This research project will provide the first comparative analysis of film musicals from Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, in the 1930s-1950s, through their transnational, intercultural and cross-media interconnections, thus unveiling an important sector of media history and popular culture in the Americas. As one of the first in-depth studies of early cinematic glocalisation in Latin America, the proposed project promises to give new insights into complex transnational exchange processes, both symbolic and in terms of media capital, including their role for shaping imaginaries of modernity in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. A network of crisscrossing histories will be mapped on the basis of a body of around 500 film musicals that have already been evaluated in the preliminary phase of the project, focusing on 38 paradigmatic films featuring the most popular singer-actor star figures who have played a central role in the transnational cultural economy of cine tanguero, chanchada and comedia ranchera productions. Combining semiotically-grounded genre and star studies with postcolonial, gender and globalisation theories, the project proposes the following objectives: (1) to analyse the cultural economy of musical film productions in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico and their multi-directional media flows as glocalising modes of modernity in Latin America; (2) to frame film genre productions in the Americas as a site of converging, but also conflicting identities and discourses and to investigate the local appropriations of Hollywood film genre structures; (3) to establish the interdependence between film and music industries in the period in focus and the kind of transnational and cross-media relations they elicited across the cultural practices of tango, samba and ranchera; (4) to analyse the role played by singer-actor stars and film crews in the interbreeding of different film musical subgenres; and (5) to establish and analyse the results of political interventions into the film industry by governments, corporations and lobbies in Argentinean, Brazilian and Mexican cinemas. The research project aims to contribute to historicise and theorise mass media globalisation by providing interdisciplinary perspectives on highly significant but mostly unexplored films produced in Latin America in the 1930s-1950s, thus complementing the prevalent focus on US-American and European cinematic globalisation from this period.

DFG-Projekt