OATbyCO

Record Kings and Cinema Emperors

As an entry to the observation of the introduction of new technologies and the emergence of new media, this dissertation reconstructs the life and work

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The Glücksmann brothers were often depicted in the Argentine, Chilean, and Uruguayan press as the “kings”, “emperors,” or even “dictators” of cine-matography. Shortly after arriving to Buenos Aires in 1890, Max Glücksmann started to work as an errand boy for the photography shop owned by the Belgian Henri Lepage. He was soon promoted to manager and left in charge when Lepage moved back to Europe in 1908. With Glücksmann directing the company, what started as a small business turned into an entertainment em-porium that controlled around one hundred cinema theaters in various cities of the three countries along with the distribution rights of the major Holly-wood studios for up to ten Latin American countries, producing weekly newsreels and feature documentaries on regular basis by the late 1920s. Max was remembered with love and hatred by tango artists such as Carlos Gar-del, who would later recall his negotiations with the record producer that brought him his first successful sales. Even though the music business was more modest than his film empire, Glücksmann and his label Discos Nacional were the proud owners of the first record factory in Argentina and the sec-ond in South America.

The actors involved in this network had similar trajectories. Max Glücks-mann migrated to Buenos Aires from Chernivtsi in the Austro-Hungarian Empire escaping religious persecution towards the Jewish population and later three of his brothers followed and started to work with him. Their

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This dissertation looks at how these actors contributed to the shaping of the emergence of new media in relation to previously existing social prac-tices rather than looking at them as the first to introduce something com-pletely new.Similar to what took place with previous technologies, the intro-duction of motion pictures and recorded sound opened new spaces of ma-neuvering and created possibilities for people beyond the main power struc-tures to shape the process of building global communication networks.9 In the case of turn of the century Latin America, these opportunities were taken by a handful of recently arrived middle-class immigrants. Excluded from practicing many professions, immigrants had a good chance of entering the fields of media and cultural production, where there were no lobbies limiting the entrance of newcomers and the financial barriers were relatively low.10

Their condition as immigrants provided them with a few advantages. Both local and transnational networks of the migrant communities enabled them to quickly build commercial relations and expand their business beyond their place of residence. Their companies were often family businesses, in which each sibling was responsible for managing different branches or areas, family or ethnic networks providing the possibility for funding in the ab-sence of bank credit access.11 Glücksmann’s company remained a family business up until its dissolution in 1957. Bernardo was in charge of the Uru-guayan branch, Carlos was the general manager and travelled regularly to Chile, and Jacobo was in charge of the arrangements with US companies and managed the office in New York. Considered all together, these actors con-trolled most of the business of film and record commercialization, distribu-tion, and production in the major cities of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Alt-hough they were representative of a broader group of migrant entrepre-neurs in emerging technology-based activities, certain specificities and sin-gular strategies made them exceptional, allowing us to understand the way in which they took advantage of economic opportunities by bringing their social and cultural capital into play.

This dissertation considers the figure of Max Glücksmann to be the center of the network and reconstructs his life and work as a film and record impre-sario, an active member within transnational migrant groups, and a leader in the Jewish community in Buenos Aires. The rest of the network will appear at specific points to illustrate aspects of the topic under examination. I dig into the limited biographical information available on these actors, whose names are known through occasional references made in newspapers and magazines or conserved in the metadata of the few film rolls and records that are still preserved. I also build on the references to these actors in previous scholarship, which are larger for Max and Bernardo Glücksmann and only occasional for the rest of the group.12

The traces left by these actors are scattered in different archives and types of sources. As powerful actors behind the scenes, their work was commented on by the local press of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay and by magazines that specialized in film and music. Government records contain some dispersed financial and legal information that allows one to trace the evolution of these actors’ businesses. In order to reconstruct the relations between these en-trepreneurs and transnational firms, I consulted the few remaining institu-tional archives of US and European companies along with Foreign Office rec-ords in Germany and the United States, which as part of their cultural propaganda work, reported on the cultural business landscape. A few pho-tos, letters and personal documents, as well as the record of Max Glücks-mann’s inheritance process allowed me to reconstruct the life of the Glücks-mann brothers and the role played by familial, social, and political relations. Records of Jewish institutions and press provide another important source of material. As an important leader in the Jewish community in Buenos Aires, the life and work of Max Glücksmann are registered in these records, includ-ing his work as a media entrepreneur, director of several Jewish institutions and a member of the community. In order to analyze their work as produc-ers, I looked at the conserved films and records as well as the accompanying metadata. The trajectories of these actors are analyzed against the backdrop of the evolution of the entertainment markets, which I reconstructed with complementary statistical information.

Like spiders building their web, these entrepreneurs travelled around the world in order to assemble the networks that kept distant peripheries con-nected to the capitals of the entertainment market. In business, nothing re-placed or replaces a face-to-face meeting to close a deal. That is why they spent months and sometimes years travelling around Europe or from coast to coast in the United States, where they met with representatives of studios and labels and visited laboratories developing innovations in the recording and motion pictures technologies. Once the deals were closed, they went back to putting their Latin American connections to work, distributing and selling the acquired products. Following these actors and their transnational relations sheds light on how communication networks became denser, all while they were making internal differences and hierarchies more evident.

It Is a Wired World

There are many reasons why the histories of media have been told as na-tional histories.13 They range from an interest in the relations between political press and the conformation of nation states to the implications of legal regulations in the consolidation of media in a specific territory, addi-tionally covering the existence of state-funded media as well as linguistic de-limitations and the possibilities of accessing sources. However, the fact that there is a connection between media and the nation should not be a reason to ignore media’s overall role in transnational connections but should, on the contrary, be a reason to pursue research in this direction in order to under-stand the mutual influence between global processes and national develop-ments.14 The need to look at media within their global dimension is espe-cially evident in the case of the period under examination in this study. The film and record industries were born in a connected world and took these connections one step further. Moreover, they emerged in a context prior to the more systematic attempts states made to regulate and dictate the con-tents of media, which can be more clearly seen starting in the 1930s.

The actors behind the expansion of new media might have labeled their products “national” for marketing reasons, but they were producing and dis-tributing in a market that consisted of a network of cities in these three coun-tries and beyond. The geographical scope of this study is defined by the ter-ritories where these actors were present, and it includes Buenos Aires, San-tiago, and Montevideo, occasionally touching on other cities in which the business was growing during the period under examination. Transcending the focus on nations as a taken-for-granted unit for media history, this dis-sertation considers a transnational market as its geographical scope. By jointly examining a larger market – Buenos Aires – a medium one – Santiago – and a small one – Montevideo – it also makes it possible to observe their positions within the region and the internal hierarchies.

The arrival of film and recorded sound in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay contributed to shortening the distances between this Southern periphery and the Global North and deepened the integration of communication networks. Cameras and movies, phonographs and records crossed the globe along with other industrialized products demanded by the growing econo-mies of the world’s suppliers of agricultural and mining products. In the same ships that carried these products across the Atlantic, Lumiere and Gau-mont’s camera operators and Columbia’s recording engineers travelled around the world to capture images and sounds for their catalogs. Film and recorded sound were part of a global communication infrastructure that had been in the process of being built since the mid-nineteenth century through initiatives developed by colonial powers seeking to connect the entire exten-sion of their overseas territories with areas of commercial interest. Between 1870 and 1930, everything involving communication and information changed entirely. These decades witnessed the expansion of print media, tel-egraphic networks, and postal service and the invention of the telephone, phonograph, motion pictures, and the radio.15

To understand how film and recorded sound played their part in connect-ing the world, we need to observe the technological landscape that existed during the time of their invention. Ocean telegraphy moved people to expand their thinking to global dimensions.16 With the cable crossing the English Channel and the success of the Atlantic cable in 1866, entrepreneurs, jour-nalists and politicians could imagine that nothing would prevent these tech-nologies from developing and moving to a global scale. The telegraph also brought an unprecedented sense of immediacy, as it was the beginning of a new system of global communication that radically increased the speed of message transmission.17 The possibility of transmitting information almost instantly laid at the core of the expansion of news agencies and a transfor-mation in the newspapers’ international news coverage. With the construc-tion of the cable line from Lisbon to Pernambuco in 1874, South America en-tered the network. Newspapers quickly signed contracts with European news agencies to receive the latest information, which then traveled across the Atlantic and were transmitted via costal and land cables throughout the region.18

If the telegraph brought the idea of a connected world by increasing the speed in which information travelled across long distances and even oceans, another technology of the nineteenth century, photography, contributed to this idea by enabling the visualization of distant geographies. Invented in 1838, photography evolved during the following decades with increasingly portable and cheaper cameras up until taking a photograph became as sim-ple as pressing one button on the mass-produced Kodak cameras in the 1900s. The history of photography concurred with the expansion of Euro-pean empires, becoming an important tool to express and articulate the ide-ologies of imperialism by depicting distant landscapes, documenting military campaigns, and being used to survey and classify “racial types”.19

Music played an important role in cultural encounters in the age of impe-rialism. Musicians traveled from all continents to European metropolises; anthropologists and businessmen brought instruments from their travels, and these kinds of instruments were also given as presents in official visits.20Efforts to export culture constituted an important element of non-govern-mental diplomacy practiced by most countries. Before becoming the main exporter of their own culture, the United States had been a target for the cul-tural expansion of European countries, which competed against each other for preponderance on the other side of the Atlantic.21 Musical encounters took place in the cities of Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia and proved to generate mutual influence on musical style while also contributing to the differentiation and emergence of national canons.22

Motion pictures and recorded sound took the interconnectedness of the world through communication networks one step further. Introduced in a world wired by telegraph cables and with photographic images circulating through various channels, their invention contributed to the integration of national markets to a transnational network of entertainment products, a process Gerben Bakker characterized as the industrialization of entertain-ment.23 According to Bakker, motion pictures industrialized spectator enter-tainment by automating, standardizing, and making it tradable. By the end of the nineteenth century, the existent forms of live spectacles could not meet a demand that was growing due to the fall of working hours and the increase of disposable income among urban audiences. The newly born film industry pushed these limits and brought a qualitative leap in productivity. As a music hall performer, Charlie Chaplin could appear in a maximum of three venues a night. As a film actor, he could appear in thousands of screens in the most distant parts of the globe.24 In a similar way that motion pictures allowed Chaplin to appear in thousands of venues at the same time, the gramophone allowed people all over the world to hear the voice of acclaimed singers such as Enrico Caruso.25

The introduction of the new technologies in the Global South relied on preexisting economic and political networks. In the months that followed their first commercial introduction in the United States and Europe, people from the most distant places of the world celebrated the novelty of the pho-nograph and motion pictures. Diplomatic envoys to Europe, exchange stu-dents, and businessmen attended scientific exhibitions, commenting on the latest inventions in their writings for local newspapers in their home coun-tries, all of which encouraged the introduction of these artifacts and edu-cated readers on their functions and features.26

Motion pictures and recorded sound revolutionized entertainment by in-troducing the possibility of mass production and reproduction, laying the groundwork for local markets to integrate into transnational ones. By focus-ing on a portion of the emerging global market constituted by a network of cities in Latin America and their connections to Europe and the United States, this dissertation observes the dynamics of the conformation of the global en-tertainment market. By observing how Latin American markets integrated into the global entertainment market, my aim is to shed light on the asym-metries that conditioned media, communication, and cultural production, as well as investigate the tension brought on by these markets’ tendency to sim-ultaneously reinforce processes of cultural homogenization and differences.

Imported Entertainment

When looking at the beginnings of film and recorded sound in Latin America, one of the major aspects that needs to be considered is the fact that these technologies and products were introduced from abroad. This fact inspired assumptions that lay at the core of two main approaches to the history of the new media of the early twentieth century in the Global South. On the one hand, the introduction of new technologies has been seen as an unmistakable sign of the arrival of modernity, which would have transplanted a series of values and practices into the receiving society. On the other hand, it has been understood as an expression of cultural imperialism, which would have turned those that interacted with these technologies into passive audiences that put their own under threat by consuming foreign culture. Over the past decades, the interpretations of this process have been revisited, introducing a series of nuances, but these two primary assumptions remain in the back-ground.

Regarding the first perspective, both contemporary actors and historians have seen cinema and recorded sound in Latin America as being intrinsically connected with modernity in different ways. For contemporaries, modernity could have both positive and negative connotations. A chronicler writing for the Chilean magazine El Film in 1919 considered movies as a break from “the material and moral agitations of this terrible epilepsy called modern life”, while Max Glücksmann labeled gramophones and cameras as “the joy of the modern home”.27 Looking back to these times, scholars have referred to film as the quintessence of the “experience of modernity”and have seenmovie theaters as the place where Latin Americans went either “to dream or to learn how to be modern”, or to see on the big screen how the differences between romanticized rural customs and “modern” urban lifestyles came to terms.28 The case of recorded music is somewhat different, as scholars have seen the introduction of recording technologies as one more step in the mod-ernization of music, not as the initiator. This modernizing force is usually equated with European and US music, and it is often argued that “non-West-ern” music became “modernized” by the global spread of European musi-cians and instruments.29

Even though these studies have made important contributions to the field by showing the way in which mass media was a channel for people to make sense of the rapid transformations they were experiencing in the early twen-tieth century, the breadth of the concepts of modernity and modern under-mines their potential as analytic categories. These terms have become empty signifiers primarily used in reference to everything that was new or associ-ated with the introduction of cultural products or technologies that were first developed in the United States or Europe.30

Several studies aim to more concretely define what modernity meant in the Latin American context in relation to the sphere of culture and media by emphasizing the way in which new and traditional cultural expressions were articulated. Beatriz Sarlo has reflected on the distinctive features of moder-nity in Buenos Aires, which she has characterized as “peripheric”, by show-ing the heterogeneity of the intellectual and cultural landscape, in which ap-parently opposed elements coexist: traditionalist cultural practices with the massive import of goods, discourses, and symbolic practices; a defensive at-titude with the spirit of renewal; criollismo with the avant-gardes.31 Floren-cia Garramuño has shown how the emphasis on “primitivists” musical ele-ments, such as syncopation and the African roots of tango and samba, were key to Argentinian and Brazilian quests to find their own modern culture, differentiating themselves from the European one. The operation that turned these allegedly primitive elements from negative features into positive ones was related to the demand of European cultural elites at the time for some-thing new, exotic, different, which Latin America could provide.32 Similarly, Ana López has argued that the technologies of visuality epitomized by cin-ema in Latin America were part of an ambiguous symbiosis of traditional ex-periences and modernizing innovations.33 The concept of modernity is also key for scholars within the field of Latin American cultural studies, especially noted in the work of Néstor García Canclini, who has considered that moder-nity needs to be revisited from the perspective of cultural hybridization, by looking at the complex relations between tradition and modernization, and at the changes that popular culture undergoes as part of the process.34

Through their more nuanced definitions of Latin American cultural moder-nity, these scholars have highlighted the heterogeneity of the changes that were taking place at the turn of the century, going against previous ap-proaches that saw modernization as a process that tended to erase differ-ences.35 They have also revealed that these types of changes were taking place within a context characterized by asymmetric power relations rein-forced by the economic status of Latin America in the world. However, these studies did not solve the problem of the breadth of the concept of modernity. On the contrary, they made it even broader: the concept now not only re-ferred to everything new, with a wide range of influences from industrialized countries, but also had different manifestations produced by the mix with pre-existing cultural elements. This dissertation is informed by the question, present in these studies, of how the adoption of new technologies and the reception of cultural contents coming from abroad resulted in the emergence of new social practices while these technologies were intertwining with ex-isting ones. However, I move away from the prior discussion on whether this phenomenon should be called modernity or not along with how it compares to the experiences of Europe and the United States, focusing instead on un-derstanding the relations of asymmetry and dependence that were the con-text for and the result of the emergence of new media.

The second perspective departs from another undeniable fact in the his-tory of the entertainment industries of the early twentieth century, which is that Hollywood movies and fox-trot, Charleston, and shimmy records con-quered Latin American markets and had an overwhelming presence in the cultural consumption of local audiences in the early twentieth century. The evidence of the expansion of US media abroad was the starting point for stud-ies pursued around the 1970s and 1980s, which posited the existence of what they defined as media imperialism. Even though it remains a vague concept, media imperialism can be summarized as “the processes by which modern communication media have operated to create, maintain, and ex-pand systems of domination and dependence on a world scale”.36 In other words, this phenomenon was considered to be a specific type of cultural im-perialism, defined in simplified terms as the process through which a foreign culture invades an indigenous/local one. Even so, the corpus on media impe-rialism has been subjected to many critiques. Among other things, critics have pointed out the difficulties of defining what a “local” or “indigenous” culture is: how does a culture belong to a place? If it is not a “natural” belong-ing but a historically constructed one, then how much time is needed for something to become “authentic”?37

Even though the concept of media imperialism has become marginal in re-cent historiography, some of its concerns are taken into account by histori-ans of culture and communication. In contrast to earlier models which had focused on the national level, the media imperialism approach favors a trans-national scale and emphasizes the global structure and its decisive role in the development within each nation.38 Aiming to overcome the main critiques without discarding media imperialism’s main contribution – centering global inequalities in reflections about culture – scholars have revisited the pres-ence of the United States in the cultural field in Latin America. In doing so, they have introduced the concept of Americanization, which bears a close relation with that of cultural imperialism but focuses on the active role of societies in contact with the US, emphasizing the multidirectional nature of these exchanges.39 Americanization has become a useful category to analyze the way in which encounters between Latin American societies and the United States took place within the context of an unequal distribution of power since the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, resulting in the transfer of consumption models, sociocultural practices, and production methods.40

Drawing on these contributions, I propose to look at how the relations be-tween the local cultural landscape in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay and new technologies and contents produced in Europe and the United States were negotiated on multiple levels: through the appropriation of new technologies on the basis of previously existing social practices and media, through the search for a place in a distribution market dominated by US and European companies, and through the mutual influences in aesthetic and narrative as-pects of production. From a technology-in-use approach, I look at how tech-nologies were appropriated on the basis of pre-existing social practices and how new media were interpreted on the basis of old media.41 This approach decenters the history of information technologies from their inventors, such as Thomas Alva Edison or Alexander Graham Bell, and instead looks at how users and retailers around the world also played important roles in shaping the evolutions in technology. By tracing the emergence and evolution of dis-tribution networks, I dedicate attention to an underexamined aspect of me-dia history, in which the negotiations between Latin American, European, and US actors are particularly visible. I look at the production of films and movies with attention to the technological, economic, and institutional cir-cumstances that conditioned the way in which films and records were made, examining the motivations and strategies that informed decisions on the nar-rative and aesthetic elements of production.

Backward Linkage – or the Nation as a Niche

Reconstructing the life and work of a group of entrepreneurs and especially that of Max Glücksmann, who followed a strategy of vertical integration and thus became involved in all parts of the process, allows for the observance of all the different spheres of motion pictures and recorded sound, along with the interactions between them. This dissertation is structured in a way that combines a thematic and chronologic division. I analyze the spheres of pro-duction, distribution, and commercialization of films and records separately. The chronology of the emergence and consolidation of these spheres reveals the specificity of this process in the countries under examination, differenti-ating their processes from the emergence of the same media in Europe and the United States, where production came first and was the most dynamic part of the process, turning producers into the most powerful actors of the field. The inventors of the technologies looked for commercial partners and founded the first companies that marketed the products, which were, for ex-ample, the first to shoot cinematographic vistas, record cylinders, and push the improvement of production techniques. In the 1910s, film studios evolved into big companies, and they followed strategies of vertical integra-tion, thus controlling not only production, but also distribution and commer-cialization. In Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, the development of these media followed a reverse order, and commercialization was the first sphere that expanded and consolidated. The technologies of film and phonography were introduced as imports among many other manufactured goods by traders who aimed to meet a growing demand for entertainment among the urban population. During their early years, and while the production of films and records was still rather artisanal, it was possible for local producers in Latin America to make their own. With the evolution of production techniques, however, it became harder for local actors to reach the quality standards needed to compete with US and European products.

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The history of these media shows a process that, borrowing from a concept within economic history and dependency theory, I call backward linkage: in a similar way than other non-primary activities, the expansion of the market for films and records induced producers to utilize domestic production in an attempt to supply the inputs that had formerly been taken up in the region via regular imports.42 With the growth in the demand for entertainment, the distribution networks expanded progressively and became increasingly sta-ble. As of the 1910s, production started to grow strong in certain niches. Once the market had reached a certain size, local firms started to produce records and movies to supply the owners of phonographs and film reproduc-ers. In order to do this, producers profited from the context of World War I, which limited the arrival of products from the belligerent countries. The pos-sibilities of domestic production of supplies for these industries relied on two aspects of cultural products. On the one side, producers needed to reach the basic technical conditions for production and needed a minimal market scale for it to be profitable. In this regard, films and records were the same as any manufactured good. On the other side, producers benefited from their capacity to capture the images and sounds that were more suited to engage audiences as movies and records were products that carried symbolic con-tent. For this reason, the niches where local production grew were mostly informative, documentary, and nationalist narrative films, niches on the re-cording side being a musical repertoire that enhanced a link to “tradition” and “authenticity”, which was made explicit by labeling the songs as part of a “criollo” culture.

This dissertation is structured with the purpose of making visible the dy-namics of commercialization, distribution, and the production of films and records in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay and how each sphere conditioned the others. Chapter 1 focuses on the introduction and commercialization of sound reproducers, cylinders and records, along with cameras and films from the 1890s throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century. It analyzes how these products were appropriated and linked to existing so-cial practices as well as created new ones, following the emergence of new media triggered by these technologies. By following a group of actors in-volved in the commercialization of these products and in film exhibition in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Santiago, this chapter shows that entrepre-neurs played a significant role in shaping the uses of these technologies through advertisement strategies based on their knowledge on the demands and expectations of consumers. It follows the evolution of the market throughout three decades and observes how it expanded and consolidated as a regional market that connected several cities in the three countries.

Chapter 2 reconstructs the emergence and consolidation of the networks and mechanisms of distribution of films and records in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. It looks at how retailers entered the distribution business and how they negotiated with studios and labels based in the United States and Eu-rope in order to obtain the rights to allocate their products. Distribution was the most profitable part of the business, and it granted Latin American actors important fortunes. However, this did not last long. This chapter follows the rise and fall of distributors, from the years in which Max Glücksmann, José Tagini, and Julián Ajuria gained control of most of the distribution business in the region to the times when Hollywood studios and major transnational music labels took the distribution business into their own hands.

Distribution mechanisms largely conditioned the way in which entrepre-neurs approached the production of films and records in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, which is the focus of Chapter 3. Entrepreneurs approached production as an import substitution process in a market that, because of its scale, could only substitute the making of its final product of films and rec-ords, relying instead on the import of more complex technologies such as cameras and gramophones. In a market dominated by contents produced in Europe and the United States, producers chose to focus on the forms, genres, and themes in which they could offer a distinctive feature. In the field of in-formative contents, newsreels and documentaries took the practice of visu-ally informing the public started by illustrated magazines one step further. Filmmakers made movies on demand for institutions aiming to advertise their work and provided a place where social groups wishing to see them-selves on the big screen could do so. In the field of fiction film and music re-cording, producers found a place to reshape the contents of other media and

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Entertainment in the Consumer Society

The shop that the Belgian Henri Lepage founded in the early 1890s in the center of Buenos Aires rapidly turned into one of the hotspots for new tech-nologies. Lepage sold photographic cameras and accessories and was re-nowned among professional photographers and aficionados. Photography spread among amateurs towards the end of the century thanks to shops such as Lepage’s, which sold the necessary equipment and instructed buyers on their uses.52 Seeking to expand the variety of products offered, he decided to import the latest novelties of the time: gramophones and records, cinemato-graphic cameras, projectors, and films. While Lepage and his employees in-troduced the technology of recorded sound and sold it as a new form of amusement, they were also among the first to experiment with the novelty of film and produced some of the first moving images on Latin American soil. Not only did they sell machines but also advertised them, gave instructions on their uses, and targeted the products for specific customers. It was through the mediation of shops and salesmen such as Lepage and his em-ployees that new technologies were introduced and appropriated in Latin American cities.

Image 1. Casa Lepage on Av. de Mayo. “El hogar del ‘film’”, Caras y Caretas, Buenos Aires, 03.01.1914.

The main stage for the introduction of new technologies was a handful of middle-sized shops in the capital cities of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Aside from Casa Lepage, other stores entered the business of entertainment technologies. Some examples are Casa Tagini in Buenos Aires and Efrain Band’s shop in Santiago de Chile. Tagini’s store was across the street from Casa Lepage in the city center of Buenos Aires. The Genoese immigrant, Giuseppe Tagini, arrived in Buenos Aires in 1885 and started out by selling bazaar items: suitcases, umbrellas, and walking sticks. By the early 1900s, he had moved to a five-hundred-square-meters shop where he sold music boxes, pianos, and a large variety of gramophones, cylinders, and records. A strong competitor in the beginning, Tagini went bankrupt in 1915 due to commercial turbulence caused by the war: not being able to offer the musical novelties of Columbia records, his business lost its main appeal.53 Efrain Band migrated in 1870s from Tver in the Russian Empire to Santiago and became a cigarette trader and opened a small store. He entered the phono-graphic business in the 1890s, when he began to experiment with different recording techniques and made study trips to Europe and the United States to perfect his knowledge. By 1907, Band had installed a recording studio and a small record factory in his house. However, the 1910s witnessed his de-cline. The opening of branches of the Victor Talking Machine in Latin Amer-ica and the expanding presence of Max Glücksmann made it impossible for Band to compete with them, and he ended up closing his business.54

In the process of becoming larger sized stores specializing in household and entertainment products, these shops adopted new commercialization practices that were spreading worldwide. Casa Tagini and Casa Max Glücks-mann implemented the selling methods of department stores that were pop-ular in both the United States and Latin American capitals: they advertised their products and published catalogs in the local press, of which people could order products from anywhere in the country to be sent by post.55 In addition, they moved to big buildings with several floors where they could offer something for every taste and need, a place where people could spend their free time walking around.56 Stores were open on Saturdays and an-nounced longer opening hours close to the higher consumption seasons such as Christmas. The new consumption patterns brought together the store as a place of socialization with the home as the place where buying decisions were made. Due to the consolidation of advertisement as a new selling prac-tice, the decision of buying a product was no longer taken after bargaining with the shopkeeper but was now supposed to be an informed decision taken at home, looking at and considering the ads published regularly on the press.57

Entertainment evolved accordingly to the emergence of consumer socie-ties in turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Montevideo. Internal markets expanded due to the export boom, which resulted in the growth of the population thanks to massive immigration. The growth of the economy created an impulse for the market, which later acquired its own dynamic due to the expansion of local industrial production. Mass consumption from sec-tors of middle and lower incomes was the impulse for local production, whereas luxury consumption continued to rely mostly on imports.58Through the diversification of products offered, in both type and price, en-tertainment industries participated in the process of broadening consump-tion. The expansion of the market and of local production resulted in the in-crease of competition among local producers and with foreign firms. Local entrepreneurs had the advantage of knowing the milieu and were often more effective with their advertisement campaigns in spite of foreign firms having the greatest expertise in the field.

Brands were a key element for competition within the market. They con-stituted as a form of differentiation that went beyond the features of the product and resulted in the consumers making their purchase decisions not in terms of generic products but of specific brands, which were seen as a guarantee of quality and reliability.59 As it happened with clothing and food, phonographs, cameras, records, and films were associated with specific names: Victor, Columbia, Odeon, Pathé Frères, Paramount, etc. Local entre-preneurs also developed their own brands to differentiate themselves from their competitors: Max Glücksmann called his records Discos Nacional and gave his own name to the store and the brand, to which he later added the claim “The Joy of the Modern Home”.

The selling techniques applied to the entertainment business in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay were a combination of the adoption of methods devel-oped in the industry in the United States and Europe and the innovation of local actors according to their own context. As branches that were born with a global vocation, the film and record industries counted on an important element to exchange knowledge on selling techniques: trade magazines. Most of these were printed in the United States and reported with great de-tail on the progress of the business worldwide. They spoke directly to dis-tributors and traders, with the purpose of keeping them informed on the lat-est productions and innovations, and instructing them in the selling tech-niques. Magazines such as Talking Machine World , Film Daily , or Cine Mundial – the trade magazine for the Spanish speaking world – reported on general aspects of the field, whereas others such as The Voice of the Victor or Men- sajero Paramount were concerned with the interests of one specific company and aimed at being a communication channel for agents of the firm in differ-ent parts of the world.

These magazines also commented on the accomplishments and creative approaches of retailers worldwide, such as Tagini’s huge sign in the city center of Buenos Aires or the “handsome window hangers” he used on his storefront. According to Talking Machine World , Tagini was “considered to be the largest dealer in talking-machine products in the world” in 1912.60However, this would change very soon. His success was built partly on his commercial skills but also relied greatly on his exclusive agreement with Co-lumbia Gramophone Co. As the exclusive representative of one of the major music labels of the time, Tagini focused most of his activities on selling rec-ords, which granted him important earnings, but also made him largely de-pendent on Columbia.61 When World War I started and commerce was inter-rupted, Tagini’s business suffered from not having new records to offer and went bankrupt shortly after.

Unlike Tagini, Glücksmann followed a more diversified strategy. Several elements contributed to his success. The young Max Glücksmann was, ac-cording to Caras y Caretas , a talented salesperson who called the attention of every client who entered the store. In this way, a quick ascent started of him becoming the “king of cinematography”.62 He was an essential part of Casa Lepage and moved up in the ranks from errand boy to manager and then owner, when Lepage moved back to Europe. However, he owed part of his success to his networks. When Glücksmann bought Casa Lepage in 1908, he was 33 years old and a recently married man: he had married in 1907 to Re-beca Lerman, a member of a Jewish family who migrated to Argentina from the Russian Empire and whose father was the employee of the grain exporter firm owned by the German Jewish immigrant Hermann Weil.63 In the years from Glücksmann’s beginnings in Casa Lepage to 1908, the shop experienced significant growth: it went from having three employees to fifty, moved from a one hundred square meter shop to a location much larger and more cen-trally located, and diversified the products it sold exponentially.

With Glücksmann in charge, the growth of the business Lepage had started accelerated and acquired a regional scale: the number of employees had tripled by 1931 and went from one shop in Buenos Aires to branches in sev-eral cities of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, and offices in Paris and New York. In addition to the stores, Glücksmann owned or managed seventy movie theaters.64 Since 1909, a permanent representative in Santiago aimed to streamline the labor of film distribution in Chile, which the Buenos Aires office had managed until then.65 By 1915, Max Glücksmann’s was considered one of the four main cinematographic firms in Chile and had the largest stock of films in the country.66 After a few years, he also became an important ex-hibitor, and by 1927, he managed nine movie theaters.67 Max’s younger brother Bernardo settled in 1913 in Montevideo and took control of the Uru-guayan branch. In a small shop, Bernardo was in charge of the commerciali-zation of photographic cameras and accessories, phonographs and records, and was decided upon to exploit the market of film and business distribution. Unlike Buenos Aires and Santiago, the field was still underdeveloped in Mon-tevideo.

The rapid growth of these stores can also be explained by the expansion of their business branches. Films, cameras, phonographs, and records became objects of mass consumption. These products were purchased on a regular basis by people of different income levels thanks to the increase of disposa-ble incomes, the introduction of cheaper models of cameras and sound re-producers, and the commercialization strategies that succeeded in targeting them to different categories of potential consumers.68 Each industry re-quired different strategies to achieve this. In the field of film, exhibitors man-aged to turn it into one of the main public forms of entertainment in the cities by adapting theaters to the needs of screenings and by segregating audiences according to their incomes in different types of venues. In the case of the phonographic industry, entrepreneurs managed to integrate the new tech-nology into the music business and succeeded in selling records by linking them to existing habits of socialization and leisure by offering records of danceable music and introducing new models of portable and cheaper repro-ducers.

Motion picture spectacles had been a social event since their early days, appealing people to gather in salons, fairs, and theaters with the attraction of seeing moving images. However, several years passed until the activity of watching movies became associated with specific venues. Since the early 1900s, Casa Lepage offered projectors for theaters and salons, which were gradually adding film exhibition to their current program of activities. Ads claimed that the Pathé Frères cinematographer was “an endless goldmine when installed in a hotel, a bar, or a salon”.69 During the first decade of film, most exhibitions were held in different venues that improvised a reorgani-zation of the space to host the projection of motion pictures, which were mainly considered a curiosity rather than a proper spectacle. During the times of early cinema, exhibition habits were different from the ones that would consolidate with the emergence of narrative film. Spectators might not have been seated or silent, and the evening consisted not only of one film, but rather a dozen of short vistas – films made with a steady camera- or of a combination of a music act, a vaudeville show, and a short film.70

It took some time until film was exhibited in venues designed for that pur-pose in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. When Bernardo Glücksmann traveled to Montevideo to study the film business in Uruguay in the early 1910s, one of his main observations was the lack of proper venues for the activity. As he recalls in his memoirs, when he travelled to the United States and thought comparatively to what he had seen in Montevideo, he “understood that (in Uruguay) the film business was being exploited routinely, without any com-mercial creativity”.71 His aim was to build momentum for film exhibition in Uruguay. The Crodara brothers, theater impresarios who until then had managed the Glücksmanns’ business, controlled all the most important ven-ues in the city and were the first to exhibit films in theaters. With the expan-sion of the activity, Bernardo decided to refurbish the old Buckingham thea-ter completely, and the inauguration of the first cinema was an important event that counted on the attendance of famous personalities, among them the president of the country.72

The Glücksmann brothers also saw the film deal as a real estate business. Putting the first bricks of the film infrastructure in Argentina, Chile, and Uru-guay was an important part of their contribution to setting the basis for the film industry in these countries. They bought or rented buildings that they then refurbished with the purpose of screening films and became some of the major film exhibitors in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, managing more than one hundred venues by the 1930s.73 During the decade of 1910, the number of venues for film exhibition grew in most cities. Even though the architecture of the new movie theaters was not so different from the existing venues, some changes allowed the use of the space for this purpose: the screens were now fixed instead of hanging from machinery that raised it up as it had been with other shows, and the layout of seats was different to allow everyone a direct view of the screen.74 The need of buildings specially de-signed to host film exhibitions was related to the massiveness of the phe-nomenon, one that required hallways and corridors big enough to allow for the entrance and exit of up to a couple thousand people. Additionally, some regulations were imposed by the corresponding authorities in order to guar-antee the security of the attendees, such as the separation of the projection booths from the main hall to prevent the expansion of a possible fire trig-gered by the flammability of film reels.75

Since its early years, the new spectacle claimed for its own a place in the city. Even though there were touring film shows that were presented in small towns in rural areas, the first decades of the twentieth century saw film con-solidated into a mainly urban activity. It was in the cities where there was capital for production and more profit could be made from movie theaters due to the concentration of population and their expendable income.76 As buildings with singular characteristics, movie theaters had an important presence in the urban space and were proper ground for architectural exper-imentation. At the beginning, many of them had a monumental style. Movie theaters stood out on avenues and squares, where most of the entertainment and commercial offerings stood. Cinema’s facades often evoked classical buildings, baroque palaces, or mosques, such as Glücksmann’s Alcazar in Montevideo, which imitated the design of the Alcazar in Sevilla.77 Others were more influenced by the vanguards of the early twentieth century or the art decó and functionalist movements.78 Over the twentieth century, the ar-chitecture of movie theaters became simpler, and buildings tended to be in-tegrated into larger commercial complexes rather than standing alone, which was the case for Max Glücksmann’s Rex Theater. Inaugurated in Mon-tevideo in 1927 on the first floor of an important building erected on 18 de Julio Avenue, this theater was considered to be a milestone of the urban change that was turning some streets, especially the main avenue, “into roads that a metropolis deserves”.79

Movie theaters targeted different audience sectors accordingly to their segregation in the city. The main innovation in cinema theater buildings between the 1910s and 1930s was the distinction of different kinds of ven-ues according to their location. The so-called premiere or first category cin-emas ( cines de estrenos or cines de primera categoría ), located in the city cen-ter and upper-class neighborhoods, were the only ones authorized to show the movies right after their release. Additionally, they had luxurious decora-tion and charged a high price for tickets. The cinemas of the middle- and lower-class neighborhoods, or second category movie theaters ( cines de bario or cines de segunda categoría ), had to wait some time until they could exhibit the new releases and charged a lower entrance price for tickets.80

Cinemas started to proliferate in cities that had been experiencing enor-mous transformations in the previous two decades. The export boom of the 1880s had changed the major cities in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, as it did in the whole Latin American region, not only in their social structure but also in their physiognomies. The population grew, activities diversified, and the lifestyle of their inhabitants changed. What had previously been the center of a colonial city, now became an area full of shops, banks, and coffee shops.81The difference between the city center and the barrios (neigborhoods) fol-lowed a similar process in the three cities under examination here. The up-per classes, who formerly lived close to the main squares and the old towns, started to move into other areas, such as Barrio Norte in Buenos Aires, la Alameda and Providencia in Santiago, or Prado and Pocitos in Montevideo. These new upper-class residential areas were built with elegant architecture and joined by a hippodrome, tennis club, or golf field.82 When movie theaters appeared in the area, their design merged with the dominant style. Even though peripheric neighborhoods changed more slowly than the city center, the emergence of commercial areas and venues for social gathering marked the introduction of features of the city center into the urban peripheries, a process that would be crowned by the inauguration of movie theaters in the 1920s.83

A logic of segregation was replicated both within neighborhoods and in-side the venues themselves. When Max Glücksmann inaugurated the Electric Palace in the city center of Buenos Aires in 1913, Caras y Caretas commented on the initial surprise of the building being only a few meters away from one of Glücksmann’s most important theaters, the Palace. The reason behind this was that the Palace was a luxurious premiere movie theater, while the Elec-tric Palace was meant to be “eminently popular, not only for its prices but also for the special character of its performances”.84 As this example shows, cinemas reflected the eclecticism of the city centers and remained the focus of political and commercial activities around this time when wealthy families were moving out and immigrants moving in, turning big residencies into ten-ements in the process.85 The new entertainment was open to everyone but not under equal conditions. Some cinemas also separated the audiences within the same venue according to the prices of each section ( balcón , platea, and galería ).86

As practices of consumption, the new forms of entertainment were part of a series of operations of segmentation of the population being performed by the market in early twentieth century. The emergence of advertisement, which now associated certain products to specific lifestyles, increasingly tar-geted goods for people of a certain age, gender, or income level. Ads also promised potential buyers to be part of the social category they aspired to by buying certain clothing or smoking the right cigarettes.87 The industries of film and recorded sound took part in these operations by addressing spe-cific segments of the population with their products. Aside from targeting audience fragments regarding their income levels, new media also addressed potential users according their age and gender.

Targeting cameras and reproducers for family used and more precisely for children was one of the segmentation strategies that proved successful for the film industry. The introduction by Pathé Frères of a new model of camera and reproducer of simple operation and low price, the Pathé Baby, contrib-uted to the further development of commercialization strategies addressing families with products for children. Pathé Baby was presented as a family cinematograph, with a camera that enabled the user to record movies and a projector to watch both the homemade and professionally recorded reels. Glücksmann’s advertisements showed this machine as mostly being used by women and children, and claimed that, due to its simple operation, “even a five-year-old kid could use it”.88 Max Glücksmann was not only one of the most active introducers of Pathé Baby in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, but was also involved in the production of films for children with educational purposes. 89

Offering products for children was part of a tendency that grew from the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Doing so allowed sellers to find fertile ground in the context of the expansion of consumption and also in the context of the transformation of the ideas of childhood and its place in society. Throughout the early twentieth century, a whole specialized culture for children took shape, including discourses about formal and non-formal education, sociability spaces, recreation, the appropriate kind of games and toys, etc. Both the expansion of the schooling system and general consump-tion contributed to the definition of the sphere of childhood and its place in society.90 Cameras and phonographs were part of a larger set of “scientific toys” that gained popularity around this time. According to Caras y Caretas , “in order to satisfy the wishes of children, toy manufacturers work without a rest to find out what they could like most, and profit from the latest discov-eries of mechanics, electricity, optic and every science. (…) Such is the influ-ence of science in amusement, it penetrates, renews and vivifies every-thing”.91

Aside from targeting products according to age and gender, another form of customer segmentation consisted of addressing immigrants with products that referred to their homeland. Recorded sound had a special potential for doing so, as music appeared as an effective form of providing an “emotional connection to the homeland”. The trade magazine The Voice of the Victor ex-pressed this idea with the following scene, one which allegedly was faced of-ten by record dealers in countries with a large foreign-born population.

The Voice of the Victor provided careful advice to traders on how to ap-proach the immigrant market. It recommended that they study with special care the ethnic composition of neighborhoods where the traders were active, to hire assistants who spoke foreign languages and to resort to the catalog of recordings made abroad to attract nostalgic immigrants. In order to show the commercial importance of this portion of the market, this magazine made a rather racist claim about the overall meaning of music for immigrants:

In Argentina, where the proportion of immigrant populations in the cities was enormous, phonographic companies also addressed their foreign-born clients with especial ads. During World War I, Victor Talking Machine re-leased patriotic songs and military marches from different countries and en-couraged the potential listeners to “stimulate the patriotism with the na-tional tunes of your people”.94 It is difficult to know what came first: entre-preneurs thinking of addressing the immigrant population with music from their homelands, or immigrants appropriating this technology and turning it into a channel of emotional connection with their places of origin. Even so, the discourse present in commercialization contributed to shaping the na-ture of this new medium: like the telephone, phonography was presented as a means that could unite the nation and supersede national boundaries through a universal language. According to Jonathan Sterne, in order to con-nect a nation or to connect people across national boundaries, a certain tech-nology required a social configuration, a set of relations, interconnections, practices, and institutions. This meaning of sound recording only took place when nostalgic immigrants appropriated as a form of feeling closer to their homeland by hearing music “from home”.95

An immigrant himself, Max Glücksmann also addressed the group he be-longed to, the Jewish community, with regular advertisements in the Jewish press and with occasional releases of Jewish music on his label, including the repertoire of religious songs recorded in European temples (Image 2).96 Max Glücksmann was the head of several Jewish institutions and was part of the editorial committee of the newspaper Mundo Israelita. He pushed for the integration of Jewish immigrants into the national community without losing their Jewish identity, and considered that the use of the Spanish language and the defense of a secular Jewish culture were important tools for this pur-pose.97 By “Jewish culture” they meant a broad spectrum of expressions, which could include literature written by Jewish authors, the work of Jewish composers or the history of the Jewish people, which they translated into Spanish, published, and commented on in their newspapers.98 Many mem-bers of this group were active in the field of culture, either as publishers, journalists, writers, or cultural entrepreneurs – fields where several immi-grants from different origins were also active – and their integration strategy was also reflected in their work. By targeting products to users based on their mother tongues or places of origin, they favored an appropriation of technology that made it flexible enough to integrate cultural differences into it.

Image 2. Odeon’s catalog of Jewish music. Di Yidishe Tsaitung, Buenos Aires, 04.04.1930.

Similar to the way in which movie theater design aligned with the changing architecture of the city, recorded sound technologies merged with the design of upper- and middle-classes homes. During the first early years of existence of this technology, the business of selling gramophones and records was sim-ilar to selling furniture, the elegance of the object was the main focus of ad-vertisement. Until the late 1910s, most sound reproducers available in Ar-gentina, Chile, and Uruguay were expensive and therefore only accessible to the upper classes, looked like elegant pieces of furniture where the machine was hidden, and were shown in ads as part of the decoration of luxurious living rooms.99 This started to change towards the 1920s. New models appeared around this time and the prices of reproducers gradually went down, making them more broadly accessible to people of middle incomes. Their sale was also encouraged by the different payment methods intro-duced by stores. Probably influenced by the tendencies of industrial design on the Bauhaus, the aesthetics of reproducers changed, becoming simpler and looking less like furniture and more like machines.100

Image 3. Advertisement Casa América. Caras y Caretas, Buenos Aires,

27.07.1922.

An increase in the penetration of the gramophone accompanied a change in commercialization strategies, which shifted the focus from the reproduc-ers to the content of the recordings. If records were initially an excuse to sell gramophones, around the 1920s reproducers needed to be affordable so that more people could buy records on a regular basis. This resulted in a shift in commercialization strategies, from one formerly based on the features or aesthetics of the machines to another based on the musical repertoire that labels offered. This meant moving from a durable product to a disposable one: whereas gramophones would last for several years, records could be easily damaged by normal use. In this shift to musical repertoire, the begin-ning of local production was of key importance. With the opening of Max Glücksmann’s record factory in Buenos Aires in 1919, it was now possible to increase the supply of records of locally recorded music and to speed up the times of production. If a song became popular, it was no longer necessary to wait three to five months for the records to be produced in the factories of Europe and the United States and then shipped to Latin America. It was now possible to have them ready in a few weeks for the regional market.101

With the focus of commercialization shifting to the contents of the catalogs, records became part of a larger and preexistent music industry. Recorded sound found a permanent place in the consumption habits of people in dif-ferent age groups, genders, and income levels by successfully connecting to consumers’ previous habits of listening to music. They became one more product to consume for people who owned a piano and bought sheet music and were used to listen to music at home. Records were also another option for those customers who shifted to the player piano, introduced around the 1890s as an alternative for those who enjoyed listening to music but did not have the time to learn how to play an instrument. It was also an alternative for those who, prior to the gramophone, had only listened to music in live shows.

The focus on musical repertoire also introduced the need to gather infor-mation on the preferences and tastes of audiences. With the opening of re-cording studios and the first factories in Argentina and Chile in the 1920s, local labels had the chance to differentiate from transnational labels that of-fered US and European music. In Argentina and Uruguay, tango was the main protagonist of music production. In order to gather insight on and offer a repertoire that met audiences’ tastes, Max Glücksmann developed an effec-tive selling technique: tango contests. Held in a fancy theater, these contests were important social events as well as effective methods of market research where Glücksmann could test the taste of the audience and guarantee a good reception of the recordings his label would release. This format had existed since the 1900s, but Glücksmann’s were the first to be organized by a record label.102 Professional and amateur composers sent their pieces to the contest where a famous orchestra would perform them in front of an audience that would then express its enthusiasm by clapping.

The introduction of the gramophone also marked a turning point in the history of another social practice: dancing. The Victor Talking Machine re-leased the first record specifically meant for dancing in 1897. After that, every label would eventually follow and develop their own repertoire of danceable music.According to Marina Cañardo, an “industry of dance” emerged at this time, with an increase in the offerings of group and individ-ual classes with professional dancers along with books that explained with text and images how to do the main steps. The increasingly popular scenes of tango dance in film also impacted this emergence.103 Even though there was a certain continuity with courtly dances of the nineteenth century, ball-room dance grew in popularity from the early twentieth century. These dances were now to the rhythm of what the press and the ads called “modern dances”, among which tango had a central position, not only in Latin America but also in Europe.104

Recorded sound found a place in the dance industry. Advertisements en-couraged consumers to improvise dancing evenings at home or even out-doors with portable gramophones (image 4). In order to test what music was better received by listeners eager to dance, record labels implemented an effective market research technique: they formed stable orchestras that per-formed in the carnival dances and in this way, tested the danceability of the songs that they would later record:

Image 4. Phonographs and records to dance outdoors. Caras y Caretas, Bue- nos Aires, 16.01.1926.

The broad acceptance of recorded sound and motion pictures as a part of everyday life was mediated by the logic of consumption. If gramophones and cinematographers became a habit of amusement, it was not so much because of the features of the technology itself, but primarily because entrepreneurs managed to portray them as a new way of satisfying old needs and desires including cherishing family memories, dancing, or listening to music, along with new practices, like spending free time shopping at a store.

Between the Theater and the Living Room: Public and Private Uses of Film and Recorded Sound

Casa Lepage announced gramophones as the new machines “that sing and speak as loud as the human voice”, with which it was now possible to “listen to famous opera singers after the season was over”.106 When Casa Lepage started importing film cameras in the 1900s, the company offered to sell them both for public screenings held in theaters and for amateurs who wanted to make their own films and see them at home.Sold together with photographic cameras and accessories, as well as other domestic entertain-ment products such as phonographs, film was portrayed not only as a form of public entertainment but also as an article of home amusement and a me-dium to cherish family memories. These technologies were appropriated as they defined their functions both in the public and private space. The overlap with existing technologies and their uses turned them from curiosities into objects of everyday use.

Even though private and public uses of the technology can be distinguished from each other to a certain extent, these media also show that the bounda-ries between both are blurry, as they bring the public into the private sphere. According to Philippe Ariès, the definition of the private sphere as separated from the public is twofold: on one side, it refers to sociability practices and forms of intimacy and understands the emergence of private life as the substitution of an anonymous sociability in the streets, the square, the com-munity, by a form of restricted sociability in the context of the family. On the other side, the emergence of private life is related to the rise of the modern state and is based on the differentiation between the public, understood as everything that is at the service of the state, and the private or particular, which is all that is subtracted from it.107 Film and recorded sound contrib-uted to the defining of forms of domestic sociability at a time that brought references to public life: with the home gramophone, it was possible to listen to records with the songs of the carnival and the ballrooms, as well as the speeches of the latest political events; the “family cinematographer” came with a selection of “the same vistas that can be seen in movie theaters”.108

New media found a fertile ground to grow inside the domestic sphere due to a series of changes in housing in Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Montevideo towards the turn of the century. The new forms of residence for the upper and middle classes included spaces of socialization for the family, where rec-reation and amusement also took place, thus encouraging the emergence of new forms of indoor entertainment. The city of Santiago grew rapidly, and the increase in the price of housing in the city center forced many people to move away. The middle classes settled in small houses in the suburbs of the East, while the lower-income sectors settled in the peripheries of the South and North.109 Between 1870 and 1930, the domestic settings changed in many ways in the Rio de la Plata area. Among the houses of the higher clas-ses, the tendency was a specialization of rooms for specific functions and a clear separation from the activities held outside. Rooms were no longer linked to each other directly through doors, but they were connected to a corridor that linked them all. The dormitory became the place for intimacy, while the living room and the kitchen were designated as a place for family activities and recreation. Additionally, new forms of housing appeared among the middle classes, namely cottages, chalets and apartments. The design of these houses also followed the logic of specialization of rooms like the those of the rich but in a more compact manner, by eliminating corridors and mixing some functions into one room (eat-in kitchen or living-dining room, laundry-kitchen room). Moreover, they featured simpler and cheaper construction structures and being settled in smaller ground units, many of them had two floors.110

The differentiation between the private and public sphere was not so pro-nounced in the case of popular housing. Among the people of lower incomes, the previous model of houses with lateral yard remained, at least until the beginnings of the twentieth century. Each of the identical rooms that faced the patio could be inhabited by a family group or host different work activi-ties such as sewing or repairing workshops. In Buenos Aires, public policies encouraged the sale of small batches and the construction of affordable hous-ing, which led to an important expansion of single-family houses where many of the inhabitants of the conventillos (tenement houses) moved.111 This also had consequences for social life and amusement. In 1913, the mayor of Santiago decreed the “prohibition of the functioning of phonographs, pianos, and other electronic and mechanic instruments in rooms or apartments open directly to the street, in canteens and other entertainment venues”.112 This shows how, with poor acoustic boundaries and less private space, the forms of amusement that were emerging trespassed the porous boundaries be-tween domestic and public space.

When the technologies of recorded sound and motion pictures were intro-duced, they were interpreted based on existing social practices, namely on the experience of playing music at home and consuming images as a form of information and entertainment. As Marshall McLuhan argues, when new me-dia emerges, the environment shifts, and the role and meaning of each medium are altered. This does not mean that the older media disappear or lose their efficacy. On the contrary, it means that the new technology em-braces its predecessor, as it does not have a specific content to fill it yet.113The phonograph embraced the conventional forms of music performance in the domestic spaces that were formed around the piano. Even though both competed for the portion of disposable income, the phonograph also profited from the piano’s consolidated role as a form of home amusement, as this en-abled its fast acceptance. In turn, the emergence of film embraced the uses of photography as a medium for storing family memories and also as a channel to transmit information and emotions, in addition to amusement through en-gagement with images. In the late nineteenth century, photography was the protagonist of several forms of visual spectacles, which facilitated the recep-tion of the motion pictures, as they were one step further in a series of ex-periments with light and moving images.

When the phonograph was invented in the 1870s, its uses were not de-fined, and the people involved in early experiments with sound recording had other functions in mind than those that finally became predominant. It was a rather small group of men who first developed this technology, Thomas Alva Edison and Alexander Graham Bell being the most well-known among them. Most of them knew each other and were part of the same pro-fessional networks, read similar literature, and worked under similar condi-tions, although independently. Both Edison and Bell financed their experi-ments in the field of sound with the payments they received working for oth-ers, until their first accomplishments raise the interest of investors. Both started to experiment with sound recording after working on telegraphy, which was the major context for the emergence of the phonographs, as the Western Union Corporation drove most of the research in communication technology at the time.Even though they worked with little help at the be-ginning, Edison and Bell later became managers of big laboratories where they rarely set foot, thus marking the transition from an artisanal to an in-dustrial mode in the invention process.114

Traditional stories about technologies portray these men as stand-alone geniuses who gave birth to the most wonderful inventions of their time. Also in their own words, their inventions were like their children: when Bell put together a working model of the photophone, a machine that transmitted sound through the use of light, he wrote a letter to his father with these words: “I have just written to Mamma about Mabel’s baby, and I now write you about my own! (…) Mabel’s baby was light enough at birth but mine was LIGHT ITSELF! Mabel’s baby screamed inarticulately but mine spoke with distinct enunciation from the first”.115 As Sterne argues, the metaphor of male-birth, persistent throughout the history of technology, has the conven-ience of fixing the origins in absolute terms: it places the inventor as the only relevant figure between the non-existence and the final formation of a ma-chine.116

Unlike human babies, machines were supposed to appear in the world as finished and fully functional. However, sound reproduction technologies were not fully formed by the time they were introduced to the public, and this plasticity made the process of its transformation into a medium largely dependent on the context of its appropriation. As with the telephone, early promoters of the phonograph sold it as a “serious” business machine, target-ing it to well-educated and overwhelmingly white middle- and upper-class people. However, and also in a similar manner as other technologies, many people found uses for the machines that were not officially promoted. Al-ready in the 1890s, half of the phonograph leases in the major markets of the United States were residential, and frustrated merchants were moving away from business uses to the growing coin-in-the-slot deal. Located in hotel lob-bies, train stations and arcades, coin-in-the-slot machines could entertain commuters in growing cities for a few minutes and a few cents. The use of the phonograph for entertainment was not completely unforeseen for its in-ventors, but its predominance was indeed unexpected. In an early publica-tion on the potential of the phonograph, Edison listed ten possible uses: 1) letter dictation, 2) phonographic books for the blind, 3) teaching of elocution, 4) reproduction of music, 5) registry of the voices of family members and dying persons, 6) music boxes and toys, 7) clocks that announce the time for going home or meals, 8) the preservation of languages, 9) preserving expla-nations made by teachers for educational purposes, 10) connection with the telephone.117 Considering that most of these uses took place for at least a short time, this list has been interpreted either as a sign of Edison’s brilliant and prophetic mind, or as evidence to the fact that nobody knew what to do with this technology and therefore needed explanation. Only one of the uses, the reproduction of music, became prominent in the end. This result cannot be explained by the intentions of its inventor but rather by the social world in which this technology inhabited.

The phonograph was introduced in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay at a time when the demand for entertainment was increasing, and the entrepreneurs who sold them promoted them as mostly useful for amusement purposes. However, other uses were still possible. During the early years of the twen-tieth century, phonographic artifacts enabled their users both to reproduce and record their own cylinders, which could lead to their use as a way of transmitting private messages. Advertisements in the earlier years of the phonograph still encouraged different uses. For example, some promoted it as a way to send private messages recorded in cylinders to a beloved one.118Or, as some of the first witnesses of a phonograph in Montevideo observed, it was also possible to use it to store political discourses for the upcoming generations: “Thanks to the surprising invention by Edison, words are not blown by the wind anymore. The phonograph collects them and repeats them over and over again according to our wish, in a way that a speech by (the Senator) Tulio Freire, for example, will be heard by the future genera-tions as if it had been just pronounced”.119

An innovation in the design of sound machines contributed to consolidate music playback as the main use. Edison’s phonographs and Bell’s grapho-phones available in the market in the 1880s and 1890s used wax cylinders, which could not be easily mass produced. Since each machine could only rec-ord one cylinder at the time, musicians had to repeat their performance sev-eral times (usually in front of several recorders). What was a disadvantage for mass production was an advantage for homemade recordings, since these machines offered a rather simple way for users to make their own cylinders. Emile Berliner’s invention, the gramophone, changed this. Made public in 1888 and first marketed in 1895, the gramophone used a rotating flat disk on a horizontal plane instead of a cylinder and was considerably louder than its predecessors. Moreover, even though it was much harder for users to make recordings, it simplified the process of mass production as disks were made through “stamping”, and one master record could be serially repli-cated.120 All three models were present in the Argentine, Chilean, and Uru-guayan markets throughout the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century. Even though a mechanism for mold-ing cylinders from a negative matrix was perfected in 1901, it was already too late, as the cylinder had lost too much ground to the flat disc.121 With the incorporation of a spring motor, the gramophone became the sound repro-ducer par excellence.

Before becoming an element of home amusement and music making in the domestic space, the phonograph was for some years divided between the public and private spheres. When the first gramophone was presented in Chile in 1892, it was within the context of an exhibition at the theater Victoria in Valparaiso. A representative of the United States Phonograph had brought it with the purpose of introducing it in the market, and following the customs of scientific exhibitions, organized a demonstration with three shifts in which the public could listen to fragments of violin music and speeches, as well as a fragment of a cueca. The gramophone was present in Valparaiso in several salons, parks, and squares, where people could listen to a song for an accessible price, following the coin-in-the-slot business model. Since one lis-tened with headphones, this was a hybrid of private amusement in a public space.122 Its presence in a public space was a continuation of previous practices of consumption of live music, but due to its technical limitations (low volume and poor acoustic quality), recordings were better appreciated through an individualized hearing experience. Since the gramophone did not rely on electricity to work, its presence in public spaces was considerable from the beginning. In 1914, the Victrola was announced in the Chilean press as a music instrument for parties in the countryside. Especially after the in-troduction of suitcase-shaped gramophones, its use for outdoor excursions was widely spread.123

Eventually, and with the help of advertisement that promoted it as “the theater at home”, the phonograph found its place inside homes in what had been for a long time the piano’s territory. Several attributes made the piano especially suitable for its role in turning the home into a site of cultural ac-tivity: its size, its solidity, and its interdependence on the self-discipline of practicing. These attributes appealed to middle class women, who found in this instrument a way of expression and a leisure activity that did not disrupt their social situation and traditional family role. In nineteenth century Eu-rope and in the United States, the great majority of amateur pianists and pi-ano teachers were women, while most professional pianists were men.124

Image 5. Advertisement of Piano-Pianola Steinway. Fray Mocho, Buenos Aires, 1916.

The gramophone inherited the gendered aspect from its predecessor: even though the inventors of most communication machines were men, the new medium of recorded sound was deeply defined by women, generally middle-class women, who helped to make it a new, newly intelligible medium for home entertainment. As Gitelman argues, middle-class women were central to the meanings of phonographs and records because they helped deeply to determine the function and functional contexts of recording and playback. Phonographs only “worked” when they managed to reproduce women’s voices with an acceptable level of fidelity, while they became home phono-graphs inasmuch they interlocked with the tensions around music playing at home, and with the ongoing construction of the idea of shopping as some-thing women do.125 Home phonographs eventually became gendered instruments of mass culture, as we can see in the advertisements, most of which portray women as the main users of the machines. Through the sym-bolic and material effects of the piano, the home was redefined both as a site for family and as a site of leisure, while music became something that one did privately rather than something that only occurred in the public domain.

Around the same time, two innovations transformed the practices of music making at home: the player piano and the phonograph. The first machine that enabled the reproduction of professionally executed music in the do-mestic space was not the phonograph but the pianola, introduced about a decade earlier, in the 1860s. This self-playing instrument works with a music roll that contains holes that admit air, thus activating a small pneumatic valve that creates the movement of a hammer that then pushes the strings. Ads of the player piano were largely similar to those of acoustic pianos and contin-ued to include women as protagonists. The difference was that now, mechan-ical instruments made music accessible to the unskilled. This feature was key to the chosen strategy to advertise them. For example, ads of player pianos in the Argentine press claimed: “A new artist will play at your house if you have a Steinway Piano-Pianola. The ladies that did not study music and are fond of it can interpret the greatest masterpieces and also light music, if they just dedicate some attention and willingness” (Image 5). With the new auto-matic means of music reproduction, either the player piano or the phono-graph, women could continue to perform traditional feminine roles, such as playing music or being hostess of social events, if they had taken a job that did not leave them enough time to become skilled pianists (Image 6).

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Image 6. Advertisement of gramophone Victrola. Caras y Caretas, Buenos Ai- res, 09.12.1911.

Experiments in the design of mechanical instruments flourished in the nineteenth century, encouraged by a context marked by the withdrawal to domestic spaces and the availability of disposable income among growing sectors of society.126 Ads of the phonograph, presented as the new form of family amusement, usually depicted the whole family group gathered in the living room listening to recorded music. Occupying the center of the salon, the gramophone was designed accordingly to the aesthetics of elegant furni-ture (Image 7).

Image 7. Victor Talking Machine’s advertisement. Caras y Caretas, Buenos Ai- res, 28.02.1914.

From today’s perspective, we might expect that the phonograph had eclipsed the piano and the pianola as the main home amusement. Unlike the

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Until the 1910s, the piano was competing with the poor acoustical repro-duction of that time’s phonographs, with breakable shellac records and their spring-loaded cranks, rather than with today’s fidelity of sound reproduction and automatic machines. In order to displace what had been for a long time a symbol of cultural capital and middle-class aspirations, the phonograph would need to first reach a better sound quality, which took several years. In the humorist article “The phonograph fever”, published in the Chilean mag-azine Zig-Zag in 1905, the writer claimed to be escaping from phonographs. He described the horrors of having to listen to recordings wherever he went, making explicit all the limitations of that time’s recorded sound technology:

In addition to coexisting and eventually replacing the piano as a form of home amusement, the phonograph also became an integral part of a music industry composed by all sorts of live shows along with the sheet music pub-lishing business. By the time the phonograph was introduced, a fully func-tional network of actors and institutions enabled the commercial circulation of music. According to Peter Tschmuck, we can speak of a music industry since the emergence of a concert culture in eighteenth century Europe. The industry’s main actors were concert and opera promoters who arranged public performances and publishers who subsequently distributed sheet music with adaptations of these performances for various instruments. The power of music publishers became the most obvious in the last quarter of the nineteenth century when they gathered in Tin Pan Alley in New York, close to vaudeville theaters, and proved that they were able to turn songwriters and lyricists into stars.131

The phonograph struggled to find a place within this network. Possibly, the invention of the phonograph in the 1870s was not even noticed by the pro-tagonists of the music industry of that time. Only after the 1890s, once pho-nographs were consolidated as music playback machines, did they start to compete for the portion of the income allotted to pianos, lessons, and sheet music. However, the different components of the music industry were also complementary: the songs of artists who were famous for their live perfor-mances were recorded and versions of these songs were published as sheet music for amateur players. In Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, piano shops sold mostly sheet music of European editorials until the massification of gen-res such as tango and cueca provided an opportunity for local publishers. As it was typical that musicians paid themselves for the first edition of their score while the editor took care of advertisement and sales, the initial invest-ment to enter the publishing business was relatively small, and publishers could decide whether to continue working with a certain author only after seeing its commercial result.132

A successful strategy to become part of the existing music industry was to link the home phonograph to public events. In order to advertise the records of his label, Glücksmann developed advertising campaigns that linked the musical repertoire to patriotic celebrations in Argentina. The name of the label itself, Discos Nacional, already pointed to the importance of what was presented as national music. Since the early twentieth century, European la-bels had been advertising the recordings of Latin American musicians under the name of criollo (creole) repertoire.133 These records were only a minor part of the offerings of labels such as Victor, Columbia, or Odeon, recorded in Europe or the United States by artists that happened to be on tour or that were brought to these places with this specific purpose in mind. Occasion-ally, and especially during the early years of the twentieth century, these songs were recorded with portable recording machines in temporary studios set up in hotels by traveling agents of the recording companies.134

Similar to the way that opera records provided “the theater at home”, the records of Discos Nacional brought the national celebrations into the domes-tic space. Local phonographic production found a niche in what could be con-stituted as a repertoire of “national” music. An analysis of advertisements shows that the commercial strategy of linking the musical repertoire to al-leged local authenticity was already present – but marginally – since the early years of the phonographic industry, and it became prominent after the emergence of local production. When Tagini opened a recording studio with the support of Columbia, some of his first recordings were “patriotic records” – as the ads claimed – with recitations of historical episodes for the commem-oration of the centenary of the May Revolution in 1910.135 Also shortly before the 1910 commemoration, Glücksmann started to emphasize the criollo rep-ertoire and announced the arrival of new recordings from local artists made by the Victor Talking Machine.136 Later on, and once he inaugurated his fac-tory in 1919 and launched the label Discos Nacional , Glücksmann released special editions of patriotic songs every year for the commemoration of the May Revolution and Independence Day in July.

While the gramophone conquered the piano’s territory, motion pictures occupied what had long been the place of photography, a means of gathering family memories and reinforcing the belonging to a kinship group. During the second half of the nineteenth century, after the introduction of the da-guerreotype in the 1840s, the price of a professional portrait in Buenos Aires was very expensive and therefore only accessible to the upper classes, for whom it had a function similar to the aristocratic custom of having a profes-sional artist produce a painting of the family members.137 A series of innova-tions in the field of photography simplified the technique and towards the end of the century, cheaper and lighter cameras were introduced in the mar-ket. Shops such as Casa Lepage made it possible for people of upper and mid-dle incomes to buy their own cameras and take their own pictures, as they not only sold the artifacts, but also offered instruction on how to use them, developed reels, and edited books and magazines with detailed explanations of the features of this technology.138 At the turn of the century, photography spread as an amateur practice and developed its uses in the private sphere, as a way of representing the family group through the habit of having pic-tures of their members as well as dead relatives exhibited at home.139

It is no coincidence that photography had been the entryway for Max Glücksmann’s career as a technology entrepreneur. Before landing on Lepage’s store, he had worked as an assistant to a professional photogra-pher, from whom he learned the technique.140 In fact, most of the men in-volved in the introduction of film were photographers, such as Eugene Py, another of Lepage’s employees and cameramen of most of Glücksmann’s production.141 In a similar manner than telegraphy and the telephone were the precedents of recorded sound, photography was the context for the emergence of film, both in terms of its invention and its uses. It provided the groundwork and the technical knowledge for the exploration with light and moving images, as well as the audiences for visual spectacles. The plasticity of new technologies enabled their transformation into media due to existing social practices and a demand for new uses.

Classical books on the history of film in Latin America start with the arrival of the technology to the region and with the first exhibitions of Lumiere’s invention in 1896 and the upcoming years in several cities of the region. This moment is often presented as a radical break with the past. According to Do-mingo Di Nubila, Argentine film was born in Casa Lepage a few months after the first exhibition at the theater Odeon in July 1896.142 The historiography also highlights that only a few months after the first projection of the Lumi-ere brothers in Paris in December 1895, European cameramen went to Latin America to record images of exotic landscapes.143 However, the invention of motion pictures can be considered a part of a larger process of technical ex-perimentation around “the great art of light and shadow”, which paved the way for the emergence of the projected moving image.144 Following Andrea Cuarterolo, the appropriation of the film technology can be better under-stood by looking at how motion pictures were part of a broader spectrum of visual experimentation, how it constituted a further step in a series of inno-vations that had started a long time ago.145 In its early years, the technology of film found a place within a series of previously existing social practices, and in this case, practices that shaped the way in which inhabitants of Argen-tina, Chile, and Uruguay engaged with images.

Parallel to its consolidation in the domestic space, photography also had public uses in the form of visual spectacles and as the medium for spreading information through images. The decision of entrepreneurs to invest in the newly introduced cinematographer was likely informed by the success of previous forms of visual spectacles. When Henri Lepage and his two employ-ees, Max Glücksmann and the French photographer Eugene Py, attended the first film exhibition in Buenos Aires in 1896, they must have already been to or heard of magic lantern shows, along with exhibitions of dioramas, cos-moramas, and polioramas. These were widespread forms of entertainment for the elites in nineteenth-century Latin American capitals, who had adopted them from their European peers.146 Photography was a protagonist of several forms of visual spectacles, and even in its more realistic expres-sions had the ability to amuse its viewers. In the nineteenth century, creative montages were made to narrate stories through photo series, and photogra-phers experimented with different attempts to create the illusion of move-ment of images with the help of light games. Even portraits taken at studios had spectacular elements, such as the poses, the decoration of the settings and the clothing.147 In 1868, people gathered in the theater Solis in Montevi-deo to witness the first demonstration of the silforama, one of the latest developments in this field, and in 1873 the diaphanorama was presented in Uruguay.148 In 1894, the entrepreneur Fred Figner introduced Edison’s ki-netoscope, a device that used a strip of perforated celluloid film with sequen-tial images over a light source, in several Latin American cities.149

Photography had contributed to the shaping of a new culture of visual in-formation during the second half of the nineteenth century, which would be continued by film. In the 1850s, the invention of the wet collodion process made it possible to reproduce photographs using the same negative and therefore encouraged its use in the press. However, it was still time-consum-ing and expensive, as the negative needed to be printed separately on each copy. For this reason, it was common for magazines to use photographs as models for drawings, lithography or printmaking, which were easier to print.150 The wet collodion process also shortened the times of exposure, making the process of developing significantly shorter and helping to create an idea of immediacy that was central for the informative genres. But it was not until the 1890s, when lighter and cheaper portable cameras appeared in the market, that informative images proliferated. With the introduction of the halftone photoengraving technique, it became easier and cheaper to in-clude pictures in printed pages. Caras y Caretas, the main illustrated maga-zine in Argentina, requested the collaboration of amateur photographers who were invited to sell images related to public or curious events or per-sonalities.151

In a similar way that phonographs had to find a place within the pre-exist-ing forms of circulation of music, film technology was interpreted on the ba-sis of the previous forms of image consumption. According to Vanessa Schwartz, the word and the image became connected in an unprecedented way in the late nineteenth century due to the development of technologies that enabled the reproduction of images in books and the illustrated press leading to a great expansion of circulation of visual representations.152 Illus-trated magazines had two main forms of structuring the narratives and con-necting pictures to text. One was a type of vignette that gathered images that shared a common theme and were accompanied by an informative text re-ferring to the same theme. Another form was mainly chronological, and it showed a series of images ordered according to a temporal progression to-gether with short explanatory texts, similar to the ones that would be used in film.

Illustrated magazines created familiarity with certain themes, characters, images, narrative forms, and genres among their readers. This way, these publications provided the interpretation skills, the familiarity with conven-tions and forms of representation that enabled a fast acceptance of film.153 Photographs were not only accessories to texts but also intertextual refer-ences with a central role in decoding the humorous messages. Magazines such as Caras y Caretas , appearing in 1898 in Buenos Aires, or Zig-Zag , which had been published since 1905 in Santiago, gave high importance to visual information and made use of the latest innovations in this field. These mag-azines combined different genres in their pages, such as chronicles, inter-views, fictional stories, social life articles and a large amount of different kind of images.154 Many of the stories were told as sensationalist narratives, and photographs were a central element within the role of reinforcing the credi-bility of a story otherwise considered implausible. This existence of this genre, known as fait drivers, suggested that any story could be turned into amusement, thus blurring the boundaries between information and enter-tainment.155

Film had continuities with both the public and private uses of photography. On one side, documentary movies and newsreels continued with their pat-tern of informing with images that illustrated magazines had started. On the other side, the use of cameras to record and treasure images of family life was a continuation of the importance of photography to represent and ex-hibit the kinship group. According to the Chilean magazine Cine Gaceta , the family movie “is one of the most appealing applications of film. In the United States, this fashion is causing furor and there is no party, wedding, or bap-tism that is not reproduced in a tape and stored among the family memo-ries”.156 In parallel to the expansion of film as public entertainment, the pri-vate uses of this technology consolidated and were reinforced by the intro-duction of Pathé Baby in the 1920s, a device designed specifically for this purpose. In 1923, Glücksmann signed a contract with Pathé Frères that granted him the exclusive rights to the distribution of all Pathé Baby prod-ucts in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay. He started a strong advertisement campaign that emphasized the benefits of having a camera at home.157 In 1929, the Department of Commerce of the United States noticed that “because Chileans rarely permit their children to attend the theater, many of the wealthier families have their own projecting ma-chines and rent standard films suitable for children and adults alike from the film exchanges” and argued that this profitable niche needed to be better grasped by US film companies.158

Even in its domestic uses, film was not disentangled from the sense of what was of public interest. Lepage, Py, and Glücksmann often took their cameras and attended public events, where they recorded images that were later to be seen in movie theaters or could be watched at home. For example, the employees of Casa Lepage took part in the visit of former president Bar-tolomé Mitre to the National Historical Museum, where they took vistas and photographs and attended carnival celebrations to record the parades.159Aside from its use as an archival medium that enabled the collection of family memories in the form of homemade movies, film brought images of public events into the domestic space in the form of vistas that could be seen with home reproducers.160

By the late twentieth century, collective forms of amusement such as the-ater and film turned into events where people were together but in silence, an overlap of the public and the private. However, this had not been the case since the beginning, but rather the result of a long process of transformation. After a long tradition of theater performances where there was no separa-tion between the performers and an audience that participated actively in the show, theater evolved into a strongest differentiation on both sides to-wards the 1850s. Nevertheless, audiences were still not expected to remain quiet as mere observers until the end of the century. With the emergence of silent film, the public maintained the habits demonstrated during a theater performance, and it was common that they would laugh, cry, or talk. Gradu-ally, the practices of cinema-going evolved into a collective experience of in-dividual watching, which consolidated to a larger extent with the introduc-tion of sound film.161

Motion pictures and recorded sound changed from curiosities to being part of established communication channels and entertainment forms inasmuch as they became part of existing practices of sociability both in public and do-mestic spaces. By embracing their predecessors, these technologies were un-derstood and interpreted by their users based on the experience they had with other media. The plasticity of recorded sound and motion pictures al-lowed them to be shaped by their users in order to fit their needs, demands and desires. In order to reach these users, entrepreneurs selling gramo-phones and cinematographers had the role of gathering knowledge and un-derstanding the expectations of potential customers. In doing so, they prof-ited from new marketing techniques and developed their own strategies ac-cording to the local contest. Entertainment became part of a larger set of lei-sure practices crossed by the growth of consumption.

Conclusions

This chapter looked at the moment when phonography and film emerged as new media. The purpose of doing so is not only to acknowledge the initial novelty, but also to look at the first phase in the birth of a new medium, when it passes through “a phase of identity crisis, a crisis precipitated at least by the uncertain status of the given medium in relation to established, known media and their functions”.162 This crisis is resolved when it becomes clear in a certain context, what that medium does and for whom. This chapter ar-gued that film and phonography turned into media through their link to prac-tices of music reproduction and consumption of images that were rooted both in the domestic and public spheres. It argued further that this happened due to the action of entrepreneurs that introduced and commercialized the new communication machines. They gathered information on the habits, ex-pectations and desires of potential buyers and through advertisement, tar-geted entertainment products for specific uses and customer sectors.

Users made sense of the new technologies thanks to the overlap of their uses with those of existing media. Phonography and film embraced old me-dia, namely acoustic and automatic pianos in the first case, and photography in the second. The phonograph was appropriated based on the habits of mu-sic reproduction at home, which had the piano as its main element, while records became part of the network that enabled the commercial circulation of music, constituted by live concerts and the publishing of scores. Film was seen as a continuation of the experiments with different forms of visual spec-tacles that were popular among the elites in the nineteenth century. It was utilized as a way to cherish family memories similar to photography and as a medium that transmitted visual information similar to illustrated maga-zines.

At the same time, communication machines contributed to the differentia-tion of the domestic and the public sphere and to the connection between both of them. If at first cylinders and records were an excuse to sell repro-ducers that looked like elegant pieces of furniture, the focus of commercialization later shifted to the musical repertoire. In order to record music that would be better received, entrepreneurs needed to test the taste of the public and develop an offer that would meet the expectations of differ-ent segments of the audience. In this regard, Max Glücksmann invented new methods of market research: tango contests and carnival balls served the purpose of gathering information on the preferences of the public. Moreover, he followed commercial strategies that linked the practice of music repro-duction at home with public events such as national holidays. Cinema was first integrated into programs of existing public entertainment and later be-came autonomous with the building of venues with the specific purpose of film exhibition, thus turning it into the main form of collective amusement in cities. In parallel, film was also portrayed as a medium of home amusement, which allowed consumers to enjoy the same movies shown at the theater in the comfort of their homes.

This chapter showed how the expansion of entertainment was part of the emergence of consumer societies in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Santiago. With the availability of more disposable income, the population increased and diversified their consumption habits. Selling and buying practices changed accordingly, and it was proper ground for the adoption of selling techniques developed in the United States and Europe, as well as for the in-novation of methods designed for the local context. These years witnessed important changes in the techniques of market research, design features of entertainment products and shopping venues. Consumer societies emerged in the context of a connected market, which through local representatives of transnational firms and communication channels such as trade magazines, allowed the transmission of experiences between different marketplaces. Even so, selling strategies also needed to be customized to meet the local needs, and the information gathered along with networks of local entrepre-neurs were key to developing accurate strategies for each context.

Successful commercialization strategies were based on targeting products to specific customer segments. In the context of emerging mass consump-tion, the entertainment industries took an active role in the classification mechanisms performed by the market. Advertisements of home amusement products shifted from informing consumers about the features of a product

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The Emergence of a Global Entertainment Market (1896–1914)

As was discussed in Chapter 1, phonographs and records started arriving to Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay shortly after their commercial introduction to Europe and the United States, and they gradually became two of the main forms of entertainment. To meet a growing demand, the imports of films and recordings stabilized and increased. In the early years, retailers selling household products acquired them through improvised distribution mecha-nisms, whereas studios and labels based in the United States and Europe found new ways of supplying their markets abroad throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century. The companies that exploited the record-ing technologies commercially became transnational corporations, and by the time World War I broke out, the phonographic and film markets were globally integrated.170

Owners of the patents of the technologies of recorded sound and motion pictures had aimed to expand their business into foreign markets since the early years of their activities. For studios and labels settled in Europe, the relatively small scale of their domestic markets made it necessary to look for buyers and audiences who could help amortize the relatively high costs of production in other parts of the world. Those settled in the United States fol-lowed suit later after expanding into their own domestic market.171Recording engineers working for the major European and US-based labels traveled around the world recording music in hotel rooms. They visited sa-lons and concerts, and, in a few weeks, had the task of recording as many songs as possible.172

As a part of this process, the figure of local film and music distributors ac-quired more prominence. The catalogs of the labels started to grow, integrat-ing music performed in different parts of the world. However, the limited time and scarce understanding of the local context and preferences of the public brought them to the need to collaborate with other locally based ac-tors. At this point, local music distributors moved into a more central role, as they were both in charge of the introduction of technologies and products, and of the selection of the music that would be integrated into the catalogs. In the case of film, studios moved from sending irregular shipments of vistas to supply stores and theaters to signing exclusive contracts with local entre-preneurs who then rented them to the venues. During this time, the figure of the film distributor emerged and turned into a highly influential and pow-erful position, a sort of gatekeeper in the film business. The Rise of Film Distributors

During the early years of film, entrepreneurs involved in the commercializa-tion of cinematographers had to get hold of movies through rather informal and irregular distribution mechanisms. Stores such as Casa Lepage an-nounced in the press the arrival of new vistas when they received shipments from Europe or the United States.173 Looking for reels to take back to their countries, studios sold the copies to traders, who then sold them to movie theaters or resold them to entrepreneurs who traveled to London, the main distribution center for film at the time.174 Entrepreneurs sought to get hold of stocks as large as possible, as vistas were sold for low prices but lost their quality after few uses and risked to burn, since the material of reels was highly inflammable.175 Entrepreneurs needed movies in order to provide them to the salons that organized commercial exhibitions and to sell them for private use to the owners of domestic cinematographers. However, a new stock was not always easy to find and therefore f ilm, like its predecessors theater and circus, started to be nomadic: those who managed to get hold of a significant stock could settle in the cities, whereas those who failed to ac-quire a large enough amount of reels to compete in the urban markets usu-ally opted to tour around small towns and villages with their movies, or simply retired.176

Over these years, studios transitioned from receiving irregular shipments to working with stable representatives in the main cities of the region. By 1901, Casa Lepage was the exclusive agent of Pathé Frères, which was, at the time, the most rapidly expanding studio in the Latin American market. Lepage became the manager of one of the first venues refurbished with the purpose of film exhibition in Buenos Aires, the Cine Opera, which only screened movies from Pathé at the time.177 The quality and reputation of this studio’s films was an important tool for Lepage, and then Glücksmann, to position themselves in the distribution market. Since they had access to successful movies, they gained access to exhibition venues by becoming managers or owners. Once they controlled part of the exhibition circuits, it made sense for studios to sell their films to them and not to other entrepre-neurs.

The distribution mechanism based on selling films to distributors or di-rectly to movie theaters changed around 1906–1907, when it was replaced by the renting system. With the shift from short films to longer ones, a growth of fiction feature films that took place with the participation of re-nowned actors and actresses, the costs of production increased. Meeting the standards became harder for less capitalized producers.Copies were sold for much higher prices than before, making it difficult for individual exhibitors to own a large stock. The renting system introduced by Pathé Frères is con-sidered a milestone in the history of film.178 It first emerged as a response to the increasing demand of the movie theaters in France, which were now more stably supplied with electricity and had a loyal audience that con-stantly demanded new films. Due to this system’s efficiency and the benefits it brought to the studios (a fixed income for every film regardless of its suc-cess), it was also adopted as the main distribution mechanism around the world. The itinerant exhibiting entrepreneurs, both in Europe and in Latin America, would soon disappear.179 The decentralized and less-capitalized distribution mechanisms that were responsible for the screenings in music halls, cafés, salons, or improvised venues, those that had taken film to remote places, from big cities to small villages, were eventually replaced by an in-dustrial organization.

At this point, the figure of the film distributor emerged. Distributors be-came specialized intermediaries who negotiated with studios to acquire a stock of films and allocate them amongst movie theaters. In 1909, the first three companies dedicated exclusively to film distribution in Chile were founded: the administrator of the well-known movie theater Kinora in San-tiago founded Compañía Cinematográfica del Pacífico, while two theater im-presarios founded the Compañía Cinematográfica Italo-Chilena, and Max Glücskmann inaugurated his Chilean branch with an office in Santiago.180With this new system, movie theaters did not need to own their own stock of movies anymore but rented them from distributors, who at the time gave a portion of their incomes to the studios. This solved some of the exhibitors’ problems by guaranteeing them regular access to new films. With the emer-gence of the role of the film distributor, the networks through which films circulated became more centralized. Most distributors were based in the ma-jor cities and from there, sent the movies using the transport and postal net-works.181

Until World War I, most films supplying the markets in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay came from European studios. Since their domestic markets were not big enough to offset the growing costs of feature films, French, Ital-ian and German companies sought the expansion into foreign markets from a very early time. Until the outbreak of World War I and the emergence of Hollywood as the dominant pole of production, French producers occupied the leading position in the world market. Among them, Pathé Frères played the most prominent role.182 From this leading role in the world market, Pathé was able to impose important changes in the distribution mechanisms. The main contribution of this studio was a new and successful business model, which played a key role in the process of industrialization of entertainment worldwide. Between 1906 and 1908, there was a great increase in the com-pany’s total revenues, and its market value and capitalization levels were registered. Apart from the previously mentioned renting system, Pathé’s model consisted of a new way of organizing production. Most films were pro-duced in the company’s studio, but thanks to the work of a constellation of minor producers collaborating with Pathé’s projects, from which the com-pany obtained a large number of images at low prices, shooting happened in different parts of the world.183

Not only Pathé but also other important European film producers, namely French and Italian studios, followed strategies of transnational expansion since the beginning. Even before Pathé turned into the first large scale mul-tinational, other companies had been trying out forms of transnational oper-ations. In the late 1890s, the British Mutoscope and Biograph exploited coin-in-the-slot motion picture machines in several countries, and George Méliès’ company opened a subsidiary in the United States to market its films in 1902.184 Pathé perfected the mechanisms of expansion by setting up distri-bution offices in nearly every European country, opening at least one branch in every continent. In the period between 1906–1915, the foreign markets represented an average of 92% of its incomes for Pathé.185 Whereas most French companies followed a similar strategy, the Italian industry was quite different. Primarily composed of small to medium firms, Italian filmmakers achieved great success by building on the know-how of theater and opera production. Until World War I, Italian films were very successful in the world market, and this industry was the country’s fourth largest export. Unlike French and US companies, they did not open subsidiaries abroad but focused instead on managing trade from their headquarters in Italy. Maybe for this reason, the Italian industry was devastated by the war and never regained its position in the global market.186

The competition between European and US studios explains the way in which they approached Latin American markets. Pathé Frères had con-quered an important share of the United States’ domestic film market in the years before World War I, and reverting his success was the first challenge that American producers had to face in order to become the dominant indus-try. The size of the US domestic market accounts for both the success but also the delay of its industry in conquering the worlds’ film market. No other country had so many movie theaters and such a high number of film-going public. The great demand created by the nickelodeon – the first indoor venue for motion pictures exhibition that flourished as of 1905 and charged only a few cents for the show – could only be met by adding imports to the domestic production, and the French, German, and Italian industries took advantage of this situation. Meanwhile, US manufacturers were absorbed by the com-petition for the use of the patents of technologies, which enabled or pre-vented the different firms from exploiting motion pictures commercially. Only in 1908 did the situation become more stable with the formation of the Motion Pictures Patent Company (MPPC), an agreement between several manufacturers who agreed to pay patent rights to Edison. The stability granted by this agreement enabled US studios to reconquer their domestic market and start their expansion abroad. However, not every producer was under the umbrella of the MPPC, and this could not prevent independent firms from going into production. In 1912, the US government filed an anti-trust measure against MPPC.187 Its dissolution gave new momentum to inde-pendent producers, now settled in Hollywood, and drove their transfor-mation into the larger companies, which have dominated the global market ever since.

After regaining their internal market from their European competitors, Hollywood studios were in a better position to compete for the foreign mar-kets. US studios were able to offset the costs of their films by supplying the enormous film-going public they had access to in their domestic market, thus being able to reach the foreign markets with lower prices. The French, Ger-man, or Italian industries, however, relied on exports to cover the costs of films, which brought only modest profit in the home market.188 Unlike Edi-son and the MPPC, Hollywood’s strategy to control the US market was not based on the ownership of patent rights but on a strategy of vertical integra-tion – the control of as many phases in the process of film production, distri-bution and exhibition as possible – and horizontal integration – the purchase of small companies by bigger ones.189 The pre-war period witnessed three movements in the US film market: the reduction of the foreign share, the con-formation of a group of powerful companies in Hollywood, and their expan-sion into the foreign markets by settling agents and subsidiaries abroad. Even so, Hollywood’s conquest of the global market would not happen defin-itively until the war. Only then could the US industry take advantage of the reduction of the European presence abroad and take over the markets that they had previously supplied. Eroding its presence abroad, Hollywood could also overcome the European studios in their own domestic markets and be-came dominant in the global market, as it has been ever since.

Until the beginnings of World War I, US films in Latin America supplied only a minor share of the market and were not so much appreciated by the public. Even in countries with close ties to the United States, such as Mexico or Panama, US studios had only small shares of the market, whereas Pathé and other European studios had most of the screen hours.190 According to the declarations of an executive of a distribution company based in Buenos Aires, “some movies produced in the US before the war and exhibited in Ar-gentina had little success or failed completely. For that reason, some distrib-utors decided to hide the names of the companies in further releases of the same studios.”191 One of the reasons for this could have been that the mate-rial sent to Latin America was often defective, as it represented the disposal of the exports to Europe.

Despite the geographical proximity, the export of movies from the US into Latin America was not well organized. Most US films arrived through London exporters and were used reels with English intertitles. They were therefore not very well received by the audiences and left no income to their produc-ers. In his visit to Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay in 1916, a representative of Famous Players commented in the trade magazine Cine Mundial on the film business in the region, noticing the limited variety of films and the low qual-ity of the reels, which, “to our shame – he claimed – (…) is related to the work of representatives of US film companies, who visited South America with one or two exceptional reels and used them to mislead local exhibitors”.192 Be-lieving that these reels represented the standard of production, distributors signed contracts for the whole stock without seeing it previously and were then surprised when they projected them and found out that the quality was much lower than the samples they had seen. The Chilean magazine Cine Gaceta also agreed that the reason why US films could not compete with the Europeans was related to the generally low quality of US films, but addition-ally attributed the fact to exporters seemingly choosing the worst ones to send to Latin America.193

This situation would change during and especially after World War I, once US studios had regained their own domestic market and moved forward on the foreign ones, all while European studios were limited on their activities due to the war. By the time this happened, distribution mechanisms were consolidated in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, and distributors had an active role as intermediaries between US and European studios and local movie theaters. During this time, these studios profited from the foreign expansion of film industries and competed against each other for a share of the profita-ble business of distribution rights. Glücksmann had several competitors. Aside from the previously mentioned companies founded in Santiago, who were mostly active in Chile and Peru, Glücskmann competed with Julián Aju-ria and his Compañía General Cinematográfica, who was based in Buenos Aires and distributed films in several countries of the region from there.194 Recording Trips and Local Agents

In the 1890s, phonographs started to be exhibited in different parts of the world as the latest curiosity of the progress of science, now allowing to reproduce the human voice. Even though the phonograph had first been pre-sented in 1877, it took about two decades before the systematic commercial-ization of talking machines began, namely until investors based in Europe and the United States from telegraphy and telephony businesses formed companies with this purpose and started distributing reproducers and re-cordings, for both domestic and foreign markets, on a regular basis.195 When phonographs were presented for the first time in different parts of the world, the machine itself was the focus of the attraction and was shown in public exhibitions where people could record their own voices. The Uruguayan Ca- ras y Caretas reported on the first exhibition of the phonograph in Montevi-deo in 1890, where the University had acquired one and had it exhibited in front of a selected public: “the machine, similar in its shape to a Singer sewing machine, spoke fluently and with inspired concepts, and sung out of tune but with great musical feeling”.196

Through public demonstrations, people gradually became familiar with the technology, thus setting the groundwork for their adoption as home pho-nographs and coin-in-the-slot machines in salons and bars along with the ex-pansion of the distribution of cylinders with music and spoken voice record-ings.197 The sound quality of the phonograph had been improved in relation to its first version of the 1870s by moving from tin foil to wax cylinders. Even though the audiences of demonstrations where simultaneously enthusiastic and skeptical in front of the marvelous spectacle of the reproduction of the human voice and a sound full of scratchy noises, as the comment in Caras y Caretas illustrates, it was now acceptable enough to start a regular commer-cialization of recordings.

The evolution of technology triggered changes in the distribution mecha-nisms. During the time in which wax cylinders were the predominant sup-port for recordings, the supply was very limited, as there was no method to replicate cylinders, and they needed to be recorded individually. Depending on the volume of their voices, singers could record into up to five machines simultaneously, whereas instrumental orchestras could record into up to ten.198 This meant that if a company had an order for 100 cylinders, the art-ists would have to play the song between ten and twenty times over. During his first years as an employee for Casa Lepage, Max Glücksmann used to drive around the city with a tricycle where he carried blank cylinders and brought them to the houses of musicians who recorded songs for Lepage. According to the testimony gathered by Francisco García Jimenez, one of these artists was Arturo de Nava, an actor and dancer from the theater company of the brothers Podestá, who made some extra money playing and recording the songs he composed. When he saw Glücksmann arriving to his house, he com-plained: “do I need to record ten more times today?”199 This anecdote shows how during the times of the cylinder, the artisanal way of production enabled local entrepreneurs to make their own recordings. This system of production of phonograms would soon become obsolete due to the combined effect of the introduction of the record – which could be replicated and did not enable such an artisanal mode of recording – and the expansion of the market, which required the production of recordings on a mass scale.200

The expansion of distribution networks of the main labels in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, as well as the generalization of the flat record as the main form of recording left several actors out of business. Even though the record was introduced in 1887, more than a decade passed before it took the lead over the cylinder.201 Once sound quality reached that of the cylinder and the production mechanisms were perfected, the gramophone and its flat records became predominant in the market. Mass production was now possible, since sounds were recorded into a negative matrix and then replicated by pressing it into shellac records. Even though some locally produced cylinders were still being commercialized, they would rapidly become obsolete. The possibility of producing on a mass scale motivated labels to expand their ac-tivities in the foreign markets in order to gain new customers as well as new musical content for their catalogs.

Phonograph impresarios such as Efraín Band, who had started experi-menting with his own recordings in the late 1890s, and founded his own la-bels with cylinders of artists in Chile, had to face the competition of mass-producing transnational labels. The adoption of the gramophone and flat rec-ord – which in Chile was generalized by 1905 – as well as the growing pres-ence of US and European labels in the Chilean market left him out of busi-ness.202 He was not only excluded from distribution, a source of huge profit, but he also had troubles competing with the better sound quality of Odeon, Columbia, or Victor records, along with getting artists to record with him in-stead of bigger companies.

Over the 1900s, the global expansion of the record industry was largely driven by the practice of recording trips implemented by most major music labels, which consisted of sending recording technicians on trips around the world to record songs with portable studios. With the gramophone and the record as the predominant technology at this time, performances had to be recorded into a negative matrix that would then be pressed into records.203These trips made it possible for companies to record matrixes in portable studios and transport them back to Europe or the United States to be pressed. Recording trips became a normal practice for the Gramophone Company and its US subsidiary, the Victor Talking Machine, during the 1900s. The Gaisberg brothers were the first to implement it. Fred Gaisberg started to work with Emile Berliner in Washington as an accompanying pia-nist and an assistant to the recordings. He later became one of Berliner’s main partners and technicians and moved with him to London, where the company was settled. When the firm started to develop their foreign mar-kets, the amount of work grew, and the firm hired Will Gaisberg as a record-ing assistant. Together, the two brothers organized their first recording trip, departing in September 1902 and returning one year later. They departed from London and traveled around India, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan, where they attended parties, concerts and theaters looking for artists to rec-ord. On the trips, the fees payed to the artist were much lower than in Europe, but the recording expenses were higher since, as Fred Gaisberg remembers, “most of the artists needed to be trained over long periods before they de-veloped into acceptable gramophone singers”.204

Recording trips were a catalyzer of the global expansion of the recording industry. The goal of these trips was to open up new markets, establish agen-cies, and acquire a catalogue of records of local music. Over the next years, most major labels implemented the idea of the Gaisberg brothers and orga-nized their own recording trips. All the songs composing this catalog were pressed into records in the factories located in Europe and the United States and later distributed to supply the different markets. In 1905, the German-based label Beka organized the longest recording trip that had been taken up until that moment, a two-year tour that departed from Berlin and went around Austria, Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Egypt, India, My-anmar, Indonesia, China, Japan, Hawaii, and finished in the United States.205The interest in Latin America surfaced a few years later. The firstcompany that organized systematic tours to this region was Victor Talking Machine. The recording engineer Harry Sooy was in charge of three trips to the region: the first in 1908 to Mexico, the second in 1909 to Cuba, and the third in 1910 to Buenos Aires.206 Even though Victor was the pioneer of getting hold of a local catalog in this region, the rest (Columbia, Odeon, Pathé, Fonotipia) fol-lowed shortly after.

These recording trips not only enabled the inclusion of music from around the world in the catalog of the major labels, but also motivated some changes in musical repertoire being recorded. Before 1900, most recordings included folk songs and chansons, many of which had a negative reputation among sections of the audience who preferred to consume more “sophisticated” en-tertainment music. According to Tschmuck, the idea of changing the reper-toire was suggested to Fred Gaisberg by the Gramophone agent in Saint Pe-tersburg in 1901. He operated a luxurious salon and commented that his cli-ents, members of the high society, were not pleased with the repertoire on offer, and suggested he record the opera star Fedor Chaljapin. After over-coming some technical obstacles, Gaisberg was able to record the opera singer, and the records were offered as a part of a new luxurious series for a higher price, the so-called “Red Label”. From that point on, Gramophone ex-panded his series of opera records, which were a great success in the early years of the twentieth century in many parts of the world.207 However, the repertoire preferences would change across time and space, and it would be up to the recording engineers and more significantly, their local partners, to be able to interpret them.

The beginnings of opera recordings resulted in the emergence of a star sys-tem in the phonographic industry, which already had a global scale. After the success of the Russian opera singers, Gaisberg approached the young star of La Scala in Milan, Enrico Caruso, and convinced him to make a few record-ings. Thanks to these records, Caruso would become the first international opera star. The fee of 100 pounds demanded by Caruso for recording ten arias was astronomical and unprecedented, but Gaisberg decided to pay it despite the objections of his employers.208 He was proven right when Gram-ophone recovered the investment in no time and obtained a big profit from Caruso’s recordings. For the tenor, who was a celebrated star at La Scala but unknown outside of Italy, it meant his introduction to a larger audience around the world.209 The distributors of the Victor Talking Machine sold his records in Latin America. As this famous self-caricature shows, Caruso was a well-known star, and his private life and habits caught the attention of the audiences of the region.

Image 8. Caruso’s self-portrait. Caras y Caretas, Buenos Aires, 24.08.1907

Aiming to emulate Gramophone’s success, other companies started to rec-ord opera singers. In order to prevent to the competition from approaching Caruso with requests, the label offered him the first exclusive record contract in the music business in 1904. From then on, the star system and exclusive contracting became key elements of the success of the phonographic indus-try.210 In doing this, labels controlled the artistic and creative input, which was the most crucial factor of the value chain. However, the recordings of the stars did not account for the majority of the profit of the labels, at least during these early years. Because the records sold for higher prices, they only con-stituted a small proportion of the total sales. But they worked as an advertis-ing medium. As an executive of the Victor affirmed, “not all of our customers can afford to purchase a $7 record, but the mere announcement of it will bring them to your store as a magnet attracts steel.”211 The star system in the phonographic industry, similarly to the film industry, was first introduced and then emulated in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Where the advertise-ments and the local press in the early years of the twentieth century cele-brated the new releases of Caruso and commented on his personal features and private life, the focus of attention would move to local musicians with the beginnings of local production.

In addition to sending technicians on recording trips, another way of ex-panding the catalog was to invite artists to record at the studios in the labels’ headquarters or record artists who happened to be on tour in the United States or Europe. In 1909, the National Phonograph Co. invited Alfredo Gobbi to record a series of “popular songs, typical of a quaint and picturesque type of Argentina and Uruguay – the daring gaucho”, which would be sold both in Latin America and the United States.212 Gobbi represented what Andrea Matallana calls an artist-entrepreneur. Some musicians in the early twenti-eth century traveled to Europe and the United States to try their luck in show business there. These artists, such as Gobbi or Angel Villoldo, usually had started their careers in the circus and had considerable experience as popu-lar entertainers who had worked in precarious conditions.213 The purpose of these tours was twofold: on one side, aware of the popularity that the music of Buenos Aires and Montevideo was gaining in the capitals of Europe and the United States, they went there looking for success. On the other side, they also had the goal of recording their songs, knowing that the records could then be exported to their countries of origin, thus helping to boost their ca-reers there thanks to the prestige of well-known labels.

The popularity of musical expressions originated in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay in Europe and the United States is one example of how the global expansion of the music market created a circulation in different directions. Not only did the audiences of Buenos Aires, Santiago, or Montevideo listen to Italian operas, but also Parisians and New Yorkers danced and listened to tango. The taste for this music had been first introduced in Paris through the thé-tango , dancing evenings and cabarets, which included this music as one of their main attractions. The record industry played a key role in promoting this genre in Europe, not only enabling the popularization of South American artists, but also the development of new styles of tango. This was based on its appropriations abroad, which sometimes came with changes in the or-chestration, singing style or the language of the lyrics.214 The popularity of tango in Paris has been broadly acknowledged both by contemporaries and by the historiography: in 1912, Caras y Caretas stated that “tango is so pop-ular in Paris that there are academies that teach how to dance to it. (…) Ar-gentina is fashionable, and not for the agricultural products we export, but rather for this popular dance, which we had almost forgotten”.215 It has been shown that tango became “Argentine” for the first time in Paris and that tango was popular in Italy, Germany, and England.216

Tango arrived in Europe via multiple diplomatic and economic connec-tions as well as the result of elites and their interest in experiencing an “exotic” culture of other parts of the world. In the early twentieth century, tango was not only well-known in European capitals but also in major US cities. It arrived there partly as the result of the emulation of Europe, consid-ered as the main example of sophistication and good taste by, for example, the New York bourgeoisie. Tango was one of several rhythms that became popular in the context of a boom of dancing as an entertainment activity. The Victor Talking Machine recorded several hundreds of tangos in the years that spanned from 1906 to 1914, both in their recording studios in Camden and as a part of their recording trips to Buenos Aires.217 In this process, the rec-ord was the material medium that enabled the circulation of this music ex-tensively and complemented the presence of tango and the musicians who played it.

Distribution networks went through a series of changes during the 1910s. Because inviting artists from abroad to record was rather expensive and re-cording those who were on tour only gave access to a very limited repertoire, the industry perfected the method that had been developed through the re-cording trips by working with locally based agents. Labels looked for ways to more efficiently select and record popular music from around the world, then pressing the records at a central plant and exporting them back to the music’s country of origin.218 Doing so guaranteed the expansion of the cata-logs offered in the markets of the North, as well as popularizing companies such as Victor, Columbia, Gramophone, Phonotipia, or Odeon in the Latin American markets. Whereas every label sold records to different entrepre-neurs in the early years, each company started to work exclusively with local agents who were the only ones authorized to distribute their records after some time. In Argentina, Max Glücksmann had an exclusive contract with the label Odeon, while José Tagini was the distributor of Columbia. Entrepre-neurs often entered legal conflicts to prevent others from selling the records of a certain label who had guaranteed them the exclusivity for a certain time but could not stop them from selling a remaining stock from a previous con-tract. In 1911, José Tagini sued Max Glücksmann for the unlawful use of the brands Odeon and Fonotipia, of which, according to a contract signed in 1907, Tagini had the exclusive reproduction rights. However, the judge ruled in favor of Glücksmann, as he could prove that the stock of records had been bought directly from Fonotipia prior to the contract with Tagini.219

In a move from the practice of taking recording trips to working with stable agents who were based locally, labels also increased the degree of infor-mation and understanding about the markets they aimed to conquer. It be-comes clear, in Harry Sooy’s memoirs, that the knowledge of traveling engi-neers about the local context was very limited and that they had an exoticiz-ing approach to the countries’ cultures they were visiting. Sooy recognized having several problems because he could not speak Spanish. When describ-ing his train trip from Mexico City to Veracruz, he recalls his confusion: “we noticed everybody in the train getting up very much excited – we did not know whether this was a revolution starting or not, as we could not talk to anyone”.220 Documenting his three month trip to Buenos Aires, in which his team made 424 recordings, one of his first remarks was that the Argentine capital was “an up-to-date city in every respect. The one thing that seemed strange to us was that June, July and August are the coldest months of the year, while December, January, and February are the hottest months – just think of eating Christmas dinner in white flannels, and the thermometer near the 100 mark”.221 Taking this into account, the contrast with figures such as Glücksmann or Tagini, who came to be in charge of selecting the repertoire for the catalogs a few years later, is enormous. They spoke the language, knew the culture, had personal contact with the artists. As immigrants with similar trajectories to many other inhabitants of Buenos Aires, they were in a position to understand the taste and expectations of the public, not a minor skill when selecting the music and the artists that would integrate the cata-log.

In the years from 1905 to World War I, the phonographic market became increasingly concentrated. A large number of small companies emerged in Europe and the US but were soon absorbed by the bigger ones. Throughout this process of horizontal integration, a few firms managed to get control of broad transnational networks of distributors and branches.222 The concen-tration of these networks in a few big companies and the matrix exchange between the head office and the subsidiaries resulted in the integration of the market. It became much faster and cheaper to include music from the most distant parts of the world into the catalog of a label. This is the first moment in history when it became possible to listen to music from all over the world in one store, salon, or house, what has become a basic component of music consumption since then up until the present. Companies needed to offer an international repertoire in order to compete in the market, and the matrices exchange was the method developed by the industry to achieve that. Inviting artists for recording sessions meant excessive costs that most companies could not afford, while importing records was also expensive and implied long waiting times.223 For these reasons, exchanging matrices was the perfect solution: in one to two weeks, it was possible to receive the ma-trix of a recording made in any part of the world and press it into records.

Throughout the years that range from the introduction of the technology to the 1910s and due to the successive technological innovations and changes in the distribution mechanisms, the phonographic market was con-solidated as a global market and the figure of the distributor emerged. This role was rather different than in the case of the film industry. Whereas a film distributor was mainly an importer, the same figure in the music industry also had a role in the inverse direction, as someone who mediated the incor-poration of the popular music of a certain place into the catalogues commer-cialized globally. As the exclusive agent of Odeon, Max Glücksmann profited from the exclusive rights to sell the records of one of the major labels in the world, of which had an extensive catalog. However, his most prominent role in this field was to be a tango impresario, to be the figure that could grant local artists access to the transnational market, the person that could offer the local input for this global industry.

Leisure and the Propaganda War (1914–1918)

World War I was a game changer for the film and record industries in Argen-tina, Chile, and Uruguay for two main reasons. On the one side, for some years these media were used as a service for spreading war propaganda; on the other, the alterations of transatlantic commerce and the economic con-sequences for Europe and the United States produced permanent changes in the distribution networks, resulting in a permanent shift in the power within the entertainment industries. This became evident after the end of the con-flict. The mediation role played by distributors based in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay became more prominent in this context, as it was partly through their networks that propaganda material could circulate. As most of them were immigrants, they were expected to not only act according to their com-mercial interests but also to an alleged loyalty to their countries of origin.

The networks of the film industry were used for the purposes of spreading propaganda in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay during World War I. Because both opposing sides of the war needed to justify the millions of victims to-wards their home front, other belligerents, and especially towards the neu-trals, this conflict led to an important escalation of propaganda as a dimen-sion of the war.224 Even people far away from where the battles were taking place were deeply shocked by them. For many societies, including the neu-tral countries but also those places where no military action took place, World War I was a mediated experience.225 Since most countries in Latin America were neutral, propaganda had a special relevance in the region. Even for those people who did not take an active part in any battles, nor were witnesses or were directly affected, the war was omnipresent in the form of vivid descriptions and images of the daily events. The coverage of mass media was not only descriptive, but a source of interpretations and attempts to understand the phenomenon. Sometimes, the war was presented as an en-tertaining spectacle. The innovations in the printing technologies introduced in the years prior to the war enabled the inclusion of big sized images with low costs, thus enabling a proliferation of abundant visual information on the conflict. Newspapers and magazines were the first option for propagandists, as they were consolidated as channels of information that reached broad au-diences and could combine the use of texts and images.226

Motion pictures soon proved to be one of the most effective channels for propaganda. The use of the medium of film for war propaganda enabled the viewing of real footage shot at the frontlines but also the spread of censored images of the armies and nations involved in the conflict. The film industry not only collaborated with the production of propaganda, but also made available its distribution networks in order to guarantee that the movies would arrive, and to the right hands. Film as a propaganda medium articu-lated the intervention of different actors, including government officials, the private sector, and civil society. At first, propaganda movies were screened in events organized by so called patriotic committees – civil associations formed with the purpose of supporting the Allies or the Central Powers – and had explicit propaganda purposes. Later, propagandists of both sides noted the importance of exhibiting propaganda war as a part of regular cinema pro-grams, as it gave them access to much broader audiences than those who would attend exhibitions organized by the committees.227

The patriotic committees, often founded by European migrants and their descendants, had the purpose of gathering funds for the armies and garner-ing the support of the public opinion. They acted in two ways: they organized their own events with talks, projections, and social events to raise money, and they functioned as intermediaries who sold movies to local entrepre-neurs, who then exhibited them as a part of their regular programs. Film dis-tributors themselves actively sought to get hold of quality images of the war that would be appreciated by the audiences. Caras y Caretas celebrated the work of Julián Ajuria and his Compañía General Cinematográfica, thanks to which “all the public can admire the bloody combats and the highlights of the war, as well as contemplate the beauty of the landscapes where they take place”.228 Propaganda combined contents produced by the demand of prop-aganda officials with those produced by the private sector (and approved by the governments). The initiatives of the civil society through the action of patriotic committees played a key role in framing the propaganda materials so that they met the cultural codes of their audiences, a central element for their success.229 However, propaganda’s influence on the field of film was probably smaller than in textual media. It was limited to how a film was framed or presented along with the discussions before and after.

Film producers and distributors became an integral part of the networks through which propaganda circulated. Both the Allies and the Central Pow-ers resorted to private companies as a way of hiding the official origin of propaganda material and in this way gave it more credibility. The Committee on Public Information of the United States, the entity in charge of controlling the production and distribution of propaganda material, opened a Division of Films in 1916. This Division worked closely with the film industry, both in the domestic market and abroad. All films leaving the US had to have a license granted by the War Trade Board. The Committee promised to expedite film shipments if the industry in turn agreed to include educational films as 20% of their stock, along with only renting the films to those exhibitors who also agreed to show movies sponsored by the Committee.230 An example of how film entrepreneurs joined the war efforts is the case of the Chicago-based film producer and distributor George Kleine. Even though he had opposed the decision of the government of the United States to join the war, 1918 found him making a generous offer to the Committee on Public Information: to make his distribution networks available to the government, to accept no further films from private producers, and to refrain from further production himself for the duration of the war. His motivations were both professional and personal: aside from being concerned for the outcome of the war for his country, Kleine believed that the newsreel of the war would be popular among audiences and trusted that enlisting in the war effort would likely benefit the film industry’s long-term interests and save it from being deemed “nonessential” or frivolous, thus causing a shut down for not fitting a nation at war.231

The propaganda war in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay was not exactly fair: migrant communities and supporters from the Allied countries were much larger than those from the Central Powers. Even though Germany counted on many active supporters, their access to communication networks was more limited, as their telegraphic cable had been severely damaged at the beginning of the confrontation and didn’t have an adequate substitute. French propaganda could build on the consolidated dominium of its film in-dustry in the region, and the weekly newsreel distributed by Pathé, shown before commercial movies, was one of the main channels used for this pur-pose.232 The British were responsible for a large part of the Allies’ propa-ganda circulating in the region, which they controlled from the War Propa-ganda Bureau and sent to the diplomatic authorities in each country. Even competing in asymmetrical conditions, German propaganda was very active and also resorted to pictorial media. At the beginnings of 1917, an office ded-icated to that purpose was opened, followed by the creation of a mixed entity, the Universum-Film-Aktiengesellschaft (Ufa) later that year. A letter sent by one of the promoters of Ufa to the Ministry of War in 1917 and later consid-ered its funding document stated that “the war has demonstrated the su-premacy of picture and film as instruments of education and influence. (…) Unfortunately, our enemies have so thoroughly exploited their advantage in this area that we have suffered serious harm as a result.”233 Ufa had im-portant capital at its disposal, and its board of directors was made up of members of the high bourgeoisie, with a strong representation of the finan-cial and industrial capitals. The composition of the board hid the govern-ment’s participation, which was established by contract. The office’s purpose was to operate in all branches of the film industry: production, distribution, and exhibition, and in any form of manufacture or trade related to the motion picture business.234

In order to be accepted by the public, films needed to meet certain stand-ards. As the legation councilor responsible for the coordination of German propaganda in Latin America noted, some of the films shown did not meet the audience’s approval, some of whom were bored by the endless series of images of captured guns and obliterated forts. Sometimes the lack of explan-atory texts led to misunderstandings, and the images of destroyed villages seemed to confirm what the enemies said about atrocities.235 The US Com-mittee on Public Information gathered impressions of local agents who re-ported on the preferences of the audiences. A letter addressed to the respon-sible parties of US propaganda in Argentina and Brazil stated: “it occurred to me that what we want and need above all are moving pictures showing the stunts in the air, as the people here have read and heard a great deal about the work we are doing along that line (…) We want to show the various movements such as the tail drive, nose dive, looping the lope, etc. That would arouse a lot of interest”.236

Film was praised as a propaganda medium for its capacity to not only in-form but also create an emotional reaction to what was happening far away. According to Cine Mundial, the cinematographer, unlike paintings or litera-ture which usually idealized the war, provided a service to humanity by showing it as it was, including all of its horrible details.237 Commenting on the release of a war film in 1916, the Spanish-language trade magazine Cine Mundial asked: “What does modern war look like?”.238 The three-page article described the details of the footage and affirmed that “even if we have a pow-erful imagination, we could never know exactly what it means nowadays the hostility between great powers. (…) the cinematographer came to clear up the unknowns”.239 Among the scenes captured, there was an air battle, a bombing, and a cannon attack. Of interest were not only images of military actions, but also the leisure times of the soldiers when they went back to the camps.240 They also showed French soldiers transport 21.000 German pris-oners, and how they first “cut their straps so the prisoners would need to hold their pants with their hands”.241 Even though the war committees were generally pleased with the achievements of these films as propaganda, they were also concerned with avoiding the reach of certain images to the public: images showing the “scientific precision” to organize slaughters or to elimi-nate dead bodies were meant to be excluded from films, as they might en-gender feelings of fear or disapproval.242

The fact that propaganda relied partly on private producers and distribu-tors gave place to several tensions, and Max Glücksmann’s position can illus-trate these tensions very clearly. As a distributor, Glücksmann had the nec-essary influence and networks to enable or block the circulation of war prop-aganda. This gave him a certain influence but at the time, made him a target of attacks. The context of the war shows how the film business was not dis-entangled from political tensions and how the social position of the actors influenced their role in this industry. Entrepreneurs were expected to show loyalty to one side or the other, based on their place of birth or political af-finity. Meanwhile, it was openly recognized by the actors involved that film propaganda was governed by commercial principles and impresarios would follow the strategies that could favor their business the most.

As a film entrepreneur, Glücksmann was part of the network for the distri-bution of film propaganda, and his strategy seemed to be to profit from his connections on both sides. He had a contract with Ufa, which produced both commercial and propaganda films; bought propaganda films from the Bue-nos Aires office of the US Committee on Public Information; and offered his movie theaters for events to patriotic committees of the Allies.243 From a purely commercial perspective, this should not have been a problem, since he could offer these films to the supporters of both sides. Many film impre-sarios accused each other of an alleged support to one or the other side of the conflict. According to the magazine Cine Gaceta , Carlos Battier, the man-ager of Casa Glücksmann in Santiago traveled to Buenos Aires to talk to the press and discredit his contender by accusing them of being pro-German. At the time, Cine Gaceta echoed critics of Glücksmann by saying that “An Aus-trian company like Glücksmann, which claims to be pro Allies for commercial reasons, disowning his own fatherland, while quietly subscribes to German loans (…) has no right to use the name of the Allies for the purpose of dishon-est competition”.244

According to the prominence that distributors gained in the context of the war, accusations against Glücksmann grew, and the press gave them more attention. In 1916, the Argentine newspaper Crítica dedicated the cover page to a campaign against him for ten consecutive days.245 According to the pro-Allied perspective, the conflagration was presented as an inevitable confron-tation between democracy and authoritarianism, between civilization and barbarism, or between spirituality and materialism.German propaganda sought to debunk the accusations from the Allies, to show that the real impe-rialist power was the United Kingdom and not the German Reich and to char-acterize the Allies’ practices as “barbaric” (such as the treatment given to war prisoners or the recourse to colonial troops).246 Actively pro-Allied, the Ar-gentine newspaper Crítica conducted a “campaign against German capitals” and claimed: “In Argentina, the imposition of German capitalism has failed. And it failed for two reasons. Because we do not need the German capitals for our financial development, and because we are Latins. Latins as a race. Intellectually Latins.”247 As a part of this campaign, Crítica accused Max Glücksmann, among other companies, of hiddenly pursuing the interests of the German and Austrian capital: “This is an unusual case. Mr. Glücksmann, representative in Argentina of the Parisian Pathé Frères, is Austrian. This is not an obstacle for Mr. Glücksmann to unabashedly show an exemplar patri-otism by protecting the Allies’ Red Cross and offering advantages to their Charitable Societies”.248 According to Crítica , the motivation for Glücksmann to show this kind of “detachment from his fatherland” was purely commer-cial, since most of the audiences of his movie theaters were clearly pro Al-lies.249

Because of his immigrant background and his commercial strategies, Glücksmann found himself between a rock and a hard place: on the one side, the Argentine press accused him of representing the interests of the Central Powers due to his alleged “Austrian” origin; on the other side, the German foreign office warned film companies not to trust him because of his collab-oration with the Allies and his Jewishness. Critica argued that, even though Glücksmann had become an Argentine citizen, he continued to be a subject of Franz Joseph according to Italian, English, and French law. This was proven by the fact that he and his brother had problems during their trips around Europe, where the English and Italian authorities “were not willing to accept the legal citizenship documents that are so easily granted by the Argentine state”.250 Another argument to support this characterization of Glücksmann was that David Lerman, his father-in-law and business partner, was openly pro-German, and that Glücksmann’s parents had moved from Czernivtsi to Vienna.251 Meanwhile, the German Foreign Office had a differ-ent perspective: when the officers in charge of German film propaganda in Latin America found out in 1919 that Glücksmann had the representation of the Ufa, they gave orders to the company to replace him immediately, due to his collaboration with the Allies during the war. They argued that having Glücksmann as a representative meant “leaving the propaganda in the hands of the enemies”.252 For the German officers, Glücksmann was considered an enemy for three reasons: his Jewish origin, his naturalization as a French cit-izen, and his support of the Allies during the war.253

In addition to film, music also functioned as a propagandistic tool in the context of World War I. Labels and distributors emphasized their ability to enhance patriotism, and especially addressed migrant communities with of-fers of music of their homeland. Phonographic companies were aware of the potential of recorded music in this context and aimed to portray it as a “war-time necessity”. According to The Voice of the Victor , “a man’s life, whether he be soldier or civilian, moves pendulum-wise between rest and labor. His rest needs are not, however, satisfied with merely food and sleep, but must include relaxation and enjoyment”. Music was supposed to have a powerful influence on patriotism and the “love of home”, and a central role to keep the morale alive in the context of the war. Against those who would argue that music was a luxury because it fell under the category of “entertainment”, Vic-tor’s ads argued that “entertainment is no luxury but a necessity”.254 In fact, the demand for records remained stable at the beginning of the war in Eu-rope, but it was eventually affected by the general descent of consumption.

Aside from film, recorded music was also part of the experience of the war, both because of its presence in the front, and because it acted as a channel for the spread of propaganda, enabling the circulation of songs with nation-alist topics. Relying on the distribution networks created during the pre-war years, this music also reached Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, where immi-grant communities, among others, consumed it as a way of “fostering their patriotism”.255 The following Victor Talking Machine’s ad (Image 11) aimed to address the different communities from the belligerent countries. How-ever, most of the records included in the catalog are in English, together with some instrumental pieces and a few songs in French. This can be explained by the greater presence of Victor Talking Machine in English-speaking coun-tries and a more limited access to music from other countries during the war. This was coupled with the intention to address one of the richest communi-ties in Buenos Aires, those of British descent. Even though the ad also men-tions Italy on the illustration, it does not include songs in Italian, probably due to the collapse of the Italian industry after the country entered the war, or due to the impossibility of interchanging matrixes with Italian records during the conflict.

Image 9. Victor’s “patriotic records”. Caras y Caretas, Buenos Aires,

16.07.1918

Music labels as well as government and military officials were aware of the relevance of recorded music, both as a propagandistic medium and as a tool to increase the moral of the soldiers. Fred Gaisberg, who was traveling around Russia and Great Britain during the early years of the conflict and continued with his work as a recording engineer, observed an increase in the demand for records both from soldiers and civilians: “In England, during the war, the cheap portable machine proved to be a boon to the soldiers, as it broke the monotony of their routine existence in the dugout. Popular patri-otic songs were recorded and distributed in thousands; the gramophone was encouraged by the military authorities of both sides, who looked upon it as a vital necessity.”256 The emotional power of music was well known by offic-ers, who resorted to listening to it for different purposes. During his time in Italy, Gaisberg was sent to prison camps near the frontlines at the Isonzo river. He was asked to record Slav, Croat, Serb, Hungarian, and Czech desert-ers singing folksongs and speaking, urging their listeners to drop out of the armies and join them. These records were then played at the trenches oppo-site the places where the enemy armies were known to be posted.257 Of all the musical genres during World War I, popular songs constituted the broad-est repertoire, and this music was used as a call to patriotism and to the par-ticipation of civilians in the war effort in all countries.258

Patriotic songs spread around the world through different channels: with migrants who played them and through records that were distributed thanks to the global reach of the phonographic industry. According to Luis Velasco Pufleau, the relationship between music and propaganda is ambiguous, and the meaning given to music depends largely on the rituals from which it is issued and the context of its reception.259 The record industry added a medi-ated experience as a way to become a part of a shared discourse, despite be-ing far away from where the war was taking place. As Gaisberg remembers, exiled musicians in Paris, London, Rome, Shanghai, and Constantinople pop-ularized songs of their places of origin.260 Then, the recordings and the pub-lishing of the music sheet of these songs brought them to the rest of the world through the usual networks of the phonographic market. Caras y Caretas published the score of a British war song and affirmed that “war chants have been and are patrimony of every people, as they keep the patriotic enthusi-asm alive”.261 In an article about “good humor in the (Italian) war camps”, it was claimed that since Italians love music, soldiers looked for every possible way to bring instruments to the frontlines: they would hide them in their baggage, acquire them in the conquered territories, or get them as presents from their families. With the instruments, they would sing the songs of their places of origin, especially patriotic songs.262 While these articles reported on the experience of music at the frontlines to their readers in Argentina, record labels offered a repertoire of patriotic songs during the years of the war. Records also joined other consumption goods in using the context of the war as a selling strategy, by turning objects into a sort of souvenir that would in the upcoming times become a reminder of the years of war.263

Due to their use as channels to spread propaganda, neither film nor rec-orded sound lost much ground during the war. Even though many companies interrupted the production of reels or records due to the context, their pres-ence as key communication channels and leisure activities remained throughout the conflict and prepared the stage for the rapid expansion in the post-war times. The war had important consequences for the power rela-tions within the markets of both industries. In the case of the film industry, it affected mostly the balance between European and US based studios, cre-ating an opportunity for the latter to take over. In the case of recorded sound, the war had important consequences for the transnational structure of the record industry, as most of the companies were corporations in which the capital came from different places and had branches in different countries.264

During the war, the center for film distribution moved from London to New York. Even though the British would try to regain their position afterwards, post-war economic difficulties in Europe (mainly inflation) made it unlikely for buyers to operate in London rather than in the flourishing context of the United States.265 In these spaces, entrepreneurs came together and negoti-ated the terms of distribution, arranging most transactions. Glücksmann started to travel regularly to New York and other cities of the United States “to study the market and select those films that would adapt better to the taste of South Americans”.266 In order to make more fluid and efficient his commercial deals in the United States, Max Glücksmann hired a permanent representative in this country, Frederick Knocke, who had been an export manager for Pathé Frères, could speak six languages, and had traveled exten-sively around Europe, Latin America, and Asia. In 1917, his brother, Jacobo Glücksmann, settled in New York permanently and took control of the of-fice.267 Soon after settling in New York, Jacobo was able to finalize important arrangements with several studios, and in 1917, Glücksmann claimed to have the most extensive program in the territories where he was active.268The exclusive right to distribute films of major US studios was key to dom-inating the market and was the reason the role of the buying representative played a key role. Judging by the relevance given in trade magazines to the relocation of buying representatives and their personal characteristics, this was a highly personalized form of negotiation. For example, Cine Mundial re-ported on the relocation of Jacobo and emphasized that “besides being an attractive young man, he is also proactive and wise. In four months of me-thodical studies he learned English, good enough to being dragged into a love story. And to emphasize his youth, he shaved his mustache”.269

The war was the perfect occasion for US producers to take over European studios’ control of foreign markets. With the beginning of World War I, film distributors in Latin America foresaw the difficulties in maintaining the sup-ply of European films and out of need rather than conviction, resorted to US producers. Even though the US industry was optimistic about taking ad-vantage of the decreasing European supplies ever since the war had begun, it was not until 1916 that it succeeded in expanding its presence in Latin America, since until then it had still been possible to get supplies from Eu-rope and most US firms had no representation in the region.270 The movies purchased in the first years of the war were better than those previously available in the Latin American market but were still of a lower quality than those few films that continued to arrive from Europe.271 The increase in US exports during the first two years of the war resulted mostly from the decline of European studios. From 1916 on, the US industry started to adopt new strategies in order to reach a more solid position in the foreign markets, opening subsidiary offices and changing their distribution mechanisms. The key to this strategy, which guaranteed a domain that would be hard to erode after the war, was to take over the non-European markets while French, Brit-ish, and Italian studios were not in conditions to fight back. Universal opened major distribution branches in Mexico and Australia, and Fox expanded in South America with an office in Rio de Janeiro. Besides opening subsidiaries, studios had other tools to become more active in foreign markets, such as having specialized sales offices for different regions and advertising in their press and trade magazines. 272

The US industry found an important obstacle in the Latin American mar-kets: local distributors. They wished to keep US films away because they were more expensive than European ones, and for some time, they had cer-tain success in doing so. According to the magazine Moving Picture World , the end of 1915 saw only about 15% of movies exhibited in South America being from US studios, independent distributors buying most of these materials from European producers. In Chile and Brazil, independents controlled up to 70% of the market. Colombian theaters were reported to have used mostly French and Italian films and when the war prevented them from getting hold of these films, they preferred to offer live shows or close down rather than turning to US suppliers.273 Despite these discouraging numbers, important actors of the film industry argued from the pages of trade magazines that it was the right time for US producers to take over the markets in Latin Amer-ica, since banking facilities and transportation had improved considerably and “the old prejudice against the Yankee is rapidly dying out”.274 These ef-forts started to pay off from 1916 on, especially once the US industry started to develop new strategies and methods for its export trade, allowing them to gain a firm control of foreign markets around the world. Through the open-ing of subsidiary offices, studios were able to bypass some of the intermediaries and deal directly with exhibitors. In doing so, they were also able to adjust to the demands of their audiences by including Spanish inter-titles.275

Unlike in the film industry, in which there was a clear competition between US and European studios, record labels were more integrated in both conti-nents. Most of the major companies were organized as corporations combin-ing capital from different origins, headquartered in both continents, with a large structure of branches in different parts of the world. Despite the maintenance of the sales during the first years of the conflict, the war had a great impact on the economic situation of this industry: it changed the own-ership structure of the record industry in Europe and created an imbalance between the two sides of the Atlantic. According to the time when each coun-try entered the war, an uneven development in the record industries of the different European countries and the United States was created. While Italy remained neutral, its industry underwent a short period of flourishing, only limited by the lack of raw material coming from England.276 But the persis-tence of the conflict eventually affected the commercial organization of the music business. During the years before the war, most labels had turned into transnational corporations, but the branches now located in enemy territo-ries were confiscated. The most seriously affected firm was the Lindström Corporation, of German capitals, which lost its factory in Paris and offices in Great Britain, Spain and Italy.277

In contrast to the situation in Europe, the industry based in the US was strengthened by the effects of the war. Whereas the European markets shrunk during the years of the conflict, the new predominant role of the US in the world economy resulted in a boom of its music business and the pro-liferation of new companies. In 1912, there were only three manufacturers active in the market: Victor, Columbia, and Edison. In 1914, six new compa-nies entered the business, and in 1915, eighteen more. By 1916, there were forty-six firms active in the record industry based in the United States.278Even so, the growth of the industry and the emergence of new firms was not reflected in the progress of music or the recording art. According to Gaisberg, “it was a sterile period of suspended animation. At best it left the appetite whetted for a feast”, which, indeed, came with the boom of recorded music in the post-war years.279

This blow to the European industry had important consequences in Argen-tina, Chile, and Uruguay. The interruption of trade obstructed the regular ar-rival of records to the region. For Tagini, this meant the end of his busi-ness.280 Without the novelties of Columbia arriving from Great Britain, the most profitable part of his business was seriously damaged, and he closed his doors before the end of the war would bring a renaissance of the activity. Glücksmann, on the contrary, took advantage of the situation and facing the weakening of his German partner Odeon (part of the Lindström Corpora-tion), he used the situation to follow an import substitution strategy, opening his own factory. Overcoming the difficulties of the war made his position stronger, especially since many of his competitors were left out of business. However, the context also strengthened the role of Victor Talking Machine, which reinforced its presence in the region. Victor and Glücksmann’s Nacional-Odeon would be the main actors of the record industry throughout and especially after the war.

The Winner Takes All (1918–1930)

The years after the war saw the recovery of the entertainment industries in the United States and Europe, along with a boom in the consumption of their products and services in the 1920s. These industries emerged from the war very different to the way they were before, especially in terms of the power balance on the two sides of the Atlantic. The US was especially favored, and in terms of the structure of entertainment corporations, was now less integrated transnationally. In the 1920s, labels and studios had an aggressive presence in the markets of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay in order to profit from the expansion the entertainment business had been experiencing in their major cities. Thanks to the consolidation of stable distribution mecha-nisms, in combination with the boom of the market, distribution became a highly profitable business, and distributors competed against each other for the lion’s share. The distribution business became a winner-takes-all game, in which the most successful distributors began to accumulate more and more allocation rights and therefore the control of large shares of the market in the region. However, during the second half of the decade, the direct pres-ence of US studios and labels via their regional branches, which had the in-tention of eliminating intermediaries between producers and retailers or movie theaters, would pose an additional challenge for local entrepreneurs. In this context, the ones that managed to keep their positions were those that applied successful strategies of vertical integration, along with securing their positions in the distribution market by maintaining a presence in the com-mercialization and production sectors. On the Shoulders or Under the Shadow of Hollywood?

Immediately after the war, the US industry had to face some challenges to keep its position in the world market. The dollar’s strength in relation to other currencies created a barrier for exports, since it became very expen-sive for distributors to purchase films priced in dollars. US producers could not just reduce their prices to a competitive level as soon as the problem ap-peared, because the earnings from abroad since 1917 had been considered fixed and predictable (usually 20% to 40% of a film’s revenues) and were therefore considered when calculating the costs. Payments, such as fees for performers and script authors, were calculated based on worldwide reve-nues, and because of this, the industry did not have the needed flexibility to charge lower prices abroad to compensate the currency problem.281 This situation allowed the industries in Germany, France, and Italy to recover and gave them something of an advantage when exporting to countries with a stronger currency, such as the US. As Glücksmann observed in 1920, “French and Italian producers are making very serious efforts to re-establish them-selves in foreign fields, this being especially noticeable in Latin America. Brit-ish productions are appreciably on the increase. Germans are just now doing everything possible to get a foothold again”.282 However, it was soon clear that by then, European industries were not in any condition to compete with Hollywood, as they were severely weakened after the war, with only a few movies reaching the standards of US producers.283 The share of US films in Argentina and Chile was overwhelmingly high, close to 95% in 1920. The currency problem also affected this market. In Chile, the US share fell to 65% in 1921 but then recovered in the following years.284 As Glücksmann pre-dicted: “The Americans have fixed themselves very firmly in Latin America, and by giving proper attention to this market, their position can be certainly maintained”.285

During the postwar years and until the mid-1920s, distributors in Argen-tina, Chile, and Uruguay were able to profit from the expansion of Hollywood. During this time, they were standing on the shoulders of the giant that was the US industry and achieved great success. Those who managed to get the distribution rights of the major Hollywood studios had access to a gold-mine business. For some years, Glücksmann was winning the game. By the early 1920s, we can see that not only was his company growing, but also his status as a successful and influential businessman. His personal life and public hab-its demonstrated a significant fortune: he owned an apartment in the most expensive area of Buenos Aires;286 he and his family spent several months a year traveling around Europe;287 and in 1921, he applied for the admission to the main aristocratic institution of Argentina, the Jockey Club.288

A closer look at Glücksmann’s activities in the early 1920s and the source of his fortune will allow us to observe the mechanisms and dynamics of film distribution at this time. Film was consolidated not only as a mass entertain-ment but also as an important economic activity by this time. Therefore, the reports on this business can be found not only in film magazines, but also in daily newspapers. In 1921 and 1922, the announcement of a series of new contracts between major Hollywood studios and Max Glücksmann brought controversy in the Argentine press. Some voices celebrated the large variety of movies offered in his program: according to the newspaper La Razón , a look at Glücksmann’s program shows that “due to the diversity of the pro-gram it is offered to them, Argentine audiences are among the most favored in the world”.289 According to the article, whereas in the United States, France, or Italy, most of the films exhibited were made locally and producers insisted on having regulations to prevent foreign films to enter the market, the theaters in Argentina showed films of all the major producers in the world. For this newspaper, this was a merit of commercial liberalism: “it is true that all of these countries have the advantage of having their own indus-try. However, as we said, the Argentine audience, free of all the obstacles of nationalist protectionism, is the most favored one. All the best films, regard-less of their origin, pass before their eyes”.290

While some commentators celebrated Glücksmann work as a distributor, others accused him of monopolizing the market. According to Crítica , Glücks-mann’s goal was to “offer a bad show in detriment of the public, let the qual-ity of the movies go down, increase the price of the tickets, ruin the import business and turn into an octopus in detriment of honest producers”.291 This newspaper affirmed that Glücksmann and his partners, including his father-in-law David Lerman and the theater impresario Faustino da Rosa, planned to buy or rent as many movie theaters as possible in order to reduce the re-sistance to their monopoly. As managers of a large amount of venues, they would be able to impose higher rent prices and pressure the studios to sell the distribution rights for a higher price, thus increasing the profit margin of distributors.292

In 1922, a contract between Paramount and Max Glücksmann was an-nounced. This agreement authorized Glücksmann’s firm to distribute 281 movies in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay. According to Cine Mun- dial , “for the number of reels it includes, for the importance of the territories it affects and for the amount of money it involves, this contract is, without a doubt, the most important and celebrated between a studio and a distributor of Latin America in recent times”.293 The attention that this contract re-ceived, not only in film trade magazines, but also in the newspapers of Ar-gentina, Chile, and Uruguay, suggests that it constituted a turning point for the distribution market in these territories. The exclusive access to Para-mount’s movies placed Glücksmann in an advantageous position. It favored him especially in front of his main competitor, Julián Ajuria, whose contract with the studio had just expired.294 Paramount’s films were highly appreci-ated by Latin American audiences due to their technical quality and the well-known artists they featured. At that time, South America represented one of the main areas of export for the company. Its movies were regularly exhib-ited in Argentina and Uruguay, and with this contract, they would enter the Chilean market.295

The criticisms raised against this contract shows how the distribution business was organized in the early 1920s: in the absence of legal regulation, informal agreements within impresarios ruled the market. The Uruguayan magazine Semanal Film argued that even though the contract was legal from every perspective, it represented a breaking of a “gentleman’s agreement” that had existed among film impresarios. According to this journal, Glücksmann offered a higher price for the rights of Paramount than the one paid by Ajuria. An article titled “Moral and Business”, reported an interview with Bernardo Glücksmann about the contract with Paramount. Bernardo did not confirm the existence of an agreement between his brother and So-ciedad General Cinematográfica but still pointed to the fact that Ajuria had been the one who “threw the first stone” by signing a contract with Glücks-mann’s previous partner, Pathé New York.296 According to La Semana Cine- matográfica “there is, at least, decency, gentleness and moral to make every honest person respect the rights of the others”.297 The arrangements be-tween entrepreneurs were, among other things, supposed to avoid the com-petition for the distribution rights of the main studios and prevent the agents from reducing the prices in order to gain more clients.

Since the late 1910s, studios’ main mechanism was to grant the exclusive right to allocate a set of films on a certain territory to one entrepreneur for a certain period of time. In this way, they aimed to avoid the circulation of pi-rate copies that left no profit for the producers. Exclusive contracts also gave a tool to distributors to initiate legal actions when another firm was offering the same film. Firms often accused each other of having acquired copies ille-gally, but this was often hard to prove. For example, in 1920 a conflict took place between Glücksmann and the Peruvian firm Teatros y Cinema regard-ing the rights of the Ufa film Madame Dubarry . Even though Glücksmann had the exclusive rights of the German company, Teatros y Cinema acquired an old copy of the film in Barcelona and projected it in Santiago de Chile before the official release that Glücksmann had been planning. To avoid a possible intervention of Glücksmann before the release of the film, they did not an-nounce the name of the film until the day of the first exhibition, advertising instead “a surprise by the best artist in the world”.298 Glücksmann started legal actions against Teatros y Cinema but only after the damage was done. The magazine La Semana Cinematográfica published a series of articles on the matter, calling on the audience to punish the company and “withdraw their support to a company that makes a clean sweep of the most fundamental principles of respect to the rights of the others, which are the basis of social order”.299

Potential challenges to distributor’s control of the market were their dis-putes with movie theater owners. In January 1920, a group of theater man-agers sent a letter to Glücksmann and Ajuria complaining about the high prices of the films and argued that due to the decrease of the viewing public during the summer months, it was not possible to pay such high fees.300 As they did not receive an answer, they decided to exclude the movies allocated by these firms from their programs.301 By 1921, the boycott kept going, at this time only destined to Glücksmann. The owners of one hundred movie theaters excluded the films distributed by him from their venues and con-gregated around the recently founded Circuito Argentino de Exhibidores.302 Crítica , aiming to support the exhibitors, made a call from its pages to the audience to support the boycott: “it is time for those who pay a ticket to be-come a part of these issues and be aware of who they support and try by all means to contribute to the progress of those businessmen who defend their pockets and artistic taste”.303 The tensions between distributors and exhibi-tors shows how the increasing specialization of the tasks within the film business created conflicting interests and led the actors to develop strategies to defend their own profit margin.

As the previous examples show, newspapers and magazines were the main platform where the conflicts of the film business were expressed. The emer-gence of specialized journals and recurring newspapers sections dedicated to film was an integral part of the consolidation of motion pictures as a form of entertainment, which was now separated from the variety show. As of 1915, several journals appeared in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. These magazines, with differing lifespans from a few months to several years, delineated the first discourses about film in the Latin American context.304Film magazines could be connected with the industry and its different actors to a larger or lesser extent: some represented the voice of the producers and aimed to highlight the importance of local production, others had the task of defending film from critics that accused it of being immoral or anti-artistic. At times, the magazines defended one of the parts in a conflict between en-trepreneurs or acted as a platform for both to publish their opinions.305

From the pages of its cinematographic section, Crítica continued the cam-paign against Glücksmann that had been started during World War I. In or-der to harm his activities as a film distributor, Crítica resorted to arguments that went beyond his commercial activities and referred to his personal life and especially to his Jewish origin. A series of articles published in 1921 and 1922 portrayed Glücksmann as dishonest and as the orchestrator of conspir-acies. As a part of these accusations, Crítica resorted to anti-Semitic stereo-types. In an article published in 1921, they called Glücksmann “ el qui mi cointas ”, a Yiddish accented broken Spanish for “¿ qué me cuentas ?” (what’s up?). The illustrations show him in his previous jobs as a servant and then as a film impresario. The text connects this trajectory of social ascent to his am-bition and attempt to become a hoarder, which, Crítica argues, would be a typical attribute of Jewish immigrants: “the man has no moral stature to deal with matters of such financial transcendence, but he is not lacking the guts to do it, similarly to the Muscovite peddlers of Libertad Street. Since he could not fulfill his hoarding dreams, he only gets to peddle in the movies.”306

As a part of his campaign to discredit Glücksmann as a film impresario, Critica resorted to anti-Jewish stereotypes. Even though there are no explicit references to Glücksmann Jewishness, the adjective Muscovite probably re-fers to the fact that a large part of the Jewish community emigrated from the Russian Empire. Similarly, Libertad Street, was where the Temple of the Jew-ish Congregation was located, the place where Glücksmann was based and acted as the director around those years.307 The figure of the qui mi cointas corresponded to a representation of Jewishness that was not based on phys-ical aspects (such as hooked nose or long beards, often used at the time as alleged markers of Jewishness) but on linguistic elements (most vowels be-ing replaced by an “i”).308 Even though Crítica clearlydifferentiated itself from right-wing periodicals that reproduced anti-Semitic discourses and representations of Jewish people based on alleged behavioral and physical aspects, this newspaper also gave use to negative stereotypes about Jewish people, representing them as stingy, cowardly, too ambitious, or disloyal.

Image 10. “Max Glücksmann, the qui mi cointas”. Crítica, Buenos Aires,

17.10.1921

The prominent role that Glücksmann occupied in the film business in the early 1920s, which had made him the focus of attention and a target of at-tacks, would not last much longer. This loss in prominence reflected a more general situation for local film distributions, which were gradually being dis-placed by an increasingly direct presence of studios in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Towards the mid-1920s, Glücksmann’s appearance in the press be-came only sporadic. The reason for this was probably the gradual loss of the most profitable part of his business due to a change in strategy of Hollywood studios in Latin America. The demand for US films continued to grow throughout the 1920s. The promising perspectives, the consolidation of big-ger markets, and the opening of smaller ones motivated most major studios to consider establishing their own distribution branches in the region.

The opening of Hollywood studios’ branches was a threat for local distrib-utors. As Jacobo Glücksmann noted in 1925, this meant that “little by little, as the American concerns take hold in the foreign markets, the business of

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Hollywood reached a dominant position in the Latin American film mar-kets mainly due to two interrelated elements: the commercial power of US producers and distributors, and the emergence of a cult of the movie stars. Aside from its direct presence through branches and distribution offices in the region, US studios relied on a wide acceptance of their movies. Hollywood studios turned into big companies that could make expensive productions and achieve great success among their audiences. The managers of movie theaters discovered the attraction of expensive productions and were willing to favor the presence of American films over local productions in their pro-grams. By 1931, seven major US studios supplied 62% of the films exhibited in Argentina.311 The public looked forward to the next films of Douglas Fair-banks, Rodolfo Valentino, or Greta Garbo. Film entrepreneurs actively pro-moted the fascination with movie stars. Producers and distributors adver-tised their movies and especially their stars in the pages of the numerous film magazines and entertainment pages of the local press. The representa-tives of the US industry in Latin America had a special interest in encouraging the familiarity of audiences with Hollywood stars, as that was the main ele-ment that could guarantee the loyalty of the public to the studio’s production. Magazines in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay reported with detail on numerous aspects of Hollywood actors and actresses’ private lives. They em-phasized their physical aspects, the artistic merits and the fabulous fortune of the protagonists of the movies.312 They would do the same with the pro-tagonists of local productions, which they also aimed to turn into stars.

The role of stars was central in every part of the process of the film indus-try. For producers, hiring a star was not only supposed to guarantee a pro-fessional and quality performance, but also a commercially successful film. Distributors profited from the use of the star’s image for marketing and sell-ing the film, both in the domestic and foreign markets, while exhibitors were confident that showing films portraying stars would guarantee public at-tendance.313 The star system had not been present since the beginning of film, but became a central element as a part of the industrialization process, especially with the emergence of Hollywood. During the earliest phase of cin-ema, the movies themselves were only secondary to the business of film, which was driven by the attraction of the technology itself. Most films were documentaries and those that included actors or actresses had no names to identify them. The performers of early narrative cinema were therefore usu-ally unknown. From 1907 on, the production of narrative films increased and the production mode changed from a system centered on the cameraman to a director-led system, eventually transforming into a studio system, as nar-rative films could be planned and contained within the controlled environ-ment of the studio. According to Paul McDonald, “the star system in Ameri-can cinema developed through the detailed division of labor, the redefinition of performance space in narrative film, and the widespread distribution knowledge about individual film performers”.314 In fact, contracts signed be-tween studios and performers gave film impresarios the right to exploit the star’s image in different media. The star’s images were one of the main tools of film distributors utilized to open new markets abroad.

The cult of movie stars created a close relationship of cooperation between the US film industry and the industry of consumption goods. The everyday and private lives of movie stars turned into a topic of interest for the press, and the audiences became interested in their lifestyles, including the cooking tools they owned or the autos they drove, what they did in their free time and what newspapers they read.315 Once Hollywood conquered its dominant position in the global market of motion pictures, film became a key feature of what Victoria de Grazia calls the “market empire”: the leading role of US firms in global markets, the great influence of its business networks, the recognition of its brands and the familiarity with the American way of life around the world. Film played a central role in establishing this empire, as “no American industry was more self-consciously rivalrous about its role in shaping international cultural trends, none more engaged in reaching out, responding to, and shaping consumer tastes abroad, none more aggressive in taking on the barriers and obstacles to its installation in other societies.”316

Allocating US films in Latin America was not only a form of making money, but also constituted a tool to strengthen commercial relations between the United States and the countries of the region, and a propagandistic tool to represent the country in the eyes of Latin Americans.317 The presence of US film was part of a larger influence in the cultural, economic and social spheres – what has been called the process of Americanization.318 Under-stood as a complex process of encounters with the material and symbolic presence of the United States, crossed with an unequal distribution of power, Americanization is not a linear process of homogenization. On the contrary, it is contested, and both approval and rejection are an integral part of the process. 319 Mass culture constituted one of the main spaces where these en-counters took place, and especially in film, can be considered a key element in this process. Film had the power to appeal to audiences of different social classes, ages, and genders, along with creating powerful beauty and consumption standards, another reason why it was considered of high im-portance among the complex of Americanization.320

After resisting the expansion of the US presence in the film market before the war and during the first years of the conflict, distributors ended up em-bracing it throughout the post-war times. With the emergence of Hollywood as the dominant pole of film production, their huge investments setting the standard for production costs as much higher than earlier, along with the promotion of the cult of movie stars, their expansion in the world market became unstoppable. Independent distributors in Argentina, Chile, and Uru-guay found a way to profit from this expansion for a few years, acting as in-termediaries between studios and movie theaters. In doing so, they became mediators in the presence of US cultural influence in the region. But their margin of action would soon narrow down. In 1927, Paramount celebrated the second anniversary of its Buenos Aires office with a dinner party that had most of the theater managers as guests, thus making it clear that its goal was to work in close contact with exhibitors. By doing this, they eliminated the intermediation role previously fulfilled by the distributors. The rise and fall of Max Glücksmann overlapped with the rise and fall of the role of film dis-tributors in the region. At first a facilitator and mediator, the local distributor became an obstacle that Hollywood, in their expansion into the global mar-ket, had to eliminate. Import Substitution in the Phonographic Industry

The phonographic industry survived the challenges imposed by World War I and witnessed a global boom in the years ranging from the end of the con-flict to the crisis of 1929.321In Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, the combination of alterations of commerce during the war and the opportuni-ties offered by the boom of the 1920s created a unique opportunity for the local industry to gain momentum. Several local distributors such as Tagini and Band went bankrupt during the war, creating a broader margin for those who stayed in business, Max Glücksmann being the most prominent. The Vic-tor Talking Machine, which emerged strengthened from the conflict, devel-oped a more aggressive policy towards Latin American markets and soon be-came Glücksmann’s main competitor.322

The post war years offered the right setting for record entrepreneurs to follow strategies of vertical integration and import substitution in order to take control of as many phases of the process as possible. After the inaugu-ration of a record factory in Brazil in 1913, Glücskmann’s in Buenos Aires was the second of South America, and contributed to the supply of demand in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. It was the only factory in the territory of these three countries until Victor opened his own in Buenos Aires in 1924, followed by one in Chile in 1927.323 The import substitution process that took place during the 1920s with the inauguration of factories in Argentina and Chile had a great impact on how music was distributed. The mechanism on which the record industry had relied for three decades now started to change. The matrix exchange practice did not disappear but turned into a reciprocal transaction, through which music circulated in both directions. The newly inaugurated factories could press both local recordings as well as the matrices of famous European and US songs, whereas the factories in the north were able to have access to recordings of music from Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, all of which was increasingly popular in their own domestic markets, especially in the case of tango. The times for production changed enormously: if it was necessary to wait for four to five months for a song to be pressed into a record ready for commercialization (or even more if the matrix happened to have failures) before, it was now possible to complete the whole process in a couple of weeks.324 Thisenabled entrepreneurs to re-act faster to the good reception of a song or a new orchestra and have it on record soon after it had been awarded the best piece at a tango contest or had been well received during the carnival balls.

It is possible to observe the impact of the import substitution process by comparing the evolution of imports of sound reproducers (phonographs and gramophones) and of recordings (cylinders and records). As the next graphs show for the case of Argentina, the imports of reproducers started to recover after the war and increased consistently during the 1920s (Graph 1). This was mostly due to the recovery of imports from Germany and to a lesser ex-tent, by increases of imports from the United States. The imports of cylinders and records, on the contrary, only experimented a minor recovery in 1919, but never reached pre-war levels again (Graph 2). This gap between the in-crease of imports of reproducers and recordings reflects the import substi-tution process. Considering that reproducers were durable products that could be used for many years, an increase in the imports resulted in a growth of the total number of reproducers available. Even though there are no sales statistics available, it is possible to assume that the number of users in-creased, absorbing the growth in the number of unities available in the mar-ket. Since cylinders and records were disposable products, which often broke after a short period of usage due to the fragility of their material, a larger number of available reproducers demanded a consistent increase in the number of records and cylinders circulating in the market. If this demand was not being supplied by imports, it meant that it was being supplied through local production.

Graph 1. Imports of phonographs, graphophones and gramophones in Argen- tina. Based on data from Anuario de comercio exterior de la República Argen- tina.

Graph 2. Imports of cylinders and records in Argentina. Based on data from

Anuario de comercio exterior de la República Argentina.

Graph 3. Imports of cylinders and records in Argentina. Based on data from Anuario de comercio exterior de la República Argentina .

Not only the opportunity created by the war, but also the general increase in the demand for new recordings since the 1910s motivated the inaugura-tion of factories in Latin America able to supply quickly and effectively to lo-cal markets. In 1913, the first factory in South America opened in Brazil, run by the entrepreneur Fred Figner in collaboration with Odeon. This factory also supplied part of the market in Argentina, as it may be seen in Graph 4, and it accounts for part of the substitution in the fall of imports from Ger-many and the United States during the war. The imports from Brazil went down in 1919, when Glücksmann’s factory was inaugurated in Buenos Aires. The establishment was capable of supplying an important part of the de-mand in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. With 32 machines, it could produce a range of 4,000 to 5,000 records a day.325 Considering that the highest imports of records in Argentina were registered in 1913, with a total of 224,257 dozens, the capacity of this factory was enough to substitute at least an important part of the supply, with a maximum of around 83,000 doz-ens.326

Figner’s and Glücksmann’s similar trajectories account for a successful model of the music entrepreneur. Fred Figner, who was also born in the Aus-tro-Hungarian Empire, migrated to the United States and settled in Texas in 1882, where he had his first contacts with the phonograph. In 1891, he de-cided to travel and bring the novelty to places where it was still unknown. He first arrived in Belen, in Brazil, carrying phonographs and blank cylinders, organized demonstrations of the talking machines, and recorded lundus, modinhas, and operetas in hotel rooms. After this successful experience, Figner decided to travel to other Brazilian cities to promote the talking ma-chine and finally settled permanently in Rio de Janeiro.327 He opened a store named Casa Edison and kept selling cylinders and recording Brazilian artists. From then on, he followed a similar trajectory to Glücksmann’s: he entered negotiations with Odeon and became their exclusive agent for the Brazilian territory. He negotiated the terms of the artists recording for this label and had the exclusive right of distributing their records. In 1913, he inaugurated the first record factory in the country.328

The beginnings of record production in Latin America in collaboration with European-based labels encouraged a fluid exchange of music between the regions. Figner’s factory was opened in cooperation with Odeon, and more than likely, the one Glücksmann opened in Buenos Aires in 1919, too. The terms of the agreement included Firner’s exclusive right to distribute Odeon records in Brazil in exchange for his commitment to buy a minimum of units every year. Figner was also able to produce records in his factory with the matrixes recorded by Odeon in Europe, while Odeon could do the same with Figner’s recordings.329 This matrix exchange agreement explains the fast dif-fusion of the music of Brazilian and Argentine artists in Europe in the 1920s. With the beginning of World War I, distributors settled in Buenos Aires re-sorted to the Brazilian factory to supply the demand that could not be met with the imports from the headquarters in Europe, which at this time were interrupted because of the conflict. Until the inauguration of the factory in Buenos Aires, the Brazilian factory largely depended on the demand of the neighboring countries. However, the opening of the factory in Argentina seemed to be planned in accordance with Figner, proven by a letter to Figner from Cohn, the technician who ran both Figner’s and Glücksmann’s factories. He informed Figner of having found a proper place for the factory in San Fer-nando, within the vicinity of the Argentine capital.330

Victor and Odeon had different business models in the region: while Odeon operated through stable exclusive agents, such as Glücksmann and Figner, both with whom he cooperated with to install factories and handle distribu-tion, Victor sent his own representatives from the headquarters in the United States. The first of Victor’s representatives was sent to settle in Buenos Aires in 1922, from where he managed all the business in the region. The main goals were to expand his knowledge on the market and speed up the produc-tion of local novelties now that Odeon did the complete process locally. This goal was first partially met by establishing permanent recording studios, but the matrixes were still being sent to the United States for pressing until 1924 when the company decided to add to the recording studio, a new establish-ment to press records.331 The Chilean and the Uruguayan market were sup-plied with the production of the US and Buenos Aires factory during these years. In in 1927, both Victor and Odeon opened a factory in Chile where they pressed the music recorded in the studios of Buenos Aires or Santiago.332

As a way of differentiating his company from Victor, Glücksmann empha-sized the local element of his company in his advertisement campaigns after the inauguration of his factory. Ads referred to his records as a “genuinely Argentine industry”, and this aspect was also emphasized by the press when highlighting that almost all the supplies used in the factory were “of national production” and that, of the over one hundred employees, “all of them were Argentines except for a handful of foreign technicians”. However, this factory was actually dependent on imported supplies, since shellac, the main com-ponent for the production of records, was almost exclusively produced in In-dia at the time.333

The possibility of local record production set the stage for changes in the musical repertoire, not only related to the incorporation of musical genres from different parts of the world, but also to internal changes within the gen-res. Music from the US and Europe was still imported in the form of finished records, but it also became more common for local bands to play their own versions of shimmies and foxtrots, while more tango records and artists were arriving in Europe and the US. The relevance given to the local genres does not mean that other music styles lost their importance. Max Glücks-mann offered a catalog of records that included a repertoire recorded in Bue-nos Aires under the label Discos Nacional, while those records imported from Europe were under the name Discos Odeon. During the 1920s, Victor and Odeon continued to distribute opera records. In 1925, Victor published El libro Victrola de la Ópera , which included a summary of the plot of over 150 operas and a historical overview of the genre in Latin America, thus mak-ing explicit the relevance of the genre in Spanish-speaking markets in the 1920s.334

The 1920s saw the rapid popularization of jazz and new musical styles and associated dances such as the shimmy, charleston, black bottom, and fox trot, which gained a fast acceptance in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Santiago. Not only were the records of jazz musicians selling well, but dance teachers were also hired to teach the locals how to do the new steps, which had also been learned through photos published in the press. New dancing salons opened in Santiago, and dance contests became important social events.335The new styles not only attracted fans, but also opponents. Some of them ob-jected to the dances because they involved closer physical contact and were seen as immoral by critics. Another argument used against these dances was that they represented the penetration of a foreign culture, a detriment to their own. In the context of the growth of a nationalist rhetoric during the government of Carlos Ibañez, those who claimed the need for supporting an allegedly “authentically Chilean” culture represented in the cueca and other folkloric rhythms raised their voices against the North American musical genres.336 Jazz arrived in Buenos Aires shortly after the end of World War I, about the same time it entered Europe.337 Some of the most celebrated art-ists were Paul Whiteman or the Benson Orchestra of Chicago, whose records sold well and whose music largely influenced the local jazz musicians.338 But despite the fact that the most “white” versions of jazz had a great impact on the South American scene, jazz was still perceived as a part of an African-American genealogy, and artists that emphasized this genealogy, such as Jo-sephine Baker or Sam Wooding, also performed in Buenos Aires, in 1927 and 1928 respectively.339

The record industry played a central role in the spread of jazz in the region and all the major labels took part in it. But Victor and Nacional-Odeon had a very different approach. Being a US-based label, Victor had contracts with several of the main jazz artists (including Whiteman until 1928) and was able to offer an extensive catalog of this genre, which was usually grouped under the name of “danceable music”.340 But the distribution of US artists was not the only way in which jazz was present in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. The interpretations of jazz music made by tango orchestras was also another ex-pression of it. Since this genre was so popular to dance, it was common for orchestras to include some fox trots in their repertoire, both live and in rec-ords, and label themselves as “Orquesta Típica and Jazz Band”. Glücksmann’s label and the orchestras recording for him, such as Roberto Firpo’s and Fran-cisco Canaro’s, did this during the 1920s. Towards the 1930s, a larger spe-cialization and differentiation of the genres would become predominant, thus ending this practice.341

Jazz was not first invented and then exported as a finished product, but it was created in the course of its diffusion. Its adoption in Latin America had a great impact in the United States, where the combination of patterns from this region’s music gave birth to Latin Jazz.342 It additionally had a great im-pact in the musical landscape of Latin America. The encounter of jazz with tango had an influence in both directions: the interpretation of jazz by tango orchestras brought some new elements to the style, while the presence of jazz had an influence in the way tango was played in the 1920s. Inspired by the jazz records that they listened to, musicians in Buenos Aires formed or-chestras that combined typical tango instruments, such as bandoneon and violin, with those commonly used in jazz bands, such as trumpets and drums.343 Aside from the instruments they used, jazz also had an impact on the compositions. It is likely that the stylistic changes that tango underwent in the 1920s were related to the influence of jazz. Leaving behind the refer-ences to the habanera, whose rhythmical pattern had been present since the first tangos, the new compositions used a four-beat structure.

Conclusions

This chapter traced the evolution of distribution networks and mechanisms and looked at actors who played a role in this sphere of the history of the motion pictures and recorded sound. It analyzed the strategies that they fol-lowed in order to position themselves as intermediaries, to defend their business in front of the expansion of transnational firms, to compete against each other, and to navigate the tensions with other actors of the field. By do-ing so, it was possible to observe how distribution networks and mecha-nisms emerged and changed through time. Throughout the period under ex-amination, distribution turned from irregular shipments of movie reels, cyl-inders and records to stable networks that guaranteed a regular supply for the expanding entertainment scene in the major cities of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay.

The rise and fall of distributors, due to the possibilities and limits for the scope of action for local actors, show the asymmetries in the global market. The major cities of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay became integrated into a transnational communication network as a dependent region in accordance with its integration into the world economy. This chapter showed how this economic dependency had an impact on the history of communication me-dia. Namely in terms of technological dependence and the role of corpora-tions based in the industrialized countries, these communication media had access to more capital and larger domestic markets than any firm based in Latin America. It also showed how local actors managed to find margins of action within the limitations imposed by the asymmetries in the market and had access to the high profit margins of the distribution business at least un-til the late 1920s.

By looking at the activities of local distributors, it was possible to observe the way the circulation of contents in these media was a two-way flux. The integration of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay into a global market of enter-tainment products and services transformed it into a receptor of contents produced abroad but also into the source of new inputs for these media. The role of distributors was key for allowing the circulation of contents and cul-tural products between different contexts. It thus contributed to the

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Due to the different and sometimes opposing interests of actors in-volved in the functioning of media, tensions emerged at different points, and became more pronounced as the tasks of production, distribution, and com-mercialization became increasingly separated. According to this specializa-tion, the interests of those active in each of these three spheres were at times opposed. For this reason, conflicts between movie theater owners and film distributors, or between local film producers and those allocating foreign films, emerged. This was also the reason local record producers were against flooding the market with imported recordings, whereas those working closely with European or US labels were interested in allowing this flood. Ad-ditionally, tensions emerged between US or European labels and local dis-tributors, especially towards the mid 1920s. Major entertainment companies developed a more aggressive expansion in the Latin American markets, often opening their own branches to eliminate intermediaries.

The trajectories of local distributors in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay show that especially in the earliest years of the emergence of these two media, these distributors were important allies for the European and US companies that sought to expand their business in the region. Later on, however, the now transnationally acting corporations often aimed to control all parts of the process and thus sought to eliminate the intermediaries. This process showed some differences in the cases of film and phonography. In the first case, it is possible to observe a clear trajectory of the rise and fall of film

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The Truncated Dreams of Early Recorded Sound

Even though the first recordings were received with great enthusiasm in the major cities of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay in the late 1890s, the emer-gence of local recording industries took more than two decades to find im-pulse. With the inauguration of Max Glücksmann’s factory in Buenos Aires in 1919 and Victor Talking Machines factories in Buenos Aires and Santiago in 1924 and 1927, the 1920s are usually considered the beginning of recording industries.350 The scene of recorded sound before the inauguration of the first factories was, however, much more dynamic than it has usually been acknowledged. This early artisanal phase of recorded sound was a fertile ground for the attempts to develop local production, since with the same ma-chine – Edison’s and Pathé’s phonograph – it was possible to both record and reproduce sounds, and blank cylinders could be bought for low prices. While the technology was still rather a novelty, some aficionados started to exper-iment with home recordings.

One example of a producer during these artisanal times was Efraín Band, who made one of the earliest, albeit unsuccessful, attempts at developing a record industry in Chile based on the recordings of local music. This owner of a cigarette store had migrated in the 1870s from the city of Tver in the Russian Empire and settled in Santiago, where he became one of the most active in introducing phonographic technologies. Band entered the business in the 1890s, when he began to experiment with different recording tech-niques. By 1907, he had a recording studio and a small record factory in-stalled in his house.351 Casa Lepage in Buenos Aires attempted something similar but in a less systematic way, recording songs of local artists on cylin-ders one by one and offering them as an alternative to the imported record-ings with US and European music.352

Technological innovations changed the conditions for production. Those entrepreneurs who managed to transition successfully were better posi-tioned to compete. During the first years of the cylinder, there was no method to create several copies out of the same recording. For this reason, the copies were limited to a small number and the prices were high, as mu-sicians needed to record each one individually. The cylinder started to lose ground the in the early 1900s against the flat record, since this technology enabled the serial production of recordings.353 The introduction of Edison’s moulded cylinders in 1902 allowed for several copies to be manufactured with the same matrix. This enabled the cylinder to keep a market share for some time, but it was eventually displaced by the flat record and its better sound quality.354 The transition from phonograph’s cylinders to gramo-phone’s flat records posed a challenge for recorded sound producers in the first years of the twentieth century. Whereas Band managed to transition to the new technology, Casa Lepage temporarily interrupted its production of local recordings and only restarted it in the 1910s, when Glücksmann inaugurated a studio in Buenos Aires and sent the matrixes for pressing in Germany, until he opened his factory in 1919.355

The case of Efraín Band offers an example of a failed strategy to compete in the phonographic market without the collaboration with US or European labels. Whereas he attempted to build a “national” recording industry, other entrepreneurs became representatives of Pathé Frères and profited from the popularity of their recordings.356 Band was connected through family rela-tions to musicians in Chile, which might have influenced his early motivation to record local artists and move away from the most straightforward path to making money with recorded sound as an importer. He took the develop-ment of the recording techniques seriously and, as his early membership to the Sociedad de Fomento Fabril shows, conceived his activity as an industrial one. In 1901, he had a recording laboratory where he was able to record and press wax cylinders. When he requested state support to make a trip to the United States and Europe to study their recording techniques, he argued that by producing cylinders locally, the costs would be reduced by 75%, and it would be possible to create sources of employment and develop the music industry based on local taste.357

Despite Band’s label, Fonografía Artísitica, had a moderate success record-ing local artists during its first years, the 1910s saw the decline of his phono-graphic endeavor. The opening of Victor Talking Machine branches in Latin America and the expanding presence of Max Glücksmann, who by then was the exclusive agent of the German based label Odeon and made his own re-cordings in Buenos Aires, made it impossible for Band to compete with them. For some time, Band combined his national records with a new catalog of US music, which he produced without the permission of labels, creating illegal copies out of imported records. Since these copies were not made with the original matrix, the sound quality was much poorer and had bad chances of competing in the market.358 The fact that Band had to combine the produc-tion of local artists with foreign music proves that the “national” repertoire was still not profitable enough to guarantee the sustainability of a label. Un-like Band, Max Glücksmann and José Tagini succeeded in the task of devel-oping a catalog of local artists while working as distributors of Odeon and Columbia respectively. They approached local recordings as a niche that could coexist but not replace the commercialization of US and European mu-sic.

The attempts of early recorded sound production to develop an industry locally that could compete with imported records failed. On the contrary, lo-cal record industries would emerge in collaboration with US and European labels, first with the system of matrix exchange and later with the inaugura-tion of factories that used imported pressing machines and raw materials, and hired technicians with experience in record factories abroad.359 Record producers presented local artists, which they grouped under the label reper- torio criollo as an alternative within a broader offer of imported records. However, unlike producers in the field of film, they did not develop a niche strategy addressing a segmented audience with different contents. Even though the commercialization of records profited from the existence of seg-mented consumers, especially in terms of addressing migrant communities with imported records of music in their own languages, producers did not engage in making records locally for different targets. A marginal niche strat-egy was applied in the 1920s in the context of the emergence of industrial production. Producers included, within a catalog of popular music, occa-sional releases of hymns and patriotic songs, dramatic recitations, or gym-nastic classes. 360 As the final section of this chapter will discuss, the consoli-dation of the record industry around music of local artists expanded and be-came successful within the transnational market by emulating certain ele-ments of US and European music and by enhancing its connection with pop-ular culture and national identities.

Filmmakers and Elite Reproduction

When considering the film made on the occasion of the livestock exhibition celebrated in Santiago in 1907, one could wonder, along the same lines of humorous comments in the newspaper El Mercurio , what or who was the real object of display.

The conserved fragments of this movie show the arrival of the guests de-scending from their cars and walking through the park Quinta Normal exhib-iting luxurious clothing. The livestock exhibition was not only an event of great commercial relevance for the livestock industry, but also an important social gathering. It took place in one of the emblematic recreational spaces for the Chilean elites, not coincidentally one of the main locations where filmmakers took their cameras to shoot images that would later be included in newsreels and documentaries portraying life in the city.

Image 11. Frames from La exposición de animales (1907)

A great number of the first films made in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay portrayed wealthy people participating in social activities, thus turning the public and private lives of a specific social group into images for consump-tion for broader audiences. The public saw these images as vistas screened before the exhibition of feature films or included as part of newsreels. The presence of the elites and their weddings, Sunday walks, and philanthropic activities in silent movies has been acknowledged by most studies on the

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With a similar format to the images taken at Quinta Normal in Santiago, films produced in Argentina showed members of the elites during their Sun-day walks in Palermo, while those taken of Montevidean elites were at Parque Prado. In the first years of film, it was common to find announce-ments in the press with information regarding the time and place where the cameras would be, so the readers could attend with the intention of appear-ing in a movie.364 Attracted by the appealing new technology and the novel experience of being filmed, the same people who attended the shoot would then buy the vistas at the stores to watch them on their home reproducers or go to see them at public screenings. Even though the casting call was for-mally open to everyone, the locations chosen, and the medium used to an-nounce it created a bias in terms of which social groups were “invited”. This practice slowly disappeared towards the 1910s and with the emergence of newsreels, the decision of who was and was not being shown became more explicit, as the producers took their cameras to the events they considered worthy of reporting.

Aside from vistas taken at social events, film producers engaged in larger joint productions with the elite’s institutions, both in the documentary and narrative genres. The film Del pingo al volante (1929) , one of three full length films produced in Uruguay during the silent era, was a collaboration of a phil-anthropic society and Bernardo Glücksmann. This film can be considered as part of the strategy utilized by traditional Montevidean elites to defend their social position from the challenges faced in the early twentieth century. The movie’s purpose was twofold: it contributed to gathering funds for the asso-ciation Bonne Garde to continue with their work providing housing for young single mothers, and it offered elite families the satisfaction of fulfilling the narcissistic desire of seeing themselves on the big screen. 365 The collab-oration between philanthropic institutions and film producers was of mutual benefit. With this film, the Bonne Garde had access to Glücksmann’s infra-structure for film production, to his movie theaters, and to his advertising mechanisms. On his end, Glücksmann obtained the funding to produce a movie that was received with great attention and was announced by the press as the “birth of Uruguayan cinema”.366

By showing how a wealthy Montevidean family escaped the risk of losing their fortune, the film Del pingo al volante offered a possible happy ending for the crisis of social reproduction the traditional elites were facing at the time. The film tells the story of a widow from a wealthy family whose de-ceased husband’s fortune is to be transferred to her sister-in-law. The only way for her to maintain her economic position is if her daughter marries her nephew who lives in the countryside with the widow’s sister-in-law. The two cousins are introduced without knowing about the financial situation and end up falling in love and saving the family’s fortune. Thematizing the chang-ing relations between city and countryside, the movie portrays the cousin from the countryside as virtuous and noble, opposite the corrupt and vicious man from the city who also tries to seduce the widow’s daughter. The rural cousin learns some “refinement” in the city, like driving a car and dancing, but is not changed by its influences. In this way, the film offered a happy ending story in which the family is able to find a solution without compro-mising their moral values.

This film fulfilled a pragmatic need: the gathering of private funds for char-ity in a moment in which philanthropic associations were facing a crisis. Since the emergence of Uruguay’s welfare state during the government of José Batlle y Ordóñez, between 1903 and 1907, and between 1911 and 1915, social assistance started to fall increasingly under the umbrella of the state. At the beginning, the same ladies’ committees formed by elite women were maintained and started to be subsidized with public funds. By the 1920s, however, there was increasing pressure to bring these activities definitively to the government’s orbit and replace them with trained social workers. In an attempt to guarantee the persistence of their philanthropic activity – which can be seen as more about the justification of social hierarchies than it was about helping the poor – the ladies’ committees started to look for new sources of private funding. They turned to film as a source of fundraising venues and techniques, finding a powerful propaganda tool as part of a series of strategies to maintain their social position.367

The films made by Bonne Garde also fulfilled the desires and voyeuristic venture of the Montevidean elites, who paid for watching themselves and their peers on the big screen. This was the case for both an earlier film made in 1926 as it was for Del pingo al volante . The 1926’s film followed the format of institutional propaganda documentary (a genre that was expanding around this time and in which the Glücksmanns were very active) and showed the members of the association in their charity duties. Del pingo al volante , on the other side, was a hybrid of documentary and narrative film, in which all the performers were members of the association or of elite fam-ilies that played themselves. It is not coincidental that Bonne Gard had turned to Bernardo Glücksmann for this purpose. He was not only one of the main film producers in the city, but also personally close to several social circles of the elites: after making his fortune as a film impresario, he started to invest in real estate. Through this activity, he shared several social circles with traditional wealthy Uruguayan families.368

The first narrative feature film made in Argentina was also the result of the collaboration of film producers with a philanthropic society. Amalia (1914) was made as an initiative of the president of a benefic society, who called Enrique García Veloso to take care of the adaptation of José Marmol’s novels into script and Max Glücksmann to take care of the production. The film premiered in the Teatro Colón – the most important theater and opera house in Buenos Aires – in the context of a beneficent screening.369 Amalia was the only narrative film produced by Max Glücksmann, whose work as a filmmaker was extensive, but with this exception, was limited to vistas, doc-umentaries, and newsreels. With this film, Glücksmann strengthened his ties with elite institutions and had access to funding to cover the costs of produc-ing a narrative film, which was often more expensive than documentaries.

For the Buenos Aires elites , Amalia served several purposes in the context of their strategies to defend and legitimize their role in society. Since all the characters in the film were played by members of the elites themselves, the film fulfilled, similarly to Del pingo al volante , the desire of seeing themselves on the screen. At the same time, hosting the release at Teatro Colón func-tioned as a way for the elites to affirm their spaces of sociability, recovering the Colón as a public space for their own private use. The Argentine-born elites were, in a way, reenacting the nineteenth-century tertulias (social and artistic gatherings) represented in the film – in a context in which an immi-grant elite was emerging with their own sociability spaces and institutions, such as the Circolo Italiano or the Club Español.

The plot also acquired a special meaning in the political context of the time. In the 1910s, the control of the state by the Partido Autonomista Nacional, which represented the interest of a sector of the elites linked to the agro-exporting model, was challenged by the emergence of the Partido Radical and a movement that demanded a broadening of the political system for the emerging middle classes.370 Revisiting episodes of the nineteenth-century civil wars can be seen as part of a discursive strategy for elite groups to por-tray themselves as more homogeneous than they really were: Marmols’ novel was the fictionalization of an episode that occurred in 1840: a group of unitarios escaped from Juan Manuel de Rosas and was led into a trap that got them killed. In the cinematographic adaptation, however, the history had some differences, for example Rosas appeared sharing the same sociability spaces with his enemies. Perhaps the context of the 1910s was calling the elites to reevaluate the past and see in Rosas a figure with some appealing features, such as his charismatic power.371 The screening at Teatro Colon was part of an attempt by the elites to show themselves as united despite their internal differences, as representatives of different groups of the polit-ical elites, usually major competitors, attended and shared the social gather-ing.372

Several vistas and fragments of documentaries and newsreels showed im-ages of events that would nowadays be characterized as private: weddings, anniversaries, funerals, birthday celebrations, and recreational activities, such as sports or walks around parks and private country houses. Somehow in between the format of family films and celebrity media, what these films shared is that the people involved belonged to the elites, and these activities were held in fancy locations. They resembled the movies made with portable cameras exhibited in home reproducers, which were very popular during the early years of film and re-launched in the 1920s with the introduction of Pathé Frere’s portable camera Pathé Baby. The difference is that these films were screened in movie theaters rather than at home. They were, in this re-gard, not so far away from the present phenomenon of celebrity media, which turns the images and news of private lives of well-known individuals of the show business or of the political sphere into an object of mass con-sumption.373 What we find in silent films, and before that on newspapers and illustrated magazines, is a predecessor of this phenomenon. Wealthy families are represented not only inasmuch they occupy political positions and ap-pear in their official roles, but also through a broad spectrum of activities that include the social assistance of their philanthropic activities and differ-ent forms of sociability.

The broad presence of films portraying wealthy families in silent film can be understood partly because of its similarity with the so-called “social pages” of illustrated magazines. Readers of magazines such as the Uruguayan and Argentinean Caras y Caretas or the Chilean Zig-Zag were familiarized with images of private events of the upper classes. In many cases, these arti-cles appeared as a part of a section written by women and were dedicated to a feminine readership.374 The interest of these articles was usually related to the appeal of the consumption patterns of wealthy people and to fashion, but there were also comments on the importance of “being in the right place”, especially when the events had a philanthropic purpose. In other occasions, under the label of “social news”, with no specific gendered target audience, illustrated magazines reported on the same kind of events, usually comment-ing explicitly on the political relevance of these events. For example, on the occasion of the wedding of Sara Unzué and Carlos Madero, Caras y Caretas pointed out how this event represented the “alliance of two representative families of Argentina.”375 With these words, magazines pointed to the fact that while wedding and funerals would normally be considered private events, the same events of certain people were considered newsworthy. These events would serve to build alliances or show groups that were internally fragmented as if they were homogeneous. Unlike the social pages, which justified the inclusion of these news by making explicit comments to its political relevance or through the attendance of politicians, film turned these images into a usual and unquestioned part of the coverage of the reality of newsreels and documentaries. The intertitles gave information on the con-text, location and people involved but did not seem to have the need to justify why these images were at all relevant.

Along the same lines as the images of private events, one of the videos con-served as part of the Max Glücksmann Collection at the National Archives of Argentina shows images of a group of people in what seems to be a social or family gathering in a country house. If we did not know who they were, we would think that it would be one of those films portraying the social life of an elite family. The situation seems to be part of a private gathering, as we can see a group of people, wearing typical fashionable clothing and hair-styles, exiting a house and walking around a garden, waving to the camera as they pass in front of it. However, we know that one of them is Max Glücks-mann himself.376

Image 12. Frames from video (untitled) included as part of Max Glücksmann

Collection at the Archivo General de la Nación (Buenos Aires). The man on the bottom right image is Max Glücksmann.

Due to his proximity to the upper classes’ social circles and practices, Max

Glücksmann occupied a singular position at the margins of the elites. Even

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Bernardo Glücksmann, who had been settled in Uruguay since 1913, went some steps further in becoming part of the local Montevidean elites. He was among the richest men of the city, having made his fortune as a film entre-preneur and later as a real estate investor. He was an active member of the Jewish community and also joined clubs of other migrant communities, such as the Italian, probably with the purpose of strengthening relations of com-mercial partnership.379 A piece of evidence to prove his proximity to non-im-migrant privileged groups was his belonging to the board of the Uruguayan Auto Club in the 1920s, where he served together with several well-known aristocrats and politically powerful men.380

Max Glücksmann’s social position can be better understood taking into ac-count the changes in the composition of the elites in Argentina that took place between the 1890s and 1920s. The integration of the country into world trade in the last quarter of the nineteenth century had brought some changes for the social structure. Before 1880, the local elites’ living standard had been far from those of their European peers. With the boom of the export model, however, the sectors linked to agricultural production conquered a level of wealth that enabled them to imitate the consumption patterns of the European upper classes, all at a time when the control of the state was achieved with the leading role of the Partido Autonomista Nacional, which was in power until 1916. This was also a context marked by mass immigra-tion and increased social mobility, which resulted in the emergence of mid-dle sectors. The response of the elites was the search for mechanisms to dif-ferentiate themselves by adopting a Europeanized lifestyle and consumption patterns along with the establishment of exclusive spaces of distinguished sociability. They became more hermetic than before. If until the last quarter of the nineteenth century they had been permeable to the incorporation of migrant families that became wealthy, the opportunity for new incorpora-tions started to be restricted in the new period.381 This attempt to close ranks could explain why Max Glücksmann’s request to become a member of the Jockey Club Argentino, the main social institution of the elites, was rejected in 1921. There are no records that allow one to know the reasons behind the decision, but it is possible that being Jewish was part of the reason for an almost exclusively catholic group.

Bernardo and Max Glücksmann were close to the circles of the most eco-nomically and politically powerful people in Argentina and Uruguay, but, at least in the case of Max, were ultimately excluded from them.382 From this position, the two brothers developed a relationship of mutual dependence with elite members and their institutions.383 The Glücksmanns profited from their requests to produce films, while the elites needed the visibility given by movies and by the extensive exhibition and advertisement machine that the film impresarios controlled. After the decline of his application to the Jockey Club, Max Glücksmann attempted “to win the aristocratic sympathy” accord-ing to the newspaper Critica .384 He did this by making a decisive financial contribution to the reconstruction of the Teatro Cervantes, a project started by a Spanish actress and her husband, which had a great symbolic relevance for the local elites. These elites aimed to have their own luxurious, Euro-pean-style theater but were unable to gather enough of funds until the salva-tion came from Glücksmann’s pockets.385

This social position for media entrepreneurs was a novelty of the early twentieth century and its new media. Until the nineteenth century, and in some cases throughout the first decades of the twentieth, newspaper owners had themselves been members of the elites and direct representatives of the ideologies of political groups. With the transition towards a model of com-mercial media in the early twentieth century, newspapers stopped being openly partisan, but their ideological orientation and political interest re-mained close to those of the elites. There is, in this regard, a difference be-tween the ownership structure of old and new media, namely between news-papers on one side, where owners were often members of the local elites; and film, records, radio, and publishing houses, whose were often immi-grants.386 Even if their economic positions made them close to the elites in many ways, they were ultimately excluded from their institutions and circles or placed as external collaborators. The increased autonomy of the media overlapped with the tendency towards an increasing autonomy between spheres within the elites. While the large majority of men who served in a political office also had a prominent economic position and belonged to dis-tinguished social institutions in the late nineteenth century, by the early 1920s these percentages had reduced considerably, to less than half.387 This does not mean that the economic elites were losing their political power, but rather that their political influence adopted more mediated forms than in the past.

Thanks to this relationship of autonomy but ultimate dependence between film producers and elite groups, both sides profited from mutual collabora-tion: film served the strategies of the elites, while filmmakers profited from the access to funding and audiences. A similar relationship took place be-tween cultural producers and state institutions, resulting in the use of the medium for the purpose of advertising the work of public institutions, and granting filmmakers access to state resources.

Mediated Patriotism

A great number of the images taken in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay during the times of silent film showed scenes of public celebrations in the streets. With intertitles remarking on the participation of government representa-tives or important guests and transcribing parts of the speeches given at the events, these movies documented and advertised the patriotic liturgy or, as Mónica Villarroel has called it, the rituals of power.388 Included as parts of newsreels before commercial screenings or as parts of documentaries, these films constituted a channel, not only to archive these events for the future, but also to reach broader audiences than those present at the moment. Aside from documenting public celebrations, films also portrayed the accomplishment and progress of the economic, infrastructure, and social programs. Taken all together, these films constitute a comprehensive docu-mentation of the work of the state. The record industry also profited from national celebrations and used them as an opportunity to launch special cat-alogs with hymns, patriotic songs, military marches, and speeches. In this way, the new media of the early twentieth century enabled a mediated way of taking part in national holidays, allowing for the festivities to be enjoyed for home consumption.

By taking part in this enterprise, film producers played a significant role in state propaganda. They established a cooperative relationship from an au-tonomous position, in which they could work with different groups and in-stitutions, producing material that was often not explicitly presented as an advertisement of the state’s work, but rather a recording of reality from a documentalist or journalistic perspective. Whereas the Glücksmanns were in charge of producing an important part of the elite institutions’ and their philanthropic activities’ filmic material in Argentina and Uruguay, one of their competitors, Federico Valle, was in charge of a significant amount of propaganda movies for the Argentine state. Even though before the 1930s there was no official governmental agency regulating or funding film produc-tion, a great number of movies were done on demand by different state min-istries. Cinematografía Valle was founded in 1914 by an Italian immigrant who settled in Buenos Aires after working in the Italian film industry. It be-came the main contender of Glücksmann in the field of filmmaking for the Argentine market.389 Cinematografía Valle inaugurated a new form of organ-izing film production, in which a team collaborated with differentiated tasks.390 Either as a result of direct competition or agreements to distribute potential clients, Valle and Glücksmann seemed to have even fares of con-tracts to produce propaganda materials, while both continued to produce their own respective newsreels.

Valle’s filmography reveals a clear commitment to advertising the eco-nomic program of the Argentine state. According to Irene Marrone, his insti-tutional movies were conceived of as essays in which he took images shot to be included in his newsreels, edited and combined with intertitles in order to construct an argument. These movies seem to go beyond the purpose of registering the reality and rather aimed to express a point of view with the support of visual documentation.391 Valle specialized in a series of themes, above all, the registering of the progress of the industry. On this topic, he produced films about sugar production plants in Tucuman, oil refineries in Rosario, and estates in the Pampean region.392 Valle actively offered his ser-vices to ministries, industrialists, and traders and produced 127 short and middle length films on demand during the 1920s. Evidence of his depend-ence on this type of funding is the fact that he went bankrupt shortly after the 1929s crisis, a moment when both public and private institutions re-duced their expenses in advertisement and propaganda.393

A good example of how Valle built a documented argument on the eco-nomic progress promoted by the Argentine state is La pampa , a documentary film of institutional propaganda made at the beginnings of the 1920s. There is no explicit information about who requested the film, but it was probably either the Sociedad Rural or the Ministry of Agriculture. With a pedagogic tone, it explains the transformation of agricultural landscapes that took place thanks to the implementation of an exporter model. The documentary takes on a historical narrative that opposes the images of “yesterday”, shown as dispersed rustic ranches framed by stormy skies, in comparison with a ver-sion of “today”, which is represented as estates and luxurious mansions un-der a shining sun. The film presents 1870 as the turning point: “with their work over half a century, our estancieros changed radically the aspect of the pampas”. By placing this date, the year Sociedad Rural was founded, the in-stitution is presented as an agent of change. After the images of the cattle lands and images of the cattle exhibitions, the movie shows images of the refrigeration establishments, which are presented as an “indispensable complement for our cattle wealth” and “one of the most powerful industries of the country”. Social conflict is absent from the film, even though there were many conflicts at the time and Sociedad Rural, Unión Industrial, and Bolsa de Cereales formed an alliance to oppose the demands of the workers’ movement.394

Among the different kinds of public events that appeared in early non-fic-tion films, a recurrent topic was the inauguration of monuments and com-memorative events. These ceremonies were an important part of the ritual-ization of history, an attempt at building a patriotic liturgy through the stag-ing of the historical narratives that were aimed to be spread via the writings of intellectuals and the public discourse of the state. Patriotic celebrations were usually organized by the government or assigned to civil organizations that acted as co-organizers, sometimes involving tense negotiations regard-ing the terms of the celebration, for which the movies cannot be seen as a direct result of the official discourse.395 Max Glücksmann and other film pro-ducers took their cameras to capture images of these patriotic and civil fes-tivities. These recordings were then exhibited several times a week in movie theaters. Films had the function of encouraging familiarity with the calendar of dates and a pantheon of national heroes.396 An educational dimension was also present in the inclusion of images of the vast amount of event attendants who were portrayed as a disciplined and enthusiastic audience. In this way, movies were also instructing on how to perform a patriotic liturgy. These types of film often gave predominance to the performative aspect of the events, separating the act of speaking from its textual content. In many scenes, as can be seen on Image 13, people appear delivering speeches, sometimes for several minutes, without any transcription of what they were saying, as if the most important feature were the act of public speaking and the act of listening.

Image 13. Teniente coronel Mendoza speaking at homage to Rivadavia in the hundred years anniversary of his presidency (left). Speech at the inauguration of the monument to Alvear (right).

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These images appeared systematically as part of a cinematographic genre that grew in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay in the 1910s: the newsreel. Even though they could differ in several formal and aesthetic aspects, newsreels shared a number of features: they appeared regularly and at relatively short intervals (monthly, weekly, or by-weekly), they included several topics not directly related to each other, referring to the current events of general in-terest at the time of the presentation, and they had a straightforward presen-tation of the theme, rather than an interpretative or didactic one.397 The aim of early film producers was to bring to their audiences a film taken from everyday life. The first movies made by the Lumiere brothers in France, La sortie des usines Lumiere (1895) and Arrivée d’un train en gare à La Ciotat (1896) , could be considered newsreel subjects. In the early years, cinema news was not presented in a journalistic format but rather a mix of comic, dramatic, or newsworthy episodes exhibited by travelling showmen. The newsreel as such emerged accordingly to two changes in the industry, which took place between 1905 and 1908 in France, England, and the United States, and expanded to other countries: the transition from travelling shows to per-manent halls as the main exhibition format, and the change to a renting-based distribution system. It was within the context of World War I, how-ever, that the newsreel asserted itself by spectacularizing contemporary facts as it reported on the battles and campaigns with a strong focus on showing the deployment of war technologies.398

Film producers in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay followed the new tenden-cies. Since 1913, Max Glücksmann offered a newsreel screened on a regular basis before commercial films and conceived according to the journal format, under the name of Max Glücksmann Journal or Información de Max Glücks- mann .399 Its main competitor was Federico Valle’s newsreel Film Revista, which appeared weekly between 1920 and 1930. In Uruguay, newsreels were exhibited irregularly during the first decades of the century and con-sisted mostly of images shot by a few local filmmakers, cameramen settled in Buenos Aires who traveled occasionally to Montevideo, or of films made in Argentina. Since 1913, the year Bernardo Glücksmann settled in Uruguay, his newsreel started to be shown regularly. In the 1920s, Uruguayan produc-tion of cinematic news became more stable, one prominent figure being the French immigrant Henri Maurice, some of whose films are among the few preserved samples of the period, which will be analyzed below.

In the case of Chile, the earliest attempts at newsreel production date from 1919 with the beginnings of the screening of Actualidades Punta Arenas and Actualidades Magallanes, which lasted until 1922 but never achieved regular releases, only being screened thirteen times throughout these four years. Newsreels became regularly seen fare in 1927 with Actualidades La Nación, Actualidades Mercurio , and Actualidades El Diario Ilustrado , all funded by the main newspapers in Chile and produced by local or US-based studios.400 Si-lent newsreels grew during the presidency of Carlos Ibañez del Campo, who applied a strong censorship on the media. In 1927, he expropriated the news-paper La Nación and turned it into the official press organ of the government. This also extended to the audiovisual field, where the newsreel reported ex-tensively on matters of the government and its institutions, the progress of public works and the economic achievements, as well as on the private life of Ibañez.401

One of the hypotheses among film scholars is that Latin American newsreel followed the model of Pathé Freres’ Le Journal Pathé and the US edition Pathé’s Weekly , which had been regularly screened since 1908 and 1911 re-spectively. These newsreels were based on a format of four sections on dif-ferent topics, which in total added up to ten minutes and included explana-tory intertitles. Following Marrone, it is possible to add nuance to this inter-pretation if we take into account the continuities between the newsreel and the illustrated press. In fact, the audiences had been exposed to the consump-tion of information through images joined by short explanatory texts. Their transition into the format of film was as such a consequence of the introduc-tion of the new technology, but it would be closer to the adaptation of a pre-viously existing narrative form than to the creation of a new one.402

The criteria of newsworthiness for film were different than for the printed press. Newsreel producers did not take their cameras to shoot spontaneous or sudden events but rather to well-planned and timely announced institu-tional events. It is likely that they received the information from the press, or that they were invited by the organizing institutions. In many cases, it is also possible that newsreels producers charged a fee for the coverage of an event.403 This shows a different understanding of how to achieve “neutrality” as within the printed press. Newspapers were going through a transition into becoming commercial media, leaving behind their partisan nature. The idea of objectivity was supposed to be achieved through the balance in the sources and a neutral language. In film, however, the idea of objectivity was allegedly portrayed through the nature of the technology in which, as with photography, was conceived of as a truthful reflection, an unmediated repro-duction of reality. According to an argument by a chronicler of Chile Cinematográfico magazine, film was superior to theater, travel books, post-cards, and photography as a way of portraying reality.404 This perception of the medium became irrelevant if an institution demanding the production of a film, payed for it and thus influenced the script and editing. In some cases, what was presented as part of the newsreels had been produced under these conditions. As long as the content was considered newsworthy, these condi-tions were not a reason to exclude it.

As part of its news coverage, Glücksmann’s Actualidades reported on a number of commemoration events, including the inauguration of monu-ments. During the first decades of the century, but especially around the Cen-tenary in 1910, there was an official program for the construction of a series of commemorative statues in the streets of Buenos Aires. The director of the Museo Histórico Nacional, in charge of one of these campaigns, saw it as a chance to “fight against the effects of cosmopolitism, which, even though it makes us move further, also tends to weaken our sense of nationality”.405 For some referents of nationalist political groups, the inauguration of monu-ments was a way of the appropriation of cities, considered to be perverted by mercantilism and cosmopolitism.406 These commemorative sculptures complemented public buildings, new streets and avenues, parks, and boule-vards and turned the cities into pantheons where, within the names of the streets and parks, and through the presence of monuments, history was writ-ten into stone.407

Aside from spreading the images of commemoration rituals and the inau-gurations of monuments to broader audiences than those that had been pre-sent at the events, films could also include comments on the meaning of the ceremony, thus contributing to turning the monuments into discourses about the nation. One example of this is the film Inauguración del monumento a Artigas, made by Henri Maurice in Uruguay in 1923. The construction of the monument dedicated to José Gervasio Artigas, a military man who fought in the Uruguayan independence wars, marked the culmination of the process of the consecration of Artigas as a national hero, even though he had formerly not been accepted by the elites who had considered him to be a plebeian po-litical figure.408 The statue had the goal of representing a nation united be-yond the civil wars by coming back to a figure who could appear as a hero, respected by everyone beyond the current controversies between political parties and forces. During the ceremony, the statue was covered by two flags, the flag of Artigas on one side and the national Uruguayan flag on the other, which uncovered the statue at the moment of the inauguration. However, the filmic register only showed the images of the national flag, while the artigu- ista flag remained at the back.According to Georgina Torello, the film took part in the conciliatory program and the attempt to go beyond the divisions around accepting Artigas as a national hero.409 With the flag as its leitmotiv, enhanced not only in the images but also in the intertitles (“the national flag flies in the heights, above everything”), the film contributed to emphasizing how a contested figure could became a symbol of unity, as a result of a nation moving beyond its internal divisions.

Image 14. Frame from the film Inauguración del monumento a Artigas

(1923)

Another example of how films took part in shaping the discourses on the commemoration of patriotic events is the movie Inauguración del monu- mento a la batalla de Sarandí . The debates on the meaning of the episodes of the independence wars were especially heated in 1923, the year of the con-struction of a monument which commemorated the battle against the Em-pire of Brazil in 1825. Unlike in neighboring countries, where there had been celebrations for the one-hundred-year anniversaries of the most symbolic date in the process of achieving independence during the 1910s, Uruguay was going through a debate of what that exact date should be. The polemic found on one side the representatives of the traditionalist approach, mainly the Partido Nacional, who considered the most meaningful date of the decla-ration of independence to be on August 25th, 1825. In contrast, the so-called reformist side – mostly supporters of the reform program of Batlle y Ordóñez – argued in favor of commemorating July 18th, 1830, the date the Constitution was sworn in. The first position was held by those who saw the declaration of independence as the permanent achievement of a pre-existing national community. The discourse that supported July 18th, on the contrary, referred to the signature of a social contract between groups, regardless of their

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The film commemorating the Battle of Sarandí in 1825, took part in the polemic supporting the claim of the Partido Nacional. By stating in the inter-titles that “finally the Uruguayan people erects this great monument”, a ref-erence to the four decade delay after the approval of the project, and by em-phasizing that Uruguayan people as a whole were the ones who were erect-ing the statue, the film can be seen as an attempt to remind people that the date, regardless of being associated with the Partido Nacional, belonged to the nation as a whole.411 According to the prominent presence of members of the civil association Asociación del Centenario on screen, one can presume that the film had been made on demand for this group, which aimed to give widespread coverage to the inauguration of the monument, as part of the struggle over the role of this event in the narrative around the birth of the Uruguayan nation.

The decisions that needed to be made around what to film and how to edit the reels resulted in the giving of more attention to certain participants over others. This is clear for example in the movie made by Max Glücksmann in 1927 on the inauguration of a monument that honored the ex-president of Argentina, Bartolomé Mitre. In the six-minute movie, an important amount of time is dedicated to portraying the members of the civic committee in charge of the monument, which had promoted the construction of the statue and co-organized the event with the government. The intertitles emphasize the central role of the civic commission by saying that their president wel-comes the Argentine president Marcelo T. de Alvear, showing the moment when they uncover the statue together.

Image 15. Frame from film Inauguración del monumento a Mitre. The Presi- dent of the civic committee and the President of the Argentine Republic, Mar- celo T. de Alvear, uncover the statue.

The intertitles of the film on the inauguration of Mitre’s monument show how this was one more step in the process of turning the former president into a national hero: “Mitre received during his life the immense gratitude of his fellow citizens”. The process of consecration had already started when Mitre was still alive through a series of tributes, such as the impression of his face on paper money and the register of his activities, such as in the previ-ously mentioned recording of his visit to the museum. The proposals for building a monument in his honor started the year of his death in 1906, at a time when monuments were reserved for a handful of independence war he-roes. The arguments in favor of having Mitre in stone presented him as the “author of the indestructible unity of the nation” for commanding the armies of Buenos Aires that defeated the Confederation armies in charge of Urquiza. Even if the building of a monument in the city of La Plata was approved in this year, the figure of Mitre as organizer of the nation was still contested by some voices that considered that the true organizer had been Urquiza. An agreement between the different opinions was achieved in 1921 when the first stone of the new monument to be erected in Buenos Aires was placed in

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Another aspect in which films contributed to framing the reception of the celebrations was related to the role assigned to the public. The traditionalist approach to commemoration celebrations pursued by civil associations saw popular participation as a key element for patriotic celebrations to become more than solemn ceremonies, turning them into educational experiences that contributed to expanding the popular basis of national projects.412These ceremonies took place in the presence of a public that ranged from a few dozens to hundreds. Comparing several film recordings of public cele-brations allows us to see that some of them portray the public as one of the main elements – or even as the only one –;413 others portray the public as disciplined, only standing in the designated areas and only holding the na-tional flag. Other films, however, do not show the public and only focus on the stage, official speakers and the statue itself. Studies on these commemo-ration events show that the public sometimes attended with their own signs and flags, differing from the message encouraged by organizers, a sort of transgressive gesture, giving a slightly different meaning to the commemo-ration than the official one.414 But according to the way in which the public was portrayed in the film, these transgressions could be blurred, as in the film Inauguración del monumento a Artigas, in which the public is first shown after uncovering the statue and only briefly, maybe as a way of hiding the audience’s disruptive gestures.

Even though less systematically as film, the record industry also played a role in the conformation of a patriotic liturgy. Despite most of the records produced in the emergent local industry in the 1920s were of popular music, a few had a different type of content. Especially advertised in the proximity of patriotic celebrations, Glücksmann’s label, Discos Nacional, released a spe-cial repertoire of “patriotic music”. This included versions of the national hymn, military marches, and recited poems of patriotic themes. Weeks be-fore the celebrations of Argentina’s two main patriotic holidays, the first commemorating the May Revolution on May 25th and the second, the decla-ration of independence on July 9th, labels announced the release of patriotic recordings. In this way, the celebrations took place not only in the public space where commemorative events were organized, but also in the private sphere, where records were heard. Patriotic songs were often announced as “school songs” and included instrumental versions of hymns and marches specially arranged and recorded for children to sing along.415

The nationalist rhetoric was also used for advertisement. Glücksmann’s company, which aimed to highlight that his was the only company producing locally in Argentina, also made use of the patriotic holidays as a way to por-tray his company as the only “truly national” one. On the occasion the com-memoration of Argentine independence on July 9 in 1924, Discos Nacional announced the release of its recordings for the patriotic holidays. With an illustration of the declaration of independence and one of people in a salon dancing to the music of a gramophone, the advertisement presented this mo-ment in time as “the independence of the record”, presenting Discos Nacional as a “truly Argentine industry”. Aside from using the occasion of the holiday to advertise their catalog of patriotic songs, Glücksmann took these dates as occasions to distinguish his company from his main competitor, Victor Talk-ing Machine, based in the United States and acting in the region through a subsidiary which had just inaugurated the second record factory in the re-gion that year.416

Image 16. “July 9 1816, the homeland’s independence. July 9 1924, the rec- ord’s independence. Discos Nacional – genuine argentine industry – salutes the people of the Argentine Republic on the day of the achievement of its free- dom”. Caras y Caretas, Buenos Aires, 12.07.1924.

The involvement of the entertainment industries in the controversies around the reception of historical events, as well as the use of national holi-days as a way of differentiating local from foreign production, were also pre-sent in the beginnings of narrative film. The first feature film in Chile referred to historical episodes of the independence wars. Manuel Rodriguez was the protagonist of the first narrative movie made in the country in 1910, along with a second version with a similar script produced in 1920, and of the 1925’s film El húsar de la muerte . The press celebrated the release of Manuel Rodriguez (1910) pointing out the satisfaction of the public with the faithful reconstruction of a story they knew well.417 In fact, Manuel Rodriguez and his role in the independence war had been an important presence in litera-ture, theater, poetry, and historical writings.418 The press presented the 1920 version again as a faithful reconstruction of the story and pointed out especially how realistic the costumes and locations were.419

Whereas these two films followed the consensus on how to portray the war and present the main character as one of the “big men” of history, El húsar de la muerte introduced a series of variations in the interpretation of the past. Structured as a melodrama, the movie presented the independence war as a confrontation between the rich and the poor, who at the time were portrayed as the “bad” and the “good”, associated with the rural and urban contexts re-spectively. This way of presenting history was different from the official nar-rative, which did not conceive the independence as a class conflict and did not see the role of the lower classes as prominent. This re-interpretation of history might have had more to do with the situation in Chile in the 1920s, when this social question figured prominently. The film projected the con-cerns of the present to the past, offering a conciliatory solution. This is ex-pressed via the role of Manuel Rodriguez, the hero who appears as someone who belongs neither to the upper classes nor to the lower classes, and can move between the two sides. He travels between the city and the country-side, can adopt the sociability habits of the rich and can also mingle with the poor.420 The conciliatory program is also achieved through the introduction of a (not historically verified) romance story between Rodriguez and a woman of an aristocratic family with ties to the Spanish side. The absence of Bernardo de O’Higgins in the film also contributes to the same purpose, as it avoids the need of confronting his role in the hero’s death.421

Narrative films based on historical themes, such as El húsar de la muerte or the previously mentioned Amalia , combined the function of spreading his-torical narratives about the national past to broad audiences with an intervention in contemporary discussions. They offered a channel for film producers to take part in current political and intellectual debates. The limits between fiction and non-fiction were also not completely clear during the early years of feature film, and the emergence of a local production field trig-gered discussions about the role of movies and whether they should be ex-pected to have an educational purpose, act as a tool to document reality or be a medium for entertainment only.422 These concerns were present re-gardless of whether the film was fictional or a documentary, as in many cases narrative films were built around the representation of reality combined with fictional elements. Through displacements in the understanding of his-torical characters and episodes, films took part in controversies around how to interpret the history in light of the present. At the same time, the use of historical narratives and characters, mediated by its re-elaboration in litera-ture, theater, and poetry, enabled producers to present these narratives and characters as “patriotic” and “truly national”.

Producing patriotic films often brought filmmakers not only recognition as producers, but also compliments directed to them as people and their com-panies, celebrating their commitment to the national cause. On the occasion of the production of the film Todo por la patria by Frey Film in 1918, Cine Gaceta celebrated the “purely nationalist spirit” of this film company and welcomed a production that was not only based on national history, but also was played by Chilean – or foreign but “completely Chileanized” – actors and actresses. The nationalist tone gained the sympathy of the press and also the government, who covered part of the costs of production by providing cos-tumes and armaments of the Pacific War and committing army troops to ap-pear in the film.423 Max Glücksmann received similar acts of sympathy from the press and official institutions, an example being the occasion of the screening of one of his films made in London. It advertised the flourishing Argentine economy, geography, and society as a way of encouraging inves-tors to do business in the country.424

The corpus of film and music productions of the first decades of the twen-tieth century reveals the commercial strategies followed by cultural entre-preneurs in order to meet the expectation of audiences while also working on demand for those actors and institutions who had the resources to pay for it. This resulted in the prominent representations of the elites and the state, directly or indirectly, and allowed entrepreneurs to position them-selves as a key factor in the production and spreading of patriotic discourses. However, since media impresarios were not themselves members of the elites or government officials, but rather worked on a relationship of collab-oration from an autonomous position, there were opportunities and margins for the production of contents that escaped this logic and offered a depiction of broader sectors of the society. This phenomenon is the topic of the follow-ing two sections.

The “Others” on the Big Screen

Many film scholars have argued that despite the broad spectrum of activities and social groups portrayed in filmmakers’ work analyzed in the previous pages, several actors were absent. The elites would be the prominent actor of silent cinema and when “others” appeared, they did so in a subordinate role, either as the recipients of the elite’s charity, or as passive and disci-plined audiences in official events. According to this perspective, it seems that in an attempt to portray the economic progress being witnessed, filmmakers ignored social conflict, poverty, and political movements ques-tioning the status quo. According to Marrone, in the production of filmmak-ers in Argentina, there seems to be no place to challenge the ruling order imposed by the agro-exporting model nor the power of the elites linked to these activities.425 For Villarroel, the representation of Chilean society in early film only reserved a passive and subordinated role for urban and rural workers and other subaltern sectors.426 Following Torello, Uruguayan silent film focused mostly on the spaces frequented by the Montevidean elites, por-traying a harmonic social system.427 The cameras only entered on a few ex-ceptions the tenant houses and rural ranches to show the social inequali-ties.428 This section will focus on these alleged “exceptions” and inquire whether the perspectives present in silent film only responded to the per-spective of those in power, or, according to the singular social and political position of film producers, there were margins in which other social groups were also represented on the screen from a different perspective.

Even though a first look at the remaining films from the silent era gives the impression of a filmography dominated by the elites, their activities, and their views, there are a number of films that offer a different perspective. Fragments of newsreels, a handful of narrative movies, and institutional propaganda reels offer a more complex mosaic of social actors and pro-cesses. Looking at these films from the perspective of their producers and understanding the motivations and the relationships of cooperation that ex-isted between those behind the cameras and those being represented on film, enables an analysis of how different social groups had access to the rep-resentation on the screen, and what this meant for their strategies of legiti-mization. Among the different silent film genres, institutional propaganda movies offered different groups, not only the elites and the state, a channel to being represented on the big screen. Producing films on demand was one of the main activities of filmmakers during the silent period, as it offered a much more secure source of funding than embarking on expensive narrative film productions that would compete against US and European productions in commercial programs. Film producers worked along the long tail of the demand represented by institutions and groups willing to pay to see them-selves on the screen, which resulted in a broad spectrum of institutions such as immigrant communities, unions, and political parties being represented on film.

Aside from films made for the elites’ philanthropic associations, such as the ones analyzed in the previous section, a broader spectrum of institutions can be found in the movies produced by Max Glücksmann. The propaganda films made by Max Glücksmann for Jewish associations were part of a legitimiza-tion strategy of these institutions, which emphasized their contribution to society and public service. One focus of these movies was the portrayal of the philanthropic activities of Jewish institutions. Even though social assistance had been an activity mainly dominated by elite ladies’ committees, it was not exclusive to them in the case of early twentieth century Argentina, and many migrant communities had their own beneficent initiatives to assist the vul-nerable sectors of their communities. They too made use of film as a way of promoting their work. In the case of the Jewish community of Argentina, their access to film production was direct, as Max Glücksmann himself, along with his wife, was among the directors of several Jewish philanthropic asso-ciations.

One example of a film on Jewish philanthropy was the movie made on the beneficent society Ezra, which had the goal of taking care of homeless Jews in Buenos Aires. The film was made for the inauguration of its hospital. With intertitles in Spanish and Yiddish, the video was directed both to Jewish and non-Jewish audiences. It advertised the new achievement of Ezra towards the Jewish community, whose members had contributed financially to the construction of the hospital at a time when it constituted a channel for the legitimization of the Jewish community in the eyes of the rest of Argentine society. The intertitles explicitly stated the purpose of Jewish philanthropy: “This is to alleviate the suffering and pain of our brothers and to contribute at the same time to relieve the municipal hospitals of the burden of our sick.” The Jewish community in Buenos Aires was the umbrella for a significant number of philanthropic institutions and initiativeswhose goal was on the one hand, follow a principle of social justice, and at the same time, legitimize the role of the community through the capacity of “taking care of its own

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Image 17. Frames from Inauguración del Hospital Israelita (1928). Presenta- tion in Spanish and Yiddish and images from meeting of the ladies’ committee.

These films were part of an attempt at emphasizing the contribution of Jewish institutions as a separate but simultaneously integral part of the na-tion. This was necessary in a context marked by the individual access of Jew-ish immigrants to citizen rights but a less clear legitimacy for the community as a collective. According to Leonardo Senkman, even though Argentina was a primarily catholic and secular nation, the republican liberalism of a large sector of the elites and the motto of the melting pot allowed for the tolerance of the cultural practices and ethnic associationism of the immigrant commu-nities. These conditions were highly attractive for Jewish people but did not mean that as a community they were afforded a legitimacy among the soci-ety. It also did not prevent the peaks of xenophobia that took place in these times.430 Jews active in the cultural sector were committed to the promotion of the work of their institutions but also to the development of a Jewish culture that was compatible with its integration into the Argentine society. The group of writers, intellectuals, cultural entrepreneurs, and businessmen who gathered around the Sociedad Hebraica Argentina promoted a Jewish culture that was secular and in Spanish.431 Along the same lines as Ezra’s video, they often aimed to show a Jewish culture that should be conceived as compatible and an integral part of the Argentine society.

The representation of different social groups was present in the entire spectrum of silent film. Newsreels and vistas focused prominently, but not exclusively, on the elites and their social practices, while the practice of in-stitutional propaganda created a channel for the self-representation of un-ions and political parties, many of which included workers as protagonists. Also in the field of narrative film, the use of melodrama as a prominent genre enabled the portrayal of characters and practices from the lower classes. Some of the first movies ever made showed images of workers, often follow-ing the model of Lumiere’s La sortie de L’Usine , and shot images of workers in their daily labor activities, such as the lost movie Desembarco de operarios en el muelle de Valparaiso from 1902.432 According to Marrone, the hundreds of strikes taking place at the time in Argentina, many of which were harshly repressed, were completely absent from films during the times of silent cin-ema.433 A fragment included in Max Glücksmann’s newsreel might prove this statement to be wrong, as it shows images of a harbor strike in 1925. How-ever, it is interesting to note that the images of the strike focus on the empty port and do not include any images of the workers in an assembly, meeting, or demonstration that were presumably taking place. The workers are, in this case, literally represented through their absence.

Image 18. Actualidades Max Glücksmann. Images of strike at a harbor.

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According to Villarroel, in the case of Chilean cinema, there are a few films that constitute an exception to the rule. The author considers these excep-tions as part of counter-discourses that moved away from the elite’s perspec-tives, representing the lower classes from their own point of view and put-ting the social question at the forefront.434 This phenomenon is what we can observe, for example, in the film Gran rodeo a la chilena en el Parque Cousiño from 1909, in which we see a group of people gathered in the park, dancing and drinking alcohol. It is highly symbolic that this celebration was taking place at Parque Cousiño, as it was often considered a recreational space for the elites but as can be seen in this movie, not uncontested in that regard.

Image 19. Frames from Gran rodeo a la chilena en el Parque Cousiño (1909)

Adopted as an important propaganda medium, institutions of different kinds resorted to the production of movies to advertise their work and his-tory. In the case of institutional propaganda, the depiction of different social groups and actors corresponded to the perspective of the funding entity. For example, in the film that the Federación Agraria commissioned to Federico Valle, En pos de la tierra , the chosen figure to tell the story of the institution was an Italian peasant, José, who migrated to Argentina escaping poverty. The depiction of topics such as work, migration, and the relations between city and the countryside are shaped to fit the purposes of the institution. The immigrant arrives to the city alone and with no help from the state, only has access to temporary and precarious jobs, and lives in overcrowded tene-ments. The countryside is presented as close to the utopic place he was look-ing for and once he moves there, his working and living conditions improve radically. After a short time, he is able to rent a piece of land and bring his family from Italy to join him in Argentina. Turned into a farmer, José became an ally of poor rural workers, who supported him against intermediaries who bought his production and kept the lion share of the profits. This movie combined elements of narrative film, such as the fictional character of José, and was conceived to synthetize a romanticized story of social progress with

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A different perspective on the role of workers in society can be found in the propaganda films produced for political parties and unions. According to Villarroel, there are only a few exceptions in which the representation of the lower classes was conceived from the perspective of workers themselves and their leaders, as opposed to the passive and objectified roles given to them in the reels produced from the perspective of the elites.436 A look at the films that correspond to this approach shows that this self-representation is mediated by the role of institutions that commissioned the films or by the proximity of film producers themselves to worker’s organization. An exam-ple of this is the film made on the occasion of the death of Luis Emilio Re-cabarren, a unionist and founder of the Partido Socialista Obrero, which then became the Communist Party of Chile. Los funerales de Recabarren was made by Compañía Cinematográfica Renacimiento in Chile in 1924. Carlos Pelle-grín, the producer of the film, was himself close to Luis Emilio Recabarren and was the first to find him in his house after he had killed himself. He later filmed the funeral, and with those images, produced a movie of hybrid genre between newsreel and documentary, which was shown in the movie theaters of the country in the months following the event.437

Produced by a filmmaker who was himself a unionist and close friend of Recabarren, Los funerales the recabarren offered a flattering view of the worker’s movement. The film’s publicity presented Recabarren as an undis-puted and beloved leader of the worker’s movement, as the “leader and comrade” whose funeral was a public event with the attendance of fifty thou-sand workers walking under the sun to say goodbye to their “guide and apos-tle”.438 With images of the procession and the ceremony, one can see thou-sands of people walking in organized columns carrying flags that identify with their organizations, portraying the Socialist and Communist parties as massive and disciplined organizations. A significant part of the footage is dedicated to the images of other union leaders reading discourses at the fu-neral, thus showing the literacy of the typographer’s leadership in a context in which the percentage of illiterateness were still very high in Chile. The proximity of the producer to the subjects represented on film is made explicit through the appearance of Pellegrín himself reading a speech at the funeral.

Image 20. Frames from Los funerales de Recabarren (1924). Carlos Pellegrín reading a speech at Recabarren’s funeral, and funeral procession.

Political propaganda was an important market niche for filmmakers in the silent times. Even though there are no records on whether Los funerales de Recabarren was funded by a union or political party, it is likely that this was the case, as the costs of producing a full-length film probably exceeded the resources Pellegrín could have had on his own. The narrative structure of the film also resembles other examples of political propaganda of the time, in which parties and unions are portrayed as part of a broader representation of workers as an organized force. Max Glücksmann and Federico Valle were active in this field, and their institutional documentaries have some similar-ities but also show their own specific marks. Even though neither of them had any organic engagement in a political force, it is no coincidence that they were convened to produce the film propaganda of the parties they had more affinity to in the context of the elections of 1928. Yrigoyen’s party chose to work with Valle rather than with Glücksmann, as Glücksmann was close to his main contender Marcelo T. de Alvear, who was in charge of the propa-ganda of the Partido Socialista Independiente, a competitor of the Partido Radical led by Yrigoyen.

Combining the input of the propaganda committees in charge of the elec-tion campaigns and the style of filmmakers, political documentaries made in

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Aside from documentaries, narrative film also constituted a fertile ground for a broader representation of different social groups. In the context of a market dominated by US and European productions, local filmmakers chose to emphasize elements of popular culture. What would become more prom-inent with the introduction of sound film already had some precedents with silent movies: melodrama shaped the form and contents of mass culture in Latin America with aesthetics of an excessive emotionality and the portrayal of a society divided in rich and poor. Melodrama was present in theater and literature since the nineteenth century and stayed alive through radio, tango lyrics, and early cinema. It has been seen as a way of depoliticizing inequalities due to its discourse of resignation and victimization.441 How-ever, according to Karush, melodrama was also a channel for the lower clas-ses to be proud of their own culture in contrast to foreign ones, an anti-elitist narrative.442

Two of the earliest films in Uruguayan and Chilean production respectively stand out as exceptions to most silent film due to their anti-elitist aesthetics and narrations. Almas de la costa (1924) , directed by Juán Borges in Monte-video, is considered by film scholars as the only movie of the time to show an image of society that is different to the rest, one that portrays the harshness of poverty in fishing villages of the Uruguayan coast.443 The Chilean produc-tion Los desheredados de la suerte (1924), directed and produced by Carlos Pellegrín, addresses the environment of poor urban workers through an ex-ample of a man who goes to prison after committing a crime seeking revenge for his sister. After going out of prison, the man is unable to find a new job and ends up joining a criminal band. Both films, considered to be exceptions to the canon that was being built at the time, share the feature of having been the only narrative film made by their producers, who made their living with other professional activities. Their differences with the rest of the corpus might be explained either by the fact that they were produced by outsiders to the film business – even though they followed the standard of professional filmmaking at the time – or by the fact that different funding sources were utilized. Pellegrín wrote, directed, and performed in the movie Los deshere- dados , and after making Los funerales de Recabarren later that year, he left the film industry and founded a business in a different sector.444 Almas de la costa was produced by a regular film company, Charrúa Film, but decided on a different source of funding than the usual. This decision was presented as a part of the company’s “independent” character, both in financial and ideological terms. Rather than with an official sponsor, the producers of this film resorted to a scheme of small investors.445

Through the collaboration between filmmakers and migrant communities, unions, and political parties, as well as in the production of a handful of nar-rative films made by outsiders to the business, a corpus of film with repre-sentations of those that escaped the world of the elites appeared during the silent period. In most cases, the depiction was mediated by the agenda of in-stitutions, which aimed to legitimize their role in society and advertise their work. Parallel to the use of the language of documentary filmmaking (either in institutional propaganda, newsreels, or narrative films), another type of discourse enabled the representation of broad sectors of society in films and music, namely one that aimed to include characters and themes who, regard-less of how faithfully they represented real people, allegedly condensed the essence of popular culture and the nation’s soul.

Criollo Narratives at Home and Abroad

In 1903, the newspaper El Mercurio of Valparaiso announced the invitation to a “cinematographic picnic” that would be “a truly criollo spectacle”. Early films in Chile, as well as in Argentina and Uruguay, often included images of men driving horses and wearing typical clothes from rural workers, presented as part of a criollo world. In the case of the Río de la Plata area, gauchos were the protagonists and in the Chilean context, huasos.With the goal of capturing scenes of “local culture” that could be presented as a mixture of a documentation of reality and a staging with entertainment purposes, early films in Chile contributed to the reshaping of the huaso, a character present in literature and music who allegedly represented the rural inhabitant and condensed elements of the national soul. The main attraction of the picnic was the huaso Rodriguez, who arrived by horse and danced a cueca to entertain the attendants.446 Including images of the huaso, easily recognized by his clothing, was a straightforward way of making it clear that the scenes filmed were a representation of local culture. Organized by the company founded by Massonier – a cameraman who worked for Lumiere in France and then settled in Uruguay and Chile –, the “cinematographic picnic” had the purpose of producing vistas that would later be screened in his movie theater in Valparaiso, combining them with reels imported from Europe.

Aside from their inclusion in early vistas as a reference to local culture, gauchos and huasos turned into an important element of the contents of narrative films and recordings made in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. These figures seemed to have contributed to the success of cultural productions not only in the local, but also in the transnational markets. The first feature film produced in Argentina to achieve box-office success in the transnational market also included references to criollo narratives. Nobleza gaucha (1915) was a film protagonized by a brave gaucho who rescued a young country maid from a landowner who had kidnapped her. This film was part of a series of productions that can be considered part of a criollo aesthetic, which combined narrative structures that emulated those of European film with atmospheres, themes, and characters that refered to the local context and contributed to the re-shaping of the figure of the gaucho under the conditions of the new medium.447

Image 21. The protagonist of Nobleza Gaucha. Cine Mundial, New York, Sep- tember 1916, 381.

The focus on local themes was not only related to finding a niche to com-pete with foreign films for the attention of local audiences, but also with the prospect of having a place in the transnational market. In 1919, the producer of the film Juan sin ropa stated: “I would like to produce and sell abroad. That is why my plan is not to engage in universal matters, but rather to offer an “Argentinean film”, a synthesis of my race, of gaucho psychology, an ethnic compendium of my homeland.”448 According to Cine Mundial , the film No- bleza Gaucha ended up revealing the mystery of the “character of Argenti-neans: how is the true criollo of the Rio de la Plata area like? (…) is its race also as mixed as it is in the United States, where of Anglo-Saxon it only has the name? Is the gaucho comparable to the “cowboy”, which sometimes seems Greek or Russian and speaks a terrible English?”449 According to the writer, the film confirmed that Argentina was following the same steps as the United States, and “the gaucho is exotic, sui generis, only comparable – to the gaucho. He is not Spanish, nor Italian, nor German”450.

A good example of the successful use of criollo narratives in the transna-tional market was the work of Julián Ajuria, the Basque film entrepreneur based in Buenos Aires who was active in the distribution market in several Latin American countries. Unlike Glücksmann or Valle, Ajuria was not pre-sent in the field of newsreel and documentary production and focused mostly on narrative films that aim to compete in Europe and the United States. Not only was he responsible for the production of Nobleza Gaucha , but also another successful film based on Argentinean themes. Una nueva y gloriosa nación (1928) , was based on a fictionalized romantic story between Manuel Belgrano and the daughter of a Spanish general in the context of the independence wars. Even though the film was not specifically connected to criollista literature or characters, the English translation of the title, The Charge of the Gauchos , functioned as an effective way of linking this film with other Argentinean productions. The poster described a film with “flashing steel, whirling bolos, galloping gaucho in a romance of the Argentine pam-pas”.451 Una nueva y gloriosa nación was an attempt at shooting a historic film with the technical and aesthetic standards of Hollywood. Since US producers denied financial support to Ajuria, he managed to finance it with his own pri-vate money. The film was shot in Hollywood studios with the technical sup-port of recognized professionals of the field and starred by well-known Hol-lywood actors and actresses. The film was exhibited in South America, the United States, and Europe.452

The motivations of Ajuria to produce an “Argentine film” in Hollywood have been seen by contemporaries and scholars as related to his own per-sonal feelings towards his country of residence. Ajuria himself wrote some years later that he was full of enthusiasm and gratitude for the Argentine people and wanted to spread the word on the great heroes of its patriotic history and the origins of the nationality.453 Mario Gallo, who worked with Ajuria, considered it to be “his way of adhering to his new fatherland.”454Film historian Jorge Finkielman considers that Ajuria’s motivation was also related to his discontent with how Argentina was being represented in for-eign productions. As a response, he wanted to make a more authentic pro-duction.455 However, even though Ajuria conferred with advisers on how to reconstruct the historical episodes of the independence wars, the production of the film was not completely realistic, as the scenography was distant from a faithful reconstruction of the geography of the Argentine territory and in-stead included reproductions of paintings of the Italian countryside.456

In order to incorporate criollo narratives into the contents of new media, producers pulled from an extensive reservoir of criollista stories present in literature and music since the nineteenth century. The gaucho, a romanti-cized inhabitant of the rural areas of the Pampas; the huaso, a worker of the Central Valley countryside in Chile; and the roto, an ideal type of the poor inhabitant of the Chilean cities, were chosen as figures that allegedly symbol-ized the national identity. This operation was an important element of na-tionalist discourses in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. Present in literature, theater, music, and visual arts, these characters were at the core of criollista narratives and through the actions of intellectuals, the market, and the state, criollo figures were presented as the soul of the nation in the three countries under examination, but with different nuances and temporalities according to the contexts of each one. By including the leit motivs of these narratives into the contents of the film and recording industries, cultural producers not only were able to effectively differentiate their movies and records from those produced by Europe and US based companies, but also took part – will-ingly or unwillingly – in controversies around the meaning of criollismo in the understanding of what national culture was or should be.

Even though stories of gauchos had been present in the territories of Ar-gentina and Uruguay throughout the nineteenth century, the operation that turned them into the emblems of nationhood took place in the early twenti-eth century. In Argentina, the meaning of the term criollo started to change in the years around the Centenary of the 1810’ Revolution and the end of the political cycle that had begun with the organization of the nation state in the 1880s. Around these years, what Carlos Altamirano and Beatriz Sarlo called a “nationalist reaction” emerged, consisting of a series of different intellec-tual responses to a moment of change, in which the question about the na-tional identity arose with great strength.457 In this context, the meaning of the term criollo changed. Whereas in the mid nineteenth century it had had a negative connotation, associated with primitivism and opposition to the idea of progress for the elites, it started to be associated with positive values, opposing the term gringo, towards the turn of the century. These changes in the meaning of the term criollo and the values associated with it were part of the quest to establish traditions that could go beyond the xenofobic reaction to everything foreign and the nostalgic evocation of the past. The search for national identity needed powerful myths that could enable a collective identification. One of the expressions of this quest was the movement of the revalorization of the poem Martin Fierro , which had one of its turning points in the conferences of Leopoldo Lugones in 1913 and was part of the series of operations that turned the gaucho into the archetype of the Argentine nation.458

In Uruguay, cultural nationalist discourses were mobilized against the sec-tor of the elites that was in power in the early twentieth century. A type of conservative nationalism emerged as a reaction to the program of reforms carried out by the government of Batlle y Ordoñez during the first two dec-ades of the twentieth century. The landowning oligarchy appropriated the figure of the gaucho as an emblem of tradition, which they considered threat-ened by the “cosmopolitan” program of reforms driven by the government. By the time this happened, the gaucho had already been disentangled to a large extent from its previous popular character and was compatible with the elites’ conception of tradition.459 On top of holding a protagonist role in the literature of the Rio de la Plata area since the nineteenth century, the fig-ure of the gaucho increased its presence in the iconography and in different media during the early twentieth century. The context of the centenary pro-vided a favorable context for the publication of different reflections on the national history and identity, as seen, for example, in the Libro del Centenario uruguayo, 1825–1925, with its numerous articles on the history and culture of Uruguay, along with the extensive use of gaucho iconography.

Criollista discourses emerged in Chile later than in Argentina and Uruguay, namely in the early twentieth century. As a reaction of a group of intellectu-als against the Europeanization of the elites, criollistas advocated for the val-orization of local culture and aesthetics.460 In the literary essays of the early twentieth century, both the roto and the huaso were presented as a synthesis or symbol of the “Chilean race”.461 Within this movement, the opinions were divided in terms of whether the huaso or the roto represented the nation the most. The myth of the roto had its origins in the Pacific War, and it repre-sented the adventurer, a brave, great soldier, while at the same time, a trou-blemaker. The roto was a mix of the urban and rural world, and took some elements of the imaginary of those who migrated from the countryside to the city looking for jobs. Some criollistas argued that the roto was only a contin-gency, whereas the huaso was the most permanent representation of the es-sence of chilenidad. A symbol of rural customs and traditions, the huaso was associated with horses, rodeos, and the skills of countryside’s workers and functioned as a shared identity between classes that contributed to blurring social differences in the rural world.462

By including representations of figures that allegedly represented national identities, film producers succeeded in including their work as part of a cor-pus considered as national culture in these three countries. Adapting the cri- ollista narratives to a new medium, movies had the effect of not only spread-ing the stories of gauchos and huasos among broad audiences, but also pro-duced some minor changes in their meaning. In the case of Chile, film and recorded sound included representations of the huaso, whereas the roto, present in literature and other cultural forms, was virtually absent. The in-troduction of changes in the characterization of criollo characters is more prominent in Argentine productions than in Chile and Uruguay, as the gau-cho was the protagonist of prominent productions of silent film there.

In the case of Nobleza Gaucha, we find an example of the adaptation of cri- ollista narratives to a new medium. Even though the references to literature are explicit, as fragments of Martin Fierro , Santos Vega, and Fausto are in-cluded as intertitles, it represents a re-elaboration of the figure of the gaucho and its character. The protagonist of the film is seen as a disciplined and do-mesticated gaucho who has lost the rebellious spirit of Juan Moreira.463When the gaucho travels to the city to save his beloved woman from her kid-napper, the city appears, as was commonplace in gauchesque literature, as the opposite to the values of the countryside. However, it is also represented as a place the gaucho could conquer, where he could go in and out without any major setback. In the film, the city is not something that overrides the gaucho, but rather incorporates him. It does not exacerbate his dismay but rather he becomes a witness of a process in which he could take part.464 The role of the gaucho’s friend, an Italian immigrant who first offers to help him but abandons him in the moment when he is needed most, has also been seen as an expression of the current xenophobic distrust towards immigrants.465The adaptations of criollismo to film spoke more to their current contexts than to the past and found new uses and functions for these figures.

The emerging record industries in Argentina and Chile also used the term criollo as the distinguishing element of the catalog produced by local artists as a way of differentiating it from the repertoire imported from Europe and the United States. Victor Talking Machine and Odeon presented the first recordings made in the 1900s and 1910s by musicians in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, marketing them as examples of criollo music. Victor announced their recording artists as those who can “give a criollo taste and expression to our typical music”.466 After Max Glücksmann opened the first record factory in Buenos Aires in 1919, he announced the regular releases of his label as “the archive of everything criollo, everything typical, everything Argentinean”.467 This label included a large variety of musical genres, both of rural and urban origins, and also featured versions of US music played by local artists.

Image 22. “Disco Nacional is heard everywhere with great interest”, “the faithful expression of criollo art”. Caras y Caretas, Buenos Aires, 21.12.1927.

A look at the catalogs published by the labels gives us an idea of what was encompassed under this tag and how it changed through time. Advertise-ments of releases grouped under the label repertorio criollo appeared regu-larly from 1909 on the press. The first catalogs included a variety of genres, most of which were related to the rural world and folkloric music, such as payadores’ improvisations, gato, milonga, vals, estilo, combined with a

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The recording industry was intertwined with the debates around what “national music” was or should be, with the statement “¿do you love criollo (music)? Bring home the best expression of national music”.469 This process was layered with several levels of tension, such as the debates between his-panists and cultural nationalists and the attempts of regional elites to place cultural expressions from their territories as the center of the national canon. Whereas hispanists saw the local folklore as variations of European music, cultural nationalist put indigenous elements at the center and considered them the only authentic cultural element. These different legacies were treated differently according to the medium. Whereas indigenous visual art was often given a great deal of importance in Chile, indigenous musical ex-pressions were oftentimes excluded from the allegedly national repertoires of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay that the recording industry contributed to shape.470 This does not mean that indigenous music was completely erased from the idea of folklore, but rather it received a different treatment. Instead of being part of the music that had to be recorded to be sold and spread, it was meant to be recorded for “preservation”. Musicologists and collectors took up the task of recording indigenous music with the purpose of preserv-ing it in museums and archives, while the record industry conceived popular music as something alive that needed to be registered in ordered to be sold.471

The figure of the huaso functioned as a cohesive element among different sectors of Chilean society. In the second quarter of the twentieth century, groups of the conservative elites and of the middle classes adopted a huaso-based conception of chilenidad that was expressed in criollista discourses in literature and especially music. Whereas the elites were attached to a Euro-pean-based sense of identity in the 1910s, they began to adopt rural images and traditions as part of their notion of chilenidad towards the 1920s. The huaso-based identity meant a very clear preference for the practices and cus-toms from rural areas of the Central Valley. The production system of this area was based on the work of transient, seasonal labors, and tenants. At the top of the social pyramid was the rural elite who owned the lands. The ro-manticized huaso identity was presented in criollista discourses as a shared identity among these groups, despite the fact that their experiences and in-terests were opposed.472 Turned into the symbol of Chilean identity, the Cen-tral Valley huaso was used as a tool to “Chileanize” the northern areas, where the territories had been obtained through the Pacific War (1879–1884) from Peru and the population still identified with Andean cultural practices.

By incorporating the gaucho and the huaso as central elements of the mu-sical repertoire for sale, the record industries also took part in the disputes around regional hierarchies in the definition of national cultural cannons. The canonization of the gaucho in Argentina meant the consecration of the Pampa region’s culture at its core. As the musician Buenaventura Luna would argue in the 1930s when he arrived from San Juan to Buenos Aires, he did not feel identified with the construction of a criollo identity around the figure of the gaucho, as this figure did not exist in his region and was related to the province of Buenos Aires. He then pushed to turn the figure of the gaucho into a broader symbol that would encompass a larger variety of cultural elements from different provinces with different ethnic identities.473 As a fig-ure used metonymically to represent the whole, the gaucho actually only rep-resented a small part of the population, a sector that was ambiguously mes-tizo but definitely not indigenous.474 By aiming at formulating a unifying dis-course, the operations that turned the gaucho into a symbol for the whole nation also had the effect of consecrating regional hierarchies.

The canonization of cueca as a national type of music in Chile, to which the recording industry contributed, played an important role in crystalizing re-gional hierarchies. In the 1920s, diverse social groups embraced cueca as the national music. Among the different variations of the genre, the one that was canonized as the national dance was that of the Central Valley, interpreted by so-called huaso groups. These groups, composed largely of educated young men from families that owned lands in the Central Valley or had ties to the region, held to the belief that folkloric music could be refined in order to compete with international music styles popular at the time.475 This was part of a process of revalorization of folkloric culture encouraged by some nationalists, who argued that it was necessary to emphasize the national el-ements in music, theater, visual arts, and dance. Cueca was well known in Europe but was not receiving an equivalent attention in Chile, because it was considered a rural and therefore inferior cultural expression. Nationalists criticized the elites for leaving the roots of the national character aside in order to imitate European customs.476

Part of the contribution of the recording industry to turning cuecas and tonadas into national music can be attributed to a series of subtle transformations introduced in relation to the live expressions of these musi-cal forms, which managed to produce versions of these genres more suitable for urban markets. Recorded tonadas adopted broader harmonic and me-lodic languages, varied the tempo, resorted to vocal and instrumental virtu-osity, and expanded the instrumentation to encompass combinations of pi-ano, bass, harp, accordion, and even orchestras. Huaso groups remodeled cuecas to fit the three and a half minutes of the records, sometimes repeating a 90 seconds cueca several times, or adding dialogue, exclamations, or inter-ludes.477 Even before the government started to openly endorse huaso groups and present Central Valley cueca as the national dance in the 1940s, the record industry had contributed to the emergence of a new version of cueca that brought together rural traditions and the demands of the market. This version of Chilean identity was not unchallenged, and in the 1940s, other versions of Chilean folklore were promoted by different institutions, aiming to present a version of chilenidad based on various regions as op-posed to the exclusively Central Valley huaso identity.478

Conclusions

This chapter reconstructed the strategies followed by cultural entrepreneurs when approaching the production of films and records. It found out that, in the context of a transnationally integrated market with a strong presence of contents produced in the United States and Europe, the most successful strategy was one that focused on market niches in which local production could compete under better conditions with foreign contents. This strategy was twofold. On one side, the niche strategy expressed in how producers ap-proached the local markets, where they profited from the segmentation of audiences. Rather than driving homogenization from the audiences, or the polarization between the rich and the poor, as previous studies on the topic have argued, mass culture in the pre-broadcasting times offered channels for the representation for a broad spectrum of social groups, including the elites, migrant communities, and unionized workers.479 On the other side, it meant that producers emphasized the connections between the films and records they were offering and previously existing elements of local popular culture. These allegedly “authentic” contents were seen positively not only by local audiences, who recognized what was being seen or heard, but also in foreign markets, in which the demand for more diverse and often exoticized con-tents was growing.

Producers of films and records approached market niches differently ac-cording to the divergences between the two media. If we compare the num-ber of filmmakers with those able to produce recordings during the first fif-teen years of both technologies (roughly until the end of the 1900s), we can see that the beginnings of production were faster and more decentralized in film’s industry than in the field of recorded sound. With the available cam-eras and blank reels, filmmakers in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay were able to record vistas, documentaries and even narrative films that were not so far from US and European standards. Those who attempted to produce record-ings in the early years, however, did not manage to achieve an acceptable sound quality to compete with labels such as Odeon, Columbia, or Victor, and were left out of the market, at least for some time. When an industrial record production finally emerged in the 1920s, it was through the collaboration with Odeon and through the presence of Victor in the region. The technolog-ical reliance on imports was high in this industry, since the pressing ma-chines had to be imported from Europe and the United States, and the shellac was only produced in India.

In order to address differentiated audience segments and sources of fund-ing, cultural producers profited from their position as part of social and po-litical networks. As this chapter showed, some filmmakers were close to the elite’s circles of sociability, but in most cases, ultimately excluded from them. From this position, the producers collaborated closely with the elites, thus constituting film as a channel for the elite’s strategies of legitimization, so-cialization, and gathering of funds, and in turn filmmakers profited not only from their access to resources to produce movies, but also the opportunity to position themselves as belonging to these social groups. However, other collaborative relationships between producers and institutions existed be-yond the elite’s circles. The examples analyzed showed different forms of col-laboration between filmmakers and institutions. This included the films made by Glücksmann for the Jewish community in Buenos Aires, to which he belonged himself, and the role of Pellegrín, who, coming from a working-class context, engaged in the production of movies to promote the work of unions and their leaders, and narrative films portraying the lives of poor ur-ban workers; and the role of filmmakers such as Glücksmann and Valle in the production of political propaganda por the parties they were close to.

Before the introduction of sound film and broadcasting, cinema and rec-orded sound grew as forms of mass entertainment in almost complete ab-sence of state regulation or support.480 This could create the impression that silent film and pre-radio recorded sound was somehow independent from official discourses. However, a closer look at how producers positioned themselves in front of public institutions and how they established relations of professional cooperation with a broad spectrum of social groups and ac-tors reveals a strong presence of state institutions and groups aiming to in-fluence public discourse and legitimize their role in society within the fabric of actors in which film and recorded sound emerged as media. The role of the state in the entertainment market during the period under examination was largely mediated by the market but nevertheless present.

Whereas the connections between film and the attempts to contribute to “national culture” have been seen by scholars more explicitly during the times of sound film, this chapter showed that the commercial and political logics of silent film production cannot be disentangled from each other.481From a position of relative autonomy from different social groups and insti-tutions with resources to fund their movies, film producers engaged in the production of political discourses that combined the perspective of their fun-ders with their own aesthetic and narrative repertoire. Engaging in the pro-duction of contents presented as “national film”, producers also found ways to portray themselves as proud members of the national communities of their countries of residence, as was discussed with the case of Ajuria. Some-thing similar can be seen in the case of the record industry, where Glücks-mann’s emphasis on his being the only “truly national” label (despite collab-orating with the German-based Odeon), granted him the support of newspa-pers and magazines.

Partly influenced by the demands of the audiences and partly by their own motivations and strategies, music and film producers engaged in the produc-tion of contents that included references to central themes of current dis-courses about the nation in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Films and records included references to patriotic holidays and commemorations of events and men consecrated by nationalist discourses, reenacted historical episodes as-sociated with narratives on the birth of the nation, and included characters and themes considered as the condensation of the national soul. In doing this, producers engaged in current debates on how to define national identities, contributed to the spread of nationalist discourses to a much broader audi-ence than those that were reached by the writings of intellectuals.

As this chapter showed, new media reproduced the discourses formulated by intellectuals and the state while also introducing a series of nuances and changes to them. This happened through a series of operations inherent to the language of each medium and to the transposition of pre-existing forms of popular culture to the new media: filmic register of patriotic celebrations could emphasize the participation of certain actors and censure others or could contextualize the interpretation of an event with the intertitles; the conformation of catalogs of “national music” favored certain genres over oth-ers, creating or reproducing regional hierarchies on the national canons; the use of the term criollo and of stories and images of gauchos in the Río de la Plata and the huaso in Chile broadened the term until it included virtually everything local with a plebeian element; records and movies turned the gaucho into the symbol of a traditionalism that could peacefully coexist with “modern” technologies and urban life and turned it into the symbol of Argen-tina and Uruguay both locally and abroad.

New Media – New Game: After Broadcasting and Sound Film

The 1930s saw important changes for the media landscape in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay due to the combined result of the introduction of new technologies and the effects of the economic crisis of 1929. For film impre-sarios, the introduction of sound would mean the need for major adaptations in terms of the forms of production and of screening infrastructure: studios needed to be equipped to produce reels with synchronized audio, and movie theaters had to be wired in order to reproduce sound. Meanwhile, the intro-duction of the radio changed the patterns of music consumption and the rec-ord industry had to adjust to them, as it was now possible for owners of radio transmitters to listen to unlimited songs for free. The chronology of media and of the careers of their main entrepreneurs overlapped to a large extent, as most of the actors of the pre-broadcasting times played only marginal roles as of the 1930s or went out of business completely, if they had not done earlier.482

Even though the introduction of sound film and radio in the 1930s changed the game for entrepreneurs of the times of silent film and pre-broadcasting phonography, several of the mechanisms of the entertainment market built during the period examined in this dissertation remained throughout the fol-lowing decades. The dependent integration of the markets of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay into a global entertainment market, which this disserta-tion analyzed, conditioned the subsequent phases in the history of media. Both the technological dependency and the concentration of the market with an oligopolistic structure played important roles in the entertainment indus-tries after the introduction of sound film and broadcasting. While the rise of Max Glücksmann, his partners, and his competitors allowed me to recon-struct in this dissertation the history of the emergence of new media, their decline show some key moments of tension that the new media of the 1930s would have to overcome in order to find a place in society.

As a central actor of the field, Max Glücksmann was aware of the new inno-vations that were emerging in the mid and late 1920s. However, they caught him in a moment of decline. When the first attempts to include sound in mov-ies were being tested in Europe and the United States, he followed the pro-gress of the technique with great interest. In a two-year trip between Europe and the United States from 1927 to 1929, Glücksmann visited several of the laboratories that were testing the different sonorization techniques. Even though he declared being enthusiastic about the possibilities of a suitable so-norization method to be achieved within a short period of time, there were no definitive results in that moment.483 The reasons why he did not break into the business of sound film when this emerged powerfully in the 1930s might have been related to the effects of the economic crisis, which forced him to sell most of his movie theaters to cover debts.484 Even though Glücks-mann did not take part in sound film as producer, he did so as a distributor of Pathé Frères’ talkies in the 1930s and as an importer of sound equipment for movie theaters.485 The Uruguayan branch of the Glücksmann company was the one that most successfully transitioned and adapted to the times of sound film. Having more liquidity in comparison with the Buenos Aires head-quarters allowed Bernardo to face the economic crisis under better condi-tions and even rescue part of his brother’s business. The office in Montevideo became an independent company in 1936, and he kept his movie theaters, screening spoken films that had arrived from Hollywood and European stu-dios.486 Max Glücksmann also made a timid attempt at entering the radio business, but he does not count among those that would turn broadcasting into the new mass medium in the 1930s. Shortly after the first transmission in 1923, Radio Splendid started to function in the upper floor of his biggest movie theater, the Grand Splendid. The radio station remained active during the next years and profited from Glücksmann’s contacts with Hollywood stu-dios, through which he invited movie stars to give interviews in their visits to Argentina.487

During the 1930s and 1940s, in a similar way than during the times of si-lent film, the relations between US and Latin American film enterprises were unstable. In the early 1930s, Hollywood took one step back and two steps forward. Even though sound ultimately reinforced the hegemony of Holly-wood in the global entertainment market, it also created opportunities for the local industries, at least for a certain time. Since this innovation over-lapped with the economic crisis, the expansion of Hollywood’s talking pic-tures was delayed. Moreover, the first attempts at producing films in Spanish and Portuguese were not well received by the audiences, who were disen-chanted by the artificial dubbing that included some dialect that was not their own. Eventually, dubbing and subtitling techniques improved and gained the approval of Latin American audiences. Even so, the delay in the expansion of Hollywood’s talkies created opportunities for film industries, especially in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, to strengthen their presence in the regional market for some time. Since the costs of producing sound film were much higher than for silent movies, productions became much more concentrated and left amateur producers out of business.488 Those who did succeed in transitioning to sound production gained the acceptance of the audiences, which were strongly appealed by the possibilities of listening to movies in their own language and accent.489

The place that the entrepreneurs of silent film had occupied was not left empty for too long. The advent of sound film provided opportunities for new actors to move to prominent roles. It also resulted in a more concentrated economy, not only within each country, but also regionally, with a predomi-nance of Mexican and Argentinean industries within the Spanish speaking markets. The asymmetries between the Argentinean, Chilean, and Uru-guayan industries also remained beyond the times of silent film: the first sound film studios opened in Argentina in 1933 and proliferated in the next years, reaching nine studios and thirty companies by the end of the dec-ade.490 In Chile, the transition to sound film by local companies took a few years and only started in the late 1930s.491 Local producers in Uruguay could not afford the transition to sound and at least during the first years, the Ar-gentine industry, together with the US and European studios, dominated the market.492 Aside from local companies, US and European studios also pro-duced films locally for the regional market or invited well-known artists to star in big Hollywood productions shot in the United States, a good example being the case of Gardel’s movies made by Paramount.493

Even bigger than the challenges that sonorization imposed to the film in-dustry were those introduced by the emergence of broadcasting for the rec-ord business. On a global level, the record industry ended up becoming an appendix of radio. After the first transmissions in 1923, radio started to grow through the proliferation of amateurs’ associations that built their own equipment and experimented with the first transmissions. The first firms that exploited the new technology formed in the 1920s in the United States and Europe, in some cases as subsidiaries of electric companies, and drove the process that turned radio into a commercial medium. The major labels in Europe and the United States first saw broadcasting as competition, there-fore attacking the new medium and rejecting any collaboration. During the 1930s, several record companies filed for bankruptcy and were taken over by broadcasting networks, thus achieving a de-facto merge of the two me-dia.494

Radio rapidly became a mass phenomenon in Argentina, Chile, and Uru-guay in the 1930s and was fertile ground for the action of local entrepre-neurs.495 Even though the record industry was well consolidated and spread as one of the main forms of domestic entertainment, its penetration into the market was limited to people of middle and high incomes. The introduction of radio allowed access to broader sectors of society to listen to recorded music at home for the single price of the transmitter. Those musicians who had started their road to fame with records became widely known artists thanks to broadcasting.496 Even though records and radio may have seemed like competing media as both offered recorded music, they were also com-plementary. The fame that musicians gained through their presence on the radio also resulted in the demand for more records.

After a fast growth that turned Max Glücksmann into one of the main cul-tural impresarios in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and beyond by the mid 1920s, a slow decline began and continued until the 1950s. The first obstacle in this process was the opening of the major Hollywood studios’ branches in Buenos Aires and Santiago, which left him out of the profitable business of film dis-tribution. The second was the crisis of 1930, which forced him to sell most of the movie theaters he owned. After that, and with the separation of Ber-nardo’s branch in Montevideo, Glücksmann’s company continued as a mod-est business in the field of phonography and film distribution in Argentina, with a minor presence in Chile. Max Glücksmann transferred the property of his company to his wife and one of his daughters in September of 1946, one month before his death.497 Handled by his successors, the scope of the business kept being reduced, especially due to a legal conflict between his children regarding the inheritance, until it was officially dissolved in 1957.498

Combining the biographical elements of individual entrepreneurs with a macro-history of the entertainment market allowed me not only to reveal the mechanisms of media, but also to contribute to restoring the human element in the history of media and technology. This means not only to acknowledge the agency of actors in shaping technologies and their uses, but also their limitations and failures. Following these actors wherever they went, and zooming into the local expressions of global phenomena in a series of Latin American cities, as well as shedding light into the local appropriations of technologies and commercial practices and their role in re-shaping cultural expressions, allowed to restore centrality to spaces often considered as pe-ripheric in the history of media.

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