When I was designing the first website for the Media History Digital Library, I asked Laura Isabel Serna — who is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts — if there were any trade papers or fan magazines that she would love to see digitized. She suggested the Spanish-language magazine Cine-Mundial, which was published out of New York by the same publisher as Moving Picture World. Laura had used Cine-Mundial extensively in her dissertation and book research David Pierce was familiar with Cine-Mundial, but I wasn’t, and it sure sounded interesting.
Now, roughly two years later, we can all see and appreciate this unique magazine for ourselves. Thanks to the the Library of Congress Packard Center for AudioVisual Conservation, you can now read and search 30 years of Cine-Mundial (1916-1946) at the Media History Digital Library and Lantern.
Naturally, when we wanted someone to write a description of the magazine for the MHDL site, we asked Laura first. Fortunately for us all, she said yes. On the website, you’ll find her insightful description, which she also translated into Spanish.
Laura also graciously agreed to participate in a Q & A for the MHDL’s blog. In what follows, I talk with Laura about Cine-Mundial, her teaching, research methods, and her new book, Making Cinelandia: American Films and Mexican Film Culture before the Golden Age.
Hoyt: Can you tell us a bit about your forthcoming book Making Cinelandia: American Films and Mexican Film Culture before the Golden Age (Duke University Press, 2014) and how you used Cine-Mundial in the course of your research?
Serna: Making Cinelandia tries to answer the question of how American films influenced Mexican film culture in the 1920s. Then, like today, American films dominated Mexican screens from the tip of the Yucatecan peninsula to both the northern and southern borders. Instead of looking at production—a problematic endeavor given that very few Mexican films from this period are extant—I look closely at exhibition, distribution, and what Yuri Tsivian has called “cultural reception” or the discourse on cinema. The central argument of the book, that Mexican audiences on both sides of the border used their encounters with American cinema to create a national film culture before the emergence of a national film industry and a national cinematic imaginary, emerges from an interest in the transnational circulation of film and film culture. I was interested in parsing cinema’s relationship to Mexican nationalism but wanted to disrupt narratives of Mexican film history that focus exclusively on national production.
Cine-Mundial, which contains reports from national correspondents from across the Spanish-speaking world including Mexico was critical in allowing me to reconstruct how American films became dominant in a market that had previously been the domain of European producers. Those reports offered strong evidence of the growing influence of American films in Mexico in the late teens and early 1920s. In broad terms, Cine-Mundial, demonstrates the ways that early classical Hollywood cinema was positioned as a cosmopolitan cultural formation that could travel across borders but was consistently localized.
Hoyt:Can you share a page or two from the magazine that highlights what you find especially interesting about Cine-Mundial?
Serna: The editorial below from the inaugural issue (January 1916) lays out the premise of the publication by pointing to commerce as a means of generating hemispheric connections, highlighting the growing popularity of American films in Latin America and Spain, and reaffirming their belief in cinema’s critical role in modern society. The editors declare that they “will try by every means to be useful to the three large branches of the cinema industry: producers, distributors (renters they say specifically), and exhibitors.” The final paragraph invites readers to participate in a dialogue in order to make the publication as useful as possible.
This next page, from the March 1923 issue, features photographs submitted by C-M’s sales agents abroad for a contest depicting the ways in which they promoted the publication. The winners of the contest, Adolfo Quesada and sons from Mexico City, are lauded for their entry , which the jury considered the “most artistic, effective, and realistic [!].” I love that these images show the publication in local contexts.
Hoyt: How would you suggest readers interpret what they read in Cine-Mundial? On the one hand, it was published out of New York by the Chalmers Company, publisher of Moving Picture World. On the other hand, as you point out, it addressed topics of particular interest to Spanish speaking markets and included letters from readers. Was this the voice of the American film industry, the voice of Spanish-language exhibitors and audiences, or some combination?
Serna: Cine-Mundial is a fascinating source in part because it represents multiple and sometimes competing interests and voices. It is not a direct translation of Moving Picture World though it was clearly conceived of as a tool for promoting the interests of U.S. film companies in Latin America and Spain. It had a separate editorial board that spoke to hemispheric concerns. In many ways it demonstrates how Latin Americans (and Spaniards) used American films to promote their own interests as entrepreneurs and cultural arbiters. It also provided a forum for Spanish-speaking fans to participate, from their historically and culturally situated positions, in a global film culture that represented modernity. The write in columns are particularly interesting as they allow us to see glimpses of what everyday people, albeit literate people, rather than the cultural elite thought about the films they saw and the stars they admired.
Hoyt: You teach USC’s survey course on the History of Global Cinema to 1945. In the course, you have used technology and the MHDL collections in some really exciting and innovative ways. Can you describe the assignment you created and what students did with the MHDL content?
Serna: Part of my goal as a film historian is to teach students some very basic historical methods and familiarize them with the materials, besides films, that film historians use to write and revise the history of cinema. MHDL can, of course, be used in a very straightforward way to find information about a particular person or film, but I decided to ask students to digitally annote pages from selected fan/trade magazines from the 1920s. Each student is assigned a page and has to research and analyze its contents. Essentially they are engaging in one of the first step in any historical research project: looking closely at a source and reflecting critically on the contents.
The first year we did this the students annotated their page—which required outside research—by cutting and pasting sections into a word document. This year we asked them to use prezi to construct their annotations, which allowed them to link to images and short video clips and to make the connections they saw on the page dynamic. In the future I’d like to use a similar type of exercise in a smaller course as the lead up to a research paper that makes use of MHDL content. Here is an example of one student’s annotation prezi:
Hoyt: You began researching your book years before the MHDL came into being. On the eve of its release, thirty years worth of Cine-Mundial have been digitized and made openly available. Can you reflect generally about the differences between digital research and old research methods and what you like or dislike about each?
Serna: Ha! I sometimes think about the hours I might have saved had I been doing my research just a bit later. Digital research can be very efficient. You insert a search term into a box and in seconds you have (hopefully) a number of hits that you can look at more closely. At the same time, I think that older research methods, in my case paging through a periodical more or less from its first issue, gives one a sense of the publication in its totality that digital research can’t provide. For example, if you read over a number of years of a publication you begin to grasp the tone and what’s perhaps more important you are seeing information in context: What’s next to it? Where in the publication does it appear (towards the front, in the back with all the ads?)
What’s more, you inevitably find things you didn’t know you were looking for! I have, literally, hundreds of pages of transcribed articles and notes from Cine-Mundial. They represent many, many hours of work, but they also represent my processing of the material because I had to choose what to flip past, what to transcribe, and, because photocopying represented a significant expense, what to copy. I’d encourage students to develop hybrid methodologies that make digital research work for them without sacrificing the deep immersion of more traditional research methods. I have to discipline myself not just to accumulate pdfs or jpgs but to actually work through them so I know what I have.