I) A) What aspect(s) of film theory and practice are highlighted here?
B) What are the author’s central concerns in writing the article?
According to Carlos Berg’s “Every Picture Tells a Story”, the cartoonist and illustrator Jose Guadalupe Posada (1857-1913), was a key influence if the early development of Mexican cinema in the late-19th and early-20th Centuries, because the proto-cinematic techniques he used in his drawings at least anticipated those that filmmakers from many countries would use. Among these were the close-up, cinematic-style narrative, flashbacks and foreshadowing, and the use of tilt and angles to create perspective. Berg’s main point is that many of the methods of popular illustrators like Posada were later incorporated into Mexican cinema, including in very early full-length fiction features like The Gray Automobile (1919). Mexican filmmakers learned how to use these types of images in the penny-press to develop “the skills of representational narration” (Berg 365). In his forty-year career, Posada produced at least 20,000 illustrations to the penny-press, which was the most widely circulated mass medium in Mexico at the time, although only about 1,000 of these drawings and cartoons have survived (Berg 363). Berg maintains that even though Posada was never involved in filmmaking of any king, Mexican directors and cinematographers “learned to transmit comprehensible, coherent narratives” from pictures like these (Berg 367).
Berg also insists that early Mexican cinema was not ‘underdeveloped’ compared to that of the United States and Europe, even though it was relatively late in creating full-length feature films, and that Mexican filmmakers did not simply learn narrative techniques from imported movies. From the 1890s to about 1917, most of Mexican cinema consisted of documentaries rather than fictional features, since most of the latter were imported from the U.S. and Europe. Documentaries were popular, cheap to produce and distribute, and the Mexican government preferred them because they seemed more realistic, journalistic and ‘scientific’, rather than fictional films that catered to illusions and fantasies. Documentaries could also serve a nationalistic purpose in that they depicted the life, culture and history of the country, unlike foreign films, and they were especially popular with audiences during the revolution and civil wars of 1910-20 (Berg 364-65). For Berg, though, Mexico was not simply a helpless victim of “cultural imperialism” or domination by Hollywood, but rather its own filmmakers contributed their own talents and skills to the creation of an authentically Mexican form of cinema. All arguments about the hegemony of the U.S. in filmmaking and mass culture allow for “very little creative participation by filmmakers outside North America” (Berg 382). He contends that narrative techniques were not simply a development or an imposition from Hollywood, but that they existed simultaneously in most countries, going back to the days of religious art and icons, through the era of cartons, illustrations, comic strips and broadsides that already used proto-cinematography long before the invention of the motion picture camera.
II) A) What useful concepts or insights does the author introduce in relation to the theme of the course?
B) Are there any flaws or limitations in the author’s argument?
C) What areas of film practice are illuminated by this article, if any?
D) Clarify your own points of agreement and disagreement, if any.
E) What questions did the article raise for you that you would like to explore further?
Berg goes into great detail about Posada’s illustrations, which would be mostly unfamiliar to a North American audience despite his immense popularity in Mexico over many decades. He points out that most early cinema, especially documentaries, used only long shots rather than close-ups, but that Posada and other illustrators and cartoonists knew how to draw close-ups long before motion pictures existed. Unlike the earliest films, which told their stories from “front-row-center”, as in the stage theater, Posada knew how to use a short and medium-range point of view, often incorporating all three into one drawing or series of drawings (Berg 368). He understood how long shorts could create a setting, while medium shots could place characters in their immediate environment and close-ups provided greater detail of actions, emotions and moods. Berg provided several of his drawings from the era before motion pictures, such as Happy Dance and Wild Party of Skeletons and Allegory of the Revolutionaries to demonstrate that the close-up technique was known to artists in Mexico (and of course many other countries) before cinema even existed (Berg 370-71). These cartoons also had a sense of “off-screen space” that was implied but not shown, which also became very common in filmmaking (Berg 373). In an 1890 cartoon called The Street Cleaners, Posada showed the action at an angle or tilt that created the illusion of depth, which also became a method for filmmakers experimenting with camera angles and locations (Berg 373).
Posada knew how to use foregrounding and portrayed many characters that were not depicted in full body but only from the wait up, such as in his illustration of a court case from 1890-91, The Trial of the Killers of Mr. Tomas Hernandez Aguirre. This method gave the viewers “a privileged view” that they could only have had if they were actually in the courtroom, and creating this illusion of ‘being there’ is also very common in cinema (Berg 379). In a 1903 cartoon, the Very Sad Lamentations of a Contracted Laborer at National Village, Posada again took up his very frequent theme of poverty, hunger, disease epidemics, exploitation of Mexican peasants and workers, and social injustice that were always very common among Mexican journalists, artists and filmmakers. He showed how many of these laborers had simply been kidnapped to work under slave-like conditions on a plantation, and used both a long short and close-up in the same drawing to drive the point home. Like later filmmakers, he also understood how to use “several illustrations to tell a complex story, the equivalent of separate film shots to capture a scene” (Berg 377).
Posada died in 1913, and was never directly involved in film or the motion picture industry, so of course it is difficult to prove any direct or one-to-one causal connection between him and any of the early Mexican cinematographers. As he admits, this is a limitation of his argument, particularly since relatively few films from the very early days of Mexican cinema have survived. This makes it difficult to determine exactly what types of techniques and practices influenced their creators, and Berg asserts correctly that this is an area that would require a great deal more research. Certainly most of this early Mexican cinema is unknown to most North Americans, except perhaps at a highly specialized academic level, and they would have little information about what Mexican audiences were actually seeing before 1920. Furthermore, it would be useful to compare these efforts by national filmmakers with information about which type of foreign movies were being shown in Mexico in this period, or at least insofar as any records still exist.
WORKS CITED
Berg, Carlos Ramirez, “Every Picture Tells a Story: Jose Guadalupe Posada’s Protocinematic Art”. Toby Miller and Robert Stone Eds. A Companion to Film Theory. Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 363-86.
