Making Cinelandia American Film Culture Before The Golden Age Summary

Laura Serna has written a study of the impact of the US silent film on cinematic culture, in Mexico and among Mexican migrant communities north of the border during the interwar period. As a film historian, Serna presents ideas that are both theoretically nuanced and meticulously documented. She gleans dozens of original insights from an outstanding array of primary sources from Mexico and the U.S: newspapers, magazines, distributor records, diplomatic correspondence, and minutes of city council meetings, literary texts, unpublished anthropological and economic theses and films.

In the 1920s American films dominated Mexico’s cinemas creating the fear in its cultural elites that Mexico would become a cultural dependent of the United States. In Making Cinelandia American Films and Mexican Film Culture Before the Golden Age, Laura Isabel Serna compellingly argues that rather than acting as a “form of cultural imperialism” (1), American films and film culture engaged city dwelling Mexican moviegoers (on both sides of the border) in ways that ultimately molded their identities as modern Mexicans beyond the cinema. Borrowing the title of a popular Mexican film magazine from the time,

Serna’s book is also a welcome addition to the English language bibliography on film and film culture in Mexico. But it also makes an important new contribution to the field by filling a significant lacuna. While Mexican Golden Age Cinema, from 1936 to 1955 has been the object of numerous recent studies, the silent era has received much less attention. And, as Serna points out, English language scholarship that does exist on this period tends to focus on the few films which survive rather than on the “popular experience of Mexican audiences”