Alton's Paradox: Foreign Film Workers and the Emergence of Industrial Cinema in Latin America

Essayists and academics have explored at length the historical beginnings of moviemaking in Latin America. Narratives about those beginnings study how national cinemas developed simultaneously with industrialization, modernization, changes in urban life, European immigration, and the consolidation of national states in the region's republics at the turn of the twentieth century. These histories furthermore seek the technological aspects and aesthetics that consolidated to spur the transition from silent film to sound in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The difficult battle against the hegemonic Hollywood system and the films it produced was a persistent element in this process, an element that the historiography has especially explored.The transition from silent film to sound shaped each of these national film industries decisively, influencing the emergence of the studio system years after. The resultant boom in film production became part of a public repertoire of nationalistic pride, eulogized by press and government officials equally in each country as the “golden age” and remembered for decades after its decadence. Those classic films were shaped both technically and aesthetically by several factors, and Nicolas Poppe's Alton's Paradox focuses on one that has oftentimes been disregarded by the dominant narratives: the incorporation of know-how through foreign workers. Built on impressive research and grounded in a vast knowledge of the filmography in several countries, Poppe's book recovers the decisive role that cinematographers, actors, directors, musicians, and other foreign workers played in Hollywood's Spanish-language industry and the film industries of Mexico and Argentina in the 1930s. As cinematographer John Alton observed in Buenos Aires in 1934, the development of national motion picture production throughout South America was enormously contingent on foreign technicians' assistance.The first two chapters explore Hollywood's Spanish-language productions and their circulation in the United States, Latin America, and Spain. The worldwide exhibition of those films is very well assessed through a meticulous analysis of their critical reception. Poppe's wonderful description of Mexican-born tenor and actor José Mojica's film career accounts for the complex interactions between the ideological conceptions involved in these films' production and the local film cultures in which they circulated. These chapters address the US studios' changing strategies to appeal to the diverse audiences in the Spanish-speaking world as well as the stereotypes and anxieties that their narratives and advertisement entailed.The book's examination of the Mexican film industry is stimulating. A detailed analysis of the artistic journey of cinematographer Alex Phillips (Canadian-born, of partial Russian ancestry, and US-trained) addresses and illuminates the central plot of the book. Phillips worked on more than 200 projects during his career in Mexico, collaborating with the great directors of that time and thereby defining “the ways in which the landscapes of Mexico would come to be used in national cinema” (p. 81). Praised by the specialized critics and collaborating on films acclaimed by audiences, Phillips was central to building national cinema in Mexico with his innovative cinematography.The same could be said of Juan Orol (born in Spain and raised in Cuba) and his approach to melodrama. Overlooked by both critics in his time and subsequent histories of Mexican cinema because they were considered unsophisticated, insufferable, and cheesy, Orol's films laid the groundwork for Mexican melodrama's main characteristics. Able to enmesh the aesthetics and the cultural signs of his films with other popular media, Orol created a distinctive way to channel the anxieties of the 1930s while simultaneously creating a distinctive style that would help “shape how melodrama was expressed in Mexican cinema of the early Época de oro” (p. 165).The cases of Ángel Mentasti and Tito Davison in Argentina are also paradigmatic. Mentasti, born in Italy, emigrated to Argentina and created Argentina Sono Film, one of the most successful studios that cemented the country's golden age. His commercial model, based on his previous experience in other industries, shaped how films were produced for decades in Argentina. Mentasti had a very clear idea of the problems facing industrial film production in the country. He focused on distribution and exhibition, without neglecting the organic relationship between his films' plots and popular culture, which would guarantee their enormous commercial success. Poppe's detailed analysis of the 1933 film Tango attests to this.Chilean-born director Tito Davison's work in Argentina from 1937 to 1943 is analyzed thoroughly in the last chapter. Performing multiple roles—assistant director, writer, and director—Davison helped shaped the evolution of a film industry adapting to the challenges of the new sound technologies. With previous experience in Hollywood, Davison helped make films less theatrical with his expertise in creating cinematic diegesis. As Poppe emphasizes, foreign professionals played a key role in the rapid specialization that helped define the Argentine film industry.A book that film scholars, historians of Latin America, and students will find stimulating and innovative, Alton's Paradox is a provocative inquiry into the many meanings and definitions of a “national film culture,” the essentially transnational character of cinema, and the persisting and everlasting relationship between Latin American cinema and Hollywood.

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