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Memories of Films and Cinema-Going in Monterrey, Mexico
A Critique and Review of In-Depth Interviews as a Methodological Strategy in Audience Studies
Lorena Frankenberg and José Carlos Lozano
ABSTRACT
Qualitative interviews, a methodology increasingly popular in media and communication studies, are not only useful for studying the meaning construction of different kinds of producers or audiences in the present. They are also useful for exploring past media experiences and for looking at the meaning and importance media had in the past for different types of publics by retrieving memories, feelings, and facts not taken into account in data collected by the media industries. To offer insight into the methodological issues and theoretical considerations media scholars need to address when using this technique, this chapter reports the use of focused interviews in a study on the screen culture of cinema-goers of Monterrey, Mexico, from the 1930s to the 1960s and discusses the methodological challenges of interpreting highly selective, subjective, and distorted-by-time memories of cinema-going in senior informants.
Most frequently during the history of media and communication research, qualitative interviews have been used not as the primary research method, but as one of a number of complementary strategies in participant observation projects, ethnographies, or case studies. Cantor (1971), Elliott (1972), Fishman (1980), Gans (1979), Lester (1975), and Tuchman (1978), who employed the “newsmaking” perspective, for example, included informal interviews with journalists when doing their ethnographic or participant observation studies at different local and national newspapers. Lull (1980), Liebes and Katz (1984), and Morley (1986), on the reception side, also included interviews with members of the families they were observing in their ethnographic projects about the social uses of television. In his seminal study on family television, Morley (1986, 1992) used in-depth interviews to explore questions of differential power, responsibility, and control within the family at different times of the day and night (1992, p. 139).
Since the late 1970s, scholars in the cultural studies tradition have pointed to the need to go beyond the traditional analysis of films as texts (typical of film studies) to include the social and cultural meanings of cinema, focusing on everyday experiences and using a bottom-up approach to film culture. Qualitative interviews are best suited to help scholars look for empirical evidence about these and other topics related to the social experience of audiences with media contents. The theoretical and empirical work of scholars like Allen (1990), Kuhn (2002), Maltby (2006), Meers (2004), Staiger (1992), and Taylor (1989), among others, have established the grounds for the “new cinema history,” an approach that looks at the lived experiences of film audiences and the social experience of cinema-going (Maltby, Biltereyst, & Meers, 2011). Qualitative methodologies based on interviews have proved extremely useful to give a voice to those memories of cinema-goers that were never formally recorded and would likely be lost were it not for these research projects. While the methodology is far from being problem-free – due to the difficulty of bringing to the present facts, behaviors, and feelings from a long time ago – it is the best available tool for engaging with the lived experiences of audience members in their historically situated social and cultural contexts.
Most oral history projects on the social experience of cinema, however, have been conducted in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other European countries, where research on film consumption has consistently been done. In other regions and countries with different historical, cultural, linguistic, and even religious contexts, cinema-going experiences may reveal important differences and patterns. Focusing on such regions might help widen the scope of the new cinema history approach. They remain, however, under-researched.
Employing a film culture audience research case study as a starting point, the central aim of this chapter is to make a case for the usefulness of qualitative interviews as a method for the historical study of cinema-going. Thus, this chapter draws on a study conducted in Monterrey, Mexico,1 the third largest city in the country, located about 130 miles from the border with Texas. As part of the overall methodological strategy, the study was based on focused interviews about the lived cinema experiences of 28 local cinema-goers older than 64, centering its attention on their memories of the cinemas and the exhibition of movies from 1930 through 1960, and their consumption of films as children, youngsters, or young adults. In the next section, we discuss some of the key findings dealing with participants' film consumption and their lived experiences of film culture, with the key purpose of illustrating the use and the relevance of qualitative interviews in media and communication research.
Qualitative Interviews and the Exploration of Cinema-Goers' Memories
According to Huggett (2002), informants in projects about cinema-going (or, for that matter, about the reception and consumption of any other medium) based on qualitative interviews do not recall events directly from the past:
Instead, narratives are constructed through a series of negotiations between past and present discourses about a particular topic; between past and present versions of one's self and one's identity; between the agenda of the interviewer and the interviewee; and between the stated topic of the interview and other prescient topics in the mind of the narrator. (p. 15)
For this reason it is always important for us, as qualitative researchers, to distance ourselves from any attempt to consider the discourse of respondents as an objective and definitive account of what they used to do, think, and feel about their media experiences in the past. The outcome of these meaning negotiations may, however, be even more useful than any utopian objective recollection of facts, as they provide a rich and dense insight into the lasting meanings and values attached to participants' media consumption habits and, consequently, about the accumulated long-term importance of that kind of experience in their lives. Qualitative interviews, as well as ethnographic approaches including observations, diaries, and written accounts, are valuable tools to explore these subjective and nonlinear memories and experiences.
As Kuhn (2002) reflects on her own work on British memories of cinema-going, the challenge for researchers using these qualitative methodologies is not doing the actual fieldwork, but the analysis and interpretation of data that are highly selective, subjective, and distorted by time (p. 6). When informants older than 65 are interviewed and asked to talk about their experience of going to the movies when they were kids or adolescents, the fragmentation, distortions, and overstressing are even more selective and subjective. The purpose of historical research on cinema-going, thus, is not to objectively reconstruct the past through the memories of respondents, but to look carefully at the recreation and reconfiguration of that past to grasp the subjective, personal meanings attached by the informants to their media experiences.
A first step in preparing the fieldwork of any qualitative study is the selection of informants. For that, researchers need to establish a clear rationale for the type of respondents they need to approach and the requirements of age, gender, social class, origin, or any other distinctive category they need to fulfill. The 28 participants in our study were selected and found in homes for elderly people or within the social circle of acquaintances of the interviewers.2 The reason for focusing on this age group was to explore the historical attendance of cinema and reception of films as far back in time as possible. By selecting informants older than 65, we were able to explore enduring readings and memories of films and of the social experience of going to the cinema. In the same vein as Kuhn (2011), we were interested in doing historical research into cinema-going, examining how cinema memory works as a kind of cultural experience and as a form of discourse so that we could “explore how the personal or the private on the one hand, and the collective or the public on the other, work together and intersect in people's memories” (p. 85). As is the case in most qualitative research, statistical representativeness was never the objective of this part of the study. Rather, we sought as much variation as possible in terms of class, sex, and ideological points of view in order to grasp a wide variety of possible routines, ideas, and motives concerning cinema-going in this age group. The level of film consumption also varied widely within our group of respondents, from avid movie-goers in the past to respondents who hardly ever visited a movie theater. Most of the informants were born in Monterrey and grew up in the city, which made their memories of cinema-going specifically about local movie houses and contexts. However, some of them were from other parts of the country, and some of their recollections refer to their cinema-going experiences in other Mexican cities.
In qualitative interviews, the adequate sample size is never known in advance. Rather, according to the “maximum-variety sample” strategy (Patton, 1987, p. 53) qualitative researchers start with a limited number of informants and continue adding cases until their opinions, narratives, and information become repetitive or do not offer any new insight into the topic at hand, what some scholars call “saturation” (see Morse, 1994, pp. 225–229). According to Lindlof and Taylor (2002), qualitative researchers should keep sampling persons, settings, or activities until “a critical threshold of interpretative competence has been reached – when for example, we cease to be surprised by what we observe or we notice that our concepts and propositions are not disconfirmed as we continue to add new data” (p. 129). Patton (1987) explains that using this strategy yields two kinds of findings: “(1) High-quality, detailed descriptions of each case which are useful for documenting uniqueness, and (2) important shared patterns which cut across cases and which derive their significance from having emerged out of heterogeneity” (p. 53). In our project, we decided to start with a relative high number of respondents (28) and, after checking the degree of saturation in their responses, evaluate if we needed to add more cases. Due to the relative homogeneity of the informants (similar age frame and geographical origin), it was clear when looking at the transcripts of the 28 interviews that saturation had already been attained; consequently, we decided not to augment our sample size.
The 28 individual interviews were conducted in 2010 and 2011. Most of the informants were contacted and interviewed in elderly homes in Monterrey. They were approached by graduate students who first got permission from the administrative office of the retirement homes to talk to the residents. Interviewers selected only respondents who were native to Monterrey or who had lived in the city since they were kids, in order to concentrate the findings on Monterrey cinemas and their social and cultural context. A few of the respondents were relatives of the graduate students doing the fieldwork or of their peers. In order to provide a more relaxed environment for respondents, interviews were performed in their place of residence. The interviews were semi-structured, whereby the interviewers used a thematic questionnaire to keep the interviews focused, leaving a large degree of space for the respondents' own stories and spontaneous memories.
The terms used to describe this kind of qualitative interviews vary among scholars. Lindlof and Taylor (2002) call them “respondent interviews,” pointing out that despite it being possible to vary some questions from one person to the next, the questions should follow a standard order so that responses can be directly compared across the entire sample (p. 178). Using the same term, Jensen (2002) explains that in “respondent interviews” the interviewee is conceived as a representative of one or more social and cultural categories: “The assumption is that these categories are inscribed in, and can be recovered from, the respondent's discourses with reference to the media” (p. 240). Patton (1987) on the other hand, calls this type of interview the “standardized open-ended interview,” noting that it consists of “a set of questions carefully worded and arranged for the purpose of taking each respondent through the same sequence and asking each respondent the same questions with essentially the same words” (p. 112). In our project, while we followed the procedures outlined by Lindlof and Taylor, Jensen, and Patton, we prefer to identify this kind of qualitative interview using the more general term “focused interview” (the term first used by Merton and Kendall in 1946 for a qualitative interview centering on the subjective experiences of persons involved in particular media experiences, like watching films in a particular setting), to distinguish them from in-depth interviews that are much longer and that cover many topics instead of concentrating on just a few.
This focus was crucial since many respondents were highly motivated to talk about cinema, had very vivid memories, and often referred to specific moments they remembered. An attempt was made by the interviewers to cover first the childhood memories, then the youth memories, and finally the adulthood memories, repeating in some instances the same questions. Interviewers would explain to the informants at the beginning the need to first provide recollections of one period of time and then the following one, and then, in several instances, they would phrase the questions using references to the period they were inquiring about (i.e., “Please tell me the names of the cinema houses you used to go to most frequently when you were a child/young/an adult”). Of course, despite this strategy, informants still decided to move freely from one epoch in their lives to others, but at least the provision allowed for some focus on each period. The length of the interviews differed depending on the storytelling capacities of the respondents, with an average length of around one hour per interview.
The interviews were transcribed by the interviewers verbatim and analyzed using the software HyperRESEARCH. Like any other software for qualitative analysis, HyperRESEARCH makes the coding and retrieving of comments and responses faster and easier than with manual strategies like working with the transcripts directly in Word files. For the analysis, we used the “thematic coding” approach (Jensen, 2002), “an inductive categorization of interview . . . extracts with reference to various concepts, headings, or themes” widely used in media research (p. 247). We started with the identification in the transcripts of each interview of the themes or frames prefigured in the open-ended general questions included in our base questionnaire, but we also generated a great number of new categories by carefully looking at the collected data to find topics, reactions, and issues not considered beforehand in our research design. The final list of themes included choice of movie theater; frequency of attendance; information about specific films; cinema-going motives; origin of preferred films; opinion about Mexican, American, and European films; and so on. Due to the relative homogeneity of the group in age, and consistent similarities between them in their memories and discourse about their cinema-going, we are confident that the number of interviews was adequate to explore the lived experience of films and cinema by this age group of Monterrey, Mexico, residents.
Taking into account that the heyday of movie-going within people's life cycle is before the age of 25, the largest part of the stories of our respondents focused on the period between 1935 and 1965. Although this is a very broad time span, spanning the heyday of movie-going as well as the decline of audience attendance, many respondents talked about it as if it were one homogeneous period. While respondents considered these evolutions to be developments within the same film culture, they strongly distinguished it from the next phase in cinema history. In the respondents' minds, the introduction of the multiscreen or multiplex cinema resulted in a totally new film culture.
The Setting
Before discussing the usefulness of focused interviews as a method to retrieve memories of cinema-going in our informants, it is necessary, as in any other qualitative empirical study, to establish the setting and historical context of the research topic – in this particular case, the availability of cinema houses and the type and number of films they were exhibiting between the 1930s and 1960s in Monterrey, Mexico.
With a population of 134,000 inhabitants, Monterrey had in 1932 eight formal movie theaters. By 1942 the number had increased to 25, spreading the options of screens to other parts of the city. Ten years later, the number went down to 20 and by 1962, with the end of the golden age of Mexican cinema and the popularization of other means of entertainment for the middle classes (Rosas Mantecón, 2000), it had dropped to 14. In addition to the movie palaces and regular cinemas in the center of the city, there were a minimum of 46 cinemas called “terraces” (terrazas), modest establishments with wood benches instead of individual seats and without a roof, located mostly in working-class neighborhoods and exhibiting second-or third-run movies after dark with very cheap entrance costs.
From the 1920s to the 1930s, Hollywood movies almost completely dominated Monterrey screenings. By the end of that decade, however, the reduction in the number of Hollywood films during World War II, as well as local government policies supporting the production and distribution of Mexican movies, led to the development of the golden age of Mexican cinema. Monterrey screens started to showcase national films widely and consistently, and for the first time local audiences had a choice between Hollywood and Mexican productions.
In 1936 the release of three films heralded the formal beginning of the golden age of Mexican cinema and in particular of its most successful genre, the comedia ranchera (rural comedies full of folklore, songs, horses, traditional dances, and so on, which frequently presented stories about love between characters from different social classes): Allá en el Rancho Grande (Out on the Big Ranch), Cielito Lindo (Beautiful Darling), and Ora Ponciano (Hey, Ponciano). The first of the three films, in particular, was massively successful, not only in Mexico but also all over Latin America, significantly enlarging that market for Mexican films. In 1937, 38 feature films were produced, 22 of them in the comedia ranchera genre. By 1938 the Mexican film industry was firmly established as such, producing 58 movies and exporting many of them to the rest of Latin America (Vidal, 2011, p. 51).
Memories of Cinema-Going: The Relevance of Focused Interviews in the Exploration of Film Audiences' Experiences
Discussing the findings of qualitative interviews is not as straightforward as discussing quantitative data. Instead of statistical tables, qualitative researchers ground their analyses in field notes, transcriptions, interview quotes, and descriptions. The data gathered, however, are usually too extensive and voluminous and a great deal of material needs to be left out. For that reason, focus is essential. Analysts should strive for the right combination of description and in-depth quotations needed to allow readers to fully understand the situation and the thoughts of the people represented in the report. It is important to stress the need to achieve the right balance between description and analysis. As Patton (1987, p. 163) explains:
endless description becomes its own muddle. The purpose of analysis is to organize the description in a way that makes it manageable . . . An interesting and readable report provides sufficient description to allow the reader to understand the analysis and sufficient analysis to allow the reader to understand the interpretations and explanations presented.
In the next section, we try to tackle precisely that point through the description and interpretation of the findings of the screen culture project in Monterrey.
Selection of Movie Houses and Films by Audiences, 1930s–1960s
For the 28 men and women older than 65 in our sample, going to the cinema was one of the few alternatives for leisure in the city. When asked about other recreational activities available, most informants mentioned only sport activities like baseball (a very popular sport in Monterrey at the time) or soccer, or, when they were kids, playing on the street. Some also talked about going to the circus when one came to town or about going to nearby farms or ranches on picnics. The rich, they explained, could go to the Casino Monterrey (a very exclusive social club with restaurant, cafeteria, game rooms, and ballroom), but they had no means for another kind of recreation than going to the movies.
Most respondents explained that they did not select particular films, but rather particular movie houses. Some would go to the big palace closest to home, avoiding some other cinema houses because of their lower status. Others, from low-income households when they were kids, asserted that they would go to the nearest neighborhood cinema, a terraza, to see second- or third-run movies.
It was clear from the interviews in Monterrey that cinema houses were clearly connected to our respondents' “mental maps” of the city. In fact, a large number of them mentioned their home address at the time and then the location of the movie house they attended, making reference to other relevant sites like markets, buildings, or streets nearby. For lower-income respondents, the big movie palaces were inaccessible and they would go to their nearest terrace, making clear that these neighborhood cinemas were attended only by people living close to them. Some of them related in a proud tone that later, as youngsters or adults, when they had a job and some money available, they had gone once or twice to the downtown movie palaces to watch a movie (frequently a Mexican big event film), emphasizing the distance they had to travel to get there.
Our informants' memories about cinemas in Monterrey during this period establish very clearly the importance of the cinemas in their daily lives. Asked about their favorite movie theater in their childhood and youth, most of them clearly remembered the name of the cinema they had attended the most. The reason for going to that particular venue and not another one was typically its closeness to their homes. They explained that, it being peaceful times where you could walk freely on the streets (even as children), they would always walk to the movies. The most frequently mentioned cinemas were located either in the historical downtown of the city or on Madero Avenue, a modern and fashionable area during the 1940s demarcating the limits of the downtown area with the north of the city, where most factories were established. Nancy,3 a 70-year-old woman, put it in these terms when asked about her preferred cinema when she was a child:
| NANCY (b. 1941): | Well, it was not a question of preference; it was a question of what movie theater was closer to our home . . . [Because of that] the Rodriguez cinema was the one our parents always chose for us. |
However, some of the respondents also preferred certain cinemas because of their formal features. Some made reference to the big palaces and the nice decorations and architecture.
| ELOISA (b. 1929): | The decoration was beautiful . . . one of them, the Elizondo, had an oriental decoration, with pagodas and statues. And in the Florida, if you looked at the ceiling when the lights went off, you would see stars scintillating. |
| BIANCA (b. 1942): | I remember the curtains. In the Palacio cinema, one of the most – let me put it this way – posh and chic, the curtains would open and I would think: “How is it possible [to have] such a tall, well structured beautiful and elegant curtain.” I remember clearly the seats, very comfortable and well fixed to the floor, and the carpet in the aisles. |
For our respondents, thus, cinema houses were more important than the actual films being exhibited when they decided to go to the movies. In contrast to the assumptions of traditional film scholars about film texts being the most – and sometimes only – relevant factor accounting for the interest and attraction of viewers, our fieldwork, based on focused interviews, allowed us to confirm what other studies in new cinema history have found: going to the movies was more about companionship, social interaction, and the integration of movies into the routines of daily or weekly life in our Monterrey informants than about the contents and meanings of specific films.
Social Class Differences
Avoiding the temptation of some other qualitative studies on cinema-going which focus only on nostalgia and ignore the important role played by, among other variables, social class, our project selected respondents from different socioeconomic status and included questions related to differences in the economic background of people attending different cinemas in the city. Thanks to this strategy, similar to the one used by Meers, Biltereyst, and Van de Vijver (2010, p. 274) in Belgium, we were able to identify the mental maps of cinemas and cinema-going experiences according to the economic position of the interviewees.
Some respondents, for example, acknowledged avoiding some cinemas, despite their proximity to their homes, because they were for people of lower socioeconomic status. In a city with a heavy presence of workers and migrants due to the numerous factories and the industrial boom, and a growing middle class of white-collar workers and managers, class differences were reflected in the selection of movie theaters. Olga (b. 1923), despite trying to use neutral wording, ended up describing people who attended the Obrero cinema as burdos (rough, vulgar) and as people unable to speak properly. Others, like María Elena (b. 1934), were careful not to use adjectives:
| MARÍA (b. 1934): | I stopped going to the movies more or less when the Elizondo cinema was destroyed [in 1982] . . . There was also the Lírico, but the Lírico was for . . . for . . . extremely . . . for the lower classes . . . |
And what kind of people used to go to the Florida and the Elizondo?
| MARÍA: | Sort of like us, the middle class. |
Were the people attending the Elizondo cinema different from the people attending the Maravillas?
| ARTURO (b. 1927): | They were different type of people. [The people attending the Elizondo cinema] would go very well dressed and immediately you would realize they were people with money . . . they paid more for the quality of the movies and for the features of the building . . . they liked movies where good manners were shown. It was very upscale . . . with very nice movies. The Encanto cinema always had a full house. You could smell the perfumes [of ladies] all over. People were very well dressed, like in the Elizondo . . . in the Maravillas [in contrast] people would go dressed anyway they liked. |
Ernesto (b. 1922) explained that he would usually go to the upscale cinemas in the downtown area, always avoiding the neighborhood cinemas, like the ones in the Independencia, a sector of the city “with bad reputation.” Asked if there were some differences between the cinemas downtown and the neighborhood cinemas or terraces, another informant answered:
| ARTEMIO (b. 1944): | Of course! There was a saying, that in the Alameda cinema the employees would give you a big stick [when entering the cinema] to kill the rats. People had bad manners, they spat on the seats and all the seats were in bad shape. You could notice the lack of education because of the aggressive behavior. That's why we would avoid going to those cinemas. |
As discussed above, one of the advantages of using focused interviews is the possibility of addressing cultural and social contexts from the perspective of the respondents. One of the informants, from a working-class background, mentioned that he would go to the Eden, located in the lower-class neighborhood Independencia, across the Santa Catarina river, because he lived there for a while, when his family arrived to Monterrey when he was a kid. “That's the time when I learned how to behave in a belligerent and problematic manner,” he said jokingly, adding that the youth gangs would throw stones to any outsider walking on the streets of the neighborhood.
Francisco (b. 1927), whose father worked for 40 years at the soap factory La Reynera, explained that when he was a child he had to work shining shoes on the street. He would give his father all his earnings because of the low wages the latter received at the factory. Every week, his father would take only three or four of the nine children to the neighborhood terrace located close to their home, and the following week he would take the others, because he could not afford to take all of them at the same time.
| FRANCISCO: | We would go to the movies always at night, after 8 p.m. when it was getting dark. As soon as it was dark, the show started, because the screening was in a backyard, not in a closed building. Terraces were like that. Once in a while he would take us to a movie theater, but only in very few occasions . . . In the terrace there was no ceiling. When it started to rain, we had to run and leave the movie. |
Egidio (b. 1915), at 96 one of the oldest informants in the Monterrey sample, explained that when he was just a kid, an illiterate blacksmith neighbor would pay for the movie tickets for him and other boys as long as they read the titles of silent movies to him.
These findings show that even in the recollection of past film consumption experiences, social class is one of the most important variables able to account for significant differences in the consumption and appropriation of films among audience members. The cultural capital available to each class and their social and economic context are clearly influential in their selections, choices, and attitudes. Consequently, it is crucial to include persons from different social classes when selecting informants in projects attempting to understand the complex relationship of audiences with any kind of media.
Memories of National and Foreign Films
With qualitative interviews, it is possible to trigger memories otherwise forgotten. As mentioned by Deacon, Pickering, Golding, and Murdock (1999, p. 301),
the fallibility of human memory may lead to omissions, compressions, elisions and idealizations in the experiential record provided by the interviews . . . [but] it is beneficial to regard oral forms of evidence as an important mode of bearing witness to the past, of providing testimony to events and experiences that have been historically lived through.
In our study, respondents mentioned the titles of around 15 national and 43 US movies. Coincident also with the boom of Mexican cinema, most of the national films remembered were from the 1940s, the decade when World War II and its difficult aftermath diminished the flow of Hollywood films to the country, and where the financial and distribution incentives for Mexican productions were at their highest (Fein, 1996; Serna, 2006). From the 1950s on, however, most titles remembered by informants were of Hollywood films (14), while Mexican pictures were hardly remembered (only 1 of the 15 Mexican movies they made reference to was produced in this decade).
The respondents had an ambivalent attitude toward Hollywood productions and national films. On the one hand, they had excellent comments about most Mexican movies and actors of their childhood and youth but on the other they also praised Hollywood movies and remembered US celebrities in affective ways.
Mexican Films
Middle- and lower-class informants were clearly partial to Mexican movies when they were kids or adolescents. They mentioned mostly Mexican actors and titles as their favorites. Many female informants said they really loved the Mexican melodramas of the epoch. Ernesto, himself not fond of that Mexican genre, remembered the time when his mother and her sister begged him to take them to the cinema to see Cuando los Hijos Se Van (When the Children Leave Home) a movie that premiered in 1941. He took them to one of the “big cinemas” on Madero Avenue and sat between the sisters. He recalled that both sniffed during the whole picture, making him anxious and uneasy. After the movie, he took them home, none of them saying a word during the drive. As soon as they arrived, his mother quickly got out of the car and went directly into her bedroom. After parking the car, Ernesto went to see her and found her crying. She told him: “Here I can cry all I want and nobody will be annoyed, nobody will tell me to shut up.” He concluded: “Mexican movies were such a drag.”
Another female informant, Nancy, also talked about a Mexican melodrama of the epoch leaving a lasting impression on her: Nosotros los Pobres (We, the Poor), a movie starring the male idol Pedro Infante which premiered in 1948. Showing the same emotional connection with urban situations and familial problems as the other female respondents, Nancy remembered uneasily that in the movie a small kid dies and another loses his eye violently: “Till today, I am unable to watch that movie again.”
Hollywood Movies
Some informants said they did not like US movies because they didn't understand English and were not able to follow the subtitles (in Mexico dubbing foreign movies was never mandatory nor common). It was more difficult for children to follow the subtitles, so some of the informants reported not watching US movies during their earlier years:
| NANCY: | there were American movies but we would not go and see them. We would not go because we didn't understand them, we weren't able to read the subtitles . . . As an adolescent I definitely started to watch US pictures, on color and such, but not as a kid. |
Others claimed that cheap movie houses and terraces exhibited Mexican films only, explaining that they were not able to go to the cinema palaces where Hollywood films were shown because of the ticket cost.
| JUAN (b. 1943): | Terraces were more geared towards families; they showed mostly Mexican films . . . they exhibited old movies only, never new releases. If you wanted to see premieres you had to go to the cinema houses in downtown. |
Not all working-class informants, however, liked Mexican movies better than American ones, especially the older ones who started going to the cinema as kids before the beginning of the golden age. Herminio (b. 1924), from a rural background, said that he loved to go see US films (apparently Westerns), the reason being that the characters “would get up in their horses and go and shoot their pistols.” Middle- and upper-class informants, although sympathetic to Mexican movies from the 1940s, reported viewing and enjoying Hollywood movies, and admiring stars like Clark Gable, Rock Hudson, Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, Doris Day, Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn, James Dean, and others. As in the case of informants in other countries (Biltereyst et al., 2011), Monterrey respondents rarely remembered any movies in particular, but were very lucid about their favorite Hollywood stars.
In another example of how widespread and popular Hollywood movies were around the world despite cultural and geographical differences of the audiences receiving them, Monterrey respondents, in a similar fashion as respondents in countries like Belgium and the United Kingdom (Biltereyst et al., 2011; Jancovich, Faire, & Stubbings, 2003), repeatedly mentioned big event movies like Gone With the Wind, Ben-Hur, and King Kong.
For some informants, Ben-Hur was one of their favorite movies of all times. Lucía (b. 1944), for example, explained that she loved the movie since the first time she saw it, adding that she still does not get tired of watching it every year, when it is shown on Mexican television during Holy Week.
European Movies
Very few informants mentioned European movies. The film market in Mexico had been dominated by Hollywood and by local productions since 1917, and European films were not that common, although during 1962 they made up 13% of total screenings. The more liberal character of European films, however, clashed with the rigid morality of the epoch, and the presence of nudity and strong topics in the pictures reduced their programing only to poor cinema houses and led to their being perceived as pornography. Some of the informants, especially women, made reference to this perception when asked about the movies they liked to watch when they were in their adulthood:
| TERESA (b. 1935): | Only American ones! Mexican movies started to become sort of ugly and we stopped watching them, and about European pictures, we would watch them depending where they were playing. If they were programed in cinemas showing only pornography, we could not go there! |
| NANCY: | Definitely, only American. European ones . . . I don't know why they are so crude, so very . . . open-minded . . . too . . . I don't like that . . . nudity and such go against my principles. |
| ARTURO: | Once I went to the Alameda cinema because I was told it was showing an “art movie,” one of those Italian pictures very high-brow for the general public . . . I watch them now and I am able to catch their meaning, but then you would only go to watch the naked girls. |
Without specialized cinemas on art or auteur films, and very scarce highbrow cultural tradition and infrastructure in the city, most informants were unable to mention alternative noncommercial films, directors, or actors. Only two of the respondents, the oldest in the sample, mentioned some of the classic European movies of the 1930s and 1940s: The Blue Angel and Bicycle Thieves.
The memories and preferences of movies by Monterrey respondents, thus, seemed to be related to both the limited supply of films by local cinema houses and what they felt were closer to their own culture and context. On one hand, Hollywood control of the distribution and exhibition of motion pictures in Mexico for the most part of the 1920s to the 1960s allowed Hollywood genres and stars to become popular among the viewers. On the other hand, as soon as there were enough national films available with good-quality production values addressing more culture-specific topics, Monterrey audiences showed a strong preference for them, and their cherished memories of Mexican stars and plots from that period reflect the high relevance they exerted on them.
Cinema-Going, Family, and Social Interaction
Despite the significant historical, cultural, and geographical differences between Monterrey and cities in the United States or Europe during the same period, the findings of our interviews show striking similarities in the way cinema-going was experienced by Monterrey audiences and is still remembered. The elder inhabitants of Monterrey seem to relate a good deal to the kind of treasured memories, choice of movies, film consumption rituals, reasons for cinema-going, and personal preferences that are characteristic of respondents in studies done in Europe and the United States.
As in the case of Flemish (Biltereyst et al., 2011) and British (Kuhn, 2002, 2011) cinema-goers, Monterrey informants' memories about going to the movies were much more about social and ritual aspects than about particular films. Most of the times, they did not recall specific movie titles and frequently they were unable to remember the name of the actors. However, they were clear and reiterative about what going to the movies represented for them when they were kids or young. Some talked about how they loved to go to a particular big palace because of its decoration and the little lights on the ceiling creating the impression that they were contemplating stars. Others mentioned that they would go to a particular theater because there were contests and prizes during the intermission. A male informant, in this respect, explained that on Wednesdays, in some movie houses, there were song contests at the intermission, or requests for the whole audience to sing particular songs, following lyrics projected on the screen.
Others talked about going to the cinema on particular days of the week with their parents or their friends regardless of the movies being shown. Antonia, an 80-year-old woman, when asked “What comes to mind when you think about going to the movies as a kid?” answered: “Going out the four of us” (with her parents and sister). Beatriz, 72, answered to the same question: “My best friends, my friend Yolanda . . .”
When questioned about who would select the movie they watched when they went to the cinema with somebody else, the recurrent answer was that they would see what their preferred movie house was showing at the moment, regardless of the genre or topic.
| ERNESTO: | Usually I would go to the cinema with my brother, but we wouldn't choose the movie we would see. They [the movies being played in the movie house] were the same as the ones being shown in other theaters in the city. For us it was not a matter of selecting titles, we would just go. We would go to the cinema and we would watch any movie that was playing. |
Some cinema-goers, especially women, were more selective and would go to see mostly romantic comedies, but very few acknowledged deciding to go to the movies only when they wanted to see a particular film for its topic, actor, or director (except for blockbusters like Ben-Hur).
Memories of Plots and Movies
Memories about the whole plot of a movie were scarce. However, focused interviews allowed informants to intertwine different levels of experiences in their narratives. In this case, they were likely to remember specific movie scenes that had been particularly relevant or shocking to them. An 88-year-old woman, for example, when talking about one of her favorite films, was only able to recollect a scene of “a movie of Betty Davis” where, having nothing to wear for a big party, she takes a curtain and makes a dress out of it (she may have been referring to Gone With the Wind and Vivien Leigh, confounding both the film and the actress). A 96-year-old male informant recalled a scene of a movie he saw when he was a kid, where the protagonist becomes blind after gunpowder from his shooting rifle got into his eyes, but he was unable to remember anything else about the film. Later, he recalled that when he was married he went to the movies several times with his wife, but he was unable to remember the title of a single movie they had watched. The scarcity of memories about complete stories or plots of particular films, in contrast with lucid and detailed recollections of how, when, why, and with whom they used to go to the cinema when they were kids or young, suggest that specific movies were for the respondents never the main reason for going to the movies.
In sum, for our sample of old Monterrey movie-viewers, cinema-going was a vivid and extremely relevant part of their lives, especially in their childhood and youth. Going to the movies was an excuse to interact with relatives or friends, to escape hot weather, to be entertained in a city with very limited leisure options. Memories of movies, as in Great Britain, Flanders, and other regions where cinema-going has been studied, are more about specific, dramatic, or shocking scenes or about favorite stars than about plots or contents or directors. Except for the big event movies clearly remembered and liked, the rest of the films watched during their childhood or youth were just a succession of nondistinctive events providing entertainment, escape, and excuses for wider social and cultural activities.
Discussion
As can be corroborated by looking at the findings, qualitative interviews are not only useful for studying the consumption and appropriation of media contents by audiences in the present. They are also useful for exploring past media experiences and for looking at the meaning and importance that media had in the past for different types of publics by retrieving memories, feelings, and facts not taken into account in data collected by the media industries. It is important to reiterate, however, that the discourse gathered through interviews in these types of studies is not equivalent to an objective recollection and description of behaviors and attitudes by the respondents, but a negotiated, subjective, and somewhat distorted account of how they look retrospectively to the past from the present. As Huggett (2002) explains, oral narratives tend not to organize themselves in sequential and chronological terms but around pivotal events in the respondents' life experience or perspective: “In the service of such narrative agendas, separate dates and times are conflated and disparate events are linked in order to make a particular point in a meaningful way” (Huggett, 2002, p. 20). Instead of affecting and diminishing the usefulness of the findings, these processes, common when interviewing people about their media habits and consumption, allow the researcher to go beyond the simple enumeration of facts and to gain some insight on the subjective and complex meanings audience members attached to them.
A particular strength of having open-ended and flexible question guides instead of fixed items in a formal questionnaire is that the researcher allows the interviewee some room to deviate from the agenda imposed by the former and to focus on his or her own salient memories, themes, or perspectives. Monterrey's respondents went beyond the topics we asked them to cover and included references about the city as a whole, the social atmosphere at the time, the absence of crime and violence in the city in that period, their relationships with friends, partners, and relatives. The role of the interviewer, however, is never neutral, and his or her presence, style of asking questions, and of establishing rapport, exert some influence on the way informants react and remember things. Our informants had to answer questions about their cinema-going habits, their memories of particular films and cinemas; when doing so, they had to make an effort to isolate parts of their holistic experience where going to the movies was only a part of a much wider context of leisure activities, social interaction, and cultural experiences.
For decades, film studies and film history have concentrated on detailed and sophisticated analyses of the content, structure, and formal features of films, or on the biographical, ideological, or aesthetic characteristics of directors, assuming that all the necessary clues for the prediction and understanding of viewers' decodings lie within the movie text: “film history had been written as if films had no audiences or were seen by everyone and in the same way” (Allen, 1990, p. 348). Qualitative research on actual audience members, like the one presented here, shows the limitations of those assumptions. At the same time, it reveals the rich contextual historical, social, and cultural factors that produce multiple and contrasting readings and appropriations of the films' meanings, as well as the relevance for audience members of many aspects that are completely unrelated to the meanings embedded in particular movies but have to do with the social rituals of going out with friends or relatives, enjoying cinema palaces for their decoration, and experiencing emotional connections with particular actors or actresses regardless of their specific roles in particular films.
NOTES
1 This project is a replica of the Belgian (Flemish) project “The Enlightened City” (Biltereyst, Meers, & Van de Vijver, 2011) conducted in Antwerp and Ghent.
2 Interviewers were master's and doctoral students Marcela Garza, Oscar Miranda, Beatriz Inzunza, Brenda Munoz, Miguel Sanchez, Elsa Flores, and Frida Godínez (Monterrey Institute of Technology), Karla Carrillo (Metropolitan University of Monterrey), and Gabriela Nallely Hernández Villanueva (Autonomous University of Nuevo León).
3 In order to protect the privacy of the informants and to comply with the confidentiality agreement signed with them, the names used in this chapter are pseudonyms.
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