¡Subestándar!: Sub-standard small gauge cinema between Mexico and U.S.A. (1923-1960)

Abstract

At the core of this project, lies the mission to reevaluate conventional wisdom in the popular and scholarly discourses that miniaturized media technologies of the modern era are uniformly emancipatory, inclusive towards society, and offer unprecedented avenues against the hegemony of dominant media. I offer the example of the small gauge, amateur and semiprofessional, “sub-standard” film scene in Mexico during the middle third of the 20th century, and in the shadow of the mighty Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, which was the darling of global Spanish speaking audiences during this period. Mexico is a country that is the next-door neighbor to arguably the biggest originator of new technologies in the last century—the United States—and a former colony of Europe, which was the largest inventor during the two preceding centuries. But the adoption of this new Euro-American technology into Mexico, of smaller, portable, and easily operable cameras with projectors, using 16mm, 8mm and 9.5mm film formats—was rapid. I examine the life of small gauge film in Mexico and its humble role in the transformation of the country’s landscape as a result of negotiation by various social groups with the new machines. Stakeholders include movie studios, film stock companies, technical personnel, families and amateur filmmakers, military establishments, civil society organizations and others operating on either side of the border. I show that sub-standard film technologies helped nonprofessional filmmakers make films outside the hegemony of the mainstream film industry and hundreds of families record ordinary and special moments in their lives. Mexican governments also adopted them to produce educational, industrial, health and many other types of films, which were shown in nontheatrical spaces, and were aimed at state-directed “nation building,” especially for the rural poor and indigenous peoples. The document has an introduction, four chapters, a conclusion, and an epilogue. The introduction charts the rise of small gauge filmmaking in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution and its flourishing during the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema. It analyzes the politics behind imported technologies and its role in building infrastructures that sustained nontheatrical film cultures. The four chapters are my account of the archival evidence collected from periodicals, newspapers, and hitherto unacknowledged films spread across the Mexican and U.S. film archives on which I base my introduction. The conclusion evaluates the afterlife of sub-standard film in Mexico as a presumed ‘dead’ technology. The epilogue offers some speculations for amateur and nontheatrical film studies. This project seeks to think of small gauge machines as “technical objects” in what Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski have termed as “media infrastructures” and uncover contradictions in their ostensibly benevolent instrumentality. As against film as a medium, I focus on the film formats because as categories, they can be inclusive in expanding the reach of a technology, but invariably come with infrastructural riders that can restrict and pervert their end use. This document is an industrial, technological, social, and cultural history of nonprofessional film technologies between Mexico and the U.S. during the 20th century, and the adventures of a technology travelling from the Global North to the Global South. It simultaneously writes footnotes to the literature about Mexican Cinema’s Golden Age.