The cinema of Venezuela is the production and industry of filmmaking in Venezuela. Film was introduced to the country in 1896, with the first national films screened in 1897. Several films were made in the last few years of the 19th Century, with a lower rate of production until the 1970s.
Venezuelan cinema has evolved through various phases, including early documentary and propaganda films, the emergence of a national industry in the mid-20th century, and the rise of socially engaged cinema during the 1970s and 1980s. In recent decades, Venezuelan filmmakers have gained increasing recognition at international festivals, even as the industry has navigated economic challenges and varying degrees of state involvement.
Since the mid-2000s and developing in the 2010s, the more successful national films have been LGBT-related as part of the broader wave of Latin American New Maricón Cinema, with several of the country's Oscar submissions being based in LGBT+ narratives.
Notable Venezuelan filmmakers include Román Chalbaud, Margot Benacerraf, Fina Torres, Clemente de la Cerda, Mariana Rondón, Lorenzo Vigas, Jorge Thielen Armand, among others.
History Early years (1890s–1930s)
It is said by film writers that during this time, filmmaking was limited to "a few pioneering filmmakers [...] who survived by selling propaganda-style documentaries and newsreels to the [Juan Vicente Gómez dictatorship]". It is also suggested that Venezuelans as a society were more film consumers than producers in this time, and that artistic films were only produced in the wider context of photography or physical art.
The first films shown in Venezuela were released on 11 July 1896 at the Baralt Theatre in Maracaibo. This was, however, not fully known until almost a century later in 1983; cinema scholarship in Venezuela was only developed during its "Golden Age" in the late 1970s, until which point the "official history [...] was limited to amusing stories told by those who were present during the early years."
The early exhibition was facilitated by entrepreneur Luis Manuel Méndez, who had travelled to New York City in June 1896 and acquired a Vitascope, as well as licenses to use it for profit in both Venezuela and Colombia. This made Venezuela the second country in Latin America (after Brazil) to receive film screening technology, and the first to use Vitascope. The films shown included The Monroe Doctrine and Umbrella Dance. Six months later in January 1897 the first films to be produced in Venezuela were shown at the same cinema; these were Un célebre especialista sacando muelas en el gran Hotel Europa and Muchachos bañándose en la laguna de Maracaibo. The reception to the introduction of cinema was seemingly "cold" and "indifferent".
Both these first Venezuelan films, and the credit for bringing Vitascope to Venezuela, have historically been attributed to Manuel Trujillo Durán. Parts of Venezuelan film scholarship have had the tendency to paint Trujillo as the most important film pioneer of the nation; others show that he was simply a photographer who had the ability to operate the Vitascope.
On 15 July 1897 the Cinemagraph was first exhibited in Venezuela, by an employee sent by the Lumière Company, in Caracas. After two months, the Frenchman was run out of the country, but may have helped film this year's Venezuelan film productions, Una paliza en el estado Sarría and Carlos Ruiz peleando con un cochero, shown on 26 November. After these, there is little evidence of film production for the next 10 years, though multiple different brands of film cameras and projectors were in the country. In total, there appears to have been 51 films, 37 short films and 14 features, made in Venezuela between 1897 and 1936. All were silent films. The first feature, La dama de las Cayenas, was released in 1913 with a runtime of 60 minutes.
Narrative films, rather than cinema as novelty, began to be produced in Venezuela in the 1910s, with its pioneers Enrique Zimmerman, director of La Dama de las Cayenas, and Lucas Manzano, who co-created what is considered Venezuela's first narrative film, Don Confusio. It wasn't long after their respective debuts that they began collaboration, with Manzano coming to produce La Dama de las Cayenas. As Manzano's short films had been light comedies, La Dama... was instead a parody film, targeting the Alexandre Dumas story The Lady of the Camellias, that told a torrid love story. Manzano recounted that it was so successful that it persuaded Zimmerman and himself to choose to become filmmakers, "peliculeros".
This was not the only film inspired by literature: Jacobo Capriles and Edgar J. Anzola made La Trepadora, based on a Rómulo Gallegos book as many Latin American films of the century would be, as part of their new production company Triunfo Films, which they had founded in 1923. Soon, film education started in the country, and photographer Amábilis Cordero took correspondence classes to make his first film, Los milagros de la Divina Pastora in 1928; though he could have been the first notable director to have been trained, he still openly thought of himself as a "rookie". The second production company, Cinematograficos Lara, was founded by Cordero from his profits.
Despite these companies existing, Arturo Serrano states that Venezuela "did not have a single professional filmmaker" and was lagging behind the rest of the world "in terms of quality and the use of cinematographic language". Serrano compares Venezuela's output to Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925) and Intolerance (Griffith, 1916). While the US and Soviet developed technology and identity, and so seem obvious to be leaders in film, Serrano does say that even compared with "some of the other countries in Latin America" Venezuela was behind, despite receiving film before almost the rest of its continent. From the late 1920s, though, even these amateur artistic films almost ceased in production, the industry falling to the government ministries of Gómez and pseudo-documentary films.
Though almost exclusively making informational films, political powers weren't entirely repressive; in 1932 Gómez' nephew Efrain Gómez returned from a trip to the US with technology that would allow sound to be added to film." With the government film agency LCN (Laboratorio Cinematográfico Nacional) having been merged with Maracay Films, Efrain Gómez worked through this company to make La venus de Nácar: Fantasía Aborigen, the first Venezuelan sound film, using only background music. When Gómez died in 1935, the government agencies of production became more chaotic (briefly becoming SCN — the 'S' for 'Servicio') before being shut down in 1938.
The Ministry of Public Works would lease the film equipment to private companies at the urging of Tomás Pacanins, though the two companies that received the most support had Pacanins as shareholder. One of these companies used the resources to create Venezuela's first synchronous sound film – one that records the sounds belonging to the recorded actions – in 1938; the accolade belongs to either Taboga or El Rompimiento. Taboga features both speech and live music, and scholars also claim it as the first Venezuelan film with a "director to understand the artistic possibilities of cinema as a medium of visual expression". In 1938, the novelist Rómulo Gallegos created Estudios Ávila with cultural and commercial aspirations, deals with the production of the institutional propaganda through the cinema. In 1939 MGM premiered Valiant Venezuela of James Kirkpatrick a travel talk that offers a Technicolor look at 1930s Venezuela, focusing on its colonial architecture and paying tribute to Simón Bolívar's fight for liberation from Spain. It is recognized as one of the earlier Technicolor travelogues covering South American regions.
Birth of Venezuelan films (1940s–1960s) From the beginning of the 1940s, there was an attitude of commercialism. Producers in Venezuela "copied [...] Mexico's mode of film production [and] its narrative and formal patterns", to guarantee at least some cinema audience. The film scholar Darlene J. Sadlier comments that "profit was the main objective" in these decades, but that film producers also aimed to make Venezuelan films relatable for Venezuelan people. Even after the death of President Gómez, into the 1950s, most film profits were made from commercial advertisements and propaganda. These films showcased Venezuelan nationalism, through techniques like landscape shots, folklore-based stories, and film stereotypes to make them publicly palatable. There was also competition with the Mexican film industry in these years, with Venezuelan people enjoying and celebrating the Mexican film output; the Mexican film Allá en el Rancho Grande was screened in Venezuela in 1936, and "beat every picture", with the Mexican stories and production system being supported in the following decades. It took only two years for Mexican and Argentinian film to overtake Hollywood films in Venezuelan screening numbers. As Venezuela's film industry was being born in the 1940s, there were co-production agreements established, which let Venezuelan actors appear in Mexican films, in a way to create more Latin American stars and help the Venezuelan films blossom with famous actors from both nations. Having Spanish and other Latin American actors in Venezuelan productions also contributed to a "'feel' of foreignness" that made films more successful in Venezuela.
Landmarks of Venezuelan cinema include two Cannes winners from this period: Carlos Hugo Christensen's 1949 film La Balandra Isabel llego esta tarde, the first South American winner at Cannes, taking the Best Cinematography Award at the 1951 Cannes Film Festival, was the culmination of Bolívar Films' efforts to create a real film industry in Venezuela, though it failed; Margot Benacerraf's 1959 documentary Araya, which "was hailed as a masterpiece of poetic cinema", was entered into the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, where it shared the Cannes International Critics Prize with Alain Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour.Araya, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Accessed online 15 November 2009.
The Golden Age: Development of film identity (1970s–1980s) In the World Cinema: Critical Approaches anthology, it is said that whilst "Venezuelan cinema began sporadically in the 1950s[, it] only emerged as a national-cultural movement in the mid-1970s" when it gained state support and auteurs could produce work. International co-productions with Latin America and Spain continued into this era and beyond, and Venezuelan films of this time were counted among the works of New Latin American Cinema. This period is known as Venezuela's Golden Age of cinema, having massive popularity even though it was a time of much social and political upheaval.
Filmmakers such as Mauricio Walerstein, Franco Rubartelli, Jorge Sanjinés, Pablo de la Barra, Joseph Novoa, Alberto Monteagudo, Manuel de Pedro, Ugo Ulive, and Félix Nakamura migrate to Venezuela. In 1973, the film When I want to cry, I don't cry directed by Mauricio Walerstein, based on the novel by Miguel Otero Silva, achieves an unprecedented success at the box office, which begins a boom of the so-called New Venezuelan Cinema, a current of social cinema very famous in the 1970s and whose maximum exponents would be, in addition to Walerstein, Román Chalbaud and Clemente de la Cerda.