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Public Spectacles of Violence: Sensational Cinema and Journalism in Early Twentieth-Century Mexico and Brazil
Duke University Press
Copyright:
This content is made freely available by the publisher. It may not be redistributed or altered. All rights reserved.
ISBN electronic:
978-0-8223-7289-9
Publication date:
2017
Book Chapter
Sensationalizing Violence in Mexico
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Published:May 2017
In early twentieth-century Mexico, photographic and filmic images of crime, punishment, and military conflict both asserted state power and demonstrated its crisis. As the illustrated press expanded in the late nineteenth century, photographs of assaults, murders, and executions fueled anxieties about criminality while making visible expanded methods of social control under the regime of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910). When widespread unrest exploded into revolution in 1910, illustrated journalism and nonfiction compilation films worked to capture and ideologically manage violent acts of sabotage, combat, and murder. As nonfiction filmmaking declined after 1916, screen adaptations of real-life cases played a key role in...
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