ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines a cinematic registering of the production of Latin American space, of the shifting social, economic, and political forms that are legible in the quintessentially spatial medium of film. Beyond the national romance, it is this annihilation of space by the need for greater velocity of trade, and the consequent deterritorialization of the nation-state system by money, that is, effectively, the principal agent at work within this film. In Mexico, the advent of sound enabled the rise of a popular national film industry in the 1940s and 1950s, which nevertheless rivalled Hollywood in its popularity and reach within the Spanish-speaking world, even as it drew on, imitated, and then renationalized Hollywood genres and themes. Effectively, the central problem of the film will revolve around a question concerning the occupation of the urban space and the demand for land on the part of the citizens, systematically abandoned by all the institutions of the state, under every political regime.
