| Abstract: | What if World Cinema was a cinema, a global movie theatre called the World Cinema? This is the imaginative leap taken in two works of fiction published in Uruguay at the end of the 1920s: the ‘Prologue’ to Felisberto Hernández’s experimental Books without Covers (1929), and ‘The Cinema Seen from the Screen’ (1930) by Alberto Mario Ferreiro. Both texts construct scenarios of fantastic, impossible cinematic spectatorship that are nevertheless situated within early twentieth-century Uruguay’s unusual political climate and the global phenomenon of the avant-garde. The fantastical points of view constructed by Ferreiro and Hernández work to interrogate both the promises and the perils of spectatorship in a medium whose circulation was becoming increasingly global. |
