Modernity at the Movies: Cinema-Going in Buenos Aires and Santiago, 1915–1945 by Camila Gatica Mizala (review)

Reviewed by:

• Modernity at the Movies: Cinema-Going in Buenos Aires and Santiago, 1915–1945 by Camila Gatica Mizala
• Cecilia Maas (bio)

Modernity at the Movies: Cinema-Going in Buenos Aires and Santiago, 1915–1945
By Camila Gatica Mizala. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023. Pp. 266.

Modernity at the Movies sheds light on a largely unexplored facet of film history: the intricacies of exhibition and audience reception. The book addresses key questions: How did early film audiences perceive the advent of this technology? How did they experience going to the cinema in the early days? How did companies build their businesses around the exhibition of movies? How did the government and civil society actors react to the content of the films? Camila Gatica Mizala skillfully reconstructs the social customs surrounding cinema-going and the interaction of early audiences with the burgeoning technology of cinema. She compellingly argues that for the inhabitants of Buenos Aires and Santiago, the act of going to the cinema was a tangible expression of modernity in their everyday lives.

The book commences with an intriguing paradox: in the early twentieth century, cinema represented both a symbol of modernity and an escape from it. Films were a beacon of the latest technical advancements and embodied modern values like universalism and cosmopolitanism. Yet, as the opening quotation poignantly observes, cinema also offered respite from the “material and moral agitation of this terrible epilepsy that is called modern life.” This dichotomy positions cinema as an ideal lens through which to explore the experience of modernity in Latin American urban settings.

Mizala engages with a wide range of scholarly literature to define modernity. She intersects perspectives that highlight the subjective and experiential dimensions of modernity, as seen in the works of Marshall Berman, Reinhardt Koselleck, and Juan Sebastián Ospina León, with those viewing it as an elusive aspiration, as articulated by Nicola Miller. The book insightfully employs the notion of “multiple modernities” (S. N. Eisenstadt) and probes the question of where Latin America experienced modernity (Sarah Radcliffe), thereby crafting a nuanced definition that encompasses both technological evolution and emerging lifestyles in the context of a peripheral metropolis.

Over the course of five meticulously researched chapters, Mizala reconstructs various facets of cinema-going in Buenos Aires and Santiago. She examines the architecture, design, and equipment of cinema theaters; the pricing strategies and commercial tactics that transformed film into a mass entertainment medium; the state’s efforts to regulate film through censorship and its impact on the moral compass of viewers; the social practices and the explicit and implicit behavioral norms within movie theaters; and the role of both written and spoken language in shaping the cinema-going experience. These elements collectively provide a comprehensive understanding of cinema’s role in urban Latin American life. [End Page 1012]

The book casts a spotlight on the societal perception of technology. By aligning with literature that explores how societies assimilate technological innovations, such as the works of Bernhard Rieger, Mizala showcases cinema’s evolution from a technological novelty to an esteemed art form throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Modernity at the Movies constitutes a contribution to the global history of technology as it shifts attention from the context of technical innovation to the appropriation process. It narrates the story of motion pictures with a unique twist: the protagonists are not the Parisians at the Lumière brothers’ first screenings but the inhabitants of the dynamic capital cities of a distant yet interconnected southern Latin America.

Cecilia Maas

Cecilia Maas holds a Ph.D. from the Freie Universität Berlin. Her dissertation was published as The Joy of the Modern Home: New Media and the Entertainment Market in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay (1890s–1920s) (WBG, 2022).

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