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Abstract: Despite its important role in the construction of imagined communities throughout the region, the study of silent cinema in Latin America has barely gone beyond an initial stage of unearthing national and regional cinemas to a more comparative and critical study of trends and ideologies from a transnational perspective. This essay outlines such a comparative history by using the spatiotemporal metaphor of triangulation as a framework for theorizing the politics of criollo aesthetics, and by combining a diachronic examination of major trends with synchronic close readings of paradigmatic films. The periodization and selection of films respond, in turn, to a broader consideration of how ideology, aesthetics, and economics intersect in the evolution of filmic practices in Latin America during the silent era. Finally, in the conclusion, I argue that the most important legacy of this period of Latin American cinema on subsequent filmmaking in the region is not so much the elaboration of a criollo aesthetics, which would not survive beyond the silent period, but rather the development of the strategy of triangulation, whereby Latin American filmmakers navigated a global cinematic landscape from a position of marginality.
INTRODUCTION: DEFINITION OF TERMS
The Spanish term criollo has a variegated history. It comes from the Portuguese crioulo, which was first applied in the fifteenth century to Portuguese people born in Africa and soon afterward to African slaves born in Brazil.1 In Spanish America, the earliest use of criollo kept its root meaning (from criar, which means "to raise") but applied first to Africans born in the New World and only afterward to Spaniards born there as well (Arrom 1951). By the seventeenth century, the term's meaning narrowed to refer only to the direct descendants of Spaniards, while after independence it broadened to designate a Eurocentric understanding of national histories and identities. In effect, by the middle of the nineteenth century, criollo was widely used as a stand-in for national hegemonic cultures throughout Spanish America. In Brazil, on the other hand, crioulo devolved, among other things, into a racial slur for descendants of Africans, and the French term créole came to refer to the African-inflected cultures and languages that emerged throughout the Francophone Caribbean Basin.2
Given the confusion that may arise from the polysemy of the...