Fictions of the Real

The Brazilian chanchada, or musical comedy, is a popular genre from the golden age of Brazilian cinema with a substantial Portuguese-language academic literature. Instead of retreading these ontogenetic arguments, this chapter argues the transition from musicarnavalesco to chanchada in light of the Estado Novo implementation of centralized monetary policy and the currency conversion to the Cruzeiro. As money (ex)changes, there is less agreement on evaluative criteria, auguring a crisis of valuation that subtends debates around the value of the genre. Making film a better commodity in an economy of desmedida undergoing a crisis of value presents challenges at levels material (currency restrictions shaped the development of the industry) and aesthetic (money as a form of economic symbolization coincides with the rise of fictionality). Classicism is mocked once more, now discussed in relation to the rise of fictionality rather than the codification of the classical realist text. The chanchada designates a certain intensification of fictionality where we actively feel the tension between the narrativized diegesis, the singularity of the comedic effect, and the present tense of the spectator.

Comedy Circulates Circuitously

This examines the international production and distribution networks in Latin America in order to argue for the cinemas of the Golden Age period beyond national frameworks. The identification of networks of film and media exchange prior to the 1960s challenges the diffusionist and center/periphery models that overdetermine understandings of cinema in the period. This chapter considers the circulation of/in Mexican, Argentine, and Brazilian comedies in order to engage with the concept of circulation in multiple ways, relating film as narrative, film as commodity, and film as spatial practice or architectonics. Circulation invites us to ask why do certain things travel? How quickly? How far? How long? This would mean writing a film history that considers how the circulation of cultural forms and the forms of circulation produce the region in an odographic turn. The unevenness and variability of intra-continental distribution mock classicism, not in necessarily a resistant practice in the mold of European modernism but through a different form of territorialization dictated by the horizon of reception. This (de)territorialization occurs courtesy of techniques that control or reconfigure time and space, that is, techniques of circulation.

Introduction

The introduction is loosely structured in three parts addressing questions of genre, geography, and period. It situates the book within comparative literature debates on world literature in order to defend a genre-based paradigm (in opposition to nation-based models) that produces a diachronic made all the more significant by the particular reception of comedy; debates in Latin American studies that cast this period exclusively in terms of cultural nationalism, that is, as complicit with nation-state consolidation; and, finally, debates in film studies on vernacular modernism and the intersections of cinema and modernity. The introduction explains how studying the transition to sound and the emergence of film comedy provides an endogenous and nonsynchronous rejoinder to the cosmopolitanism of these debates, a mock classicism reliant on an intertextual horizon that produces a semblance of continuity between screen and theater.

The Call of the Screen

The second chapter broadens our understanding of the mediascape during the golden age of Argentine cinema by examining the film and radio stardom of Marina Esther Traverso, “Niní Marshall,” as a case of aural stardom that challenges image-based star studies and provides a framework to consider the particularities of popular Argentine cinema, in which radio furnished the framework for the development of its industry and star system. Star-contract disputes from studio archives and evolving sound conventions in film texts are ventriloquial gambits that rearticulate the relationship between voice and body in a shifting organization of the senses. In Marshall’s film, the actress is the site of multiples selves that surface differentially in relation to the image. Marshall is never quite in synch, is never quite embodied, is never quite diegeticized. This failure to diegeticize mocks a Hollywood classicism that differentiated diegetic and non-diegetic sound in order to secure a narrative space distinct from the theatrical space.

Cantinflismo and Relajo’s Peripheral Vision

This chapter revisits the popular comedies of Mario “Cantinflas” Moreno from the golden age of Mexican cinema and argues that these films are not simply escapist and ideologically suspect but represent peripheral spaces of subversive difference that in their cultural and historical specificity cannot be easily co-opted by a cultural-imperialist center. Cantinflas’s humor is characterized by his linguistic contortionism, or cantinflismo, in which he says plenty without saying anything, a verbal nonsense that sidesteps narrative registers and affords a bodily engagement through laughter that relies on particular cultural codes and learned structures of feeling. This chapter provincializes classical Hollywood cinema by arguing for a peripheral vision modeled on the comedic practice of the relajo, which plays with the classical spatial arrangement of screen and theater space. This chapter examines the comedian’s quick verbal play in addition to formal devices, editing techniques, and doubled narrative structures that “sidestep” on multiple levels.

Timing Is Everything

The modernization of an increasingly urban and industrial Argentina and the effect of modernity on the experience of time provide a backdrop for my discussion of the films of Luis Sandrini. More specifically, Sandrini’s films rely on the comedian’s stutter that literally disrupts the temporal continuum that film records. This chapter uses the stutter heuristically, figuring it within film texts, material film practice, spectatorial experience, and historiography. Radio sound aesthetics and sound technologies played an important role during the transition to sound, not only determining technological developments that affected film production, but also providing the material base for the nation’s nascent studios. Additionally, by focusing on Sandrini’s physical slapstick, this chapter discusses his films as staging a confrontation with standardized time both in terms of the reification of time in modernity and the standardization of film through the registration gate. Classical Hollywood may have aspired to a hermetic diegetic world, but Sandrini mocks classicism with a stutter that makes the world salient precisely because it acknowledges that the world “slips through our fingers.”