ABSTRACT
Photography, the medium with which the cinema is most ontologically linked, was the basis for many of the visual entertainments that most influenced the emergence of motion pictures, yet it is often overlooked in critical and historical studies. This chapter focuses on the idea that a good part of the acceptance and understanding with which early Latin American cinema was received was the result of the reading competencies, representational codes, and thematic and aesthetic fashions that had been internalized by spectators during the preceding 50-year history of photography. It explores how photography and cinema were interconnected in the context of Latin America in the first decades of the twentieth century, leading the way for the exploration of film and photography intermedialities in the 1930s—1960s. Many filmmakers traveled to study and/or to work in the US or Europe and interacted with the avant-gardes.
