Life in rapidly urbanizing Brazil and Mexico could be both awe-inspiring and deadly violent. Resonating with high levels of danger, insecurity, and inequality, a wave of silent-era films that recreated notorious crimes and other high-risk activities offered the viewing public new forms of exciting, fast-paced entertainment as well as a novel means of making meaning in their own lives.
As Rielle Navitski observes, “Photography and cinema staged quotidian experience as thrillingly modern by spectacularizing violent and socially disruptive events” (128). Journalists at the time effectively made increasingly frequent use of graphic images in the production of newspapers and magazines. At the same time, filmmakers similarly seeking to craft a sense of excitement and newness presented “a rapid flow of unpredictable, contingent and disruptive events” (15). Taken together, Navitski argues, sensationalized media in Mexico and Brazil “worked to actively construct experiences of time as distinctly modern” (15). Further, she provocatively contends, sensationalism (much like melodrama) in early cinema and print journalism proved instrumental in “mediat[ing] the affective and moral dimensions of Latin American” life (16).
Navitski's carefully crafted study dedicates nearly equal time to cinema and print journalism in Mexico and Brazil. Her first chapter on Mexico discusses the staging of public violence during the late Porfirian and Revolutionary Eras (ca. 1890–1930). Her second chapter takes up a series of “adventure melodramas” produced during the 1920s, including productions such as Gabriel García Moreno's 1926 El tren fantasma which featured romance and intrigue on the Mexico City-Veracruz railroad. She observes how these pioneering works relied on techniques successfully used in various Hollywood productions, including on-location filming, daring stunts, and special effects to portray, among other things, a highly modern sense of “fast-and-furious action.”
Sensationalized films struck a collective chord. Perhaps this was because the emerging mass visual culture that early photojournalism and silent age movies engendered provided audiences a way to use produced images (either print or moving picture) to “tell stories about themselves” as they became part of a newly emerging public sphere. Joining in the mass consumption mediation of violent and related high-risk images through cinematic reenactments and highly visual print offerings, spectators managed to forge new social relations (just as fans do today).
Indeed, some of the most popular early films in Mexico and Brazil proved to be those that offered sensationalized recreations of actual events. The 1908 Brazilian film based on a true story of robbery and murder in Rio de Janeiro titled Os estranguladores (The Stranglers) “triggered a local craze for screen adaptations of real-life crimes”(1). A decade later, production of the Mexican El automóvil gris effectively restaged actual events in the nation's capital by a notorious criminal gang with connections to high-ranking military officials. Amazingly, this work is said to have attracted more than 40,000 Mexico City viewers in only one day while also drawing significant crowds outside the capital during the film's record-breaking run.
Navitski's chapters on Brazil insightfully consider “reconstructed crime” in early film as well as related print culture, as seen in various sensationalized serial literature published in newspapers and magazines. Her final chapter shows innovation by considering related works developed outside of Brazil's two major cities.
Building successfully on the pioneering work of other film and cultural historians, the author identifies her sophisticated approach as intermedial by seeking to both “recuperate the ephemeral artifacts of popular visual culture” and distinguish her perspective from that of previous studies, which have tended to concentrate on the influence of modernism and literary production more generally (4). In this endeavor, Navitski makes a most original and welcome contribution.
