister Tobar Donoso prohibited the granting of visas to Jews, although the prohibition became illegal in 1942 when Ecuador definitively broke diplomatic relations with Germany, Italy and Japan after the 8  As mentioned above, the exhibiting companies were concentrated in the country’s large cities, restricting access to the cinema to rural populations and those further from urban centres.

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formal resignation of Tobar Donoso as chancellor. After the rupture of diplomatic relations with Germany, the “Black List” was established, under which Germans identified as Nazis were investigated. Some left the country or hid in remote places in Ecuador, but the majority were imprisoned and sent to Crystal City, Texas, or Cuenca—Ecuador (Kersffeld, 2015, p. 15). In this context, the film The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin, 1940) arrived in Quito. During March 1941, considering the controversial reactions that happened in other countries and particularly in Argentina, a special board was formed to evaluate whether the film should be screened in theatres. After viewing the tape, the board unanimously approved the screening of the film. As the readers are informed, in Buenos Aires the film has been banned and, for this reason, the Argentine public, eager to see such an interesting film, is moving in river boats to Uruguay, where the film is being screened. The round-trip ticket on these steamers includes the value of the ticket to attend the screening of the film. (Seminario de la Empresa de Teatros y Cinemas, 1941, p. 3)

After the screening of the film, several articles circulated in the same magazine, which reinforced the importance of democratic regimes and humanism: (…) the great audiences that night after night have filled the seats of the Bolívar Theatre, have followed the development of the renovating film, assessing what it has of artistic transcendence, of popular emotion, of a sense of democracy, of condemnation of regimes that threaten the tranquillity of the world and above all that which is healthy, strengthening and humorous in it. (Seminario de la Empresa de Teatros y Cinemas, 1941, p. 3)

Despite the fact that German cinema was greatly admired in Ecuador, during this period no German film provoked the reaction of the spectacles press to write special reviews that could encourage the public to see the film, as Chaplin’s film certainly did. In addition, no film released in national cinemas remained in theatres for more than four days on average, but The Great Dictator stayed in theatres for 4 weeks. One aspect that we observed during the research was the way in which German films were advertised in Ecuador. The newspapers dedicated large advertising spaces to German films, especially if they were operettas or musicals. The publicity of the films was extensive and aimed at recognising the technical level of production of the films. In this aspect, every film made by UFA stood out. The majority of Nazi propaganda films that arrived in Ecuador managed to spread in the country because they bore the seal of the UFA production company as a synonym of film quality, and that is how they were promoted in the press of Quito and Guayaquil. Although German cinema was not dominant in Ecuador, it was highly appreciated by Ecuadorian society for its quality and technical production. In general, European cinema was idealised and German cinema was no exception.

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Conclusion During the Third Reich, a total of 1097 films were produced in Germany, out of which 229 were considered propaganda films according to the own assessments of the Nazi regime. From these, 96 titles were commissioned by the state, which means that they were considered important from a political perspective and that they were granted large funds for production and publicity. Approximately half of the films were love stories or comedies, while the rest were dramas or musicals (Welch, 2001, p. 9). Considering the importance of the German film industry, only a few German-produced films arrived in Argentina or Ecuador during that time. One first aspect to address is the methodological implications of comparing the exhibition of Nazi films in two different countries for the same period. The comparative perspective “entails methodological sophistication and forces researchers to be critical at every stage of their work” (Biltereyst & Meers, 2016, p. 14). In our case, we had to strictly define certain parameters. First, we had to establish which titles would be considered as Nazi propaganda: we solved this using the lists from the Murnau Foundation and from the US Military Board. Nevertheless, it was not always easy to determine if a given title in Spanish corresponded indeed to one film included in the list. In those cases, we compared the casts and all other information we could gather. Another aspect that we had to carefully decide on was in which kind of newspapers we would perform our search and which counted as a cinematic exhibition. In sum, the comparative perspective encouraged a more precise definition of the research criteria. The comparative perspective also means that the researchers must reflect upon the extent to which the comparisons are actually appropriate and to take into account the differences between the cases under consideration. For instance, Argentina and Ecuador had very different cinema markets, with a more developed film industry in the former, and with a more receptive configuration in the latter. The different magnitude and qualities of the exhibition sector in each country is also relevant here. By the 1930s, Ecuador had 32 theatres located in the main cities, to which only the urban population had access, while Argentina had more than 1600 cinema theatres. Given this contrast it is not surprising that Argentina would have more German releases per year than Ecuador. But in other aspects the markets were similar: both Guayaquil and Buenos Aires were port cities, points of entry for foreign films, while Quito had a very dynamic cultural life. All the three cities were flooded by American films since at least the decade of the 1920s. The comparison of the exhibition of Nazi films in both countries allows us to signal that there are many coincidences, since most of the films released in Ecuador were also exhibited in Argentina. There is, however, a difference in the permanence registered: in Argentina some of these films stayed in theatres for up to 20 weeks on a bill, but in Ecuador the most successful German films only managed to be shown for four days.

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Regarding the political context in Argentina and Ecuador, both countries were neutral for most of the years of the war. Some political and intellectual figures were inspired by the fascist German regime. There were also resistance movements from the German and Jewish migrants who were critical of the Nazi regime. Nevertheless, this resistance was very much focused on the written culture, they would periodically scrutinise books, journals and newspapers for Nazi contents, but not so much the films (Moguillansky, 2021). On the other hand, the best-known Nazi propaganda films such as The Eternal Jew (Der ewige Jude, Fritz Hippler, 1940) or Jud Süss (Jud Süß, Veit Harlan, 1940), which are strongly antisemitic films were never released in any of the countries. In 1939, after the rupture of diplomatic relations with the Axis countries, and the start of the war, the exhibition of German cinema declined both in Argentina and in Ecuador. From 1941, the black lists by the United States were effective and the distribution and exhibition of German films was prohibited. According to our archival research, there were no more releases from 1942 to 1945 either in Argentina or Ecuador. This is significant in particular for Argentina since it had a significant presence of German immigrants and used to have an important presence of German cinema in its theatres.

References Allen, R. (1990). From exhibition to reception: Reflections on the audience in film history. Screen, 31(4), 347–356. Biltereyst, D., Maltby, R., & Meers, P. (2019). The Routledge companion to new cinema history. Routledge. Biltereyst, D., & Meers, P. (2016). New cinema history and the comparative mode: Reflections on comparing historical cinema cultures. Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, (11), 13–32. Bisso, A. (2005). Acción Argentina: Un antifascismo nacional en tiempos de guerra mundial. Prometeo. De Franceschi, G. (1935). Revista Criterio, 105. de Luna Freire, R. (2021, May 25–27). What is not new in “New Cinema History” from a non-European point of view?. HOMER Conference. https://homernetwork.org/ discussion-­session-­15/ Díaz, E. (1999). Los acuerdos cinematográficos entre el Franquismo y el Tercer Reich (1936–1945). Archivos de la filmoteca: revista de estudios históricos sobre la imagen, (33), 35–59. Druetta, M.  E. (2021). En defensa de la neutralidad: El ejercicio de la diplomacia a través de la censura cinematográfica en Argentina, 1938–1940. Secuencias, (52), 39–56. Fox, J. (2000). Filming women in the Third Reich. . Friedmann, G. (2010). Alemanes antinazis en la Argentina. Siglo XXI. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation. (n.d.). 49 Suchergebnisse. Retrieved June 11, 2019, from https://www.murnau-­stiftung.de/movie_search?genre=22 Fuhrmann, W. (2021). Sueños en blanco y negro: La expansión de la UFA en Brasil y América Latina. Secuencias, (52), 57–76.

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Galván, M. V., & Moguillansky, M. (2021). La diplomacia cultural alemana y el cine de propaganda nazi en la Argentina en el período previo a la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Secuencias, (52), 77–96. Getino, O. (2005). Cine argentino. Entre lo posible y lo deseable. Getino, O. (2007). Cine iberoamericano: los desafíos del nuevo siglo. INCAA. Giesen, R. (2003). Nazi propaganda films: A history and filmography. McFarland Publishers. Gil-Blanco, E., & Canela-Ruano, A. (2018). La migración europea al Ecuador (1935–1955). La visión diplomática de la llegada de colectivos problemáticos: los judíos. Chasqui. Revista Latinoamericana de Comunicación, (138), 211–227. Granda, W. (1995). Cine silente en Ecuador (1895–1935). Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana—Cinemateca Nacional. Hake, S. (2001). Popular cinema of the Third Reich. University of Texas Press. Hull, D. (1969). Film in the Third Reich. A study of the German cinema 1933–1945. University of California Press. Jason, G. (2013). Film and propaganda: The lessons of the Nazi film industry. Reason Papers, 35(1), 203–219. Kelson, J. F., & Short, K. R. M. (1996). Catalogue of forbidden German feature and short film productions: Held in Zonal Film Archives of Film Section, Information Services Division, Control Commission for Germany, (BE). Flicks Books. Kersffeld, D. (2015). Antinazi: Ecuador y el movimiento de lucha contra el nazismo durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar Sede Ecuador. Kracauer, S. (1985). De Caligari a Hitler. Una historia psicológica del cine alemán. Paidós. Kreimeier, K. (1999). The UFA story. A history of Germany’s greatest film company, 1918–1945. University of California Press. Kriger, C. (2009). Cine y peronismo. El Estado en escena. Siglo XXI Luna, M. (2001). Aula del siglo XXI.  Historia del Ecuador: Historia y biografías del Ecuador. Cultural SA. Maltby, R. (2006). On the prospect of writing cinema history from below. TMG Journal for Media History, 9(2), 74–96. Maltby, R., Biltereyst, D., & Meers, P. (2011). Explorations in new cinema history: Approaches and case studies. Wiley-Blackwell. Mateu, C. (2008). La producción cinematográfica en un país dependiente. Desarrollo cinematográfico en las décadas del 30 y 40. XXI Jornadas de Historia Económica. UNTREF. Retrieved October 10, 2019, from http://xxijhe.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/programa/descargables/Mateu.pdf Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Organ of the Ecuadorian Government. (1938). Official registration, from October 1937 to August 1938. Quito. Moguillansky, M. (2021, May 25–27). Nazi films in Buenos Aires (1936–1942). Distribution, programming and exhibition. HOMER Conference. https://homernetwork.org/discussion-­session-­17/ Moeller, F. (2014). Forbidden Films/Verbotene Filme. Germany, 94 min. Nazario, L. (2007). Nazi film politics in Brazil, 1933–42. In R.  Vande Winkel & D. Welch (Eds.), Cinema and the swastika. The international expansion of the Third Reich (pp. 85–98). Palgrave Macmillan. Negrete, A. (2006). Centuria. Las noticias de los 100 años. El Comercio. Núñez del Arco Proaño, F. (2013). El Ecuador y la Alemania Nazi: Los secretos de una relación ocultada. Editorial JG.

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CHAPTER 19

Towards a Global and Decentralised History of Film Cultures: Networks of Exchange among Ibero-American Film Clubs (1924–1958) Ainamar Clariana-Rodagut and Diana Roig-Sanz

Introduction Methodological debates about how a global history of cultural processes should be written have been set in motion in recent years (Iriye & Saunier, 2009; Middell & Naumann, 2010; Iriye, 2012; Rotger et al., 2019), but there is still room to consider global perspectives in film studies and, more specifically, in relation to how global and digital approaches can help us rethink film history. This chapter contributes to a decentralised and global history of film by seeking to offer some theoretical insights which give a voice to lesser-known actors, whom we understand as cultural mediators (Roig-Sanz & Meylaerts, 2018).

This research is funded by the ERC StG project Social Networks of the Past: Mapping Hispanic and Lusophone Literary Modernity, 1898–1959, led by Diana Roig-Sanz (Grant agreement No. 803860).

A. Clariana-Rodagut (*) Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain Marburg University, Marburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] D. Roig-Sanz Open University of Catalonia & ICREA, Barcelona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Treveri Gennari et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38789-0_19

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Specifically, cultural mediators are defined as actors who have often been overshadowed by mainstream histories. Nonetheless, they transgress linguistic, disciplinary, and geographical boundaries, and may appear as central nodes when applying a network and relational approach. This goal to apply a global and decentralised perspective to film cultures also introduces a gender perspective, which stresses the role of the Global South (Latin America specifically) and pays attention to different scales that go beyond national frameworks and involve other units of analysis such as the city, the region, or the sea. Our purpose is to analyse cross-border phenomena involving multiple spaces and scales, and overlooked movements and connections. Thus, we propose a comparative and decolonial approach that reflects upon these issues by applying, on the one hand, five concepts that we consider key to applying a global approach to any discipline (Roig-Sanz, 2022; Roig-Sanz & Rotger, 2022)—space, scale, time, connectivity, and agency. On the other hand, we propose a case study to reflect upon these concepts through the emergence of film clubs in Latin America, Spain, and Portugal between 1924 and 1958. As Navitski and Poppe (2017) have pointed out, this time-period in Latin American film history remains quite unknown from a transnational, multidirectional, and decentred perspective, and it is thus imperative that we reassess it. To do so, we firstly discuss the idea and definition of the global as a way of rethinking cinema history in relation to other terms such as transnational or world cinema. We also take on a relational and digital analysis of Ibero-American film clubs as a neglected cinematic experience, which was shaped on a large scale, through the idea of networks of exchange. This case study can shift our gaze to the Global South and to the networks that specific actors successfully established. As a conceptual starting point, we adopt the premise that no single film culture travelled from a specific centre to the peripheries to constitute a driving force in the history of cinema. Quite the contrary, we advance the hypothesis that many film cultures developed at the same time or within a short time span, mirroring, uniting, competing, or ignoring each other. This implies that we must abandon the idea of innovative centres and imitative peripheries and instead address various cinematic projects and spaces of sociability with different scopes and ambitions, which nonetheless shared the goal of reaching a broad audience at different scales: local, regional, national, and international. Certainly, most well-known literature has mainly focused on the analysis of cinema-going experiences in Western Europe—the Ciné-Club de France (1920), the Film Society in London (1925), or Filmliga in Amsterdam (1927)—and the United States (Gauthier, 1999; Gunning, 1999; Hagener, 2007). However, we scarcely know about film clubs and film societies in other geographical domains. These spaces also experienced the growth of cinematic initiatives, but, as we will see later in the chapter, they were characterised by features that were mostly related to ideology and politics, education, and the foundation of a film industry, straying from the theoretical basis of France’s first avant-garde cinema and its initial film clubs. In this respect, we work on a large scale with situated historical case studies (Haraway, 1989).

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The Idea and Definition of the Global: Rethinking Film History The global turn refers to a recent field that has been gaining ground in different disciplines since the mid-1990s. Multiple cultural, political, social, and economic issues have been narrated from a global and transregional perspective, with the field of global history being one of the most challenging and innovative ones across many disciplines, in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. Global historians have focused on entanglements and networks, the agents who encourage these connections, and the circulation of intercultural processes and cultural patterns (Middell, 2019, p. 16). When taking a global approach to film studies, we advocate embracing an interdisciplinary approach. This involves utilising concepts, terms, and methods from various fields, such as comparative and world literature, as previously demonstrated by Robert Stam (2019). Additionally, incorporating other disciplines like anthropology, sociology, and computer science may prove beneficial, particularly when adopting a data-driven approach and utilising digital tools in film history research. Dudley Andrew has already attempted a global and interdisciplinary approach in Atlas of Wold  Cinema (2004, p.  12), which referenced Franco Moretti’s work and adopted a world systems approach, as well as in Stam’s book World Literature, Transnational Cinema, and Global Media. Towards a Transartistic Commons (Stam, 2019). Andrew recognises that film historians continue to divide the world by nations, much like film festivals or textbooks do. In this respect, he understands world cinema as an approach that should allow us “to know the territory differently” (Andrew, 2004, p.  21) and to include many worlds that live together and often compete with each other. Likewise, literature on world cinema has historically placed the idea of the “foreign” at the core of the research. Moreover, considerable literature on world film festivals (Elsaesser, 2005; de Valck, 2007; de Valck et al., 2016) has been published to nuance national perspectives in cinema studies (Higson, 1989; Crofts, 1998; Hjort & Mackenzie, 2000; Vitali & Willemen, 2006; Abel et al., 2008). Thus, we take advantage of the significant advances made by world film historians published in the early 2000s (Chaudhuri, 2005; Ezra & Rowden, 2006; Thanouli, 2008; Ď urovičová & Newman, 2010) to increase the application of the global in cinema history and describe which gaps require reconsideration. On a different note, the idea of the global also recognises the heritage of transnational cinema (Wilson & Dissanayake, 1996; Bergfelder et  al., 2007; Ezra & Rowden, 2006; Higbee & Lim, 2010; Dennison, 2013). Moreover, the global recognises the influence of postcolonial literature on narratives of diaspora, migration, and exile (Naficy, 1996), cinema and multiculturalism (Shohat & Stam, 2003), as well as remarkable attempts to engage in comparative film history (Biltereyst et al., 2019; van Oort & Whitehead, 2020). The notion of transnational cinema has expanded since the late 1990s to better understand the relationship between the global and the local, and the national and the international. The idea of transnational cinema has been used to refer

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to cross-border cinematic experiences and connections, but, as Higbee and Lim (2010, p. 7) point out, this term is both useful and problematic. In this respect, the representation of multiple, simultaneous spaces and processes still involves various conceptual and methodological challenges, including aesthetic, political, economic, social, and cultural constraints. These challenges have led to the transnational turn, which has questioned the centrality of the nation and promoted regional labels, as with Nordic or Latin American cinema. Despite recognising that transnational flows are far from new (Stam, 2019, p.  130), transnational approaches in film studies have also benefited from the research published in the fundamental journal Transnational Cinemas (2010-). In light of this succinct review of the state of the art, we may ask, what is the difference between the transnational and the global in cinema history? What is the value of the global in this debate (Gorfinkel & Williams, 2018)? Obviously, these terms are very multifaceted and potentially problematic since they have many layers: economic, political, aesthetical, etc. Consequently, it is not always easy to disentangle the complex set of secondary literature that has been published from different research traditions and diverse yet occasionally overlapping theoretical frameworks. Thus, the notion of the global, when vaguely applied, may give voice to multiple overlooked movements, networks, and cultural mediators that have been under-addressed (Hagener, 2007) or overshadowed by bigger names, who are generally White European or US American male film-makers. Nonetheless, we still need to critically examine the term global and be clear in terms of its similarities and differences with other terms, such as the above-mentioned transnational or world cinema, as well as the international or cosmopolitan (Delanty, 2010) in relation to film history. This is fundamental to discussing the concerns of a new generation of film historians who focus on global dynamics, applied both to the past and the present, which may at times differ from those historiographies which dominated the 1990s and 2000s. This new generation has also challenged Eurocentric discourses when applying the notion of the global, promoting plural globalities, heterogeneity, and the recognition of Latin American, Asian, and African historiographies, while using a gender-conscious, ethical, and digital approach. Of course, we foresee the possibility of manifold definitions of the global (both as a process and as an approach). Nonetheless, we understand global, decentralised, and decolonial film history as an epistemological premise and methodological research perspective that crisscross the five concepts mentioned above and enables us to grapple with hegemonic discourses. Thus, we take on the following fundamental topics: (1) the analysis of film cultures and their global circulation in new and multiple spaces that do not ascribe to national boundaries; (2) the analysis of under-explored film narratives related to multiple scales and units of analysis, as detailed above; (3) a longue durée approach that analyses film cultures in an historical continuum and also considers parallel processes; (4) the study of connectedness and overlooked movements, connections and cultural transfers by applying a relational and network approach; and (5) the

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study of cinematic experiences that have been insufficiently analysed or remain lesser-known,1 such as film clubs and the agents involved therein, namely audiences and cultural mediators. To do so, we pursue a more inclusive and ethical approach to cinema history that includes the gender perspective (Gaines, 2018; Bull & Söderbergh Widding, 2010; Dall’Asta et al., 2013), the role of the Global South (Clariana-­ Rodagut in press 2023), and the analysis of ethnic, minorities, and queer cinema (Rich, 2013; Loist, 2014; Schoonover & Galt, 2016); a critical digital approach using little data (Borgman, 2015) and big data (Acland & Hoyt, 2016), and a solid attempt at interdisciplinarity that may connect cinema history with computer science and other disciplines like global literary history, and ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities (Kääpä & Gustafsson, 2013) if we consider the high environmental cost of the global circulation. In what follows, we will briefly address these fundamentals through the five concepts embodying them. Regarding the idea of space, there is no doubt that we need to challenge the relationship between European, US American, and other film cultures worldwide and encourage a more complex idea of world, transnational, and global cinema. In recognising the impact of the market and the film industry, as well as the effects of political, social, economic, or cultural constraints, we must also bear in mind the impact of the “spatial turn” and the specificities of cultural production and circulation in many contexts to avoid reproducing the diffusionist perspectives we are seeking to overcome. Settings have always been fundamental in film history and the discussion on the idea of space was also undertaken by Robert C. Allen (2006) within the framework of New Cinema History. Allen reflected upon this notion in relation to the cinema as a physical space and understood the experience of cinema as “the product of multiple, heterogeneous interrelationships that extend from the person sitting next to you in the theatre to the distribution chain […] as well as to the other people’s experiences of cinema (including their experiences of that particular film)” (Allen, 2006, pp. 23–24). However, these thoughts were subsequent to what had been already proposed by Foucault (1986), Soja (1989), and Harvey (1990), and it is also worth acknowledging the reassertion of space in the last few years. Indeed, the idea of mapping is at the core of critical discussions in many disciplines (such as film, literary, art history) and the idea of multiple spaces (localities, regions, landscapes) and multiple boundaries—new or redrawn—now offer geographical features which are relevant to the analysis of film cultures. Space is not an empty container “in which the unfolding of events over some durée could take place” (Tally, 2017, p. 2). Thus, introducing the space variable within our global perspective on the history of film would not 1  Along these lines, see, for example the valuable work by Thunnis van Oort (2007), who analysed the role of cinema in the Dutch province of Limburg. This research shows the impact of lesser-known local initiatives in the building of modernity, as well as proposes a different scale beyond the nation.

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only aggregate more regions for a multi- or transnational study but also allow us to conceive of space through new coordinates, helping to bring new and less-studied geographies to the fore. Information technology has certainly proved helpful. Another determining factor that articulates the film field, from the spatial point of view, is sociotechnology, which not only affects cinema today—as internet now conditions access to certain films in turn—but also made its mark in the past, given that technology and its progress often set the limits, possibilities, and conditions of film screenings. Thus, we may not only study the circulation of global cinema and multiple film cultures beyond the logic of the nation state (by examining regions such as Río de la Plata, the Caribbean, the Andes, the Caucasus, or Southeast Asia) but we might also look to geographic areas like oceans and mountain ranges. This exercise could lead us to explore the place of the South within the North, South-to-South relations, and interperipheral relations. Using this framework, we can blur the lines of analysis centred on European or Western film, as well as of Eurocentric perspectives emanating from such analyses. When we use the notion of the global properly and endow it with meaning, we aspire to give voice to a broader plurality of film cultures—not only from a supranational perspective but also from an intranational one, which can help balance out inequalities between spaces in terms of representation and power. The notion of the global not only challenges our understanding of space and the national boundary but also other geographical scales. Thus, based on our mutual goal of integrating scales—the local, national, and global—rather than viewing them as mutually exclusive, we suggest exploring concepts with articulating potential from other disciplines, such as “glocalisation” (Bauman, 1998), “translocality” (Freitag & von Oppen, 2010), “entangled histories” (Werner & Zimmermann, 2003), “peripherocentrism” (Juvan, 2010), “significant geographies” (Laachir et al., 2018a, 2018b), and “bibliomigrancy” (Mani, 2017). These terms can help shed light on the relationships, similarities, discontinuities, and frictions between scales but also make manifest those cultural, social, political, and economic constraints that have affected, and continue to affect, the film industry. Likewise, such terms can help elucidate whether the ties between scales are horizontal or vertical. The notion of the global also implies multidirectionality when transcending multiple scales and allows us to break with those transnational approaches that tend to involve binary directions between the host and target country. On a different level, multiple scales are also related to what we call global film narratives in contemporary cinema, a term that can closely line up with the global novel, as understood by Ganguly (2016), among others. In this respect, global film narratives are the result of locating the narrative approach on a planetary scale in order to overcome the androcentric perspective and include themes or challenges on a global scale, such as terrorism and global violence, climate change, migration movements, diasporas, femicides, and global pandemics.

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Finally, the notion of scale also leads us to consider source selection as well as analyses on a large or small scale.2 What is the uniqueness and applicability of little and big data in film history? Or, in other words, and as also discussed by Deb Verhoeven (2016), how can we understand and apply datafication to the discipline? How can we bring together quantitative and qualitative analyses? And how can we combine the sociological perspective with that of aesthetics? Gaining awareness of what factors promote or resist these approaches is one of the essential features of applying the global and digital perspectives to film and cinema history. Reconsidering cinema history from the global perspective, and analysing micro-histories in light of global evolutions as proposed by New Cinema History, too, can enable researchers to study multiple film cultures in the longue durée (Braudel, 1958). This concept is tied to the plurality of social times and structures and to the duration of an historical social system—the world—which became global (according to Braudel) in the late-nineteenth century. We use this term to study cinema-history processes in an historical continuum but also to analyse film production and cinematic experiences that develop simultaneously. Likewise, considering certain periodisations that have not been generated by the great centres of cultural production can allow other, less-studied social and political events to come to the fore in global film history. In fact, considering temporality from a global and long durée perspective can help establish cinematographic calendars and cast light on potential coincidences between them and more classical periodisations, as well as their points of disruption (if they exist as such), transition, or multitemporal circulation, which do not always align with national film histories. The notion of time has to do with processes of acceleration, canonisation, and crisis. As we will come to observe, film clubs can be analysed as global phenomena, considering the confluences, transitions, and exchanges between them over time and in space. On the other hand, the role of connectivity (and hyperconnectivity) and the relevance of networks as the emerging form of social organisation are at the core of a global perspective on film history. Researchers are still struggling to analyse the existence (or lack) of relations, flows, circulation, mobility, or displacement that can shed light on processes of cultural transformation. Certainly, network analysis, as it was described by Wasserman and Faust (1997), is still not fully expanded in film studies, but some interesting initiatives appearing in other fields (digital and intellectual history, literary studies) may contribute to this aim (see, for example, Grandjean, 2018a, 2018b). Indeed, the analysis of movements allows us to rethink uneven or apparently asymmetrical relations, as well as understanding connections as paths of power transmission or exclusion. Thus, we can discover how connections, networks, and connectivity 2  Along these lines, please bear in mind that microhistorical research has also been undertaken in New Cinema History by Arthur Knight, Stephen Hughes, and Kate Bowles in Maltby et al. (2011).

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homogenise film cultures or make them more diverse across the world. Indeed, global networks (James & Steger, 2016; Gorfinkel & Williams, 2018) have shaped canons in cinema history, but may have also encouraged marginalisation, as the lack of literature regarding film clubs in the Global South shows. Thus, tracing the connections between film clubs in spaces such as the Ibero-­ American region can allow us to understand film-club experiences that have been invisibilised until now, but that played relevant roles in Western film-club history and advanced the development of diverse film cultures, often independently of broadly known European film cultures. Likewise, we should also think about the political, cultural, linguistic, religious, and economic constraints that encourage or slow down these connections and any subsequent cultural transfers (Espagne & Werner, 1987; Espagne, 2013) that were deployed, if we assume connections as necessary precursors to such transfers. Thus, we could situate the ideas of transfer, exchange, and impact but also of continuities, frictions, and discontinuities that emerge when analysing relations and interactions over time, even though the connections leading to meaningful qualitative impact are often very difficult to chart. Finally, adopting a global perspective for film and cinema history allows us to study lesser-known agents, including a number of women who have been completely overshadowed in the mainstream literature, as well as the roles of apparently secondary actors (Roig-Sanz & Meylaerts, 2018). The latter would comprise local audiences, fans, the custodians of private archives, cultural mediators who travelled or exchanged film prints, and mediators related to film clubs. The idea of agency also enables researchers to analyse agents with hybrid identities due to migration movements, displacement, or any sort of mobility for professional or personal reasons causing them to fluctuate between multiple spaces. On another level, we can also study the strength of the market in-depth, as well as the role of national governments in the film industry, or the place of film archives, and cinematheques. Thus, agents can be described and related using social network analysis in order to shed light on their greater or lesser centrality in various spaces of sociability. In this sense, one of the main challenges ahead is to study their multifaceted profiles and analyse them in relation to their various sources and archives. On another note, we can also reassess which of these agents were more global in terms of their impact or mobility. Lastly, we should consider the biases that film history has introduced by overlooking the gender perspective, one which new generations of researchers applying global and decentralised approaches have adopted as their own. In fact, from a materialist, feminist (Grosz, 1999; Haraway, 1989, 2003), posthumanist, and Latourian approach (Latour, 2005), agency as a force of action is not only human but also pertains to objects and other beings (actants, in Latour’s words) and can circulate through networks to generate connections and movement (Clariana-Rodagut & Hagener, 2023).

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Networks of Ibero-American Film Clubs (1924–1958) Adopting a relational and global approach, we understand film clubs as experiences that are not exclusive to a region, location, or nationality. As we have already seen in relation to the concept of scale, by analysing Ibero-American film-club networks, we may detect various scales of exchange. For instance, Uruguayan, Brazilian, and Argentine film clubs were created within national film-club federations around the 1950s, but they also established relationships among themselves, creating a regional scale of exchange. We may trace such exchanges to the magazine Cine Club (1948–1953), an official organ of Cine Club del Uruguay (1948–1960). In this magazine, we find a report on the Brazilian Film Club Federation’s foundation, as well as the Argentine Film Club Federation. In this report, Cine Club del Uruguay members remark upon the new federations’ inaugurations with pride, celebrating such initiatives. On another scale, we may also identify ties between film clubs across various countries. For instance, Cine Club del Uruguay and Gente de Cine (1942–1965), in Buenos Aires, exchanged films with each other. This was also the case with Cine Club Español (1928–1931) and Cine Club de Buenos Aires (1929–1931), whose relationship can be gleaned in their publications: La Gaceta Literaria (1927–1932) and Sur (1931–1970). These relationships exemplify how transnational exchanges between Argentina and Spain evolved over time, both increasing and decreasing. Another network that transcended federations, at the local level, resulted from film clubs’ exchanges of people and films within the same city. This was evident in the conferences and film presentations organised by members of Montevideo’s film clubs, as can be gleaned from the pages of the Uruguayan magazines Cine Club and Marcha. Besides analysing the history of film clubs in terms of scale, as we have just done, we will also conduct a historical periodisation of the first Ibero-American film clubs as related to the agents associated with these film clubs, thus illustrating the concept of agency as well as the networks they successfully established—which may allow us to reflect upon the idea of connectivity.

The Birth, Waning, and Re-Emergence of Film Clubs in Ibero-America (1924–1958) (Fig. 19.1) As noted above in regard to the temporal dimension, the history of Ibero-­ American film clubs can be studied from a global perspective, implying that historical periodisations are not only tied to national processes but also to global ones. Thus, we adopted the longue durée perspective to study the emergence, expansion, and waning of this flow—which not only extends beyond the classical periodisations that have been used to study the film-club phenomenon but also surpasses those periodisations on national history and film that remain limited to European and US American cinema. Thus, in a historical continuum framework, we could refer to a global history of Western film clubs, starting

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Fig. 19.1  Clariana-Rodagut, A. and Ikoff, V., “Emergence of Ibero-American film clubs per year based on the database of the project Social Networks of the Past”

with those years when film clubs progressed more or less evenly in Europe and the Americas until 1945. In the post-war period, Latin American film clubs saw quicker growth and recovery than European ones. Indeed, the latter’s recovery did not start until the 1950s: the European continent took longer to revamp its film industry as well as its spaces of sociability, like film clubs. In this sense, we might expand upon Andrew’s (2010) views on global film history and apply a decentred perspective, allowing us to compare diverging and converging processes in the histories of Ibero-American and European film clubs. The periodisations of analysis we propose for the exchanges between the agents of Ibero-American film clubs are threefold. First, we see a phase comprising the birth of film clubs in Ibero-America (1924–1936); followed by a waning phase (1936–1946) when the avant-garde film movement of the 1920s came to an end just as authoritarian regimes took root in many Ibero-American countries, sound films were introduced, and national film industries started being developed in Latin American countries; and lastly, a phase of re-emergence (1946–1958) stemming from the expansion of neorealism and the emergence of Latin American neorealism, growing interest in film as a mass entertainment phenomenon at the global level, and the further development of Latin American film industries, which boosted amateur and experimental film-making. Meanwhile, the global perspective and the use of digital tools provide an innovative way of studying film clubs—privileging the analysis of connections between these entities and the agents involved therein. Through these networks, agents circulated in the artistic field in general but also in specifically film-related fields. In our case, the cultural mediators we have traced are people

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associated with or related to Ibero-American film clubs.3 Of course, other kinds of agents and actants (Latour, 2005) circulated as well, including ideas on film; letters between critics, directors, and film-club founders; as well as other kinds of documents outside the scope of our research.4 For our case study, we have traced those persons with ties to film-club initiatives—as these agents participated, throughout their lives, in various events where they established ties to other agents involved in different film-related entities. Using the data we have gathered by consulting various materials, including historical magazines, personal archives, and primary and secondary sources, we may observe that the networks of people who gathered to watch films in non-commercial, Ibero-­ American theatres—which called themselves or were considered film clubs— emerged as of the mid-1920s.5 From this moment on, we have been able to trace these clubs’ exponential growth, peaking around the mid-1930s and waning thereafter. The decade spanning the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s experienced a moment of stability in which film clubs stopped their expansion across the Ibero-American space. However, as of the mid-1940s, growth quickly accelerated up until the mid-1950s, with the year 1955 seeing the greatest number of film clubs. A small decline followed, but we do not know if the drop continued into the 1960s, as we only have trustworthy information up until 1959. Regardless, similar analyses studying film-club agents and their interactions should be replicated outside the Ibero-American space—this being the first of its kind. The Birth or Emergence of Film Clubs: 1924–1936 The first Ibero-American film club we have documented, Associação dos Amigos do Cinema (Granja, 2006), took root in Porto in 1924, with similar objectives to those of the Parisian film clubs led by Louis Delluc (in 1920) and Riciotto Canudo (in 1921). The birth of film clubs in Paris led to the global circulation of the term “film club”, denoting the coming together of a group 3  In the case of Figure 19.1, we have used our database of film clubs which goes from 1898 to 1959 in Ibero-America. The sources we have used to create this database are diverse, including primary sources (cinema and cultural journals, institutional and personal letters, and historical documents) and secondary literature. This database also includes the work done by Rielle Navitski and by Irene Rosza in her thesis. We are very grateful to them for sharing with us their work. This database is not published yet, but it is the most complete database we are aware of on film clubs in Ibero-America during the period above-mentioned. 4  In terms of the circulation of films, even though we know about the exchanges of film and even programming between film clubs, we cannot study these kinds of exchanges because they were subject to which copies were available, and the latter is almost impossible to trace. We may analyse the transnational circulation of a given film by focusing on the physical reel itself (vid. Clariana-­ Rodagut & Hagener, 2023). In this case, the copies may prove relevant but are not required for the study of circulation. 5  In this case, we have entered the data manually. We have not applied data mining, as data on film clubs is usually scarce and very scattered, especially regarding the first film clubs. In this respect, only a small number of sources are digitised.

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of cinephiles who aimed to program films and then discuss them. However, the legitimation of film as an art—as in Paris’s film clubs—did not reach other spaces across history in the same way. In fact, Christophe Gauthier (1999) writes that, after Canudo and Delluc’s clubs, several other proposals emerged with pedagogical and hygienist goals, which sought to improve the hygiene habits of citizens. This occurred in Paris in the 20s as well as in Brazil’s Catholic film clubs in the 50s. Certain political goals may be discerned among the film clubs of the 1960s, both in Latin America—as in Cuba—as well as in Europe, where the youth of the Nouvelle Vague embodied the epitome of this trend. Film clubs also sought to entertain, projecting recent releases to captivate audiences who shared interests, as was the case with Cine Club de Colombia (Navitski & Poppe, 2017). A few film clubs were founded by associations—as was the case with Barcelona’s Hiking Centre (Centro Excursionista)—whose members climbed mountains but also organised a film club.6 Without a doubt, what did emerge in France and extended beyond the country was the concept of film clubs as spaces to screen and discuss films. Now, the ideas behind film clubs were quite varied, and not all of them ascribed to the Parisian model. In Ibero-America, before the first film club in Brazil, which was also the region’s first film club, a few initiatives that cannot be defined as film clubs per se paved the way for subsequent film clubs, as is the case with Mexico’s City’s Cinematógrafo cine club (1909–1911), Club Cinematográfico de Horta in Barcelona (1923), and Clube Paredão (1917) in Río de Janeiro. Given the scarcity of film critics at that time, these activities were organised by the audiences themselves. At Club Cinematográfico de Horta and Clube Paredão, where Brazilian film criticism had its origins, audiences were both members and founders (Macedo, 2006, p.  74). In other cases, we find entertainment companies organising activity rooms, such as the Mexico City’s Cinematógrafo. Thus, even though these much-earlier initiatives differed from the French film-­ club model of the 1920s, they did share a few elements.7 The Waning of Film Clubs: 1936–1946 As of 1936, the film clubs which had cropped up in the previous decade started to disappear, with no new film clubs emerging in their place. This waning could be attributed to the onset of sound-film circulation. The fact that film clubs were not created for monetary gain often meant that they suffered economic losses or had trouble surviving, as can be gleaned from the press of the time. In 6  We have not found the start and end dates of this film club’s activities: the hiking centre launched in 1891, but there is nothing to suggest that the film club opened at the same time. 7  Regarding initiatives prior to Parisian film clubs, see Macedo (2016), who provides examples such as Cinéma du Peuple, 1913–1914, and Club du faubourg, 1918, in Paris, as well as Escuela Moderna de Francisco Ferrer Guàrdia, in Barcelona, which screened films for educational purposes, and the Socialist Movie Theatre, 1911, in Los Angeles. Macedo traces the beginnings of film club to screenings organised by associations, leagues, clubs, and other groups with pedagogical (and often religious), political, or entertainment aims.

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this sense, sound film drew the public to commercial cinema theatres, highlighting the technological deficiencies of film clubs and causing their audiences to dwindle. In fact, we can find negative reviews on the screening quality and venues of these clubs in the press (Orsetti, 1932, p. 51). Ten years after the first sound film, in 1936, silent films had stopped attracting audiences in the West, as Andrew notes (2010, p. 67). By the same token, avant-garde film—most of which was silent—had also lost some of its lustre. Many film clubs had once enjoyed close ties to this artistic movement (Hagener, 2007), prioritising its films.8 Besides avant-garde cinema, film clubs also tended to screen German expressionist, Soviet, Italian, and US American cinema. Now, the arrival of sound film, and its circumscription to certain linguistic communities in turn— in what Andrew (2010) describes as the era of national cinema (which started in the mid-1920s and ended after the Second World War)—left film clubs with programming that would prove less attractive to the general public. Thus, film clubs offered reruns of films that had already been screened or that had not yet been launched nationwide. For instance, the Mexican film club 35  mm Cinema’s first screening marked the debut of Un chien andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1929) in Mexico City. Meanwhile, Cine Club de Buenos Aires (1929–1931) screened the already released Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene, 1920) in 1931, eleven years after its world debut. Another issue tied to the relevance of national production and sound film was the idea—shared among Latin American critics—that nationally produced films were not up to the standards of what they called the art of film. The Guatemalan critic Luis Cardoza y Aragón considered the matter in his column for the Mexican magazine Todo, for which he conducted several interviews with significant industry personalities of the time. In Mexico, critics generally tended to believe that even though the country had a well-developed industry (we may recall the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, which started in the mid-1930s), it had yet to master the art of film. In Spain, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, women and men writers and artists who met at film clubs and participated in specialised magazines also complained of the industry’s shortfalls. Through his newspaper column in Nuestro Cinema (1932–1935), the Spanish film critic Juan Piqueras demanded more authentic, quality cinema (Gubern, 1997, p.  263). The fact that amateur cinema peaked in Barcelona in the 1930s (Cinema Amateur 1932–1939 and Boletín del Cinemátic Club Amateur, 1933–1937), just as many associations became interested in creating film, is related to the industry’s inability to satisfy the novelty-seeking public. The Spanish Civil War also truncated the art’s chances of development. We should bear in mind that, by the late 1930s, many historical events would encumber 8  For instance, we may note the failure of Tararira (Benjamin Fondane, 1936), one of the first experimental films made by the Argentine avant-garde, which was never launched (Aguilar, 2011, p. 18), because by the time it was filmed, there was no longer an audience for it. The film is considered Argentinian because it was produced there, by Victoria Ocampo, and its actors were Argentinian. Nonetheless, it was conceived by Benjamin Fondane, a French philosopher of Romanian origin.

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the emergence of film-club projects in other countries, too. For instance, we may look to the Infamous Decade in Argentina, or the Estado Novo in Brazil and Portugal. Likewise, the Second World War made a huge impact on European film production, leaving film clubs across Ibero-America with scarce screening material. Despite this fact, we cannot speak, from a longue durée perspective, of a breakdown. In fact, from a global history perspective, we document certain continuities, starting with the projection of avant-garde films in Ibero-American film clubs and continuing with the exponential growth of film clubs in Latin America after the Second World War thanks to—among other factors—the relationship between these clubs and neorealism, and the development of Latin American neorealism, as we will see later on. Likewise, the re-emergence of film clubs in 1950s Europe, as well as their tendency to become politicised during the Cold War, is closely related to the Latin American film clubs that opened their doors in the mid-1940s. Meanwhile the connections between agents and cultural mediators and the transnational flow of ideas—which had been so rich and productive for film clubs in previous years, up until the 1930s—became limited to private correspondence. Re-Emergence Phase: 1946–1958 In 1945, we begin to see a resurgence in film clubs that spanned an entire decade and peaked in 1955. This peak was sustained, with a few fluctuations, until film clubs began to ebb in 1958, after which we would come to the end of our period of analysis—meaning we have no data to corroborate further trends. However, we are interested in explaining the growth that fluctuated from the mid-1940s to the late 1950s. According to Paranaguá (2003), this growth continued well into the 1960s and 1970s. In his seminal work, Paranaguá addresses the peak of Latin American film culture, which was in full glory by the 1960s, culminating a process that had begun a decade prior, in the 1950s. This boom had its roots in the first national film archives, the expansion of film clubs, and the publication of specialised film criticism magazines—coinciding with the growth of film clubs which our analysis places in the mid-­1940s. Indeed, this decade also saw the global circulation of Italian neorealism, a movement that garnered great interest from new criticism magazines and film clubs in Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, Uruguay, Chile, and Mexico, as Paranaguá (2003, p. 173) notes. Thus, it is no surprise that a considerable amount of film clubs would emerge: while US American film tended to comprise most of the programming in commercial cinema theatres, neorealism tended to be projected at film clubs. Thus, gatherings and screenings did continue outside commercial spaces. We can therefore affirm that neorealism took on the role that the avant-garde had played for the first film clubs. In fact, the modes of production of neorealism—understood as an alternative model to Hollywood’s—incentivised the agents involved in the film-club movement to produce films themselves. In this sense, we may recall that the Ibero-American

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film-club phenomenon had close ties to amateur film production, as well as to experimental film. Neorealism boosted interest in low-cost film production, which privileged filming outdoors with non-professional actors, leading to what was later known as Latin American neorealism. This mode of production continued until the 1960s, when Brazil’s Cinema Novo, Argentina’s Nuevo Cine, and Cuban Post-Revolutionary film began to explore new paths (Paranaguá, 2003, p. 91). Interest in neorealist film production was accompanied by a fascination with French criticism and the film schools of Paris and Rome (Paranaguá, 2003, p.  208). The latter were also closely tied to Latin American film criticism, as we may glean in film-club magazines. Issue 9 of Uruguay’s Cine Club magazine (1948–1953) (Vida de los cineclubes 1949, p. 11) includes accounts of club members’ trips to Europe. The articles specify that these people were sent by the government so that they could train in European schools, acting as film-club representatives with the goal of returning to Uruguay, where they would share what they had learned. It is worth noting that the mediators who revamped Latin American film in the 1960s—coinciding with the Latin American Boom in literature—were once film-club audience members. For instance, we could name writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and Álvaro Mutis, as well as film-­ makers and photographers like Glauber Rocha, Gutiérrez Alea, Néstor Almendros, Germán Puig, Eulogio Nishiyama, Luis Figueroa Yábar, César Villanueva, Carlos Velo, and Pedro Chaskel, who participated in the film-club movement. It is worth acknowledging that here we have only mentioned the names of male film-makers who contributed to the emergence of the Latin American cinema of the 1960s onwards because we have not been able to find data to empirically attest the participation of women, even if we are aware of the active role of some specific women such as Helena Solberg and Sara Gómez. In any case, the people turning the wheels of the film clubs of the mid-1940s were about twenty years old after the Second World War, around when Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica, 1948) came out. It was these same people who would create what we know as Latin American neorealism. The subsequent generation, which started organising screenings at a much younger age than their predecessors, were behind the revamping of Latin American film that reached global acclaim in the 1960s. In our view, it was this second generation that boosted the growth of film clubs the most, or at least helped them survive past the second half of the 1950s. Film clubs increased as their audiences grew, with more audiences interested in attending their sessions. By 1953, the Cine Club de Uruguay had garnered 2000 members, as noted in the magazine Marcha (C.M.G., 1959, p.  26), securing 2800 participants by 1960. Uruguay’s Cine Universitario had also accrued 2143 members by 1957 (Navitski & Poppe, 2017, p. 4). In contrast, Cine Club de Colombia only boasted 300 members, and the organisation began to dwindle in 1960 as a consequence of its own success, as new film clubs cropped up in direct competition with the former (Navitski & Poppe, 2017). These massive audiences did not exclusively attend film clubs—rather,

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this activity complemented their commercial cinema-theatre-going. In 1946, Hollywood sold more tickets at the box office than it had since the 1930s (Gubern, 1997). Such box-office success also graced European countries.9 Likewise, Mexico City registered a boom in cinema-going in the 1950s, extending to the rest of the country by the 1960s (Rosas Mantecón, 2006, p. 331). As per Paranaguá (2003), from 1937 up until 1949, large audiences watched films in their national or neighbouring-country’s language.

Conclusions This chapter has been an opportunity to help decentre film history. These insights are not definitive but aimed at making some progress in current theoretical debates. Likewise, it has provided a space to discuss the transformation of overlooked cinematic experiences like film clubs (Hagener, 2007), which unfolded on a global level through the relationships, connections, and networks established by apparently secondary actors (many women among them) who have been often overshadowed by the “big names”, generally, White, European, or US American male film-makers. A global, decentred, relational, and data-driven approach can enhance more transnational research on relevant topics such as gender, mobility, migration, networks, global film narratives, neglected cinematic experiences, and cultural mediators in cinema history. Until recently, we lacked the tools to understand the scope of a transfer’s impact, for example. However, we now find ourselves able to imagine far more complex networks. This research is also aimed at stressing the relevance of our methods when approaching minoritised, marginalised, or peripheral objects of study, such as film clubs in the Ibero-American space as well as the women agents within these entities. The lack of data could be compensated with a method that casts light on that—given its invisibilised and overlooked condition—cannot be compared to objects that have already enjoyed abundant study and boast more structured and consistent data. This is one of our working goals, as we aspire to gather data that is valuable due to its quality, rather than its quantity. In this sense, we still require a more meticulous study than this space permits, using other, less common tools and procedures, such as a multidimensional analysis of the relationships between people and entities, which could respond to the need to build a global history of film, under the terms we have proposed. In this respect, we can work with more data and process them so that our objects of study reach scales that broaden our understanding of how vectors move and how our cultural goods circulate. Thus, we locate, map, and evaluate movements, connections, and interactions at the micro level while generating data that can shed insights at the macro level, from a social-network perspective. 9  See the results of the European Cinema Audiences (ECA) project, which proposes a comparative analysis of 1952, a year in which film was a very popular form of entertainment (Ercole et al., 2020).

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This chapter has also sought to offer theoretical insights on the notion of the global as applied to film history through five concepts that prove relevant to any global perspective (space, scale, time, connectivity, and agency). Likewise, we seek to bolster the analysis of multiple cultures, connections, and interactions in the Global South (Latin America, in this case) in order to grasp asymmetries and imbalances. Finally, we have offered several insights regarding methodological challenges and future directions when applying a data-driven approach to the analysis of film clubs from a gender perspective. One of the greatest challenges ahead is to encourage a decolonial perspective, and we believe that major future contributions could emerge by enmeshing new data from a wide range of sources drawn from cultures that are generally considered peripheral, thus producing a more global vision. Acknowledgements  We thank Malte Hagener for his valuable insights and for having read the first sections of this chapter. We would like to thank Ventsislav Ikoff and Alessio Cardillo, two postdoctoral researchers in the ERC StG project “Social Networks of the Past: Mapping Hispanic and Lusophone Literary Modernity, 1898-1959”, for their help with data extraction and analysis, as well as María Cristina Fernández Hall for her proofreading and translation of certain excerpts.

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Grandjean, M. (2018a). Les réseaux de la coopération intellectuelle. La Société des Nations comme actrice des échanges scientifiques et culturels dans l’entre-deux-guerres [Doctoral dissertation, Université de Lausanne]. Grandjean, M. (2018b). The network of intellectual cooperation. [Data repository]. Github.com. Retrieved March 30, 2022, from https://github.com/grandjeanmartin/intellectual-­cooperation; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1257287. Granja, P.  J. (2006). As origens do movimento dos cineclubes em Portugal: 1924–1955 [Master’s thesis, Universidade de Coimbra]. Grosz, E. (1999). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Indiana University Press. Gubern, R. (1997). Historia del cine. Lumen. Gunning, T. (1999). Ontmoetingen in verduisterde ruimten. De alternatieve programmering van de Nederlandsche Filmliga. In C. Linssen, H. Schoots, & T. Gunning (Eds.), Het gaat om de film! Een nieuwe geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche Filmliga, 1927–1933 (pp. 217–263). Bas Lubberhuizen / Filmmuseum. Hagener, M. (2007). Moving forward, looking back: The European Avant-Garde and the invention of film culture, 1919–1939. Amsterdam University Press. Haraway, D. (1989). Primate visions. Gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science. Routledge. Haraway, D. (2003). The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people, and significant otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press. Harvey, D. (1990). The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. . Higbee, W., & Lim, S. H. (2010). Concepts of transnational cinema: Towards a critical transnationalism in film studies. Transnational Cinemas, 1(1), 7–21. Higson, A. (1989). The concept of national cinema. Screen, 30(4), 36–47. Hjort, M., & Mackenzie, S. (2000). Cinema and nation. Routledge. Iriye, A. (2012). Global and transnational history: The past, present, and future. Palgrave Macmillan. Iriye, A., & Saunier, P.-Y. (2009). The Palgrave dictionary of transnational history. Palgrave Macmillan. James, P., & Steger, M. B. (2016). Globalization and global consciousness: Levels of connectivity. In R.  Robertson & D.  Buhari-Gulmez (Eds.), Global culture: Consciousness and connectivity (pp. 21–39). Routledge. Juvan, M. (2010). “Peripherocentrisms:” geopolitics of comparative literatures between ethnocentrism and cosmopolitanism. In J. Bessière & J. Maár (Eds.), Histoire de la littérature et jeux d’échange entre centres et périphéries : les identités relatives des littératures (pp. 53–63). L’Harmattan. Kääpä, P., & Gustafsson, T. (2013). Transnational ecocinema. Film culture in an era of ecological transformation. Intellect. Laachir, K., Marzagora, S., & Orsini, F. (2018a). Multilingual locals and significant geographies: For a ground-up and located approach to world literature. Modern Languages Open, 1, 1–8. Laachir, K., Marzagora, S., & Orsini, F. (2018b). Significant geographies: In lieu of world literature. Journal of World Literature, 3(3), 290–310. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford University Press. Loist, S. (2014). Queer film culture: Performative aspects of LGBT/Q film festivals [doctoral dissertation, Universität Hamburg]. Macedo, L. F. (2006). Pequeno manual do cineclube, Sao Paulo.

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Macedo, L. F. (2016). Naissance des ciné-clubs au Brésil: Le rôle de l’oralité dans le développement des formes d’organisation du public. In G.  Lacasse, A.  Boillat, V. Bouchard, & G. Scheppler (Eds.), Dialogues avec le cinéma. Approches interdisciplinaires de l’oralité cinématographique (pp. 155–173). Nota Bene. Maltby, R., Biltereyst, D., & Meers, P. (2011). Explorations in new cinema history. Approaches and case studies. Wiley-Blackwell. Mani, B. V. (2017). Recoding world literature. Libraries, print culture, and Germany’s pact with books. Fordham University Press. Middell, M. (2019). The practice of global history. European perspectives. Bloomsbury Academic. Middell, M., & Naumann, K. (2010). Global history and the spatial turn: From the impact of area studies to the study of critical junctures of globalization. Journal of Global History, 5(1), 149–170. Naficy, H. (1996). Phobic spaces and liminal panics: Independent transnational film genre. In R. Wilson & W. Dissanayake (Eds.), Global-local: Cultural production and the transnational imaginary (pp. 119–144). Duke University Press. Navitski, R., & Poppe, N. (2017). Cosmopolitan film cultures in Latin America, 1896–1960. Indiana University Press. Orsetti, L. (1932). Cinema: Las actividades del cine club. Nervio, 15, 50–52. Paranaguá, P. A. (2003). Tradición y modernidad en América Latina. Fondo de Cultura Económica de España. Rich, B. R. (2013). New queer cinema: The director’s cut. Duke University Press. Roig-Sanz, D. (2022). Global translation history: Some theoretical and methodological insights. Translation in Society, 1(2), 131–156. Roig-Sanz, D., & Meylaerts, R. (2018). Literary translation and cultural mediators in “peripheral” cultures: Customs officers or smugglers? Palgrave Macmillan. Roig-Sanz, D., & Rotger, N. (2022). Global literary studies: Key concepts. De Gruyter. Rosas Mantecón, A. (2006). Las batallas por la diversidad: exhibición y públicos de cine en México. In G. Sunkel (Ed.), El consumo cultural en América Latina. Construcción teórica y líneas de investigación (pp. 318–341). Convenio Andrés Bello. Rotger, N., Roig-Sanz, D., & Puxan-Oliva, M. (2019). Introduction: Towards a cross-­ disciplinary history of the global in the humanities and the social sciences. Journal of Global History, 14(3), 325–334. Schoonover, K., & Galt, R. (2016). Queer cinema in the world. Duke University Press. Shohat, E., & Stam, R. (2003). Multiculturalism, postcoloniality, and transnational media. Rutgers University Press. Soja, E.  W. (1989). Postmodern geographies: The reassertion of space in critical social theory. Verso. Stam, R. (2019). World literature, transnational cinema, and global media. Towards a transartistic commons. Routledge. Tally, R. T. (2017). The Routledge handbook of literature and space. Routledge. Thanouli, E. (2008). Narration in world cinema: Mapping the flows of formal exchange in the era of globalisation. New Cinemas, 6(1), 5–15. van Oort, T. (2007). Film en het moderne leven in Limburg. Het bioscoopwezen tussen commercie en katholieke cultuurpolitiek (1909-1929). Verloren. van Oort, T., & Whitehead, J. L. (2020). Common ground: Comparative histories of cinema audiences. TMG Journal for Media History, 23(1–2), 1–11. https://doi. org/10.18146/tmg.797

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Verhoeven, D. (2016). Show me the history! Big data goes to the movies. In C. R. Acland & E. Hoyt (Eds.), The arclight guidebook to media history and the digital humanities (pp. 165–183). REFRAME Books. Vida de los cineclubes. (1949). Cine Club, (9), 11. Vitali, V., & Willemen, P. (2006). Theorising national cinema. British Film Institute. Wasserman, S., & Faust, K. (1997). Social network analysis: Methods and applications. Cambridge University Press. Werner, M., & Zimmermann, B. (2003). Penser l’histoire croisée: entre empirie et réflexivité. Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 58(1), 7–36. Wilson, R., & Dissanayake, W. (1996). Global-local: Cultural production and the transnational imaginary. Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 20

Intercultural Transfers in Cinema Dynamics: A Global and Digital Approach to Early Writings on Cinema through the Uruguayan Periodicals Archive Pablo Suárez-Mansilla and Ventsislav Ikoff

Introduction The global turn in the historical inquiry of cultural processes (Rotger et al., 2019), alongside the increasing digitisation of film archives and their related materials, such as print media, presents a new scenario to reconsider cinema history. Within this context, this research aims to survey with computational methods the digitally preserved cinema-related writing from Uruguayan magazines dating back to the early film period. Based on this examination, we propose a specific focus anchored on the text-interweaving connections through film critic José María Podestá, exploring how global and digital approaches to text-based film heritage could shed new light on questions related to the comparative history of film cultures. To this end, the chapter will deal with transnational networks of film criticism, critics and their shared cinephilias manifested

P. Suárez-Mansilla (*) IN3, Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] V. Ikoff Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Treveri Gennari et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38789-0_20

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in the Uruguayan press and the entangled ties that emerge with countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Spain and France. As a starting point, we will use data from the Uruguayan digital periodicals-repository Anáforas1 to configure a research corpus whose analysis allows us to plot a timeline of film writing in Uruguayan magazines. The purpose of this initial step is to identify the time periods, the magazines and issues where film criticism was published and to reconstruct the field of cinema writing in periodicals. Then we will concentrate on the period between the 1910s and 1930s and the figure of Podestá. The review of the texts of this critic, who represents the intellectual cinephilia of Montevideo,2 will lead us to trace cross-border linkages via intertextual relations across magazines. Finally, we adopt a global point of view to the qualitative insight into the case study since the articulation of this certain highbrow cinephilia took place simultaneously within an intercrossing of cultural flows— circulation of films, texts and critics—in the cities of Montevideo, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, but also in Madrid, as well as in Paris. The choice of Uruguay as a starting point goes beyond national boundaries and is justified by several factors, namely that Uruguay is a country located within a strategic cross-border enclave for the circulation of cultural goods known as Río de la Plata, where parts of Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil converge. Río de la Plata is also the destination of intensive migration flows, originating in Europe, and welcomed important communities of Basques, Catalans, French, Galicians, Italians or Spaniards. Secondly, Uruguay has an acknowledged film culture associated with reception practices concerning cinephiles and film criticism (Silveira, 2019). Lastly, the state and availability of its digitised materials considerably mirror the conserved printed materials of the time, enabling a reasonable accuracy for computational exploration. From a theoretical standpoint, we consider critics as cultural mediators (Roig-Sanz & Meylaerts, 2018), or social agents who play essential roles in cultural transfers (Espagne, 2013)3 and whose criticism is a preeminent element in the consecration of cinema and the configuration of audiences and cinephilias (Bourdieu, 1983; de Baecque, 2003; de Valck & Hagener, 2005; Jullier & Leveratto, 2010; Cowan, 2015; Le Gras & Sellier, 2015). Likewise, we contemplate periodical publications as social spaces articulated by hierarchies and ties across fields (Bourdieu, 1979, 1984, 1994, 1998). This cross-­ disciplinary proposal mobilises different lines of research that we succinctly 1   Anáforas. Publicaciones periódicas del Uruguay (https://anaforas.fic.edu.uy/jspui/handle/123456789/13). Created by the Seminario Fundamentos Lingüísticos de la Comunicación of the Faculty of Information and Communication at the University of the Republic, Uruguay. Anáforas is the most comprehensive digital repository for historical periodicals in Uruguay and also includes a Digital Library of Uruguayan Authors. 2  As we will see later, Podestá was one of the pioneers and most prolific film critics in the cultural press in Uruguay and Montevideo, in particular. He was also behind the first attempts to create a film club in the Uruguayan capital. 3  The notion of cultural transfer considers the circulation of objects as a re-semanticist process other than a mere exchange.

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outline in two blocks. First, we apply a digital humanities strategy (Moretti, 2007, 2013; Jockers, 2013) to social and cultural inquiries within a periodical studies framework (Latham & Scholes, 2006; Ernst et al., 2022) for the analysis of film-oriented writings and magazines (Abel, 2015; Acland & Hoyt, 2016; Biltereyst & Van de Vijver, 2020). And second, from an empirical and entangled perspective (Werner & Zimmermann, 2003, 2006), we circumscribe the research into contextual and comparative approaches to New Cinema History (Maltby, 2011; Noordegraaf et  al., 2018; Biltereyst et  al., 2019; Ercole et al., 2020).

Composition of the Research Corpus The opening research is based on an initial analysis of periodicals published between 1898 and 1959 in Uruguay and continues by focusing on the early period of cinema writing between the 1910s and the mid-1930s.4 From a conceptual perspective, we understand translations and writing on cultural productions, including film criticism, as a practice relatively stable over time or, using Fernand Braudel’s (1958) terms, as a longue durée or historical time structure implying a continuity for an extended period. Therefore, we examine the journals across four scales that vary in terms of the distance of our reading, by providing a general panorama of potential cinema references in the corpus; reviewing and contrasting cinema-related content; a closer analysis of the identified journals; and a qualitative analysis of articles on cinema. As we will see, these phases combine qualitative methodologies with computational processes, offering a range of opportunities but also limitations when it comes to historical research. In this sense, the chapter is an exercise in applying culturomics, the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture (Michel et  al., 2011), to a corpus of Uruguayan magazines on the subject of film, in order to detect and explore early cinema writing in Uruguay. A similar approach to cinema using Scaled Entity Search was used by Hoyt et al. (2015, 2020) for the study of film in the Hollywood magazine Variety and can be viewed in relation to Franco Moretti’s notion of distant reading (Moretti, 2013), which aims to observe large-scale trends across a large amount of texts. In our case, the research corpus consists of a selection of 118 periodicals held mostly at the Uruguayan online library Anáforas and complemented by a few issues from the National Library of Uruguay’s Digital Collection (BNU, n.d.). In total, it comprises 2939 issues; however, neither library holds the full collections of all magazines published in the country. In addition, it must be noted that the collections of some titles are only partial, and while this

4  This research framework is part of the ERC project “Social Network of the Past: Mapping Hispanic and Lusophone Literary Modernity (1898–1959)”, whose material and temporal framework demarcates our exploration of various Ibero-American libraries.

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precludes a conclusive analysis, it does offer a glimpse into their nature and into some of their contents. The initial selection criteria that the research team have applied considers the time frame, periodicity and the subject of the periodicals. Guided by the broader objectives of the project within which this research is taking place, the period of study was established as 1898–1959. With regards to the periodicity, for practical reasons, the corpus excludes daily publications, as we deemed that their sheer volume across the project’s time frame would render daily materials difficult if not impossible to process. Hence, the corpus contains monthly, weekly, and other irregular publications. Finally, with respect to the subject of the periodicals, we include all those covering literary, artistic, and cultural matters, while excluding strictly political or industrial publications, or institutional bulletins. Since the selection was to be based on the review of only a few issues per title, it ought to be acknowledged that some relevant titles may have been inadvertently excluded and, conversely, that we may have included titles that might turn out to be less relevant than others. For our overall analysis and for the longue durée perspective across our corpus, we used the digital texts produced by the source libraries via their own optical character recognition (OCR) processes, as it was beyond the scope of our experiment to OCR the digitised journals ourselves. In our initial review, we detected a few titles or issues that did not contain digital texts or that only included a few pages that had undergone OCR, while in another rare case we discovered an unintelligibly OCR’d text, likely due to encoding errors. This again comes as a reminder that the working corpus and all observations based on it are limited by both technical and methodological constraints. Adding to this the fact that journals vary significantly in format, extension, periodicity and longevity, it should be stressed that the corpus is quite heterogeneous. The diversity in terms of availability and time span of the issues printed under all titles within the corpus and their combined textual extension can be summarised in Fig. 20.1.

Tracing a “Field” of Cinema Writing in the Digital Archive For an initial overview of the corpus and textual references to cinema, we saved magazine texts as xml files and analysed them computationally, counting the absolute frequencies of a list of selected terms. Specifically, we were interested in the distribution of particular film-related words or their roots, such as cine*, film*, películ* (from película, film), biógraf* (from biógrafo, cinema), and cinta* (tape, film).5 The polysemy of cinta, while useful on several occasions in 5  The asterisk (*) denotes any character after the root of the word. This allows us to include derivative terms: for instance, with the root cine, we may include cinema, cinematográfico, cinematografía, cinematógrafo, etc., equivalent to “cinema”, “cinematographic”, “cinematography”, and so forth, in English.

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Fig. 20.1  Number of journal issues (continuous line, left scale) and their combined text length (dotted line, right scale) covered by our corpus between 1898 and 1959 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0

Fig. 20.2  Frequency of cinema-related morphemes in the corpus

the early period, turned out to be misleading in many cases, whereas that of vista, given the wide usage of its other meanings, made it unsuitable for ­consideration. This basic computational process allowed us to plot a timeline of the frequency distribution of our selected terms and observe the trends or peaks of cinema or film writing over time in the periodical non-daily press across the entire 1898–1959 period, as illustrated in Fig. 20.2. More importantly, the quantitative approach also helped us detect those magazines in which the selected terms appeared at higher frequencies, guiding us towards which issues required further exploration by means of a classical,

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close reading. We will get back to this with more details at a later stage, but first we may observe the general trends and their main drivers. Overall, the frequency distribution shows relatively low levels of film-related terms up until 1920, followed by several sporadic peaks in term usage up until 1937, driven by the appearance of cinema-specific magazines such as Semanal Film (1920–1922) and Cinema y teatros (1920–1921) in 1920, Cine Revista (1922–1923), Maravillas (1934–1935) and Cine Actualidad (1936–1960).6 Afterwards, we observe further occasional increases between 1937 and 1948 and more frequent and regular usage thereafter, probably due to the weekly Marcha as of 1939 and the monthly publication of Cine Club as of 1948. This, however, is only a rough review of the panorama, and a more detailed observation is required. Since our interest lies in the early period, we will focus on publications up until 1939. In this exploration, we also decided to ignore all references prior to 1910, as the frequencies seem very low (see Fig. 20.2), and it is not unreasonable to assume that writing about cinema was not widespread in Uruguay before that time. Additionally, for practical reasons, we divided the data in smaller time frames of three decades (1910–1919, 1920–1929, and 1930–1939); however, such periods are completely arbitrary and we will only occasionally refer to them. We will keep a chronological order for clarity though. As noted earlier, the frequency of cinema-related terms prior to 1920 is very low. Upon closer inspection, and after manually reviewing individual magazines and issues, we may note that references to cinema and film in that period are indeed very scarce and of limited scope. Most are advertisements or lists of cinemas or theatres exhibiting films that appear in specific periodical publications. For instance, La Semana (1909–1914) printed a regular section called “Espectáculos” that listed theatres and biógrafos (biographs or bioscopes); likewise, El Terruño (July 1917–June 1918) published brief articles about several cinemas in the city. One striking detail is the number of cinemas operating in the city of Montevideo. For its population of about 300–350,000 people at the time,7 in a randomly picked issue of La Semana from December 1912, one can find a list of twenty cinemas or film-projecting theatres. While we could not find similar data for other cities, it does seem to us a clear indication that cinema-­going was a very popular pastime. Despite this wide availability of cinema theatres in the Uruguayan capital, it is surprising to come across only a couple of opinions about cinema in the periodical press, and even more so when they all refer to cinema as a morally

6  Although Cine Actualidad ran until 1960, the sourced archives held issues only for its first two years, 1936 and 1937 at the time of starting this research. That is why its presence appears as just a short peak around 1936–1937 in Fig. 20.2, but otherwise would be reflected as a continuous plateau all through the 1940s and 1950s. 7  Allowing for some variation from the 1908 census figure of 309,231 as reported by the country’s National Statistics Institute (https://www.ine.gub.uy/web/guest/censos-1852-2011) (INE, n.d.)

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reprehensible visual form.8 A fine example is the article “La moral de los biógrafos” in Anales (09/1917), in which its author, the journalist and future politician Eduardo Rodríguez Larreta claims that what seems to me most worthy of consideration is that this bedlam of crime is profoundly demoralising, and that the instrument that seemed destined to serve lofty educational purposes is preparing us for a future humanity in which Rocambole will be the “reigning character” that Taine speaks of, a model of perfection and the mirror of chivalry. (Rodríguez Larreta, 1917).9

Two years earlier, an article titled “Cine y Dramones” signed with the initials MAD., also in Anales Mundanos (12/1915), compared film to crime dramas in theatre and heavily criticised both as low-quality products that were an offence to intelligence and common sense. Interestingly, the author blamed film and theatre critics who “shrug their shoulders” in their reviews in magazines. It remains unclear who those critics were and in which magazines they wrote. Our research has not identified critics or film criticism in these early years, and neither have our consulted sources. It is not until the appearance of Mundo Uruguayo (1919–1967), a weekly publication, that we can observe more frequent attention being paid to the world of cinema, focusing on a number of specific aspects. Since its first number (08/01/1919), Mundo Uruguayo printed a page called “Del cine y del teatro” (On Film and Theatre) with stills and photos of actors from films and plays; its first few issues (issues 2–4) included a section called “Charlas del biógrafo” (roughly translated as “Cinema Gossip”) about film stars; and later, starting with issue 8 (26/02/1919), a section called “Cinegramas” was printed, with short film reviews; news about stars, directors, and films; opinions on cinema; and various announcements. This long-lived weekly publication would continue into the 1960s, and similar sections would still appear with varying regularity in the following decades. Nevertheless, these texts seem to be addressed to the general public and are scarcely related to cinema criticism.10 The 1920s saw the birth of specialised titles like Semanal Film (1920–1922), Cinema y Teatros (1920–1921), and Cine Revista (1922–1923), all of which were apparently produced by the film and distribution industry for the creation of a cinema following. These magazines focused on promoting the latest Hollywood film productions as well as famous actors and directors. Cinema 8  In the early days of film, distrust of cinema or its repudiation on moral grounds was common in many countries, not only in Uruguay. 9  “[…] lo que me parece más digno de consideración, es que toda esa algarabía del latrocinio, es profundamente desmoralizadora, y que el instrumento que parecía destinado para servir los altos fines educativos, nos está preparando una humanidad futura en la que Rocambole será el « personaje reinante » de que nos habla Taine, modelo de perfecciones y espejo de caballerías: […]” (Rodríguez Larreta, 1917). 10  Since many issues of Mundo Uruguayo are not available online, our observations about this magazine are solely based on the small sample of available issues.

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featured more frequently also in the monthly Reseña (1922–1927) and, to a lesser extent, in the short-lived Vida teatral y cinematográfica (June–September 1926). Reseña (Spanish for “review”) was a popular weekly publication that announced itself as “lectura para todos”, or reading for everyone, and delivered news on theatres, cinema, literature, and general information. Its regular section on cinema, initially called “Cinematográficas” and later “Crónicas del cine”, included comments on films, cinema theatres and actors and offered interview-like accounts of film stars. The importance of film in its pages is further underlined by the fact that some of its covers featured film actors, while the magazine published a supplement called “Reseña cinesca” in its last days and changed its name to “Reseña de cine” for its last issue. These publications, though, still treat cinema as a commercial, popular form of entertainment and not as an artistic form subject to the same kind of criticism as other artistic expressions like literature or the visual arts. In parallel to them, however, other magazines of markedly artistic and literary character began to turn their critical eye to cinema. In May of 1927, Páginas de Arte (1926–1927), an organ within the Fine Arts Circle, dedicated an entire issue to cinema and published articles by French art critics and historians Elie Faure and León Moussinac. In a relatively short period of time, between 1928 and 1931, La Cruz del Sur (1924–1931), edited by the novelist, literary critic, and translator Alberto Lasplaces, La Pluma (1927–1931), edited by critic and essayist Alberto Zum Felde, and Alfar (1923–1926  in A Coruña, Spain; 1929–1955 in Montevideo) with poet and critic Julio Casal as editor, all published critical articles by José María Podestá and Ildefonso Pereda Valdés. They seem to be the first out of just a few critics of the time who wrote critical materials on cinema as an art form in Uruguay. In fact, Podestá would continue writing about cinema in Alfar into the 1930s and would be considered one of the fathers of film criticism in the country (Martínez Carril, 2011b; Torello, 2014; Silveira, 2021). In the late 1930s, another periodical from the intellectual circles, A.I.A.P.E. (1936–1948), the Organ for the Grouping of Intellectuals, Artists, Journalists, and Writers, was concerned with cinema and denounced fascist cinema and Nazi censorship in cinema in several of its issues. A.I.A.P.E. was another journal to which Podestá would also contribute, albeit a bit later, in the 1940s. The most important development of the 1930s, though, is the appearance of Cine Actualidad (1936–1960). Founded by René Arturo Despouey and Emilio Dominoni, Cine Actualidad marked a turning point in cinema writing and enhanced the role of the film critic and film criticism. Right from the start it defended the role of film criticism as an important and complex one. Opening its second issue with an article on the function of film criticism, it claimed that film criticism was in the interest of the spectators, while maintaining that it also benefited distribution and exhibition companies (La función de la crítica, 1936). The editorial policy seems to have been relevant and successful, given that the journal would enjoy a long popularity. It would also add other media

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in its focus, such as radio, reflected in its changing of name to Cine Radio Actualidad from September 1936. The editors of Cine Actualidad, René Arturo Despouey and Emilio Dominoni, wrote about cinema in another periodical of general interest too. From 1939, the weekly Marcha (1939–1974) provided regular coverage of cinema and together with Cine Radio Actualidad would remain the two most relevant publications on the subject even through the 1940s and 1950s. Eventually, other titles like Cine Club (1948–1953; continued as Cuadernos de Cine Club until 1967) and Film (1951–1955) would appear in the late 1940s and the 1950s; however, they are well beyond our scope on early writing on cinema and we will not explore them further in this chapter. This review of the field of cinema writing in Uruguayan periodicals has brought forward just a few names of critics or cultural mediators. We will now focus on one of them, José María Podestá, a prolific representative of highbrow cinephilia in Uruguay and a figure of the global cultural elite.

J. M. Podestá and the Seeds of a Transatlantic Network By broadening our structural perspective within the press industry and considering other literary and cultural publications, we may discover trends and outlines that would go unnoticed in analyses solely focusing on specialised publications and specifically film-related content in the daily press. As we have noted, magazines can be understood as social spaces and as places in which lines of thought can unfold while discourse can interweave before audiences. Therefore, the introduction of writing dedicated to film in more prestigious literary, scientific, artistic, and philosophical magazines is a signal of film’s artistic and cultural legitimation. These magazines tended to publish materials with certain cultural or artistic quality and were as such associated with and aimed at intellectual audiences. José María Podestá (1898–1986) was a professor of history, who wrote poetry anthologies, plays, and about Italian history. In the field of cinema, Podestá was one of the few forefathers of film criticism in Uruguayan historiography. In issue 22 of the “arts and ideas” magazine La Cruz del Sur (January 1929), he penned an article, which, as Georgina Torello (2014) notes, was a remarkable synthesis between criticism and reflections on cinematography in Uruguay, whose main features we will outline as follows. Under the title “El arte en el cine” (“Art in Film”), the critic structures his argument based on a reflection by André Levinson, a Russian-French Romanist lamenting the industrialisation of film, as having inhibited its artistic potential by prioritising economic returns. To Podestá, Levinson’s reflection has one key shortcoming: it focuses the problem on production while ignoring audiences. According to Podestá, producers and exhibitors, with few exceptions, could not change the course of an industry still dictated by audiences. Therefore, to him, “renovation should start from the bottom, with the multitude” and, in consequence, “such a capital task corresponds to criticism”, since “the true environment [of

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film experience] is built by the multitude and not by the intellectual ‘elite’” (Podestá, 1929, pp. 28–30). As of this point, Podestá develops a discourse that links together descriptions, features, values, and films, which he uses as examples of a cinephile perspective that would aim to “crystalise concepts that establish its position as an independent art and clarify the confession existing between what is proper for this position and what is foreign to it”. Lastly, he launches an appeal to the intellectuals, who “would be responsible for most of this quite pressing task: film criticism, essays, and dissemination, carried out with no less seriousness than in all art criticism, which would yield magnificent results” (Podestá, 1929, pp. 28–30). Podestá’s article echoes the typical opposition structuring the film field between an artistic or restricted pole, on the one hand, and a large-scale production pole destined to the “wider audience”, on the other (Bourdieu, 1971). It is worth highlighting that the critic confers sovereignty  to this audience, though the audience nonetheless comes off as useless in terms of artistic value, lacking instruction, and as harbouring a disinterested perspective. Consequently, despite the optimism towards the future that can be read at the end of the text, the author does not give any authority to the culture, practices, and reinterpretations originating from this other popular cinephilia. Likewise, in his analysis, Podestá’s argument does not manage to shake off a certain belief that plagues all of film history: the controversial idea that film is an art that has been sullied by its industrial condition. Drawing from Podestá’s perspective, which called for the emergence of artistically committed criticism, and considering him as a mediator, we will trace the cultural publications in which he participated throughout the period of study. We will focus on qualitative readings in terms of intertextual relations and intercultural transfers from a global perspective. Exploring the case of Podestá forces us to consider additional sources, foreign to our base selection but which are relevant for being intertextually connected to his writing in Uruguay. In December of 1928, one month before the previously discussed article, Podestá wrote another one on German film-maker Fritz Lang’s science-fiction film Metropolis (1927). The text was published in the magazine La Cruz del Sur’s 21st issue, whose editorial note denounced the “grotesque panoramas”, as the title calls them, that criticism has cast for Uruguayan literature. One of these allegedly ill-fated essays was attributed to a critical article by Guillermo de Torre in the Madrid-based magazine La Gaceta Literaria (1927–1932). De Torre (1900–1971) was a Spanish intellectual whose outlining of the literary avant-garde (de Torre, 1925) was both relevant and pioneering. De Torre was also one of the main agitators within Spain’s Ultraist movement. Standing among the writers’ circle known as “generación del 27”, he collaborated to main mastheads in Madrid at the time. He was married to Argentine painter and art critic Norah Borges, with whom he participated in several cultural circles across Europe and the Americas, including Buenos Aires, where he lived for most of his life. De Torre is particularly interesting for our case study

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because, through his writing, we may glean his interest in cinematography. Thanks to the press of the time, we also know that he helped organise the Buenos Aires Film Club in the late 1920s, having established a close relationship with Ernesto Giménez Caballero, a literary critic and cultural promoter from Madrid, who had close ties to the film field and to the creation of the Spanish Film Club under La Gaceta Literaria, which the two had founded. La Cruz del Sur in fact mentions, unrelatedly to Podestá’s article, La Gaceta Literaria, and this hint leads us, due to the journal’s deep connections with cinema, to explore the intertextual and intercultural relationships via Guillermo de Torre. In this sense, we may draw parallels with Podestá, who was also active in the film club movement. As will be seen later, Podestá participated in the first film club in Montevideo around 1930–1932. Furthermore, an article in Cine, Radio, Actualidad (issue 17 dated October 9, 1936; Inauguró sus actividades “el Cine Club”, 1936, p. 16), reveals also that Podestá, alongside “elements in the Circle of Fine Arts, critics, and painters”, helped organise a film club in 1936, and for whose inaugural session he presented Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1931). The same article celebrated the audience’s attendance as well as the fact that the session was broadcast on radio, too.11 Historiography gives account of the intercultural relationship between Uruguay and Argentina in terms of film culture. However, criticism and non-­ commercial programming of those years only tend to be mentioned anecdotally, as failed or isolated experiments of mere precursors (Silveira, 2014; Lema Mosca, 2020). To remedy this, we have compiled texts from the Argentine magazine Nosotros (1907–1943), which reviewed the Buenos Aires Film Club’s sessions, and from the aforementioned La Gaceta Literaria12 in an attempt to articulate film-related texts in terms of the interconnections they reveal. Issue 247 of Nosotros (December 1929) announced the first season of the Buenos Aires Film Club, which was directed by a commission comprising Horacio I.  Coppola, Mariano Casano, Néstor Ibarra, Leopoldo Hurtado, Jorge A.  Romero Brest, and León Klimovsky—all of whom boasted ties to Argentina’s film-culture landscape. The cycle reportedly had fifteen anthological and informative sessions. The venue was Asociación Amigos del Arte (Friends of the Arts Association), a renowned cultural space for the dissemination of various cultural manifestations and artistic traditions run by patron Elena Sansinena de Elizalde and Victoria Ocampo, the celebrated mediator, founder and editor of the magazine Sur. Films from various countries were screened. For instance, Héctor Eandi, Carlos Macchiavello, and Guillermo de Torre organised a session on German film. The following year, de Torre 11  They also allude to several notices in the periodic daily press regarding the event, which we have not been able to investigate. 12  Consulted in the Digital Collections of the Ibero-American Institute (https://digital.iai.spk-­ berlin.de/viewer/toc/51602325X/) and the Digital Periodical and Newspaper Library of the National Library of Spain (http://hemerotecadigital.bne.es/details.vm?q=id:0003882694).

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described the club’s programming and activities in detail for issue 79 of La Gaceta Literaria. In issue 81 of La Gaceta Literaria (May 1, 1930), de Torre published fragments of certain conferences held at the Department of Educational Sciences of Paraná on November 19 and 20, 1929, with the complementary exhibition of “some characteristic, modern films” (de Torre, 1930b, p. 7), which, alongside the information in the article in Nosotros, we may associate to the film club’s activities. For issue 85 (July 1, 1930), de Torre transcribed his presentation of Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin—Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Symphony of a Great City, 1927) at the film club, with the goal of reaching Madrid-based audiences. In his texts, de Torre writes about how Un chien andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1929) premiered in Buenos Aires just two months after it did in Paris but before its release in Madrid. He also writes that Buenos Aires was privileged by the absence of censorship, which the European film clubs suffered when it came to screening Soviet films. Meanwhile, he laments the lack of releases and exclusive premiers at the Buenos Aires Film Club, which he attributes to financial and organisational difficulties and limited communication with European film clubs. De Torre also writes about economic challenges, audience successes, and a new viewing season, calling for closer collaboration with Madrid and other European cities in order to fight against the taste in film promoted by commercial circuits for a public which he deems “more like an opium addict than a true cinephile” (de Torre, 1930a, p. 5). Similarly, we understand the importance of Victoria Ocampo and Amigos del Arte for the Buenos Aires Film Club. Indeed, Ocampo made vain attempts to organise a visit from Sergei Eisenstein but did succeed when inviting Benjamin Fondane so that the films by Buñuel, Man Ray, and René Clair that de Torre mentions in his article in La Gaceta Literaria (de Torre, 1930a) could reach Buenos Aires (Ocampo, 1974). The Buenos Aires Film Club ceased operations in 1932 (Sel, 2016), but some of its promoters, such as León Klimovsky, would continue to organise similar initiatives (Cine Arte, circa 1940), collaborating with other groups (Cine Club Gente de Cine, 1942) that would become the seeds of the future Cinemateca Argentina (1949) (Couselo, 1991). With the end of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship and after the First National Conference on Cinematography in Spain, organised by the Madrid-based weekly La Pantalla (1927–1929), took form a Hispano-American Film Conference, which, behind a long and complex process, was finally held in Madrid in October 1931, once the regime of the Second Spanish Republic came to power. This event, which was an attempt to articulate Hispanic nations in the face of the Hollywood industry, was also plagued with controversies, something that can be observed in the Spanish press of the time (García Carrión, 2013). However, there was also plenty of support for it; for instance, in Uruguay, Minister Fernández y Medina backed the idea (Viola, 1930). By observing the conference’s program and the correspondence between Giménez Caballero and de Torre (2012), we may infer that the somewhat lukewarm and

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frustrated Pan-Hispanic fight for the commercial industry that represented the wide public (Gubern, 2017) was accompanied by a distinct preoccupation for tying film to education.13 We could argue that there was a  clear intellectual and commercial will in Madrid to establish strong ties among Spanish-speaking spaces, leading to certain disputes and debates in the transnational field.14 Guillermo de Torre (who lived between Buenos Aires and Madrid), his friendship with Giménez Caballero, and their respective positions in the literary and filmic field hint at the Spanish State’s positions on the film industry’s foreign policy, as well as at some flows of cultural ideas. Indeed, Pan-Hispanic strategies proposed to form a resistance that may seem politically conflictive on both national and global scales, but that was, from a socio-historical perspective, rich in terms of cultural production within a transnational scale (Casanova, 1999; Duval, 2020). Inasmuch, the socialisation of film developed with the emergence of a cinephilia that reinterprets its culture, subject to multiple conditioning factors that, as we have established, overcame national borders and disputed South-to-­ South interests.

Southern Parallels and Dynamics Through the study of magazines and the organisation of their audiences, we can trace the transmission of certain ideas with great potential for transfer. To this end, we may turn to Podestá once again and study his writing for the magazine Alfar, an eminently artistic and literary publication created in the Galician city of A Coruña in 1923. Edited by Julio J. Casal, the magazine was a cultural reference point in which currents of the avant-garde and art from Galicia, Catalonia, Spain, or the Americas intermingled. In 1929, with the migration of its editor, Alfar started down a new path in Montevideo, where it would operate until its closure in 1955. Exploring the magazine’s incursions into film, we find an article on the organisation and activities of the Montevideo Film Club in issue 71 (1932), 13  Around that time, Sangro y Ros de Olano stood among the dictatorship’s high command, representing Spain at the International Educational Cinematographic Institute in Rome—a specific division that the League of Nations dedicated to educational film—and had approved the conference’s organisation. It was he who appointed Giménez Caballero, a man with fascist ideologies, as secretary general of the Spanish Committee for the Institute in Rome in 1930 (Alted Vigil, 2016). We may note that film as a pedagogical or educational tool—be it as a revolutionary instrument, scholastic material, or as a propagandistic device—was a common concern for a myriad of reasons, especially for intellectual cinephiles, religious institutions, State strategies, and transnational organisations concerned with the development of mass culture. 14  Noteworthy among these is the discussion that arose in Spain, Río de la Plata, and abroad following a problematic opening article by La Gaceta Literaria from April 1927 (issue 8) (Madrid, meridiano intelectual de hispanoamérica, p. 1) in which an ambitious de Torre calls on Spanish-­ speaking territories to create an intellectual and leading hub of Hispano-American culture to make a “meridian” centre in Madrid against Paris or the US domination. The article has no author signature; nonetheless, authorship is from de Torre (Giménez Caballero & de Torre, 2012).

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revealing some interesting details. Firstly, concerning its management, we may note that it was run by Justino Zavala Muniz, Ildefonso Pereda, Nicolás Fusco Sansone, H.  Díaz Casanueva, E.  Casaravilla Lemos, and José María Podestá himself. Secondly, we may note that the audience comprised a “minority of artists” who were able to recognise the “important cultural work” of organising “pure film screenings” (Cine Club de Montevideo, 1932), which also speaks to the film club’s subject matters. Then, in terms of logistics, it operated provisionally in a theatre in the Galician Centre (“Centro Gallego”),15 and a later note indicates that it used Cine Versailles for its series of sound films. Further, with respect to its programming, we may gather that it included avant-­ garde films such as Staroye i novoye (The General Line, Sergei Eisenstein & Grigoriy Aleksandrov, 1929), Oktyabr (October. Ten Days that Shook the World, Sergei Eisenstein & Grigoriy Aleksandrov, 1927), Konets Sankt-Peterburga (The End of St. Petersburg, Vsevolod Pudovkin & Mikhail Doller, 1927), Feu Mathias Pascal (The Late Mathias Pascal, Marcel L’Herbier, 1925), L’Argent (Money, Marcel L’Herbier, 1928), Sous les toits de Paris (Under the Roofs of Paris, René Clair, 1930), and Le voyage imaginaire (The Imaginary Voyage, René Clair, 1926). Likewise, we may observe announcements for Díaz Casanueva and José María Podestá’s presentations on Russian film, Ferreiro’s on “Cinema seen from the screen”, and Morey y Otero’s on “educational film”. Finally, in terms of circulation, the article reveals that great economic efforts were made to bring films from Argentina and Brazil to Montevideo, establishing tight links of exchange with the Buenos Aires Film Club and the Chaplin Club in Brazil. In this relation, Ildefonso Pereda Valdés hosted a talk at the latter film club, on the subject of Charlie Chaplin himself—likely a similar talk to the one he gave in Montevideo and the one published in the magazine Alfar (Pereda Valdés, 1931)—forging solid ties to the Brazilian club.16 Chaplin Club in turn was linked to the magazine O Fan (1928–1930), a seminal space created by Octávio de Faria, Almir de Castro, Claudio Mello, and Plínio Süssekind Rocha, in which the celebrated Brazilian film-maker Mario  One of many social venues for the Galician diaspora (Núñez Seixas, 1992).  We have not found much of the information presented in the magazine Alfar in historiographies of Uruguayan films, nor have we found it in other magazines (Silveira, 2014, 2019; Lema Mosca, 2020; Amieva Collado, 2021). We knew of this film club’s existence due to certain academic literature and sources, but it is usually cited as a very brief, failed initiative, with research relying on the programming printed in the magazine Marcha (Un cine club, 1948, p. 12). We suspect that the information in Alfar is far more trustworthy due to its proximity in time to the events themselves, which would make clear that Podestá actually did participate in this first film club, even though he tends to exclusively be associated with the second attempt at creating a film club. Likewise, this information would corroborate oft-forgotten collaborations among film clubs, while broadening the list of films that were screened. Such information likely cannot be found in the daily periodic press and was overlooked for two reasons. On the one hand, this is a short article, and, on the other, the magazine Alfar is associated with literature and other “high” arts, with scant content for film historians. In fact, Podestá’s archive at Anáforas lacks indexing for the articles on film that he wrote for Alfar. As a consequence, this information, which has been found using digital methodologies, may prove quite novel for the historiography of film. 15 16

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Peixoto collaborated. In this environment, Peixoto created the most recognised artistic “classic” in the “pantheon” of Brazilian and American global film history: Limite (1931).17 Thus, the Montevideo Film Club benefited from films coming in from the Buenos Aires Film Club, which, as we have seen, espoused close ties to Europe via Benjamin Fondane18 and Guillermo de Torre, as well as from Rio de Janeiro’s club, not only exchanging films but also lecturers, such as Pereda Valdés. Likewise, we know that all three film clubs screened films from the area, usually documentaries made on small-gauge formats, as was the case with Justino Zavala Muniz, in Uruguay, who filmed Cielo, agua y lobos (Sky, water and wolves, 1931), a feature-length silent documentary, in colour, using 16 mm, which would be lost in the 1940s (Martínez Carril, 2011a, p. 702). On the other hand, the conferences around screenings and the texts published in magazines were impregnated with European spirit and showed awareness of artistic cinema. From the perspective of local film production, the erratic and amateur incursions into the film along Río de la Plata stand in contrast to those organised at the Brazilian Chaplin Club, where they will make a myth of Brazilian cinema around Peixoto’s film. We posit that these three initiatives may have converged with the writer and cultural anthropologist Ildefonso Pereda Valdés, whose connection to Brazil took shape in the form of translations of Brazilian Portuguese (e.g., poetry in La Cruz del Sur, issue 19/20, 1928) and the aforementioned invitation to give a talk at the Chaplin Club; meanwhile, in Buenos Aires, he was one of the Ultraist poets, alongside de Torre and Jorge Luis Borges, which would link him to the Amigos del Arte screening environment. In addition, according to archives from Universidad de la República, Pereda Valdés published a book on Chaplin via the Montevideo Film Club,19 suggesting that Uruguay’s efforts were more brazen than previously described. In fact, following the publications of Pereda Valdés in the journals from the Anáforas archives, we see that he wrote several texts in the art and literature magazine Cartel (1929–1931). This publication was edited by the Galician Julio Sigüenza and the Uruguayan poet Alfredo Mario Ferreiro, who, as Alfar notes (ut supra), gave a lecture as part of the Montevideo Film Club programme, entitled “El Cine visto desde la pantalla” (“Cinema seen from the screen”) (Ferreiro, 1930). Ferreiro’s lecture, in which he imagines something similar to the arrival of video, was published by Cartel in an issue in which the Galician 17  This mythical film launched in Rio de Janeiro in 1931 and was confiscated and kept underground until 1978 (Conde, 2018). The historian Georges Sadoul (1965) called this film, with echoes of Balzac, “the unknown masterpiece.” 18  In 1929, Fondane was preparing for a trip to Buenos Aires, Santiago (Chile), and Montevideo to give talks on avant-garde French cinema, as testified by Fondane himself in a letter to Henri Martinie, July 1929 (Freedman, 2013). 19  The only reference to the book on Chaplin we could find is in the descriptive note of Pereda Valdés’ archival fond held at the Faculty of Humanities and Education Sciences by the University of the Republic.

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mediator Ángel Aller also reports on a lecture by Guillermo de Torre at the Galician Centre (Aller, 1930). This scenario points to a strong link between one part of the Galician migration and this Uruguayan film society: on the one hand, through the promotion of the activities of the Montevideo Film Club in magazines with Galician roots, although mainly written in Spanish, such as Cartel and Alfar, and, on the other, by hosting screenings at the headquarters of the increasingly conservative Galician Centre (Cagiao Vila, 2005). Overall, together with the rest of the exchanges traced with Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, we find an at least apparent centrality of Montevideo in the intercultural flow of the set of these social spaces of magazines and film clubs devoted to cinema. Beyond nation-state perspectives, this case pushes us to view these initiatives together, as, in their specific ways and through their respective traditions, they all synchronically reinterpreted avant-garde and film culture, collectively drawing from their various perspectives. The seed of solid, theoretical filmic thought had already been planted in Argentina by the celebrated Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga (Silveira, 2016). Film criticism and non-commercial programming have shown that these cultural transfers in the Río de la Plata area were considerably fruitful in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The magazines and the screenings constituted spaces of socialisation, where, beyond cultural dynamisation, symbolic struggles and masked commercial aspirations developed around an international artistic and documentary cinema that differentiated from that offered by the so-called mass culture and which, as we have seen, had relatively persistent early attempts to stabilise a distinguished film culture through the discourses of publications and film clubs. Nonetheless, the initiatives of these film circles towards a cultural legitimation by the intellectual class, which included the film clubs, failed when it came to commercial subsistence, as they never adequately monetised their goal of creating a space for exchange and differentiation, and were ultimately abandoned due to their inefficiency.20 These failures can be understood as an experimental laboratory for the proliferation of film clubs that was to take place in the following decades. This is likely the reason why, in his article published in November 1932 in Alfar, Podestá laments but also celebrates the public programming initiatives that Uruguay’s Official Service of Diffusion, Representations, and Entertainment (S.O.D.R.E.) had undertaken. According to the critic, public initiative is the only true way to counteract the economic forces of film made for the masses and complacent criticism, which he deemed incapable of challenging the status quo. According to Podestá, the film club had tried to counteract such forces but would never succeed, because film clubs were spaces for the edification of minorities. Thus, Podestá requested that S.O.D.R.E. be more “selective” with its programming, in contrast to the commercial circuit, offering quality screening agenda to its audiences without the pressure of seeking 20  All of these attempts by the film clubs share the same pattern: a festive inaugural session followed by two years of decay up until their definitive closing.

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economic gain. Likewise, he reiterated his ideas on the cinephile perspective by organising a discourse structured around the ambivalent opposition between the “film industry” and “art film” (Podestá, 1932). It even seems contradictory that, despite the ideas outlined in his article, he created another film club in 1936, a key year in Uruguayan film culture, whose intellectual germination can be partially explained through this case.

Conclusion The computational method applied in this research has allowed us to follow the evolution of early writing on cinema in the Uruguayan periodical press and to uncover a few articles or periodicals which seem to have remained unexplored in the traditional historiography of Uruguayan cinema.21 As a result, we are able to draw the contours of a field of film-writing periodicals, composed of (1) film magazines representing the Hollywood film industry and aimed at the “mass public”; (2) hybrid magazines with plenty of filmic content but that were associated to other cultural manifestations, specifically theatre where— unlike with film—theatre critics were showcased and national matters were addressed, suggesting that film criticism was precarious and lacked autonomy; and (3) broadly literary or cultural magazines, which boasted greater prestige, legitimacy, and intellectual support and which eventually included film writing with a focus on aesthetics. These magazines tended to include more translations and content from Western culture. Finally, the quantitative analysis of the temporal dimension of the field also shows a clear turning point in the year 1936, with the emergence of Cine Actualidad, a milestone in Uruguayan film history in terms of audiences and cinephile perspectives. The example of José María Podestá reveals the connections that shape the early writing on cinema in Uruguay and links it to European ideas of film as art. Adopting a global perspective proves particularly fruitful to explore how “intellectual” cinephilia was cultivated both in parallel and intertwiningly across the cities of Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires, but also in Madrid and Paris. In Montevideo, film writing could be found across several prestigious cultural magazines, with Podestá being the most prolific critic, focusing on the legitimation of film as an art form, with preoccupations for the education of the masses regarding “high culture”. We followed its ties to Buenos Aires and figures such as Victoria Ocampo and Guillermo de Torre, who was ever-present in publications on both sides of the Atlantic and boasted close ties to the film club of Madrid. This case study also identifies new research paths to explore in the future. Regarding cinephilia and the institutional history of film, we should analyse the 21  Digital exploration of printed magazine materials tends to match well with those sources we can trace through Uruguayan film historiography. However, beyond the Alfar case, for instance, it seems that cinema historians have overlooked the magazine Reseña, as we have seen, a publication with notable film content, which even printed two issues dedicated to the cinema.

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trajectories of the involved agents in further detail, including their social class, socio-professional category, gender, political inclinations, religious conviction, commercial interests, and life stories, as well as networks connecting them within different national frameworks. Likewise, the circulation of ideas and their intercultural reinterpretation—which would require an examination of the Soviet question as a discordant political element—should contemplate the complex mesh of laws, regulations, and agreements that existed among these various spaces so that we might understand the extent of their proximity in terms of the circulation of agents and cultural goods. On a more specific level, it would be desirable to adequately study the histories of taste burgeoning today, considering which milestones, referential systems, collections, and archival motivations were driven by the mediators and affected programming beyond the commercial screening circuit, which we have only partially described here. In this sense, while the avant-garde sphere brought discussions on cinema as an art form, the understanding of the cinema field should also take into account the discourses from the so-called “popular” cinephilia. Correspondingly, we should find more connections in various directions and senses—for instance, in reverse, from allegedly peripheral spaces to key centres like Paris or Berlin. Methodologically, even a simple and heuristic computational technique such as word frequency counting has helped us unearth forgotten events and objects that may boost our understanding of newfound interactions. Likewise, tracing digitised publications can offer a broader perspective on film writing, inviting us to detect convergences between “other” spaces. In terms of perspectives, we may complement national histories and comparative exercises by studying the entangled histories of saliently transnational topics. Global dynamics offer connections with traditional world histories and well-known hegemonic histories, allowing us to broaden our scope to understand certain phenomena on a larger scale. These processes may serve as models for the research of cultural and industrial human productions, such as film, bringing us to pose questions about the future of global and historical foci deployed towards digital film heritage as a source for the writing of history. Acknowledgements  The authors are grateful to Diana Roig-Sanz, Julia Noordegraaf, and Georgina Torello for their valuable comments in earlier drafts of this text. This chapter results from the research undertaken as part of the project “MapModern— Social Networks of the Past: Mapping Hispanic and Lusophone Literary Modernity, 1898–1959” that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 803860).

References Abel, R. (2015). Menus for movieland: Newspapers and the emergence of American film culture, 1913–1916. University of California Press. Acland, C. R., & Hoyt, E. (2016). The arclight guidebook to media history and the digital humanities. REFRAME Books.

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CHAPTER 21

Transnational Cinema Memory: Latin American Women Remembering Cinema-Going Across Borders Dalila Missero

In a 2016 article discussing “the comparative mode” in New Cinema History (NCH), Daniel Biltereyst and Philip Meers argue that “qualitative microhistories of cinema memory and everyday life experiences [are] more difficult to operationalise in terms of meaningful comparison” (Biltereyst and Meers 2016, p.  19). Such limitations at the “micro level” contribute to “geographical monocentrism” complicating the harmonisation of micro and localised studies into existent research based on large-scale, empirical data collection. This chapter contributes to this methodological conversation by proposing a comparative approach centred on transnational cinema memory and qualitative methods. My objective is demonstrating that a qualitative approach, combining NCH with feminist reflexivity and transnational scholarship, provides a dynamic framework that overcomes monocentrism by means of the transcultural and self-reflexive potential of cinema memory. To do so, I will discuss the findings of a study on migrant cinema memory consisting in the collection and analysis of 35 in-depth interviews with an

D. Missero (*) Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Treveri Gennari et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38789-0_21

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intergenerational group of Latin American women living in Barcelona and Milan.1 Informed by a comparative design, the research explored the interplay of past and present experiences of cinema-going with gendered discourses about proximity, distance, and belonging. Participants aged between 29 and 70 years, from different countries and socio-economic backgrounds, were asked to talk about their habits of cinema-going before and after migration, in relation to different stages of their lives and day-to-day experience. The resulting memory work evoked multiple cinematic cultures, which transcended a single territorial inscription; at the same time, these memories were attached to forms of “everyday transnationalism” (Vertovec 2009), namely ordinary activities, like talking at the phone with distant family and friends, that enable migrants to stay in touch with their country of origin and negotiate distance. As such, these cinema memories “travelled” (Erll 2011) and circulated across borders at different levels, producing a bottom-up transnational knowledge on the socio-cultural meanings of cinema-going, which connects diverse cinematic cultures from an everyday and emotional perspective. To demonstrate how the study of transnational memories contributes to the “comparative mode”, I divided this chapter into two main sections, one methodological and one analytical. The first part details the role of reflexivity and transnationalism in the study, with a focus on methodological coherence and the research/researched relationship. Then, I will illustrate how a transnational approach connects individual memories of cinema-going with broader questions in cinema and migration studies, offering a theoretical model for future comparative research. The second section consists in a thematic discussion of extracts from the interviews, concentrating on a selection of multi-local memories about cinematic venues that the informants experienced before migrating to Europe: the cines de barrio (neighbour theatres) and the cines del centro (cinemas of the centre), cine clubs and cinematheques, and the multiplex. The focus on the venue allows me to engage with the multifaceted meanings of place (Kuhn 2002, 2004) and reflexivity in cinema memory, to illustrate how its affective, sensorial, and topographic features support comparisons across borders, historical periods, and scales.

1  Participants were all first-generation, voluntary migrants, with 2+ years of permanence in Barcelona or Milan. They were coming from the following countries: Bolivia (1), Ecuador (5), Mexico (3), Argentina (4), Colombia (8), Peru (5), Venezuela (1), Brazil (6), Honduras (1), and Uruguay (1). Recruitment was conducted through snowball sampling. The interviewees have in common an averagely high level of education (high school diploma/degree), and have all lived, at least for a period of their life, in a large Latin American city. The interviews were conducted on-line between April and December 2020  in Spanish (except for one in Italian), audio recorded, and transcribed. The analysis was made with NVivo, using both inductive and deductive thematic approaches. All the participants have given their written consent for the publication of anonymised extracts.

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A Toolkit for a Mnemo-Centric Comparative Model: Reflexivity, Transnationalism, and Travelling Memories According to Daniel Biltereyst, Thunnis van Oort, and Philippe Meers, the comparative mode in NCH represents an opportunity for the field to become “methodologically more mature” because it “requires researchers […] to be self-critical at every stage of work” (Biltereyst et al. 2019, p. 96). However, as Jonathan Petrychyn (2020) has pointed out, NCH’s tendency to privilege large-scale data collections has often translated into a form of empiricism that prioritised the study of hyper-public cinematic cultures and the reflection on operative matters. Petrychyn argues that this form of “post-positivism” consolidates the marginality of minorities and less-visible groups in cinema history, which could be counterbalanced by a broader integration of queer and feminist perspectives in the field. If we shift our attention to the geographies of research and knowledge production, these considerations may also apply to the still predominantly European and North American focus of most NCH scholarship.2 Drawing from these critiques, this section embraces self-criticism to discuss how my study engaged with some of these issues, by integrating feminist tools and transnational theories as correctives to NCH’s—still—sporadic preoccupation for the marginalisation and invisibility of minoritarian film cultures. In doing so, I do not intend to give a definitive answer, nor do I claim that my project has not reproduced some of these tensions. Rather, my intervention aims to stress the importance of these issues in the hope of stimulating further debates around the dynamics of power permeating historical research in film studies.

Reflexivity: Reframing Positionalities and Knowledges Since its design, my study integrated a series of methodological tools drawn from feminist scholarship, with the specific aim of avoiding empiricism. Specifically, the adoption of a feminist approach to reflexivity provided a “holistic framework” (Hesse-Bibber and Piatelli 2012) to tackle operative concerns while addressing issues of power and in/visibility at every stage of the research process. This is particularly important as migrant women are precisely one of 2  Looking at the Projects Map published on the website of the History of Moviegoing, Exhibition and Reception Network (HoMER), a scholarly association linked to the development and dissemination of NCH methods, we can observe a concentration of projects in Europe (49), followed by North America (Canada, United States, and Mexico) with 14, and a handful of other countries (Turkey 3, Australia 2, Malaysia 1, South Africa 1, Brazil 1). Although the map may not be updated, it mirrors a still incomplete process of expansion of the field beyond Europe (HoMER, n.d.). In this context, it is also worth mentioning that, as the most recent editions of HoMER annual conferences demonstrate, the field is welcoming a growing number of projects focusing on a variety of geographical areas. However, to date and to the best of knowledge, it has not yet been systematically discussed whether NCH’s emphasis on quantitative methods is sustainable for research conducted on postcolonial and scattered archives affected by the migration, dispersion, and absence of documents.

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those groups whose experiences struggle to emerge in large-scale quantitative data collections as well as in the public discourse (Morokvasic 1984; Mattoscio and MacDonald 2018). The use of qualitative methods (in-depth interviewing, cinema memory, life-story methodology) intended to address this challenge, in line with the invitation of feminist migration scholars to give “a flavour of the heterogeneity of [women’s] migration, [its] different spatio-temporal dimensions […], the multiplicity of causes for their moves and the often-overlapping strategies used by women migrants” (Kofman et al. 2000, p. 14). As a result, the study recuperates, compares, and analyses memories linked to multiple geographical areas, generations, and biographical trajectories, and in doing so, the practice of self-reflection was key to ensure consistency and maximise the visibility of different experiences and situated perspectives. To paraphrase Sandra Harding (1992), this feminist approximation to research translates in a form of “strong objectivity,” in which reflexivity assures that the positionality of the researcher is visible, making her accountable for the political and epistemological constraints of her investigation. This meant positioning myself within the project at the intersection of a broader network of social, political, and power relations. My positionality as a researcher, migrant, and bi-cultural woman impacted on the researcher/researched relationship, translating into different degrees of proximity and distance to the topic of the study and influencing the ways participants described their memories. For instance, my accent encouraged some participants to ask where I was from, and my answer somehow placed me as an insider and/or outsider. This did not happen in all circumstances, as most of the interviewees did not ask me personal questions, yet it became clear that my positionality was a relational product, which shifted and influenced every research encounter, and the ways memories are shared. It is important to note that reflexivity is also key to the act of remembering itself. Since the interview guide follows a life-story methodology (Erel 2009), participants organised their memories in space and time by following a biographical trajectory centred on their experience of migration. As a result, the interviewees engaged in a reflective practice that ensured the cohesiveness of their storytelling and harmonised the comparisons they made across different cinematic cultures. Moreover, life stages (childhood, adolescence, maturity, etc.) and migration provided recurring narrative points that allowed the study to compare memories from participants of different generations and countries. By making visible the intimate and subjective nature of memory work, reflexivity also highlights the participatory nature of a qualitative study, in which the role of the informants is not reduced to the mere provision of data but becomes also key to understanding the research process.

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In evaluating the results, reflexivity encouraged me to review my “politics of citation”3 to challenge the Eurocentrism that still dominates film and media studies. Recent debates on the “de-Westernisation” (Keightley et al. 2023) in media and film studies are sparking from individual and collective reflections on methods and research processes, which embrace postcolonial and intersectional perspectives. As my project surveys practices of cinema-going between two continents, I sought to put into dialogue the still prevailingly European scholarship on cinema memory with a long tradition of Latin American research on cultural and media consumption (García Canclini 1994, 2001; Martín-­ Barbero 1993; Mata 1999; Sunkel 2006). The revision of theory went hand in hand with the survey of local studies in support of a comparative and transnational analysis. As we will see in the next section, localised notions and practices of transnationalism can be productively harmonised by means of a sustained interdisciplinary dialogue, beyond the perimeters of NCH and film studies. To this extent, a holistic approach to reflexivity, applied at different stages of the study has been pivotal to assess the power relations and methodological constraints in the process of eliciting and analysing cinema memories. Thanks to its holistic framework, feminist reflexivity enables the discussion of “ontological, epistemological and axiological components of the self, intersubjectivity and the colonisation of knowledge” (Berger 2015, p. 220), allowing the identification of alternative research strategies to avoid empiricism and the reproduction of dominant patterns of exclusion and marginalisation by means of the multifaceted and heterogeneous nature of qualitative data.

For a Mobile and Transnational Cinema Memory The holistic reflection on the research process also contributed to building the interdisciplinary approach to transnationalism at the basis of the project, which results from the combination of insights from film, migration, and memory studies. The consistent assessment of positionality and power relations throughout the research process also contributed to identify the shortcomings of the prevailingly monocentric and “sedentary” studies in cinema memory.4 As suggested earlier, the decision to interview a transnational group of women reflected the comparative (Schroeder Rodríguez 2016) and transnational (Tierney 2018) characteristics of Latin American cinema histories and 3  Advanced by feminist and minoritised scholars, the politics of citation scrutinises citation as a practice that contributes to consolidate patterns of inclusion and exclusion in the production of knowledge, by articulating an intellectual economy of legitimacy and property over ideas. As Annabel L.  Kim explains, citation practices “most often violently erases the contributions of minoritized scholars such as women and people of color, thus abetting the continued consolidation of intellectual influence in a white, heteronormative, masculine center. […] The phrase ‘politics of citation’ was first coined by legal scholar Richard Delgado to point to the exclusion of minority scholars of civil rights by white scholars who coopted the field for themselves—the notion of citational politics is itself rooted in the idea that citation has victims” (Kim 2020, p. 5). 4  I discussed the opportunities for a “mobile” approach to cinema memory in Missero 2021.

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institutions, which have a shared history of regional cinematic infrastructures (including in terms of distribution and exhibition). One of the reasons for the productivity of this framework resides in its acknowledgement of the persistent agency of the national state, in a context of uneven relations and mobility implicit in every cinematic exchange across borders (Ď urovičová and Newman 2009). However, as Will Higbee and Lim point out, film studies have often used the concept of transnationalism in a prescriptive or merely descriptive manner, overlooking “the potential for local, regional and diasporic film cultures to affect, subvert and transform [national and transnational cinemas]” (Higbee and Lim 2010, p. 18). As such, the bottom-up and situated perspective offered by cinema memory could be particularly helpful to observe transnational cinematic flows and how they are experienced by the audience, making a great contribution to existent work on diasporic (Smets 2013) and transnational audiences (Madianou 2013; Athique 2016). To this extent, scholarship on transnational and global memory (Huyssen 2003; Rothberg 2009; De Cesari and Rigney 2014) provides a series of helpful tools to operationalise cinema memory in function of a bottom-up approach to transnational cinemas. In her discussion on the “travels of memory,” Astrid Erll suggests looking at the circulation of mnemonic archives developing across borders as well as at acts of social remembering in contexts of high cultural complexity (i.e., diaspora, migration) (Erll 2011). A focus on migrant cinema memory, then, allows us to observe individual and local experiences of cinema-going and how they intersect with interconnected histories of travel, mobility, and displacement. This attention to movement boosts cinema memory’s “insights into the workings of cultural memory in general, especially with regard to the production and sustaining of identities and communities” (Kuhn 2011, p. 96), by articulating historical, cultural, and geographical variations across the global/local continuum. This mobile understanding of cinema memory can also be approached as a form of “everyday transnationalism” (Vertovec 2009), which improves NCH’s limited ability to inquiry on marginalised and minority film cultures, by looking at its contribution to migrants’ home-making practices. In the interviews for my project, women often associate their memories of cinema-­ going with family members and close friends, with familiar spaces (both urban and domestic), and with positive aspects of their gendered and class identity. The positive character of these memories is generally emphasised by the tone of the voice and sometimes by the ironic comments attached to some of the anecdotes. In her oral-history project on the Italian cinema audiences of the 1950s, Daniela Treveri Gennari (2018) has found similar characteristics in the memories of older people, so much so that she speaks of cinema memories as “memories of pleasure.” These “memories of pleasure” relate to “beauty, as well as enrichment and self-esteem, [and produce] optimistic thoughts and positive feelings” (Treveri Gennari 2018, p.  42). For migrant women, then, remembering cinema-going is a means to transmit their heritage and identity, but also negotiate their sense of belonging “in between homes”: as Sarah Ahmed (2000, p.  91) puts it, “the question of being at home is always a

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question of memory” and the “gap between memory and place is embodied in the act of remembering.” As we will see in the second part of the chapter, these mobile and affective aspects are key to migrant cinema memory and enable us to respond to a set of interdisciplinary challenges. Indeed, by means of a bottom-up, subjective, and emotional perspective, migrant cinema memory provides a holistic framework to understand several aspects of transnationalism in film, memory, and migration studies, encouraging a more sustained dialogue across these disciplines, as well as demonstrating the potential of qualitative, small-scale studies to respond to wider epistemological issues.

Cinemas, Transnational Memories, and Life Narratives: Scaling and Comparing Across the Individual, the Collective, the Local, and the Global This second part of the chapter offers a thematic analysis of interview extracts illustrating the role of reflexivity and transnationalism in the act of remembering as well as their importance in the operationalisation of comparisons across borders and generations. To do so, I will be focusing on transnational memories linked to the following Latin American venues: the cine de barrio (neighbourhood cinema), the cine del centro (cinema of the centre), the cine club, and the multiplex. Each thematic section combines a localised and situated analysis of historical issues in cinema history with questions of identity formation emerging through the reflexivity of the participants. I will approach cinema memory as a cultural experience and as a discourse, in order to survey the interplay between the individual and the private, the collective, and the public (Kuhn 2002). By doing so, I will demonstrate that the elicitation of memories of cinema-going contributes to build a bottom-up transnational knowledge, by making visible commonality and differences in the experiences of women who have experienced films in different cultural contexts. Moreover, the selection of extracts also highlights the inherently reflexive nature of remembering. I will articulate my analysis to give at least a flavour of the biographical structure of the interviews, which also highlights the ways in which the reflections on life stages and the experience of migration contribute to the overall comparative framework of the study.

Reflexivity, Childhood Memories, and the City: Cines de barrio or cines del centro?5 I am starting my analysis with a compilation of memories linked to two types of venues, the neighbourhood cinemas (cine de barrio) and the cinemas of the city centre (cine del centro), whose presence in most of the Latin American 5

 All translations from Spanish are by the author.

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cities declined since the 1980s. The proliferation of these cinemas coincided with a modernisation and intensification of urban life and with the “Golden Age” of national cinemas (Rosas Mantecón 2017; Kriger 2014). Memories of these venues hark back to a vanished cinematic experience, which was centred on sociability, informality, and scarcity (in terms of technology and choice of films). Remembering these theatres means reflecting on one’s experience by retracing emotional geographies (Ercole et al. 2017) and locations that have been lost. Some participants, regardless of their age, remember them in relation to their childhood, with memories that accentuate the passing of time, like in these three examples from informants, respectively, aged 70, 42, and 36 years from Peru, Honduras, and Argentina: In the neighbourhood where I grew up, San Martín de Porres, there was a small cinema where, from the early hours of the morning until noon, all the children could come in [for free] if they collected five small caps of a brand of soft drink. […] It was a neighbourhood cinema, a classic, poor neighbourhood cinema, which gave us a space of distraction in those years… What year was that? ‘59… At that time, I couldn’t even think I’d make it to this life… [70, Callao, Peru, twenty years in Milan] I was about five or six and my mother used to sell baleadas6 in a wooden cart […] in front of a [neighbourhood] cinema, the Lux. [The owners] already knew her quite well and I remember that if there were screenings of Disney films, they would let me in [for free]. That’s how I enjoyed cinema in [my country]. I never enjoyed it when I was an adult. Here [in Barcelona] is different, I’ve enjoyed it because I’m alone, I don’t have my children. […] but if they come here, I want them to know the cinema. [42, San Pedro Sula, Honduras, three years in Barcelona] In my neighbourhood cinema […] the seats were made of wood and leather. It was a bit old and there wasn’t that much choice [of films] either. Then, as I got older, there were more crowded cinemas and much more comfortable theatres, much bigger screens. Technology changed the experience a bit. [36, Buenos Aires, Argentina, two years in Milan]

In the first two quotes, the participants look back at their childhood while reflecting on themselves in the present and their life journey as migrants. These reflections hint to cinema memory’s reflexive quality and ability to link the everyday to wider considerations about one’s identity; in this case, through a discursive register that draws comparisons between the past and the present (Kuhn 2002).

 Typical street food from Honduras.

6

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Considering the intergenerational nature of the group,7 the reflexivity inherent in the biographical structure of the interviews enables comparisons of memories about same life stages (in this case childhood) across generations, while preserving historical and individual specificity. A similar feeling of changing times can be found in the memories about the cine del centro (cinema of the centre), which were bigger, more refined venues, and usually located downtown. The topographical traits of these memories blend with anecdotes that recreate a specific experience of the urban space. Indeed, as opposed to the neighbourhood theatres, where children could go on their own, going to the cine del centro was a more planned, family activity, which included dining out or shopping: We used to go downtown […] and our habit was going out and having pizza after the movie. […] I remember those cinemas of Buenos Aires, of the times when I was a girl, those huge cinemas, with lots of people, way more people than in the small theatres [of today], where the screen is just a bit bigger than a television… [60, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 28 years in Milan]

In the following extract, the neighbourhood, with its simple cinema theatre and its informal economy (the market) is counterposed to the possibilities of consumption offered by the shops and restaurants of the centre: We went to the most central cinemas, where you could find places to eat out. Because of course, there was nothing outside the neighbourhood cinema, there wasn’t a restaurant, there was only a market… So, we would go to the cinemas of the centre, where you could find an ice-cream parlour or a big bookshop… [42, Lima, Peru, eleven years in Barcelona]

In these memories, “the cinematographic event was at the core of a range of spectacles and practices, of journeys and complicities in which the public experience of the city was brought back to life” (García Canclini 1994, p.  81). However, as suggested by recent studies on cinema-going in Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile,8 the distinction between the cine de barrio and the theatres of the centre was less neat in the perception and experiences of the audience. These venues could be in close locations, show similar films, have a similar 7  The very diverse age of the respondents reflects the intentionally open criteria for the recruitment of participants (over eighteen and based in Milan or Barcelona for at least two years). By design, the project aimed to mirror the “superdiversity” (Vertovec 2007) characterising contemporary global migrations, which are marked by the intertwining of regulatory channels, routes, temporalities, and social positionings. In this respect, interviewing first-generation migrant women of very different ages enabled also a set of trans-historical comparisons, like in this case, using the biographical narrative structure of the interviews as a thread. 8  I am referring to two ongoing projects, respectively, focusing on cinema-going in Buenos Aires and Santiago del Chile: Historia de los públicos de cine en Buenos Aires (1933–1955), led by Clara Kriger, University of Buenos Aires; “Públicos de cine en Chile: cultura cinematográfica, cinefilia y procesos de formación,” led by María Paz Peirano, University of Chile.

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composition of the audience, and a similar size. In the next extract, the link between the cine de barrio, a certain type of architecture (the “old building”) and the urban space, lead an informant from Lima to compare them with the surviving historical cinemas in Milan, where she now lives: Well, of the cinemas that I’ve seen here [in Milan], if you go to the centre, several are old cinemas, in old buildings. […] In Peru, and specifically in Lima, it’s also like that. We call the cinemas of the centre “neighbourhood cinemas”… because there used to be a cinema in almost every neighbourhood, but now they are gone. [50 Lima, Peru, twelve years in Milan]

Likewise, other informants remembered the disappearance of both these types of venues, linking this process to the urban transformations that occurred to the Latin American metropolis between the 1980s and 1990s. This decline was also described in relation to the neglected state of the buildings and their interiors, like in these two examples from participants of same age: When my mum was little there were some historic cinemas […] But I remember that when I went to, for example, the Museum of Modern Art, which is in the centre of Bogotá, there were some cinemas nearby that were always closed, abandoned. [50, Bogotá, Colombia, 24 years in Milan] The neighbourhood cinemas were dirtier, less well-kept, uglier, let’s say… well, cheaper yes, but also uncomfortable. It smelled bad; you know what I mean? You came out with fleas […] “It’s better I don’t go there,” I used to tell myself, but sometimes I just went there, because I wanted to see a specific film. [51, La Paz, Bolivia, fifteen years in Barcelona]

These memories have a strong visual and sensorial characterisation, which articulate the comparative lines of the past/present, and a perception of change in the urban space. Some of these recollections refer to processes of identity negotiation, particularly when participants find themselves thinking back at their childhood or at the differences between Latin American and European urban spaces. In these cases, cinema memory is almost like a glue that connects experiences, stages of life, and emotional states and illustrates how very local experiences of cinema-going intersect with multi-local, transnational trends in the history of the urban space and film exhibition.

Transnational Memories: The Cine Club Experience and the Geopolitics of Translation

as a Transformative

This section explores memories linked to practices of cinephilia and other forms of culturised spectatorship generally associated with specific modes of exhibition, like the cine club and other institutions like cinematheques and

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museums.9 My decision to focus on these experiences goes in two directions. First, the cine clubs and the cinematheques are good examples of cinematic cosmopolitanism and cultural policies developed in Latin America, two aspects that still need to be studied in relation to other global circuits of art house and political exhibition. Second, despite some historical research has been conducted on the gender politics of cinephilia,10 there is still very little knowledge about women’s, and even less about migrant women’s, participation in these audiences today. Thomas Elsaesser describes cinephilia as “the love that binds the present to the past in memory” (in de Valck and Hagener 2005), while Laura Mulvey (2009, p. 191) observes that for the film lover, the perception of loss, “a simple product of the inevitable passing of time, […] is also accentuated by changes in the loved object itself [the cinema].” In other words, memory is key to the cinephile’s “personal moments of discovery and joy, […] affectionate rituals, and specialized communities” (de Valck and Hagener 2005, p. 11), which nurture their passion for movies. Since the 1980s home video and other forms of “cinephilia 2.0” (Jullier and Leveratto 2012) have turned cinema-going into one of the many possibilities for the film lover to access and comment on films. However, this diversification has not erased an established connection between specific habits of cinema-going and notions of “quality,” “aesthetic disposition,” and “distinction” (Bourdieu 1984). This is somehow confirmed by my study in the memories of participants who attended screenings at cine clubs and cinematheques, and who are interested in cinema as a form of art. These informants have generally in common a high level of education (university degree or more) and such memories are often linked to specific periods of their lives, like their late teens, or early twenties, when they were university students. At the same time, the attendance of these venues is described as key to the refinement of their personal taste, which coincided with a gradual move away from the more “childish” “commercial cinema.” In other words, they connect the development of a specific taste in cinema with personal growth and/or with adulthood, contributing to defining the identity of the participant also in the context of the study, as they somehow reclaim a sense of expertise on the topic of our conversations. At the same time, these memories are also interesting to compare with the link between the cine de barrios and childhood, as they hint 9  The cine clubs date their first steps in many Latin American countries in the first decades of the twentieth century. From their beginnings, they became sites for cosmopolitan exchanges across the region and with Europe (Navitski and Poppe 2017). During the 1960s and 1970s, they found a fertile ground in the universities, where they promoted a politically and socially conscious form of spectatorship, in dialogue with similar European experiences. Today, the cine clubs are currently experiencing a phase of revival in certain areas of the region, as they continue to promote forms of alternative spectatorship (Broitman and Esverri 2018). The cinematheques were founded in various Latin American capitals throughout the 1970s, promoting the preservation and dissemination of national cinema and the diversification of the offer, attempting to reach remote and rural audiences with targeted initiatives. 10  Discussions on gendered dynamics of cinephilia in Italy and France are in Treveri Gennari et al. (2020); Sellier (2008).

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at different life stages. In this context, it is especially the cine club to be remembered as a transformative experience, in which the participant discovered and established special relationships with the film, understood as an artistic and/or political product (Rosas Mantecón 2017, p. 161). The formation of this sensibility is often described in relation to “growing up,” like in this case: When I was a little bit older, I started to discover the cine club […]. I went with friends, you know at that age when you start to go out on your own and make your own plans. […] [At the cine club I saw] “Tango feroz [La leyenda de Tanguito]” [Wild Tango, Marcelo Piñeyro, 1993], an Argentinian film that has to be seen in a cineclub. […] Of course, it was a different kind of film that you went to see there. [37, Bogotá, Colombia, eleven years in Barcelona]

The memories of seeing films at the cine club are also associated with positive feelings of discovery and youthful enthusiasm: There was a Cinematheque at our university that showed Tarkovsky. We didn’t eat to go to see these films, as they were screened at the lunch break, and then we went back to class. And then Cali had another place, the Cinemateca La Tertulia […] It was very far from my house, but we went there to see films that were shown in their super original version, and you could almost hear the reel running, it was beautiful… [45, Cali/Bogotá, Colombia, twelve years in Barcelona]

Such unconventional experiences (rare films, off-beat theatres, low prices) are also remembered in relation to other pleasures and acts of self-care: I went to the Cinemateca [on my own] every Saturday […]. It was a tiny cinema, very small, old and quite awful […]. There, I saw cycles of French and Spanish films, depending on the authors. […] I also had my favourite chair […] in the front row, because the screen was tiny and I wanted to sit there, where I could stretch my legs very comfortably. Nobody bothered me there. [51, La Paz, Bolivia, fifteen years in Barcelona]

In these occasions, informants generally remember the consumption of European cinema, and some of them use these memories to establish a link with the countries where they are currently living, like this Peruvian participant who recalls having seen Italian films in a cine club in Lima: I was a spectator of the cine club in Peru, because with auteur cinema you must think about what you see. […] I got to know the cine clubs at university, thanks to a professor of religious anthropology of Italian origin, who brought us to the cine club at the Lima Art Museum, […] to see “La Strada” [The Road, Federico Fellini, 1954] and “Ladri di Biciclette” [Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica, 1948]. [50, Lima, Peru, twelve years in Milan]

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These films could also contribute to build a certain image of Europe and its culture, creating expectations that clashed with the reality encountered once moved there: At the Universidad del Valle [Cali] there is a cinema in the university which is very nice […] Let’s say that I learned a bit about classic cinema there […] And I came to Europe with this idea of cinema in my head and then obviously everything has changed, and it is very different. I’m not saying that they don’t make good films, but I think that to see good films you have to go to festivals and choose them very well. [34, Cali, Colombia, five years in Milan]

These participants continue to cultivate their passion for “non-commercial” cinema by attending, albeit less often, screenings at la Filmoteca de Catalunya, Casa America, and art house theatres like the Renoir and Verdi in Barcelona; and the cinemas Anteo, Beltrade and Mexico in Milan. In other words, there is a continuity between the old habits of film-going with those developed in Milan and Barcelona, as these participants are still interested in watching rare and author films. There is also another aspect that motivates these informants to attend art house venues in Milan and Barcelona: their preference for subtitled versions. However, for the same reason they could attend screenings to multiplexes, like the Icaria in Barcelona and the UCI Bicocca in Milan, which show films in their original language. To some of these participants, who do not live close to the city centre, these venues offer more options in terms of schedule and easier access by car or public transportation. This “quest” for the original version is motivated by the dislike for dubbing, which is explained by aesthetic reasons (i.e., dubbing distorts the performance of the actors) but also with aspects of cultural difference, like in these extracts: [The first time I saw a film in Barcelona] I was very surprised because I was expecting subtitles. English audio and subtitles in Spanish. For me it was a surprise, it was very bad. I remember I said: “What’s this? What’s going on in this country?”, and when I told my friends about it, they said: “It’s just that here you have to look for the cinemas that have subtitles, not all theatres do it”. [40, Santo Angelo, Brazil, seven years in Barcelona] I miss watching films in the original language, because in Colombia all films were subtitled. And I must say that I practised English much more there than here. Everything is translated here, and I lose a lot, because the titles of the films are also translated. [50, Bogotá, Colombia, 24 years in Milan] There is something that happens to us, Latinas in Barcelona. […]. Here, they have this system, not only at the cinema, but also in television, of dubbing everything that is foreign. They don’t have subtitles, they have actors who reinterpret the original actors, and this lowers my consumption a lot. […] I don’t care to see Joaquim Phoenix playing Joker and speaking in Spanish. I don’t believe it. So

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that’s like putting a cultural limit to cinema-going. [35, Rio Grande, Argentina, five years in Barcelona]

These considerations are good illustrations of how “translation wars” between detractors and supporters of dubbing are still relevant today, and leave “a tangible trace of the specific linguistic, cultural and geopolitical routes that media travels” (Dwyer 2017, p. 10) by revealing national specificities and cultural hierarchies. In the last extract, dubbing is interpreted as a process of cultural assimilation and levelling (“they dub everything that is foreign”), while in the second, the participant blames dubbing for her loss of familiarity with English. Moreover, in all these extracts, English is implicitly considered the dominant language of films. As such, transnational cinema memory offers a privileged angle to observe how ordinary acts of transcultural negotiation, such as watching dubbed films, contribute to processes of identity formation, participate in the negotiation of belonging, while hinting at broader questions of cinematic circulation and reception. At the same time, we see that notions of value and quality expressed in relation to cinema-going are not necessarily linked to cinephilia but could be informed by a “geopolitics of taste” that intersects, like in these examples, with one’s experience as a migrant.

The Multiplex Across the Local/Global In this shorter thematic section, I am discussing a selection of extracts that further illustrates the entanglement between cinema-going and the negotiation of difference. Specifically, I focus on comparative memories of the multiplex, in which the participants discuss these venues in relation to Europe through discourses about modernity and progress. Indeed, the multiplex, a mode of exhibition so closely linked to the globalisation of contemporary economy and culture, is still subjected to local articulations and negotiations. They well exemplify Charles R. Acland’s idea that “the contemporary film business is an industry and cultural practice built around and reproducing certain ideas about links between the local and the global” (Acland 2003, p. 43). Indeed, the dissemination of multiplexes in the Latin American region coincided with a specific process of urban and economic transformation that led to a privatisation and segregation of the public space (Rosas Mantecón 2017). At the same time, their diffusion and success caused a broader redefinition of the exhibition sector in the region, where multiplex chains are owned by a handful of regional players, and a series of smaller, independent ventures are trying to fill the gaps left in the market proposing national and regional cinema (Falicov 2019). In the framework of my study, it is interesting to observe how discussions on the multiplex mirror some of these aspects, by means of comparisons with Europe, that once again are linked to the reflections of the participants on their own identity:

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In the last few years, Peru has developed a lot in terms of urban planning. I’m talking about Lima, there are a lot of large shopping centres there […] with cinemas that have nothing to envy those in Milan. On the contrary, they are the best. Sorry, I’m Peruvian, but it’s true, they are better. [70, Callao, Peru, twenty years in Milan] Well, [at the beginning], I was ignorant, and I thought that [the multiplexes in Mexico] were only replicas of those from the United States or Europe. Then, when I got here I realised that no… In Mexico, even the normal cinemas […] are bigger and nicer than the nicest ones here [in Milan]. So that gives me the idea of how important cinema is in Mexico, how much is consumed and how much the big film companies invest in Mexico. [36, Guadalajara, Mexico, three years in Milan] When I was still in Colombia, before I came to Italy, there was already a Cine Bar at the Hacienda Santa Barbara, another shopping centre. [At the Cine Bar] there were armchairs with a table, and you could have a drink while watching the film. This already existed in Colombia in ‘96, when I arrived in Italy, there wasn’t anything like that. [50, Bogotá, Colombia, 24 years in Milan]

As the informants draw comparisons between multiplexes in their country of origin and in the city where they are currently living, their subjective evaluations intersect with their own experience of migration. At the same time, these memories reflect the multi-temporal heterogeneity that characterises Latin America’s relationship with modernity (García Canclini 2001). In other words, the multiplex works as a prism that reverts the gaze from Latin America to Europe, showing how ideas of modernity and affluence could be negotiated from the angle of leisure and cinema-going. This confirms Ien Ang’s argument that in the context of a globalised world, local cultures tend to reproduce themselves through the appropriation of global flows of mass-mediated forms and technologies (Ang 1996, p. 153). As such, translocal and migrant cinema memories provide insights on the workings of contemporary global flows as experienced locally and in the everyday. At the same time, they reveal the complex transcultural negotiations that a simple, ordinary act like cinema-going can stimulate.

Conclusions This chapter explored the possibilities offered by a reflexive and transnational approach to the study of cinema memory and New Cinema History more broadly. A feminist, holistic approach to reflexivity increases the accountability and sustainability of research in transcultural settings, by making visible the positionality of the research and the contribution of the participants in the process of knowledge production. These tools can also contribute to improving large-scale comparative, transnational studies by enhancing a process of diversification of theories and citation strategies, avoiding the reproduction of

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established patterns of knowledge extraction, and marginalisation of less-visible cinematic practices. In this context, scholarly work in memory studies concerned with issues of mobility and transnationalism reminds us that many times it is “migration, rather than location, the condition of memory” (Creet and Kitzmann 2014, p. 9). By looking at the micro movements of migrant memory, which unfold through the reflective work of the informants over their identity and experiences, we gain access to day-to-day negotiations of proximity, distance, and belonging from a pleasurable and emotional angle. At the same time, a transnational and interdisciplinary approach to cinema memory sheds light on how people’s movements transform and negotiate national and transnational cinemas. In the thematic analysis focusing on interview extracts about Latin American venues, I illustrated how the reflexivity of the participant articulates comparisons at the micro level of individual experience while enabling connections with broader topics in cinema history. This can be observed in the topographical and spatial aspects of the memories of the cines de barrio and the cines del centro, which produce comparable emotional geographies linked to historical transformations of the urban space and film exhibition. Similarly, experiences of cinema-going at cine clubs and art house venues contribute to build specific understandings of cultural value and taste, which intersect with processes of identity formation and influence present patterns of cinema-going in Barcelona and Milan. Finally, the consumption of dubbed films in Europe and comparisons between experiences at multiplexes in different contexts stimulate discussions about the negotiation of cultural differences that transcend the cinematic. All these aspects demonstrate that transnational cinema memory articulates through comparisons that are meaningful beyond the individual and localised experience of the informants. In other words, cinema memory can be operationalised as a multi-dimensional and interdisciplinary tool, with great potential for the development of larger-scale and data-driven projects, as it illuminates patterns of individual and collective remembering that can be verified and tested at the meso- and macro levels. As such, a qualitative-driven, reflexive, and comparative mode enables us to valorise diversity and less-visible experiences, to look at issues of fragmentation and monocentrism as opportunities to build a multi-local, bottom-up perspective on cinema history.

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Treveri Gennari, D., O’Rawe, C., Hipkins, D., Dibeltulo, S., & Culhane, S. (2020). Italian cinema audiences: Histories and memories of cinema-going in post-war Italy. Bloomsbury Academic. Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(6), 1024–1054. Vertovec, S. (2009). Transnationalism. Routledge.

Index1

A Abbot and Costello meet the Killer, Boris Karloff (Charles Barton, 1949), 84 Abel, Richard, 403, 425 Åberg, Anders, 148, 153 Aboulaoula, Salma Mediavilla, 174 Acculturation, 42, 49 Acland, Charles R., 405, 425, 458 Adamczak, Marcin, 103, 115 African Consolidated Theatres (ACT), 341, 347, 349, 350 Agency, 21, 22, 24, 31, 64, 68, 312, 334, 338, 383, 392, 402, 408, 409, 417, 450 Agrasánchez, Rogelio, 87 Aguilar, Gonzalo, 413n8 Ahmad, Feroz, 37, 38, 49 Ahmed, Sarah, 450 Akbulut, Hasan, 11, 36 Alarm in Pekin (Herbert Selpin, 1937), 390 Aldrich, Robert, 229 Alice in Wonderland, (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske, 1951), 89 All about Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950), 231n6

Allan, Sean, 199 Allen, Robert C., 36, 43, 128, 147, 149, 155, 169, 198, 361, 384, 405 Aller, Ángel, 438 Alted Vigil, Alicia, 435n13 Altenloh, Emilie, 35 Altman, Rick, 264, 265 Al-Warda al-bayda’ (The White Rose, Muhammad Karim, 1933), 372 Amador, María Luisa, 74, 75, 81, 83, 88, 94, 96 An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951), 259 Amieva Collado, Mariana, 436n16 Amsterdam, 192, 239–259, 402 Anderson, Sheldon, 197 Andersson, Lars Gustaf, 148 Andrew, Dudley, 231, 235, 403, 410, 413 Ang, Ien, 459 Anisimovich, Antonina, 103 Anselmo, Diana W., 53 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 229, 232, 234 Antwerp, 192, 239–259, 318n18 Apartheid, 337, 345–348, 354 Approach qualitative, 106, 445 quantitative, 106, 127, 244, 427

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Treveri Gennari et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38789-0

465

466 

INDEX

Arena smelykh (Daring Circus Youth, Sergei Gurov & Yuriy Ozerov, 1953), 215 Argentina, 95, 334, 383–398, 409, 414, 415, 424, 433, 436, 438, 446n1, 452, 453, 458 Arsan, Andrew, 372, 373 Arthouse, 30, 246, 249, 252, 255, 258, 335 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 37, 38, 50 Athique, Adrian, 450 Audiences active, 103 adult audiences, 36 attendance, 38, 323, 433 audience as consumers, 175, 193, 282, 295, 338, 345, 348 audience composition, 333, 454 audience demographics, 102 audience preferences, 192, 193, 282, 284, 285, 293, 295, 300, 308, 310 audience research, 35, 39, 106 audience statistics, 120, 284, 289 audience taste, 26, 311, 377 child audiences, 156 contemporary, 16, 17, 103 family audiences, 42, 373 as imagined constructs, 103 local audiences, 21, 64, 91, 102–104, 120, 193, 198, 211, 216, 225, 257, 308, 339, 402, 408 passive, 35 rural, 40, 46, 455n9 school, 101, 226, 234, 282 urban, 40, 46, 49, 240 working-class, 217, 270 youth, 35, 153 Auditory ecology, 263–277 Authorship, 435n14 Autocratic, 192, 281–301 Avant-garde, 402, 410, 413, 413n8, 414, 432, 435, 436, 437n18, 438, 440 Ayala Blanco, Jorge, 74, 75, 81, 83, 88, 94, 96

B Baarova, Lida, 390 Baberowski, Jörg, 198 Bagwadeen, Dowlat Ramdas, 341, 341n3 The Bahamas, 13, 173–189 The Baidas, 371–376 Bala Joban (Baburao Patel, 1934), 351, 353 Balcerzak, Władysław, 126, 127, 129, 132, 133, 136 Baldwin, Davarian L., 55, 57, 67 Balgaran e galant (The Bulgarian Is Gallant, Vassil Gendov, 1915), 103n2 Baptist, Vincent, 240 Barcelona, 225, 335, 412, 412n7, 413, 445, 446n1, 452–454, 453n7, 456–458, 460 Barefoot Contessa, The (Joseph L. Mankiewitz, 1954), 226 Bari, 192, 263–277 Barker, Jennifer M., 264 Barrett, M. M., 342 Barten, Egbert, 314 Bathrick, David, 199, 211 Bator, Monika, 127 Bauer, Ela, 127, 138 Bauman, Zygmunt, 406 Bazin, André, 147 Belgium, 4, 5, 104, 129, 132, 192, 193, 240–243, 308, 311n5, 314, 320, 323, 325 Bendana, Kmar, 374 Bengtsson, Bengt, 147, 148, 153 Benny Goodman Story, The (Valentine Davies, 1956), 165 Berger, Roni, 449 Berger, Stefan, 240 Bergfelder, Tim, 403 Bergman, Ingmar, 147, 161, 227–229, 232, 233 Berlin - Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Symphony of a Great City, Walter Ruttmann, 1927), 434 Beyen, Marnix, 245 Beyer, Frank, 230 Biel, Urszula, 127

 INDEX 

Biltereyst, Daniël, 3, 4, 36, 43, 44, 54, 102, 104, 112, 128, 174, 192, 222, 223, 236, 239–242, 258, 362, 384, 385, 397, 403, 425, 445, 447 Bisso, Andres, 387 Björklund, Elisabeth, 147 Bjurström, Erling, 153, 163 Black Roses (Schwarze Rosen, Paul Martin, 1935), 394 Blanche Fury (Marc Allegret, 1947), 94 Bleeke Bet (Alex Benno, 1934), 251 Bluecoat, 30 Blumer, Herbert, 176, 187 Bolin, Göran, 167 Bollywood, 345, 352, 353 Bomba, the Jungle Boy (Ford Beebe, 1949), 84 Borgman, Christine L., 405 Bourdieu, Pierre, 361, 424, 432, 455 Boustan, Leah Platt, 55 Bowles, Kate, 407n2 Box office, see Exhibition Bramdaw, Dhanee, 342 Braudel, Fernand, 407, 425 Bristol City Council, 15, 16, 31 British Colonial Film Exchange (BCFE), 349–351 British Film Institute (BFI), 18–24, 32 British Intelligence (Terry O. Morse, 1940), 390 Brno, 193, 213n16, 307–326 Brockman, Stephen, 233 Broitman, Ana Isabel, 455n9 Brown, Leslie, 55 Bruno, Giuliana, 225, 263, 265 Brussels, 193, 240, 242, 307–326 Bryant, Chad, 318 Buenos Aires, 335, 386–390, 388n3, 394, 396, 397, 409, 424, 432, 434, 435, 437–439, 437n18, 452, 453, 453n8 Bukowski, Maciej, 134, 135 Bulgaria, 12, 101–121, 311n5 Bull, Sofia, 405 Bunche, Ralph J., 343 Burke, Peter, 150 Burns, James, 333, 339, 362 Butsch, Richard, 2

467

C Caddoo, Cara, 54, 56, 59 Cagiao Vila, María del Pilar, 438 Çam, Aydın, 104 Candy wrappers, 264, 270, 271, 275 Canela-Ruano, Antonio J., 392 Captain Horatio Hornblower (Raoul Walsh, 1951), 91, 94 Carbine, Mary, 55 Carlson, Laura, 54 Cartas a Ufemia (Letters to Ufemia, José Díaz Morales, 1952), 87 Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942), 225 Casanova, Pascale, 435 Casetti, Francesco, 43, 44 Cassanello, Robert, 64 Castro Ricalde, Maricruz, 74 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks, 1958), 225 Censorship, 6, 13, 35, 110, 127, 154, 173–189, 191, 221–236, 309, 321, 322, 343, 346, 347, 391, 430, 434 Centralny Urza ̨d Kinematografii (CUK, Central Office of Film), 199 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 360 Chatelain, Marcia, 55 Chaudhuri, Shohini, 403 Chaume, Frederic, 83 Chong, Blanca, 82n6, 84, 91 Christie, Ian, 103 Chwalba, Andrzej, 316, 317 Chyet, Michael, 48n5 Cielo, agua y lobos (Sky, water and wolves, Justino Zavala Muniz, 1931), 437 Cine Actualidad, 428, 428n6, 430, 431, 439 Cinema advertisements, 46, 259, 323, 428 city-centre, 21, 22, 37, 41, 47, 201, 215, 241, 245, 251, 258, 272, 317, 341, 373, 451 early, 6, 12, 35, 57, 73, 80n2, 81, 129, 176, 196, 198–202, 213, 216, 217, 226, 246, 266, 268, 269, 297, 334, 338, 341, 342, 349, 353, 355, 361, 367, 403, 425, 429n8, 431, 439 memories, 6, 11, 13, 35–50, 147–169, 192, 445–460

468 

INDEX

Cinema (cont.) neighbourhood, 42, 67, 215, 242, 243, 245–249, 251–259, 388, 388n3, 451–454 offer, 104, 112, 119 programming (see Exhibition) travelling, 46, 47, 116, 118, 120, 132, 149, 159, 242, 349, 446 Cinema as entertainment activity, 40, 42, 49, 102, 105n3, 130, 132, 164, 165, 168, 240, 312, 363, 363n6, 364, 366, 368, 416 courting, 48, 167 cultural practice, 192, 235 culture, 3, 4, 7, 12, 23, 36, 37, 50, 102, 142, 166, 173, 191, 192, 196, 198, 200–202, 216, 239–259, 265, 308, 333, 334, 338, 347, 377, 384 escape, 40 identification, 40 learning, 40 modernisation, 11, 13, 41–43, 48–50, 168, 169, 365, 452 ritual, 11, 48–50 self-improvement, 40 socialising, 27, 40 treat, 48, 160, 430 Cinema-going black, 12, 53–68 practices, 5, 6, 11, 36, 39, 45, 47, 49, 56, 128, 166, 240, 264, 270, 362, 370, 373, 385, 449 rural, 45–49, 148, 166, 167 urban, 11, 42, 49, 54, 132, 450, 454 Cipullo, Angelica, 22 Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), 231n7 Clariana-Rodagut, Ainamar, 334, 405, 408, 410, 411n4 Class, 12, 39, 39n3, 41, 42, 44, 53, 96, 150, 152, 153, 167, 201, 210, 211, 217, 273, 342, 344, 351, 365, 367, 438, 440, 450, 456 Clayton, Jane, 22 Clifford, James, 149 Coding, see History, oral history Cold War, 12, 103, 104, 196, 414 Colored Airdome, 61–64

Cómicos (Juan Antonio Bardem, 1954), 231n6 Commercialisation, 12, 104, 121 Community, 3, 6, 7, 15, 20–22, 24, 26, 29, 37, 49, 55, 56, 59, 60, 64, 68, 140, 149, 155, 159–161, 166, 184, 192, 221, 222, 242, 264, 266, 269, 274–277, 316, 333, 334, 337–341, 343, 345, 349, 351, 353, 354, 359–378, 387, 413, 424, 450, 455 Compañía Operadora de Teatros (COTSA), 76, 77, 88 Comparative approach, 2–4, 6, 7, 74, 196, 359, 362, 384–386, 425, 445 perspective, 102, 196, 241, 334, 384, 385, 397 Conde, Maite, 437n17 Confesiones de un espía nazi (Confessions of a Nazi Spy, Anatole Litvak, 1939), 394 Connectivity, 334, 402, 407, 409, 417 Conrad, Sebastian, 126 Corbould, Clare, 56 Corriou, Morgan, 333, 334, 373, 375 Couldry, Nick, 169 Courtship, 155, 160 Couselo, Jorge Miguel, 434 COVID-19, 13, 121, 174, 182–184, 186, 188 Cowan, Michael, 424 Cracow, 125, 138, 141, 191, 195–218, 298, 301–305 Creet, Julia, 460 Creswell, J. David, 179 Creswell, John W., 179 Criminal, The (Joseph Losey, 1960), 228 Crofts, Stephen, 403 Cross-regional, 55 Cruse, Harold, 56 Cuadrado-García, Manuel, 105 Cultural mediators, 334, 401, 404, 405, 408, 410, 414, 416, 424, 431 Czajka, Katarzyna, 127 Czech Republic, 103 Czechoslovakia, 193, 196, 211, 215, 216, 308, 313, 318, 319n19 Czesany Dvořáková, Tereza, 313

 INDEX 

D Dall’Asta, Monica, 405 Dallas (Stuart Heisler, 1950), 84 Damiens, Caroline, 333, 334, 365 Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene, 1920), 413 Das russische Wunder (Annelie & Andrew Thorndike, 1959-1963), 233 Data, 1, 4, 5, 7, 13, 17, 24, 36, 37, 44, 55, 81n4, 82n6, 96, 102, 106, 110, 113, 117, 119, 126–130, 133, 137, 141, 142, 176, 179, 180, 182, 188, 191, 196, 202, 204, 205n12, 216, 244, 244n3, 246, 246n8, 249, 254, 259, 267, 282, 285, 285n2, 286, 287n4, 288, 290, 292–294, 292n9, 300, 301, 309, 309n2, 316, 318–320, 322, 323, 325, 333, 362, 377, 386, 405, 407, 411, 411n5, 414–417, 424, 425, 428, 445, 447–449 David and Bathsheba (Henry King, 1951), 88, 89 David-Fox, Michael, 363n5 Davis, Ennis, 60, 61, 63 de Baecque, Antoine, 424 De Cesari, Chiara, 450 De Franceschi, Gustavo, 394 De Jantjes (The Tars, Jaap Speyer, 1934), 251 De la Vega Alfaro, Eduardo, 74, 75, 77, 80, 81, 87 de Luna Freire, Rafael, 385 De Sica, Vittorio, 224, 415, 456 de Torre, Guillermo, 432–435, 435n14, 437–439 de Valck, Marijke, 403, 424, 455 Deacon, David, 179 Deadline at Dawn (Harold Clurman & William Cameron Menzies, 1946), 84 Dębski, Andrzej, 193 Decherney, Peter, 196 Decolonial, 334, 360, 402, 404, 417 Delanty, Gerard, 404 Delgado, Richard, 449n3 Dennison, Stephanie, 403

469

Der Biberpelz (The Beaver Coat, Erich Engel, 1949), 213n18 Der Rat der Götter (The Council of the Gods, Kurt Maetzig, 1950), 213n18 Desai, Ashwin, 345 Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA), 198, 199, 204, 213, 216, 227, 299 Devan, Yogin, 345 Dhoest, Alexander, 36 Díaz, Emeterio, 389 Díaz Delgado, Carlos, 231n7 Dibbets, Karel, 243, 244, 248, 314 Dibeltulo, Silvia, 222 Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1931), 433 Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives of Windsor, Georg Wildhagen, 1950), 211, 213 Dietrich, Marlene, 94 Discursive realism, 106 Dissanayake, Wimal, 403 Distribution block booking, 91, 104 film circulation, 360 film supply, 193, 198, 205, 218, 284, 308, 310, 321, 323 first run, 315 marketing, 89, 103, 111, 126 release pattern, 333, 338 run-zone-clearance system, 248 second run, 84, 91 third run, 84, 91 Distributor, 63, 77, 83, 84, 88, 91, 95, 103, 111, 112, 132, 224, 225, 243, 247, 269, 285, 287, 292, 296, 297n11, 299n14, 312, 314, 315, 333, 359–361, 371, 375–377, 386, 388, 389 Dolfsma, P. J. M., 242n1 Domestic film, 38, 43, 46, 125, 126, 138, 153, 192, 200, 288, 295, 297, 299, 318, 324, 325 Donaldson, Ken, 341 Donev, Alexander, 103, 111 Douglas, Kirk, 89 Dovey, Lindiwe, 346 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 229 Drieu, Cloé, 365

470 

INDEX

Druetta, María Eugenia, 390 Dubbing, 83, 104, 223–226, 323, 457, 458 Ducatteeuw, Vincent, 243 Dunås, Jon, 148 Durban, 6, 333, 337–355 Ď urovičová, Nataša, 403, 450 Duval, Julien, 435 Dwyer, Tessa, 458 E Eastern European, 102–105, 110–114, 121, 229 East Germany, 195–218, 222, 228, 233, 286 Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969), 162 Echeverría, Yazmín, 334 Ecuador, 334, 383–398, 446n1 Edgar, Robert R., 343 Egea, José Luis, 232 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963), 234 Eisenstein, Sergei, 231, 386, 434, 436 El Ceniciento (Cinderella Man, Gilberto Martínez Solares, 1952), 87 El derecho de nacer (The Right to Be Born, Zacarías Gómez Urquiza, 1952), 87, 88 Elias, Norbert, 283, 295 Elsaesser, Thomas, 403, 455 Enforcer, The (Bretaigne Windust & Raoul Walsh, 1951), 84 England, 11, 16–20, 23, 158, 163, 168 Entertainment, 27, 38, 40, 41, 45, 50, 54–56, 61, 63, 64, 68, 75, 76, 80, 104, 116, 138, 141, 149, 153, 163, 166, 174, 188, 193, 211, 274, 293, 317, 319, 338, 341, 343–345, 350, 363, 365, 366, 370, 385, 390, 410, 412, 412n7, 430 Ercole, Pierluigi, 263, 265, 425, 452 Erel, Umut, 448 Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, 353 Erll, Astrid, 446, 450 Ernst, Jutta, 425 Espagne, Michel, 6, 408, 424 Esping, Ingrid, 148 Essa, Ebrahim, 343, 347 Esverri, Máximo, 455n9

Eternal Jew, The (Der ewige Jude, Fritz Hippler, 1940), 398 European Cinema Audiences (ECA), 6, 202, 202n9, 265, 266, 272, 277 European Union (EU), 101n1, 105, 108n7, 112–114 Everitt, Brian S., 244 Everyday life, 13, 47–49, 148–150, 155, 180, 225, 277, 320, 320n23, 445 Exhibition admission prices, 284, 299n14, 351 box office, 77, 83, 87, 89, 91, 93, 103, 112, 113, 148, 156, 247, 293, 295, 299, 372, 373, 416 double bills, 244, 255 film bookings, 91, 246, 297 itinerant exhibition, 31, 241 local, 16, 19–25, 31, 81n4, 88, 112, 121 matinee, 46, 155–159, 166–169, 205, 244, 255, 268, 269 performances, 42, 47–50, 54, 56, 61, 163, 177, 273, 286, 343, 345, 365, 390, 457 première, 63, 77, 202, 214–216, 233, 241, 243, 245–252, 255–259, 292n9, 311, 315, 315n12, 316, 351, 388, 390, 391, 393 programming, 4–6, 21, 22, 111, 121, 192, 240, 241 road shows, 63 screenings, 30, 37, 38, 40, 43, 46, 54, 56, 61, 79–92, 94–96, 101, 104, 112, 129, 133, 149, 154, 160, 166, 178, 198, 200, 204–207, 210–212, 214–216, 222, 242–246, 249, 251–258, 268, 276, 282, 285, 287–289, 293, 309, 310, 316n13, 317, 351, 360, 363, 363n6, 365, 373, 377, 393, 395, 396, 406, 412n7, 413, 434, 452 ticket sales, 192, 282, 283, 290, 290n7, 293, 299, 317, 319 Exhibitors independant, 18, 57 women, 361 Experience, 4, 11, 12, 17, 20, 22, 24–28, 30, 35–37, 39–45, 47–50, 53–55,

 INDEX 

59, 66, 68, 101–103, 105, 106, 106n4, 109, 110, 111n11, 115, 116, 121, 147–150, 154, 155, 158–161, 167–169, 180, 191, 192, 197, 223, 224, 226, 228, 230, 234, 239, 240, 263–277, 333, 335, 337–339, 342, 354, 360, 364–366, 373, 402, 404, 405, 407–409, 416, 432, 445, 446, 448, 450–460, 455n9 Experience of cinema, 36, 49, 50, 147, 149, 150, 155, 168, 264, 273, 405 See also Cinema-going Ezra, Elizabeth, 403 F Fahlstedt, Kim Khavar, 192 Fahrendes Volk (Jacques Feyder, 1938), 309 Les gens du voyage (Jacques Feyder, 1938), 309 Fair, Laura, 338, 376 Fairbrother, Malcolm, 7 Falicov, Tamara L., 458 Faust, Katherine, 407 Fee, Annie, 53 Fein, Seth, 74, 75, 80–82, 83n7, 87, 95 Feminist, 373, 408, 445, 447–449, 449n3, 459 Fernán Gómez, Fernando, 94 Feu Mathias Pascal (The Late Mathias Pascal, Marcel L’Herbier, 1925), 436 Field, Allyson Nadia, 54 Film classification, 13, 173–180, 182, 184–188 Film club, 21, 30, 120, 160, 161, 191, 192, 221, 223, 224, 226–230, 227n4, 228n5, 232n8, 234, 235, 334, 335, 360, 401–417, 424n2, 433, 434, 436–439, 436n16, 438n20 Film consumption, 4, 6, 13, 17, 18, 106n4, 120, 173–189, 221–236, 264 Film criticism, 119, 191, 227, 230, 234, 334, 386, 412, 414, 415, 423–425, 429–432, 438, 439

471

Film culture, 4–6, 11, 15–32, 35–50, 54–56, 59, 103–105, 161, 162, 191, 192, 198, 202n9, 205n12, 216, 221–224, 226, 227, 231, 234, 235, 240, 334, 401–417, 423, 424, 433, 438, 439, 447, 450 Film genres, 23, 77, 87, 88, 105n3, 153, 158, 173, 181, 183, 186, 213, 249, 252, 255, 272, 273, 353, 390 Film history, 6, 54, 148, 149, 151, 161, 166, 227, 236, 264, 277, 335, 384, 401–408, 410, 416, 417, 432, 437, 439 Film industry, 3, 18, 23, 38, 55, 75, 77, 93, 103, 106, 110, 125, 127, 128, 131, 132, 175, 177, 186, 188, 196, 200n3, 206, 284, 295, 311, 313, 325, 334, 343, 372, 383, 387, 397, 402, 405, 406, 408, 410, 435, 439 Film magazines, 191, 226, 233, 386, 439 Film policy, 11, 16–18, 32, 198–200, 215, 218, 308, 309n1, 310, 311, 314 Film Policy Review Panel, 222 Film Polski, 198, 199 Film popularity, 103, 105n3, 282, 309 Film production, 21, 38, 38n2, 54, 103, 126, 132, 138, 153, 181, 199, 200, 200n3, 227, 284, 299, 308, 311, 314, 318, 323, 325, 334, 360, 386, 407, 414, 415, 429, 437 Film programming, 4, 6, 11, 30, 74, 119n21, 191, 193, 204, 208, 241, 248, 259, 283, 285, 288, 309, 325 Film reception, 102, 222 Film selection, 198 Film studio, 199, 314 Film supply, see Distribution Film theory, 226 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 366 Flynn, Errol, 89 Font, Domènec, 222, 224 Forbidden Films. The Modern Legacy of Nazi Film (Felix Moeller, 2014), 385 Forman, Miloš, 233 Foucault, Michel, 405

472 

INDEX

Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT), 20, 22, 23, 28–31 Four Sons (Archie Mayo, 1940), 390 Fox, Jo, 394 Freeland, David, 57 Freitag, Ulrike, 406 Fridericus films, 390 Friedmann, Georges, 361 Friedmann, Germán Claus, 387 Frymus, Agata, 12, 54, 57 Fuhrmann, Wolfgang, 362, 383, 384n1 Furhammar, Leif, 148, 149, 151, 153, 166, 296 G Gaines, Jane M., 405 Galt, Rosalind, 405 Galván, María Valeria, 387 Ganguly, Debjani, 406 García Canclini, Néstor, 449, 453, 459 García Carrión, Marta, 434 García de Dueñas, Jesús, 229, 231n6, 234 García Pastor, Antonio, 93 García Riera, Emilio, 74, 75 Garncarz, Joseph, 192, 193, 283, 290, 290n8, 295, 296, 316, 316n13 Garnemark, Rosario, 232 Gastroli kitayskikh tsirkovykh artistov v SSSR (The Tour of Chinese Circus Performers in the USSR, Leonid Varlamov, 1951), 213 Gauthier, Christophe, 402, 412 Gehler, Fred, 229, 233 Gelly, Christophe, 36 Gender, 13, 39, 46, 48, 102, 105, 105n3, 119, 149, 151, 152, 155, 159–163, 166–168, 187, 269, 270, 273–275, 282, 334, 402, 405, 408, 416, 417, 440, 455 Genre, see Film genre Geraghty, Christine, 48 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 6, 191, 195–200, 198n2, 200n3, 205–208, 205n13, 211, 211n14, 215–217, 221–236, 281, 283–287, 292–295, 298–299

Germany, 35, 128–130, 132–134, 158, 192, 197, 197n1, 210, 211, 288, 296, 297, 311, 311n5, 322, 324, 371, 383, 385, 387, 388, 390–392, 395–397 Gersch, Wolfgang, 233 Getino, Octavio, 385, 388 Gierszewska, Barbara, 127 Giesen, Rolf, 387 Gil-Blanco, Emiliano, 392 Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946), 223, 225–227 Giménez Caballero, Ernesto, 433–435, 435n13, 435n14 Ginio, Eyal, 368 Ginzburg, Carlo, 150 Glenn Miller Story, The (aka Moonlight Serenade, Anthony Mann, 1954), 165 Global South, 334, 339, 402, 405, 408, 417 Godard, Jean-Luc, 225, 228, 229 Goddard, George, 355 Goerres, Achim, 7 Gomery, Douglas, 76, 241, 264 González, Jaime Miguel, 88 Gooptar, Primnath, 339, 351–353 Gopal, Sangita, 338 Gorfinkel, Elena, 404, 408 Gothenburg, 192, 263–277 Granda, Wilma, 392, 393 Grandjean, Martin, 407 Granger, Stewart, 94 Granja, Paulo Jorge, 411 Great Dictator, The (Charles Chaplin, 1940), 390, 391, 396 Great Migration, see Migration Greenberg, Cheryl, 56 Grey Street, 340–345, 347 Grgić, Ana, 104 Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 55 Griffiths, Alison, 57 Grimaud, Emmanuel, 362, 377 Gripsrud, Jostein, 35, 36 Gronow, Pekka, 371 Gross, Natan, 127 Grossman, James R., 55 Grosz, Elizabeth, 408 Guarner, José Luis, 225, 234, 235

 INDEX 

Gubern, Román, 224, 413, 416, 435 Gunckel, Colin, 80 Gunning, Tom, 402 Gustafsson, Fredrik, 148, 164 Gustafsson, Tommy, 405 Gutsche, Thelma, 339, 341, 350n10 Guzek, Mariusz, 128 Guzowski, Piotr, 128 Gwóźdź, Andrzej, 127 H Hagener, Malte, 402, 404, 408, 411n4, 413, 416, 424, 455 The Hague, 193, 307–326 Hake, Sabine, 385 Haltof, Marek, 127 Hames, Peter, 103 Hanchard, Matthew, 11 Hansen, Miriam, 53 Hantrais, Linda, 178 Hanzlík, Jan, 103 Haraway, Donna, 402, 408 Harding, Sandra, 448 Harlem, 12, 53–68 Harvey, David, 405 Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard, 1–3, 6, 308 Havelka, Jiří, 319n19, 324, 325 Hayward, Susan, 89 Hayworth, Rita, 223, 224 Hedling, Erik, 148 Heimann, Thomas, 199, 200, 205, 211 Hendrykowska, Małgorzata, 127 Hendrykowski, Marek, 127 Hesse-Bibber, Sharlene, 447 Heylen, Georges, 242, 245–248, 255, 256 Higbee, Will, 403, 404, 450 High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952), 91 Higson, Andrew, 196, 403 Hirdman, Yvonne, 149, 151–153 Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959), 232, 234 Historiography, 127, 150, 404, 431, 433, 436n16, 439, 439n21 History economic history, 1, 127 micro history, 407

473

oral history, 11, 13, 36–38, 46, 91, 96, 102, 150, 264, 265, 267, 270, 273, 277, 339, 450 social history, 55, 151 Hitlerjunge Quex (Our Flags Lead Us Forward, Hans Steinhoff, 1933), 390 Hjort, Mette, 403 Hobson, Valerie, 94 Höijer, Birgitta, 151, 153, 154, 169 Holistic, 449, 451, 459 Hollywood, 12, 74–77, 80, 81, 81n4, 83, 83n7, 84, 87–89, 91, 93, 94, 96, 102–105, 111, 112, 153, 210, 241, 258, 259, 274, 295–297, 338, 352, 355, 386, 388, 390, 414, 416, 425, 429, 434, 439 Hooks, bell, 59 Horak, Laura, 128 Hotel Sahara (Ken Annakin, 1951), 94 Howard, Trevor, 94 Hoyt, Eric, 405, 425 Huggett, Nancy, 50 Hughes, Stephen, 407n2 Hull, David, 390 Hussars of Death, The (Ritt in die Freiheit, Karl Hartl, 1937), 395 Huyssen, Andreas, 450 Hyman, Laura, 167 I An Ideal Husband (Alexander Korda, 1947), 84 Identity cultural, 26, 28, 30, 368 formation, 335, 451, 458, 460 negotiation, 454 Ideology, 44, 193, 196, 200, 210, 283, 284, 293, 363, 367, 385, 387, 394, 402, 435n13 Iglesias, Luis Alberto, 83 Ikoff, Ventsislav, 334, 409, 410 Ilshammar, Lars, 148 India, 338, 339, 341–345, 348, 351, 353, 354 Interdisciplinarity, 3, 106, 405 Intermediaries, 333, 334, 359–361, 375–377

474 

INDEX

Internet, 13, 104, 108, 111, 119, 120, 174, 180, 181, 185, 406 Interviews, 11, 17, 25, 28, 30, 36–38, 40, 46, 47, 62, 96, 102, 103, 150, 154, 160, 167, 176, 178, 191, 192, 218n21, 223, 242n1, 263, 265, 266, 273, 335, 413, 445, 446, 446n1, 448–451, 453, 453n7, 460 Irandoust, Manuchehr, 105, 105n3 Iriye, Akira, 401 Italy, 4, 76, 95, 129, 192, 263, 271, 311, 311n5, 324, 395, 455n10, 459 ¡Volga, Volga! (Stjenka Rasin, Alexandre Volkoff, 1936), 395 J Jackson, Melveen Beth, 343 Jacksonville, 12, 53–68 Jagarnath, Vashna, 339, 345, 347 James, Paul, 408 Järviluoma, Helmi, 271 Jason, Alexander, 290, 296 Jason, Gary, 387 Jeanpierre, Laurent, 361 Jernudd, Åsa, 13, 150, 150n1, 169, 242 Jews, 126, 127, 138, 140, 141, 283, 316, 317, 367, 369, 371, 392, 395 Jewsiewicki, Władysław, 127, 128, 130, 133, 137, 325 Jim Crow, 53, 55, 58–61, 64, 65 Joan of Arc (Das Mädchen Johanna, Gustav Ucicky, 1935), 393 Jockers, Matthew L., 425 Jönsson, Mats, 148 Jontes, Dejan, 49 Jordan, Günter, 222 Joseph, James A., 54 Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer, 1961), 234 Jud Süß (Jud Süss, Veit Harlan, 1940), 370, 398 Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim, François Truffaut, 1962), 232 Jullier, Laurent, 424, 455 Jungle Raiders (Lesley Seleander, 1945), 89 Juvan, Marko, 406

K Kääpä, Pietari, 405 Kaelble, Hartmut, 1 Kaliński, Janusz, 127, 129 Karnasiewicz, Jerzy Aleksander, 201 Kašpar, Lukáš, 318 Kauber, Sten, 104 Kaya, Dilek, 338 Kayhan Müldür, Sezen, 104 Kehoe, Timothy J., 78 Keightley, Emily, 449 Kelly, Grace, 226 Kelson, John F., 385 Kendi, Ibram X., 68 Kenez, Peter, 363n5 Kepley, Vance, 365 Keridis, Dimitris, 367 Kerins, Mark, 264 Kersffeld, Daniel, 396 Kersten, Heinz, 227n3 Khan, Sultan, 347 Kiesling, John Brady, 367 Kim, Annabel L., 449n3 King Solomon’s Mines (Bennett & Marton, 1950), 259 Kisjes, Ivan, 192, 243 Kitzmann, Andreas, 460 Klejsa, Konrad, 191 Klenotic, Jeffrey, 4, 128, 132 Klimeš, Ivan, 325 Knight, Arthur, 407n2 Kocka, Jürgen, 1–3, 6, 308 Kofman, Eleonore, 448 Kołodyński, A., 199 Konecny, Brandon, 104 Konets Sankt-Peterburga (The End of St. Petersburg, Vsevolod Pudovkin & Mikhail Doller, 1927), 436 Koskinen, Maaret, 148 Kostov, K., 102 Kracauer, Sigfried, 385, 390 Krakow, 193, 307–326 Kreimeier, Klaus, 383 Kriger, Clara, 385, 452 Krzeczkowska, Eugenia, 201 Kuhn, Annette, 36, 149, 155, 176, 263, 265, 446, 450–452 Kumar, Ranjit, 351 Kunakhovich, Kyrill, 196, 198, 211 Kyloušek, Jakub, 315

 INDEX 

L Laachir, Karima, 406 Labanyi, Jo, 225, 226 La Corona Negra (Black Crown, Luis Saslavsky, 1951), 94 Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica, 1948), 224, 415, 456 Lagerkvist, Amanda, 160 Lamarque, Libertad, 386 Lamberti, Edward, 174 Landau, Zbigniew, 127 Langellier, Kristin M., 49 Langhamer, Claire, 149, 154, 168, 369n15 La noche del sábado (Saturday Night, Rafael Gil, 1950), 94 La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961), 234 L’Argent (Money, Marcel L’Herbier, 1928), 436 Larkin, Brian, 363n4 Larsson, Mariah, 147, 148 La Strada (The Road, Federico Fellini, 1954), 456 Latham, James, 57 Latham, Sean, 425 Latin America, 4, 12, 73, 75, 93, 334, 383–398, 402, 412, 414, 417, 455, 459 Latour, Bruno, 408, 411 L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960), 232, 234 Le Gras, Gwénaëlle, 424 Lee, Lauranett L., 54 Lefebvre, Henri, 266, 269, 275 Leisure, 12, 20, 55, 57, 67, 148, 151, 152, 154–156, 159, 166, 168, 173, 189, 240, 274, 321, 347, 459 Lema Mosca, Álvaro, 433, 436n16 Les Misérables (Raymond Bernard, 1934), 213 Let Love Live (Yahya al-hubb, Muhammad Karim, 1938), 373 Leventopoulos, Mélisande, 333, 334, 368n11, 375n28 Leveratto, Jean-Marc, 377, 424, 455 Levine, Philippa, 2, 3, 6, 7 Levinson, André, 431

475

Le voyage imaginaire (The Imaginary Voyage, René Clair, 1926), 436 Lewin, Moshé, 364n8 Lim, Song Hwee, 403, 404, 450 Limite (Mario Peixoto, 1931), 437 Liontou, Nefeli, 333, 334, 375n28 Liverpool City Council, 15, 16, 23 Livingstone, Sonia, 2 Lizé, Wenceslas, 361 Loist, Skadi, 405 Longue durée, 404, 407, 414, 425, 426 Lotze, Kathleen, 191, 192, 242, 247–249 Lozano, José Carlos, 12, 76, 84, 91 Lozev, Emil, 102 Lubelski, Tadeusz, 127 Luckett, Moya, 55 Luna, Milton, 391 Lundmark, Mats, 150, 150n1, 242 M MacDonald, Megan C., 448 MacDonald, Richard Lowell, 22, 30 Macedo, L. Felipe, 412, 412n7 Macedo, Lynn, 339, 353 Mackenzie, Scott, 403 Madajczyk, Czesław, 320n22 Madianou, Mirca, 450 Magazine cultural, 221, 230, 233, 431, 435, 438, 439 film (see Film magazines) hybrid, 439 literary, 430 Magdeburg, 191, 195–218 Maghreb, 359–378 Maingard, Jacqueline, 338, 339 Making of a King, The (Der alte und der junge König, Hans Steinhoff, 1934), 389 Maltby, Richard, 3, 17, 35, 36, 54, 106, 128, 150, 155, 196, 384, 407n2, 425 Mamlouk, Khélil, 373 Mani, B. Venkat, 406 Manning, Sam, 338 Mapping, 128, 132, 133, 138–141, 240, 405

476 

INDEX

Marache, Corinne, 241 Marcus, Joseph, 127, 133, 141 Mardin, Şerif A., 37, 49 Mariscal, Ana, 94 Marks, Carole, 55, 67 Marks, Laura U., 264 Martin, Benjamin George, 308, 310 Martin, Terry, 363 Martín-Barbero, Jesús, 449 Martínez Carril, Manuel, 430, 437 Martínez de la Rosa, Enrique, 74, 77 Massey, Doreen, 147 Mästerdetektiven Blomkvist (Master Detective Blomkvist, Rolf Husberg, 1947), 156n2, 169 Mästerdetektiven och Rasmus (The Master Detective and Rasmus, Rolf Husberg, 1953), 156n2, 169 Mata, María Cristina, 449 Mateu, Cristina, 386 Matinée, see Exhibition Mattoscio, Mara, 448 Mayo, Nathan, 62 Mazower, Mark, 367n10 Mazur, Daria, 127 McCammack, Brian, 55, 67 Media consumption, 106, 153–154, 449 Meer, Fatima, 345, 346 Meers, Philippe, 3, 4, 36, 54, 102, 149, 192, 222, 236, 240, 247, 362, 384, 385, 397, 445, 447 Mehlhorn, Ludwig, 198 Memmi, Albert, 373 Memory cinema, 6, 11, 13, 35–50, 147–169, 192, 445–460 matinée, 155–159, 166–168, 268 migrant, 335, 445, 446, 448, 450, 451, 459, 460 sound, 5, 192, 263, 265–277 transnational cinema, 335, 445–460 Menasche, Albert, 370 Merello, Tita, 386 Merrington, Peter, 11, 18, 23, 104, 112 Merseyside Film Institute, 21–22, 30 Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927), 432

Mexico, 4, 12, 73–78, 80, 81, 81n3, 83, 87, 89, 91, 93, 94, 97, 386, 388, 393, 412–414, 416, 446n1, 447n2, 457, 459 Meylaerts, Reine, 401, 408, 424 Meza, Felipe, 78 Michel, Jean-Baptiste, 425 Microhistories, see History Middell, Matthias, 401, 403 Migration rural, 75, 78, 88 studies, 446, 448, 449, 451 Mikonis, Anna, 127 Milan, 335, 446, 446n1, 452–454, 453n7, 456, 457, 459, 460 Miliani, Hadj, 372 Minard, Philippe, 361 Mingant, Nolwenn, 360n2 Mino Gracia, Fernando, 74 Mishra, Vijay, 339 Miskell, Peter, 176 Missero, Dalila, 335, 449n4 Modernity, 11, 35–50, 57, 75, 148, 149, 225, 227, 334, 361, 363, 365, 390, 405n1, 458, 459 Mogambo (John Ford, 1953), 226 Moguillansky, Marina, 334, 387, 398 Mohn, Volker, 313 Moix, Terenci, 225 Moldova, 104 Molho, Rena, 367 Monocentrism, 445, 460 Monsiváis, Carlos, 75 Monterde, José Enrique, 229 Montero, Julio, 225 Montevideo, 335, 409, 424, 424n2, 428, 430, 433, 435, 436, 437n18, 438, 439 Moore, Paul S., 43, 132 Moorti, Sujata, 338 Mora, Carl J., 74, 83n7 Moretti, Franco, 403, 425 Morin, Edgar, 361 Mörner, Cecilia, 148 Morokvasic, Mirjana, 448 Multiplex, 458–459 Multisensory experience, see Experience Mulvey, Laura, 455

 INDEX 

N Naar, Devin E., 367 Na arene tsirka (In the Circus Arena, Leonid Varlamov, 1951), 213 Naficy, Hamid, 403 Naumann, Katja, 401 Navitski, Rielle, 402, 411n3, 412, 415, 455n9 Navratil, A., 233 Nazario, Luiz, 384n1 Neal, Patricia, 89 Negrete, Alfredo, 395 Negrete, Jorge, 74, 94, 96 Negus, Keith, 361 Nelson, Richard Alan, 67 Neorealism, 229, 410, 414, 415 Netherlands, 5, 132, 192, 193, 240, 242, 242n1, 243, 248, 296, 297, 308, 313, 317, 320–322, 325 New Cinema History (NCH), 1–7, 11, 17, 35, 36, 54, 106, 128, 147, 173, 192, 222, 235, 239–241, 265, 333, 338, 362, 384–386, 405, 407, 407n2, 425, 445, 447, 447n2, 449, 450, 459 Newman, David, 177 Newman, Karen, 22 Newman, Kathleen E., 403, 450 Newspapers, 46, 74, 74n1, 78, 81, 82, 82n6, 88, 163, 202, 204, 229, 242n1, 243, 259, 276, 309, 342, 386, 387, 392, 393, 396–398, 413 Niranjana, Tejaswini, 353 Nixon, Rob, 346 Noble, Andrea, 74, 75, 81, 84, 88 Noise, 149, 156, 192, 264, 267–273, 275–277 Noordegraaf, Julia, 128, 192, 243, 244, 309, 425 Nora, Pierre, 240 Nordmark, Dag, 153 Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, Alain Resnais, 1955), 232 Núñez del Arco Proaño, Francisco, 394 Núñez Seixas, Xosé M., 436n15 Nygaard, Bertel, 165

477

O Obžalovaný (Accused, Ján Kadár & Elmar Klos, 1964), 233 Ocampo, Victoria, 413n8, 433, 434, 439 O’Keeffe, Linda, 266 Okręgowe Zarza ̨dy Kin (OZKs, District Boards of Cinemas), 200 Oktyabr (October. Ten Days that Shook the World, Sergei Eisenstein & Grigoriy Aleksandrov, 1927), 436 Oliver, Jos, 235 Open-air, 40, 61, 104, 120, 242 Oral history, see History, oral history Orsetti, Luis, 413 Ortiz, Paul, 61, 63–65, 67 Ostrowska, Dorota, 196 P Pafort-Overduin, Clara, 5, 193, 240, 241, 259, 323, 324 Panicherski, I., 102 Papadimitriou, Lydia, 104 Paranaguá, Antonio Paulo, 388, 414–416 Parla, Taha, 37 Patriots (Patrioten, Karl Ritter, 1937), 395 Patzner, F., 228 Paxman, Andrew, 74–78, 81, 83, 87 Paz, María Antonia, 225 Peck, Gregory, 94 Peirano, María Paz, 453n8 Pennetier, Claude, 364n7 People’s Republic of Poland (PRP), 127, 191, 195–200, 198n2, 202, 208, 210, 215, 217, 281, 283–285, 288, 293, 299–300 Pereda Valdés, Ildefonso, 430, 436, 437, 437n19 Peredo Castro, Francisco, 389 Periodicals, 56, 59, 222, 223, 231, 235, 334, 423–440 Persson, Leif G. W., 269 Petrychyn, Jonathan, 447 Phantom Rider, The (Spencer Gordon Bennet & Fred C. Brannon, 1946), 89 Piatelli, Deborah, 447

478 

INDEX

Pickrell, Kristen, 63 Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965), 225 Piñol, Marta, 229 Pippi Långstrump (Pippi Longstocking¸ Per Gunvall, 1949), 156n3 Plamper, Jan, 198 Pleasure, 104, 115, 116, 165, 167, 168, 187, 215, 450, 456 Pociag (Night Train, Jerzy Kawalerovicz, 1959), 228 Podestá, José María, 334, 423, 424, 424n2, 430–436, 436n16, 438, 439 Poland, 103, 115, 125–127, 129, 130, 132–135, 140–142, 193, 195–218, 298, 308, 309n1, 312, 314, 320, 320n22, 325, 390 Pollard, Tom, 177 Poniat, Radosław, 128 Poppe, Nicolas, 402, 412, 415, 455n9 POPSTAT, 192, 193, 282, 284, 285, 290–293, 290n6, 290n7, 290n8, 295, 297, 298, 300, 301, 309, 310, 315 Portugal, 334, 402, 414 Porubčanská, Terézia, 128, 193, 196 Pour le mérite (Karl Ritter, 1938), 391 Pozner, Valérie, 365 Premiere, see Exhibition Presence, Steve, 17, 21 Presley, Elvis, 149, 165 Privatisation, 111, 349, 458 Programming, see Exhibition Propaganda, 191, 196, 213, 233, 311, 313, 334, 365, 372, 376, 384–391, 393–398 Pryt, Karina, 13, 127, 193 Pudal, Bernard, 364n7 Pušnik, Maruša, 47–49 Putintseva, Alexandra Petrovna, 363–367, 375–377 Q Queer, 405, 447 Questionnaires, 106–110, 109n8, 110n10, 114–120, 179, 180, 184, 185

Qué te ha dado esa mujer (What Has That Woman Done to You?, Ismael Rodriguez, 1951), 87 Qvist, Per Olov, 148, 153 R Rabbit Is Me, The (Kurt Maetzig, 1965), 233 Rabin, Lisa M., 242 Racy, Ali Jihad, 371, 372 Radio, 77, 149, 151, 153, 164, 165, 169, 371, 372, 387, 394, 431, 433 Ragin, Charles C., 1 Ramcharitar, Raymond, 354 Ramirez Berg, Charles, 74 Ramos Arenas, Fernando, 191, 227, 228n5, 230 Randall, William Lowell, 49 Randeria, Shalini, 126 Ratings, 109n8, 114, 174, 175, 177–179, 181–188, 293 Ravazzoli, Elisa, 133 Reception, 3, 4, 6, 12, 17, 36, 102, 169, 174, 191, 217, 222, 223, 227, 229, 231n6, 235, 361, 377, 390, 424, 458 Reception research, see Audiences Regester, Charlene, 53, 54 Regulations, 89, 121, 129, 175–177, 193, 196, 227, 281, 307–326, 392, 440 Religion, 39, 49, 53, 186 Rentschler, Erik, 385, 387 Rich, B. Ruby, 405 Richardson, Peter, 339 Rigney, Ann, 450 Rioufreyt, Thibaut, 361 Ritt in die Freiheit (Karl Hartl, 1937), 390, 395 Rivelles, Amparo, 94, 96 Robertson, Stephen, 57 Roche, David, 36 Rocklin, Alex, 353 Rodríguez Larreta, Eduardo, 429, 429n9 Roig-Sanz, Diana, 401, 402, 408, 424 Roman, Ruth, 89 Rosas Mantecón, Ana, 452, 456, 458

 INDEX 

Rosay, Françoise, 94 Ross, Corey, 128, 133 Ross, Steven J., 53 Rossellini, Roberto, 235 Rosza, Irene, 411n3 Rotation (Wolfgang Staudte, 1949), 213n18 Rotger, Neus, 401, 402, 423 Rothberg, Michael, 450 Rothenbuhler, Eric W., 48, 49 Rotsztat-Miastecki, I., 201 Roueff, Olivier, 361 Rowden, Terry, 403 Royal Romance (Die kleine und die große Liebe, Josef von Báky, 1938), 395 Ruiz Butrón, Eduardo Angel, 227n4 Run, see Distribution Ruppin, Dafna, 44, 338 Russian, 104, 129, 133–135, 213n17, 363, 364, 394, 436 S Sadoul, Georges, 437n17 Salgado Porcayo, Raymundo, 83 Sampson, Henry T., 66 Samson and Delilah (Cecil B. DeMille, 1949), 89 Samuelson, Paul Anthony, 282 ̇ Şanlier Yüksel, Özgür Ilke, 104 Saraband for Dead Lovers (Basil Dearden, 1948), 94 Sassen, Saskia, 239, 241 Saunier, Pierre-Yves, 401 Saura, Carlos, 231 Scales, Rebecca P., 374 Schafer, Raymond Murray, 263–266, 269, 274 Schiweck, Ingo, 314, 317, 320 Schmidt-Catran, Alexander W., 7 Scholes, Robert, 425 Schoonover, Karl, 405 Schrøder, Kim Christian, 106 Schroeder Rodríguez, Paul A., 449 Screen culture, 81n3, 82n5, 91, 97 Seating capacity, 112, 115, 129–131, 192, 214, 216, 244, 248, 254, 258, 259, 309, 317, 345

479

Sedgwick, John, 5, 128, 192, 193, 240, 243n2, 282, 282n1, 283, 297, 297n12, 309 Seg, Dora, 368 Segregation, 53, 54, 57, 59, 67, 173, 317, 338, 346–348, 351, 370, 458 Segura, Benico, 367–371, 375–377, 375n28 Sel, Susana, 434 Sellier, Geneviève, 424, 455n10 Semilski, Jerzy, 319 Serna, Laura Isabel, 75, 80n2 Sharma, Tashmica, 343–345 Shohat, Ella, 403 Short, Kenneth R. M., 385 Show Boat (George Sidney, 1951), 91 Siberia (Soviet), 6, 333, 359–378 Sibirska Ledi Magbet (Siberian Lady Macbeth, Andrzej Wajda, 1962), 228 Siekierski, Stanisław, 204 Silber, Marcos, 127 Silence, 228, 267, 270, 271, 276 Silent cinema, 12, 53, 176, 265, 413 Silveira, Germán, 424, 430, 433, 436n16, 438 Sinden, Donald, 226 Singer, Ben, 43 Sitkiewicz, Paweł, 127 Sitruk-Benacin, Marianne, 371 Si yo fuera Diputado (If I Were a Representative, Miguel Delgado, 1952), 87 Sjöholm, Carina, 148, 149, 166, 169, 269 Skaff, Sheila, 127 Skopal, Pavel, 193, 196, 206, 211, 309, 312, 319 Smets, Kevin, 450 Smith, Peter Dunbaugh, 63, 66, 67 Smoodin, Eric, 240 Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries, 1957), 233 Snelson, Tim, 242 Snickars, Pelle, 148 Snows of Kilimanjaro, The (Henry King, 1951), 91 Sobchack, Vivian, 264 Söderbergh Widding, Astrid, 405

480 

INDEX

Soja, Edward W., 405 Soldier Blue (Ralph Nelson, 1970), 162 Sommarlek (Summer Interlude, 1951), 228 Sommarnattens leende (Smiles of a summer night, 1955), 228 Song of the Heart, The (Unshuda al-Fu‘ad, Mario Volpe, 1932), 373 Sound and relationship with the screen, 192, 264, 271–275, 277 and social interaction, 47, 105n3, 264, 267–271, 276, 277, 360 and voice of authority, 192, 264, 275–277 Sound films, 343, 386, 410, 412, 413, 436 Sous les toits de Paris (Under the Roofs of Paris, René Clair, 1930), 436 South Africa, 6, 333, 337–355, 447n2 Space spatial analysis, 4, 128, 132–139 spatial data, 142 spatial identity, 147 Spain, 4, 12, 73, 93, 95, 96, 221–236, 311, 311n5, 334, 386, 389, 402, 409, 413, 424, 430, 432, 434, 435, 435n13, 435n14 Spectator, 38, 45, 46, 64, 102, 225, 226, 227n3, 232–235, 272, 277, 360, 361, 365, 370, 371, 373, 375–377, 430, 456 Spectatorship, 454, 455n9 Spiker, Jürgen, 313 Stahr, Gerhard, 312 Stalinisation, 191, 196, 205, 210, 216, 217 Stam, Robert, 403, 404 Stamp, Shelley, 53 Star, 12, 74, 75, 83, 91, 94, 149, 165, 168, 173, 223, 250, 266, 309, 346, 386, 390, 429, 430 Staroye i novoye (The General Line, Sergei Eisenstein & Grigoriy Aleksandrov, 1929), 436 Statulov, Deyan, 111, 121 Stead, Lisa, 53 Steele, Tommy, 149, 164, 165 Steene, Birgitta, 148

Steger, Manfred B., 408 Steinmetz, George, 362, 377 Stevens, Robert P., 75 Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma, 54, 55, 57 Stiehler, Hans-Jörg, 293 Stjernholm, Emil, 148 Stokes, Melvyn, 35, 36 Stolen Face (Terence Fisher, 1952), 94 Stott, Rosemary, 200n3, 211, 211n14 Stradomski, Wiesław, 127 Stroiński, Maciej, 127 Studer, Brigitte, 364 Stuempfle, Stephen, 339 Suárez-Mansilla, Pablo, 334 Sumpf, Alexandre, 365 Sundholm, John, 148 Sunkel, Guillermo, 449 Sweden, 13, 105, 147–169, 192, 263, 269, 271, 311n5, 394 Świdziński, Wojciech, 127 Szarota, Tomasz, 319, 320n21 T Talavera, Julio, 114, 117 Tally, Robert T., 405 Tango ferozL la leyenda de Tanguito (Wild Tango, Marcelo Piñeyro, 1993), 456 Tararira (Benjamin Fondane, 1936), 413n8 Tashakkori, Abbas, 106 Tears of Love (Muhammad Karim, 1935), 374 Teatro Apolo (Rafael Gil, 1950), 94 Teddlie, Charles, 106 Tegel, Susan, 391 Television, 23, 38, 74, 111, 118, 119, 148, 151, 153, 154, 166, 169, 181, 347, 353, 453, 457 Teresa, Carrie, 59 Thanouli, Eleftheria, 403 Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA), 65, 66 Thessaloniki, 359–378 Thissen, Judith, 53, 55, 149, 241, 242, 362 Thompson, Elizabeth, 373 Thompson, Emily Ann, 263

 INDEX 

Thompson, John B., 47 Thompson, Paul, 37 Thys, Marianne, 325 Ticket, see Exhibition Tierney, Dolores, 449 Tiger Woman, The (Spencer Gordon Bennet & Wallace Grissell, 1944), 89 Titoreva, Galina, 367 Toeplitz, Jerzy, 127, 319 Tomanas, Kostas, 369 Tomaszewski, Jerzy, 127 Tonkiss, Fran, 264 Toppin, Monique, 13, 173 Torello, Georgina, 430, 431 Torres, Augusto M., 227, 228 Translation, 267, 425, 437, 439, 454–458 Transnational, 2, 96, 193, 196, 236, 307, 335, 360, 362, 374, 377, 402–406, 409, 411n4, 414, 416, 423, 435, 435n13, 440, 445–460 Treveri Gennari, Daniela, 5, 36, 133, 149, 155, 167, 192, 222, 240–242, 272, 273, 450, 455n10 Triangulating, 102 Trinidad, 6, 333, 337–355 Triumph of the Will, The (Triumph des Willens, Leni Riefenstahl, 1935), 393n7 Trotman, David V., 351, 353 Truffaut, François, 229, 232 Trujillo, Gabriel, 77 Tsirk (The Circus, Grigoriy Aleksandrov, 1936), 213 Tubau, Ivan, 232 Tuñón, Julia, 75 Turkey, 11, 35–50, 104, 447n2 U Un chien andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1929), 413, 434 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 196, 198, 205, 208, 210, 211, 215–217, 313, 317n14, 363, 364, 366

481

United Kingdom, 4, 16–19, 21, 22, 32, 94–96, 104, 105, 175, 177, 188, 197n1, 296, 297n11, 338 United States, 1, 4, 12, 35, 53, 68, 73–76, 79–80, 80n2, 83–93, 95, 96, 111, 112, 129, 130, 132, 153, 177, 178, 188, 196, 197n1, 210, 217, 225, 265, 277, 297, 297n11, 299, 322, 347, 385, 387, 388, 391, 395, 398, 402, 403, 435n14, 447n2, 459 Urban, 4, 11, 12, 16, 17, 21, 23, 25, 29, 30, 32, 36, 40–43, 46, 49, 54, 57, 62, 67, 75, 77, 78, 81, 87, 88, 96, 102, 104, 113, 118, 120, 132–138, 140, 141, 149, 151, 160, 161, 166, 239–259, 263, 269, 350, 353, 355, 365, 373, 376, 395n8, 397, 450, 452–454, 458–460 Urbanisation, 13, 78, 111, 133, 141, 149, 152, 153 Urbański, Krzysztof, 127 Uruguay, 334, 396, 414, 415, 424, 424n1, 424n2, 425, 428, 429n8, 430–434, 437–439, 446n1 Ushers, 54, 58, 192, 263, 267, 275, 276 V Vahed, Goolam H., 343, 345 Van Belle, Jono, 13, 148 van Bueren, Richard, 242n1, 246, 252, 254, 257 Van de Vijver, Lies, 104, 112, 223, 425 van Dijk, Hanneke, 242n1 van Gelder, Henk, 314, 325 van Oort, Thunnis, 5, 192, 193, 240–243, 248, 309, 338, 362, 403, 405n1, 447 van Steen, Oliver, 245 Vande Winkel, Roel, 193, 308, 310–312, 315, 315n11, 317n16, 324, 383, 384n1, 393, 393n7 Vaquerizo García, Luis, 222 Verhoeven, Deb, 128, 407 Verräter (Karl Richter, 1936), 390 Vertovec, Steven, 446, 450, 453n7 Vesterlund, Per, 148

482 

INDEX

Vidal, Rosario, 76 Viola, Fernando, 434 Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, 1961), 234 Vitali, Valentina, 403 Vivre sa Vie (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962), 228 von Oppen, Achim, 406 W Wainwright, Oliver, 15 Wajda, Andrzej, 228, 233 Wallenberg, Louise, 148 Wallers, Christo, 21, 22 Walton, Lester A., 56–58 Ward, Meredith C., 264, 265, 269, 270, 276 Warszawska premiera (The Warsaw Debut, Jana Rybkowski, 1950), 213 Wasserman, Stanley, 407 Weckel, Ulrike, 223 Welch, David, 308, 311, 315n11, 383, 384n1, 393n7, 394, 397 Wenz, Clara, 374 Werner, Michael, 361n3, 362, 406, 408, 425 Wessels, Bridgette, 11, 17, 24 West Side Story (Robert Wise, 1961), 234 Whitehead, Jessica Leonora, 5, 240, 338, 362, 403 Wiedemann, Dieter, 287, 293 Wildiers, Clement, 246 Willemen, Paul, 403

Williams, Linda, 264 Williams, Tami, 404, 408 Wilson, Rob, 403 Witte, Karsten, 383 Włodek, Roman, 127 Wolf, Nikolaus, 127, 130 Word of mouth, 105n3, 120 Work, Monroe N., 67 Wrightson, Kendall, 263 Y Yo Acuso (Ich klage an, Wolfgang Liebeneiner, 1941), 393n7 Youth, 13, 35, 40, 101n1, 148, 149, 151–155, 159–169, 176, 215n20, 412 Z Zajiček, Edward, 127, 128, 130, 132, 138 Zakazane piosenki (Forbidden Songs, Leonard Buczkowski, 1947), 213 Zaremba, Marcin, 127 Zavala, Lauro, 74 Zhou, Min, 269 Zimmermann, Bénédicte, 361n3, 362, 406, 425 Zimmermann, Clemens, 149, 241 ̇ Zołnierz zwycięstwa (Soldier of Victory, Wanda Jakubowska, 1953), 213 Żytyniec, Rafał, 197