ABSTRACT
The early decades of cinema in Latin America saw a deep preoccupation with off-screen culture. Latin American film scholarship, however, has until recently tended to focus on films and film production at the expense of historicized explorations of how the cinema was experienced. Hollywood's consolidation in the Brazilian market was central to Brazil's first film magazine, Cinearte, which described itself as "the natural intermediary" between the latter and Hollywood. Cinearte's traditional portrayal of Brazilian actresses was markedly different to those from the US. While Hollywood stressed stars' rags-to-riches trajectory, this was absent in Cinearte's depiction of Brazilian starlets, which emphasized their elite backgrounds. The golden age of Mexican cinema also saw the appearance of publications devoted to national film culture such as Cinema Reporter and Filmografica, which, like Brazil's Cinearte, provided a forum for the discursive construction of a national film culture. La Casa screened "anti-imperialist" films that served as pedagogical and motivational tools.
