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Public Spectacles of Violence: Sensational Cinema and Journalism in Early Twentieth-Century Mexico and Brazil
In Public Spectacles of Violence Rielle Navitski examines the proliferation of cinematic and photographic images of criminality, bodily injury, and technological catastrophe in early twentieth-century Mexico and Brazil, which were among Latin America’s most industrialized nations and later developed two of the region’s largest film industries. Navitski analyzes a wide range of sensational cultural forms, from nonfiction films and serial cinema to illustrated police reportage, serial literature, and fan magazines, demonstrating how media spectacles of violence helped audiences make sense of the political instability, high crime rates, and social inequality that came with modernization. In both nations, sensational cinema and journalism—influenced by imported films—forged a common public sphere that reached across the racial, class, and geographic divides accentuated by economic growth and urbanization. Highlighting the human costs of modernization, these media constructed everyday experience as decidedly modern, in that it was marked by the same social ills facing industrialized countries. The legacy of sensational early twentieth-century visual culture remains felt in Mexico and Brazil today, where public displays of violence by the military, police, and organized crime are hypervisible.
344 pages, Hardcover
Published June 2, 2017
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September 12, 2019
Violence has been a mainstay of the cinema since the early days of film, complaints about Sam Peckinpah and Quentin Tarentino focusing on the rise of violent film content notwithstanding. In 1903, film audiences, having just witnessed a bludgeoning death via a lump of coal, ducked in terror when a gun pointed at the camera proved too realistic for them during The Great Train Robbery. Five years later, Chicago police would close an engagement of The James Boys of Missouri because of concerns over its violent content and disrespect for the law. But despite these lip service objections to film brutality, violence has its cultural uses on and off the screen as well. Witness Donald Trump’s encouragement of violence against protestors at his rallies as a recent example of attempting to set a cultural norm through intimidation.
In Public Spectacles of Violence: Sensational Cinema and Journalism in Early Twentieth-Century Mexico and Brazil, Rielle Navitski examines the use of spectacle not merely of violence but also of physical prowess in Mexican and Brazilian cinema at the turn of the last century as the two nations attempted to define themselves in the face of modernization. As Mexico saw the end of the Porfiriato, a period marked by economic prosperity for the elite and poverty and political repression for the rest, it entered the long years of the Revolution while Brazil saw a period of relative stability at the beginning of the century followed by series of crises that would end in a coup that left the military temporarily in charge of the country. Simultaneously, film was on its way to becoming one of the world’s most popular art forms. Navitski, an Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of Georgia as well as a core faculty member of that school’s Latin American and Caribbean Studies Film Institute, argues that the sensational in films and journalism of the era reveal the radical transformation of everyday life during the process of modernization. Informed by Guy Debord’s contention that public spectacles of violence create image-mediated social relations among people, Navitski sees the darkened cinemas of early twentieth-century Mexico and Brazil as sites where the consumption of images by people sitting together created a new national imaginary. Using a comparative approach, she performs close readings of a handful of extant films from the period as well as of reconstructions of presumedly lost films based on press accounts and archival materials, paying attention to critical and audience reception.
In Chapter 1, “Staging Public Violence in Porfirian and Revolutionary Mexico, 1896-1922,” Navitski examines the trend of recreating violent events for the camera popular during this time period. Early Mexican filmmakers restaged violent events from the Revolution as well as from everyday life in order to craft commentary on politics as well as on the rapid changes of modern life. With the advent of Mexican feature films in 1917, the popularity of serial films from France and the United States had an enormous influence on the structure of Mexican films, as did that of the foletin, Mexico’s popular serial novels. One of these serials, El automovil gris, originally released in 1919, reconstructed the misdeeds of the real Grey Automobile Gang, a criminal ring with ties to the government. Not only does the film contain landscapes that would have been familiar to audiences, it may also actually contain footage from the real gang members’ execution. Navitski sees the film as refashioning “the cityscape, the automobile and criminal activity as interlinked emblems of modernization” (69). Chapter 2, “On Location – Adventure Melodramas in Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1920-1927,” follows the growth of the adventure melodrama, which created contradictory meanings via violent spectacle that, in turn, signaled the tensions inherent “in postrevolutionary modernizing projects” (88). She also writes of the boycotting of some U.S. film companies in Mexico at the time because of the presence of negative stereotypes of Mexicans in U.S. films even as the U.S. film cowboy became a role model for the next Mexican male, a tantalizing argument warranting further study.
Turning her attention to Brazil in Chapter 3, “Reconstructing Crime in Rio de Janeiro and Sáo Paulo, 1906-1913,” Navitski argues that cinematic reenactments of violence in Brazil during this time reflected the new visibility of immigrants and women, whose criminal acts seemed to characterize modernity. Presenting simple, moralistic stories, these films made visual the fears of the elite, eager to exploit the masses while simultaneously fearing their growth. Meanwhile, the success of journals relying largely on photographs signaled a desire for news among the illiterate. Both media sensationalized violence without offering a critique of it. Focusing on “The Serial Craze in Rio de Janeiro, 1915-1924: Reception, Production, Paraliterature” in Chapter 4, Navitski notes the popularity of serial films that openly associated violence with modernity and argues that the Brazilian serial, influenced primarily by French serials, constituted a site through which Brazilian filmmakers could reimagine “imported cinema through local cultural forms” (171). She concludes her look at early Brazilian cinema by taking the reader outside Brazil’s major cities in Chapter 5, “Regional Modernities: Sensational Cinema Outside Rio de Janeiro and Sáo Paulo, 1923-1930.” With a semi-amateur film industry thriving in the nation’s regional capitals, Brazil’s regional films were, according to Navitski, “utopian attempts by working- and lower-middle-class actors, directors, and camera operators to actively participate in the technological modernity embodied by the cinema” (200). The elites, however, feared that these films would make them seem provincial to the rest of the world.
Navitski has done a massive amount of archival work, plumbing archives in several locations and digging through a mountain of periodicals in Mexico and Brazil. Beginning life as her dissertation at Berkeley, the work won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Dissertation Award in 2014 before the full-length book version was a finalist for the Wall Award from the Theatre Library Association in 2018. Though she does mention crosscuts and other film devices from time to time, Navitski has written a book that the non-specialist can understand as well as the film expert. Though the book gives a bit more real estate to Brazil than to Mexico, it never feels unbalanced and she spends a great deal of time unpacking the early twentieth-century history of both nations, evoking a time of change sometimes brutal and always breakneck.
Navitski leaves the reader with a snapshot of public spectacles of violence in Mexico and Brazil today. Public violence continues with the rampant growth of organized crime, often entangled with the state. With increasingly segregated spaces dividing the elite and lower classes and internet broadcasts of violent crimes, including drug cartel ordered executions, Brazil and Mexico continue to experience violence as a public spectacle and as a sign of modernity. Though conservative social critics still decry the use of violence in media as a catalyst for violent crime, Navitski’s work makes clear the fact that the matter of which comes first – crime or depictions of crime in media – is a much more difficult question to answer than it might appear at first glance. The relationship between violence in the media and outside of it is a tanged one. Media doesn’t determine who we are; it reflects it.
In Public Spectacles of Violence: Sensational Cinema and Journalism in Early Twentieth-Century Mexico and Brazil, Rielle Navitski examines the use of spectacle not merely of violence but also of physical prowess in Mexican and Brazilian cinema at the turn of the last century as the two nations attempted to define themselves in the face of modernization. As Mexico saw the end of the Porfiriato, a period marked by economic prosperity for the elite and poverty and political repression for the rest, it entered the long years of the Revolution while Brazil saw a period of relative stability at the beginning of the century followed by series of crises that would end in a coup that left the military temporarily in charge of the country. Simultaneously, film was on its way to becoming one of the world’s most popular art forms. Navitski, an Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of Georgia as well as a core faculty member of that school’s Latin American and Caribbean Studies Film Institute, argues that the sensational in films and journalism of the era reveal the radical transformation of everyday life during the process of modernization. Informed by Guy Debord’s contention that public spectacles of violence create image-mediated social relations among people, Navitski sees the darkened cinemas of early twentieth-century Mexico and Brazil as sites where the consumption of images by people sitting together created a new national imaginary. Using a comparative approach, she performs close readings of a handful of extant films from the period as well as of reconstructions of presumedly lost films based on press accounts and archival materials, paying attention to critical and audience reception.
In Chapter 1, “Staging Public Violence in Porfirian and Revolutionary Mexico, 1896-1922,” Navitski examines the trend of recreating violent events for the camera popular during this time period. Early Mexican filmmakers restaged violent events from the Revolution as well as from everyday life in order to craft commentary on politics as well as on the rapid changes of modern life. With the advent of Mexican feature films in 1917, the popularity of serial films from France and the United States had an enormous influence on the structure of Mexican films, as did that of the foletin, Mexico’s popular serial novels. One of these serials, El automovil gris, originally released in 1919, reconstructed the misdeeds of the real Grey Automobile Gang, a criminal ring with ties to the government. Not only does the film contain landscapes that would have been familiar to audiences, it may also actually contain footage from the real gang members’ execution. Navitski sees the film as refashioning “the cityscape, the automobile and criminal activity as interlinked emblems of modernization” (69). Chapter 2, “On Location – Adventure Melodramas in Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1920-1927,” follows the growth of the adventure melodrama, which created contradictory meanings via violent spectacle that, in turn, signaled the tensions inherent “in postrevolutionary modernizing projects” (88). She also writes of the boycotting of some U.S. film companies in Mexico at the time because of the presence of negative stereotypes of Mexicans in U.S. films even as the U.S. film cowboy became a role model for the next Mexican male, a tantalizing argument warranting further study.
Turning her attention to Brazil in Chapter 3, “Reconstructing Crime in Rio de Janeiro and Sáo Paulo, 1906-1913,” Navitski argues that cinematic reenactments of violence in Brazil during this time reflected the new visibility of immigrants and women, whose criminal acts seemed to characterize modernity. Presenting simple, moralistic stories, these films made visual the fears of the elite, eager to exploit the masses while simultaneously fearing their growth. Meanwhile, the success of journals relying largely on photographs signaled a desire for news among the illiterate. Both media sensationalized violence without offering a critique of it. Focusing on “The Serial Craze in Rio de Janeiro, 1915-1924: Reception, Production, Paraliterature” in Chapter 4, Navitski notes the popularity of serial films that openly associated violence with modernity and argues that the Brazilian serial, influenced primarily by French serials, constituted a site through which Brazilian filmmakers could reimagine “imported cinema through local cultural forms” (171). She concludes her look at early Brazilian cinema by taking the reader outside Brazil’s major cities in Chapter 5, “Regional Modernities: Sensational Cinema Outside Rio de Janeiro and Sáo Paulo, 1923-1930.” With a semi-amateur film industry thriving in the nation’s regional capitals, Brazil’s regional films were, according to Navitski, “utopian attempts by working- and lower-middle-class actors, directors, and camera operators to actively participate in the technological modernity embodied by the cinema” (200). The elites, however, feared that these films would make them seem provincial to the rest of the world.
Navitski has done a massive amount of archival work, plumbing archives in several locations and digging through a mountain of periodicals in Mexico and Brazil. Beginning life as her dissertation at Berkeley, the work won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Dissertation Award in 2014 before the full-length book version was a finalist for the Wall Award from the Theatre Library Association in 2018. Though she does mention crosscuts and other film devices from time to time, Navitski has written a book that the non-specialist can understand as well as the film expert. Though the book gives a bit more real estate to Brazil than to Mexico, it never feels unbalanced and she spends a great deal of time unpacking the early twentieth-century history of both nations, evoking a time of change sometimes brutal and always breakneck.
Navitski leaves the reader with a snapshot of public spectacles of violence in Mexico and Brazil today. Public violence continues with the rampant growth of organized crime, often entangled with the state. With increasingly segregated spaces dividing the elite and lower classes and internet broadcasts of violent crimes, including drug cartel ordered executions, Brazil and Mexico continue to experience violence as a public spectacle and as a sign of modernity. Though conservative social critics still decry the use of violence in media as a catalyst for violent crime, Navitski’s work makes clear the fact that the matter of which comes first – crime or depictions of crime in media – is a much more difficult question to answer than it might appear at first glance. The relationship between violence in the media and outside of it is a tanged one. Media doesn’t determine who we are; it reflects it.
Displaying 1 of 1 review