Public Spectacles of Violence

"Perhaps the most popular—and today the most neglected—genre of silent cinema was the sensational serial film portraying violent and often rebellious action. It was also the most international film form. In this highly original work Rielle Navitski shows how the cinema of early twentieth-century Mexico, with its experience of a recent violent revolution, gave the genre a unique twist, helping to shape a major emerging film industry." - Tom Gunning, coauthor of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema

"Public Spectacles of Violence is exemplary of the ground-shifting work on silent Latin American cinema of young scholars in English-language film scholarship today. Obsessively delving into archives and producing not only unknown 'data,' but thoroughly well-grounded and original hypotheses about early cinemas in Mexico and Brazil and their intermedial relationships with the popular press and popular sensationalism, Rielle Navitski's book will take its place in the canon as the must-be-referenced book in the field. It is a tour de force of scholarly rigor and ingenuity." - Ana M. Lopez, Professor of Communication, Tulane University

“Public Spectacles is an artful and enthralling reflection on the interaction between urban visual culture forms and the violence of modernization. An excellent text to assign to advanced students.” - Jessica Stites Mor, EIAL

“Public Spectacles of Violence is an important contribution to the historiography of Mexican and Brazilian cinematography and of Latin American silent cinema in general. A must for researchers and students interested in the early cinema of Brazil and Mexico.” - Pablo Alvira, History

“Public Spectacles of Violence is essential for scholars of Latin American cinema. It offers conceptual and methodological tools that students and scholars of cinema, cultural studies, or history might use to approach the eternally resonant topic of violence and its symbolic representation.” - Georgina Torello, Cinema Journal

"[Navitski] has provided new insights into the perception of sensational violence as a mark of modernization, and into the close relationship between journalism and film. This book will be of interest to students and researchers working on early Latin American cinema; the relationship between American and Latin American film; and film and cinema as an expression of Latin American nationalism. For readers outside of film studies who are interested in spectacles of violence, the book presents invaluable research on the roots of the sensational public treatment of violence that we continue to see in Latin American media today." - Corrie Boudreaux, The Latin Americanist

"Public Spectacles of Violence is a compelling, convincing, elegant, and exemplary work of the emerging yet momentous field of Latin American silent cinema studies. It is a great read, a crucial contribution to its sub-specialty and to cinema studies in general, and representative of some of the best new scholarship in the area." - Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz, Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature