Description
Book SynopsisRielle Navitski examines the proliferation of cinematic and photographic images of violence in in early-twentieth-century Mexico and Brazil, showing how sensational media helped audiences make sense of the political instability, crime, violence, and change in daily life that accompanied modernization.
Trade Review“
Public Spectacles is an artful and enthralling reflection on the interaction between urban visual culture forms and the violence of modernization. An excellent text to assign to advanced students.” -- Jessica Stites Mor * EIAL *
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Public Spectacles of Violence is an important contribution to the historiography of Mexican and Brazilian cinematography and of Latin American silent cinema in general. A must for researchers and students interested in the early cinema of Brazil and Mexico.” -- Pablo Alvira * History *
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Public Spectacles of Violence is essential for scholars of Latin American cinema. It offers conceptual and methodological tools that students and scholars of cinema, cultural studies, or history might use to approach the eternally resonant topic of violence and its symbolic representation.” -- Georgina Torello * Cinema Journal *
"[Navitski] has provided new insights into the perception of sensational violence as a mark of modernization, and into the close relationship between journalism and film. This book will be of interest to students and researchers working on early Latin American cinema; the relationship between American and Latin American film; and film and cinema as an expression of Latin American nationalism. For readers outside of film studies who are interested in spectacles of violence, the book presents invaluable research on the roots of the sensational public treatment of violence that we continue to see in Latin American media today." -- Corrie Boudreaux * The Latin Americanist *
"
Public Spectacles of Violence is a compelling, convincing, elegant, and exemplary work of the emerging yet momentous field of Latin American silent cinema studies. It is a great read, a crucial contribution to its sub-specialty and to cinema studies in general, and representative of some of the best new scholarship in the area." -- Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz * Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature *
Table of ContentsA Note on Usage ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Part I. Sensationalizing Violence in Mexico
1. Staging Public Violence in Porfirian and Revolutionary Mexico, 1896–1922 31
2. On Location: Adventure Melodramas in Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1920–1927 85
Part II. Staging Spectacles of Modernity in Brazil
3. Reconstructing Crime in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, 1906–1913 123
4. The Serial Craze in rio de Janeiro, 1915–1924: Reception, Production, Paraliterature 167
5. Regional Modernities: Sensational Cinema Outside Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, 1923–1930 199
Conclusion 247
Notes 259
Bibliography 297
Index 315
