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Cinelandia (El Club Diógenes)
Cinelandia es un lugar fascinante, una ciudad falsa y surreal, con algo de circo universal y negocio del siglo; en ella se gestan y difunden las historias que harán soñar a la media humanidad civilizada. Es la capital del cine, la factoría mundial de los sueños, y a ella afluyen, de todos los rincones del planeta, hipnotizados por la fama, bellas de cuento y apuestos galanes; pero también hombres increíblemente feos, siniestros o con aspecto de malos rabiosos, gordos inverosímiles o toreros falsos: el cine está naciendo y es el rostro «quien» transmite la emoción de la historia. Es la Era Dorada del cinematógrafo cuando Ramón desembarca en Hollywood y contempla con fervor inaugural la eclosión de un arte hoy ya centenario.
Cinelandia es la crónica genial y novelada de ese descubrimiento: una visión disparatada, greguerizante, de un mundo fastuoso y exótico, con esa comicidad torrencial que caracteriza su prosa, con esa fantasía rara y caprichosa que convierte en tesoro de metáforas todo cuanto toca.
Cinelandia es la crónica genial y novelada de ese descubrimiento: una visión disparatada, greguerizante, de un mundo fastuoso y exótico, con esa comicidad torrencial que caracteriza su prosa, con esa fantasía rara y caprichosa que convierte en tesoro de metáforas todo cuanto toca.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1930
2 people are currently reading
60 people want to read
About the author
Ramón Gómez de la Serna
282 books59 followersRamón Gómez de la Serna y Puig (July 3, 1888, Madrid - January 13, 1963, Buenos Aires) was a Spanish writer, dramatist and avant-garde agitator. He was especially known for "Greguerías" - a short form of poetry that roughly corresponds to the one-liner in comedy. The Gregueria is especially able to grant a new and often humorous perspective.He strongly influenced surrealist film maker Luis Buñuel.
He was a partner of Carmen de Burgos
Gómez de la Serna published over 90 works in all literary genres. In 1933, he was invited to Buenos Aires. He stayed there during the Spanish Civil War and the following Franco regime and died there.
He was a partner of Carmen de Burgos
Gómez de la Serna published over 90 works in all literary genres. In 1933, he was invited to Buenos Aires. He stayed there during the Spanish Civil War and the following Franco regime and died there.
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October 7, 2023It’s been a long while, but I finally found a book worth writing about for my Invisible Books column: https://thecollidescope.com/2023/09/2...
I announced the concept of this segment around a year ago, and now it’s my distinct pleasure to present the first episode of The Collidescope Podcast’s Invisible Book Buddies. My dear friend Matthew Taylor Blais and I discuss the invisible book Movieland by Ramón Gómez de la Serna, translated by Ángel Flores. We touch on all things Hollywood and cinema.
Available to listen here and wherever else podcasts are streamed: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1849671/13...
You can support the show and publication by buying Movieland through the affiliate link at the Collidescope Bookshop. Plenty of other awesome lists of books to pore through as well: https://bookshop.org/shop/thecollides...
I announced the concept of this segment around a year ago, and now it’s my distinct pleasure to present the first episode of The Collidescope Podcast’s Invisible Book Buddies. My dear friend Matthew Taylor Blais and I discuss the invisible book Movieland by Ramón Gómez de la Serna, translated by Ángel Flores. We touch on all things Hollywood and cinema.
Available to listen here and wherever else podcasts are streamed: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1849671/13...
You can support the show and publication by buying Movieland through the affiliate link at the Collidescope Bookshop. Plenty of other awesome lists of books to pore through as well: https://bookshop.org/shop/thecollides...
June 14, 2022
I've been wanting to read this for what feels like forever, but is probably only about a year now; it was as simple as filling out an online Interlibrary Loan request. (Salable editions go for $400-$1,000, from a recent glance at auction sites.) I've had it in hand for about a week, but only read through it over the weekend; if you follow my Goodreads account you know that I'm constantly trying to catch up.
Ramón Gómez de la Serna is increasingly central to my literary worldview, insofar as my literary worldview has been intentionally frogmarched away from the British-American nexus in which I was raised towards a Hispanist model: the most complete European of the Silver Age of Spanish Literature (1898-1938), Ramón (there is a lovely convention in Hispanic studies that he is referred to by his first name where you would normally use the patronym) assimilated the avant-garde tendencies of the era -- German expressionism, Italian futurism, French surrealism -- into a lightweight, almost evanescent style which reminds me more of contemporary cartooning than of any purely literary comparison. His prime literary invention, the sentence-length greguería (from the Spanish for "hubbub," descended from "griego," or Greek in the "it's all Greek to me" sense) is little more than the practice of surprising metaphor or simile, the "defamiliarization" of the familiar which is the stock in trade of poets and sci-fi writers (and cartoonists). A synthesist and a humorist far more than a heroic poet forging in the smithy of his soul, etc., he was neverthless the guiding light of two distinct movements in Spanish prose during the latter half of the 1920s: the vanguardia movement of which Benjamín Jarnés was a central figure, and the humorístico movement typified by Enrique Jardiel Poncela. (In Latin America, Ramón was even more central, particularly after the Civil War, when he lived in exile in Buenos Aires, revered by the young Julio Cortázar and the middle-aged Borges.)
Movieland was the only translation of his work into English in his lifetime (he was much more welcomed by the French, where many of his works are still in print), a 1930 rendition of the 1923 Cinelandia, a fantasia (in the musical sense) on Hollywood as seen entirely from the screen or press clippings. Although conceived and written practically before Hollywood history as we understand it in the twenty-first century had gotten underway, it remains penetrating as an examination of the crosscurrents of lust, danger, death, and the endless consumption of female bodies, on screen and off, which the movies have always entailed.
It's also profoundly silly, a series of imaginative cartoons in prose, tying the Italian futurist mania for technology and speed to a Tex Avery-style passion for ludicrous exaggeration and sexual metaphor. Imagining Hollywood (or rather Movieland, a country of its own, surrounded by impassable desert and Negro shantytowns) as a jumble of set design and imitation palaces, "reminiscent of those vignettes that used to illustrate old magazines, wherein cathedrals, mosques and ancient baronial manors stood side by side," and where even the sun itself is brightened by the use of Klieg lights, Ramón paints an impossible but still recognizable picture, heightened only so that we can recognize the strangeness of the reality.
It's a book by a European in 1923: it's racist as hell, with chapters devoted to Japanese, Black, and Jewish members of the film colony. But the satire, some of which is definitely supposed to be aimed at the white Christian majority, doesn't really come off; when he shifts to a theme he knows something about, i.e. imitation bullfighters who prance for the screen, the satirical note rings truer.
There's no real plot. Characters appear, are followed for a time, then dropped for someone else. In typical Ramón style, it's little more than a collection of vignettes, sketches, burlesque essays, and precisely formulated similes; but once you get used to it and drop the expectation that anything will happen, he suddenly draws threads together, and something does. (Based on the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, Hollywood's original sin, but cloaked in Ramón's ironic-idealist method.) The writer I most want to compare him to, similarly entirely forgotten in English, is Jean Giraudoux (see here and here for my reviews), but if I wasn't afraid of being misunderstood (Ramón is all for modernity and against the past), I'd compare him to the similarly discursive, every-line-a-paradox, novelist-as-essayist, voluminously-interested G. K. Chesterton.
Ramón Gómez de la Serna is increasingly central to my literary worldview, insofar as my literary worldview has been intentionally frogmarched away from the British-American nexus in which I was raised towards a Hispanist model: the most complete European of the Silver Age of Spanish Literature (1898-1938), Ramón (there is a lovely convention in Hispanic studies that he is referred to by his first name where you would normally use the patronym) assimilated the avant-garde tendencies of the era -- German expressionism, Italian futurism, French surrealism -- into a lightweight, almost evanescent style which reminds me more of contemporary cartooning than of any purely literary comparison. His prime literary invention, the sentence-length greguería (from the Spanish for "hubbub," descended from "griego," or Greek in the "it's all Greek to me" sense) is little more than the practice of surprising metaphor or simile, the "defamiliarization" of the familiar which is the stock in trade of poets and sci-fi writers (and cartoonists). A synthesist and a humorist far more than a heroic poet forging in the smithy of his soul, etc., he was neverthless the guiding light of two distinct movements in Spanish prose during the latter half of the 1920s: the vanguardia movement of which Benjamín Jarnés was a central figure, and the humorístico movement typified by Enrique Jardiel Poncela. (In Latin America, Ramón was even more central, particularly after the Civil War, when he lived in exile in Buenos Aires, revered by the young Julio Cortázar and the middle-aged Borges.)
Movieland was the only translation of his work into English in his lifetime (he was much more welcomed by the French, where many of his works are still in print), a 1930 rendition of the 1923 Cinelandia, a fantasia (in the musical sense) on Hollywood as seen entirely from the screen or press clippings. Although conceived and written practically before Hollywood history as we understand it in the twenty-first century had gotten underway, it remains penetrating as an examination of the crosscurrents of lust, danger, death, and the endless consumption of female bodies, on screen and off, which the movies have always entailed.
It's also profoundly silly, a series of imaginative cartoons in prose, tying the Italian futurist mania for technology and speed to a Tex Avery-style passion for ludicrous exaggeration and sexual metaphor. Imagining Hollywood (or rather Movieland, a country of its own, surrounded by impassable desert and Negro shantytowns) as a jumble of set design and imitation palaces, "reminiscent of those vignettes that used to illustrate old magazines, wherein cathedrals, mosques and ancient baronial manors stood side by side," and where even the sun itself is brightened by the use of Klieg lights, Ramón paints an impossible but still recognizable picture, heightened only so that we can recognize the strangeness of the reality.
It's a book by a European in 1923: it's racist as hell, with chapters devoted to Japanese, Black, and Jewish members of the film colony. But the satire, some of which is definitely supposed to be aimed at the white Christian majority, doesn't really come off; when he shifts to a theme he knows something about, i.e. imitation bullfighters who prance for the screen, the satirical note rings truer.
There's no real plot. Characters appear, are followed for a time, then dropped for someone else. In typical Ramón style, it's little more than a collection of vignettes, sketches, burlesque essays, and precisely formulated similes; but once you get used to it and drop the expectation that anything will happen, he suddenly draws threads together, and something does. (Based on the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, Hollywood's original sin, but cloaked in Ramón's ironic-idealist method.) The writer I most want to compare him to, similarly entirely forgotten in English, is Jean Giraudoux (see here and here for my reviews), but if I wasn't afraid of being misunderstood (Ramón is all for modernity and against the past), I'd compare him to the similarly discursive, every-line-a-paradox, novelist-as-essayist, voluminously-interested G. K. Chesterton.
November 11, 2022
Going in, one might assume Senor Serna was an intellectual who loathed "the pictures" ...until it becomes clear only the most hopelessly devoted film buff and Hollywood gossip junkie would have enough insight and motivation to savage silent-era Tinseltown from top to bottom. Far more a Robinson Jeffers-ish epic poem than a novel, MOVIELAND is best consumed in quick daily nips over several weeks. It's kinda prescient too: who else was worried about television and predicted Virtual Reality in 1928? Kudos to Tough Poets Press for resurrecting a forgotten L.A. takedown every bit as withering as their earlier re-release of Myron Brinig's THE FLUTTER OF AN EYELID.
March 5, 2025
Ramón se marcó el objetivo de no escribir novelas buenas...pero es Ramón y es cine.
January 5, 2022
Well, I read this in the new Tough Poets edition. It is appealingly avant-garde and ahead of its time, but it's plotless and not necessarily a book I loved in itself. Super interesting, though.
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July 31, 2022Review TK
January 17, 2017
Kniha o tom, že podstatné je zdání, nikoliv realita; že důležité jsou pouze vnější věci, něco jako duše není potřeba; že vše je pomíjivé a každý má jen svých patnáct minut slávy a pak konec. Kniha z doby, kdy film byl němý a jediné, na čem záleželo byl výraz; z doby kdy kinematograf okouzloval moderní umění; z doby než zhrubl hlasem.
Kniha je z roku 1923 (zvukový film se prosadil v roce 1929), a tak je při čtení opravdu nutné abstrahovat od všeho, co si člověk představuje pod pojmem film a vrátit se výrazově do éry Mary Pickford, Rudopha Valentina či Charlieho Chaplina - tedy do doby, kdy kinematograf kraloval zábavě pro masy, kdy hvězdy byly nedosažitelné idoly a po smrti Rudopha Valentina se hromadně páchali sebevraždy. Autor tuhle dobu skvěle vystihl, a to hned ve dvou rovinách. Na jedné straně má skvěle zmáknutou typologii postav a jeho jednotlivé popisy "zlých hochů, Japonců, černochů, milovníků" atd. jsou naprosto přesné. Na druhé straně ale tohle všechno shazuje, poodkrývá roušku halící továrnu na sny s veškerou její přetvářkou, cynismem a falší, která občas zamění realitu za sen a sen za realitu.
Tohle všechno je zabaleno do krátkých vět s magickou poetikou, básnickými přirovnáními, které vytváří vlastní obrazy - obrazová kniha o obrazech. Právě jazyk mi na knize přišel nejzajímavější, občas je tedy překlad trošku krkolomný, ale za přečtení a zažití tahle knížka určitě stojí, jen si to chce k tomu pustit Šejka.
Jako milovník starých němých filmů jsem byla v pokušení dát knížce čtyři hvězdičky, ale nakonec po nějakém uvažování jsem se rozhodla pro tři, ale je to spíš tak tři a půl.
Kontext: Dočítala jsem to narychlo před posledním dílem Sherlocka - to jsem si raději měla dát na čas a pak jít spát.
První věta: "Z dálky vypadala Kinolandie trochu jako Konstantinopol smíchaná s Tokiem, měla cosi z Florencie a hodně z New Yorku."
Poslední věta: "A na zbytečné věšáky biografů, jež inzerovaly filmy s mrtvou, se věšel plášť noci."
Kniha je z roku 1923 (zvukový film se prosadil v roce 1929), a tak je při čtení opravdu nutné abstrahovat od všeho, co si člověk představuje pod pojmem film a vrátit se výrazově do éry Mary Pickford, Rudopha Valentina či Charlieho Chaplina - tedy do doby, kdy kinematograf kraloval zábavě pro masy, kdy hvězdy byly nedosažitelné idoly a po smrti Rudopha Valentina se hromadně páchali sebevraždy. Autor tuhle dobu skvěle vystihl, a to hned ve dvou rovinách. Na jedné straně má skvěle zmáknutou typologii postav a jeho jednotlivé popisy "zlých hochů, Japonců, černochů, milovníků" atd. jsou naprosto přesné. Na druhé straně ale tohle všechno shazuje, poodkrývá roušku halící továrnu na sny s veškerou její přetvářkou, cynismem a falší, která občas zamění realitu za sen a sen za realitu.
Tohle všechno je zabaleno do krátkých vět s magickou poetikou, básnickými přirovnáními, které vytváří vlastní obrazy - obrazová kniha o obrazech. Právě jazyk mi na knize přišel nejzajímavější, občas je tedy překlad trošku krkolomný, ale za přečtení a zažití tahle knížka určitě stojí, jen si to chce k tomu pustit Šejka.
Jako milovník starých němých filmů jsem byla v pokušení dát knížce čtyři hvězdičky, ale nakonec po nějakém uvažování jsem se rozhodla pro tři, ale je to spíš tak tři a půl.
Kontext: Dočítala jsem to narychlo před posledním dílem Sherlocka - to jsem si raději měla dát na čas a pak jít spát.
První věta: "Z dálky vypadala Kinolandie trochu jako Konstantinopol smíchaná s Tokiem, měla cosi z Florencie a hodně z New Yorku."
Poslední věta: "A na zbytečné věšáky biografů, jež inzerovaly filmy s mrtvou, se věšel plášť noci."
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews