The Galician Correspondencia Film: A Documentary Subgenre and an Early Form of Communicative Travel

Abstract

The 1896 arrival of the cinematograph in Galicia (northwest Spain) coincided with a period of massive economic migration to the Americas (1850s–1950s) and also with the nationalist awakening, which aimed to recover a language and a culture subjugated for centuries. In the 1910s, film pioneer José Gil created a subgenre called cine de correspondencia (“epistolary cinema”): documentaries showing the landscape and celebrations, exported to the Americas as visual letters with the specific purpose of communicating with the Galician diaspora. I propose an interdisciplinary methodology to study the correspondencia documentary, regarding it both as a cinematic expression and an early form of communicative travel (Urry, 2007). I evaluate the use of the Galician language in this subgenre and its impact on the sense of belonging in the migrant community. Finally, I establish a parallel between José Gil’s correspondencia documentaries and the modern expressions of this subgenre, produced within the Novo Cinema Galego movement.