1944 Medellín, Colombia

Jorge Cárdenas Gutiérrez

1930

Medellín, Colombia

Interviewed on Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021

By Isabela Cárdenas

The first movie I remember seeing? No… I don’t remember. It probably a Mexican movie. Back then, they were so famous in Medellín. They played them on a theater not far from my house, like 15 minutes on foot. And I loved them: the music, the dancing, the plots, and of course, the fights and conflicts. I also remember Tarzan was very popular. Tarzan in the jungle! Tarzan on a vine swinging from tree to tree!

I was about 10 or 11 when I first began going to movies. It was around the same time I started going to the big school, after Kinder. I’d go to the theatre on Saturday afternoons with my friends. The theater was in the center of Medellín. I don’t remember the name, but I do remember it was right next to La librería Berú, which was the most famous place in town. They played mostly Mexican and Argentinian movies, and then some other movies came.

Ah… you know what? The first title I remember was “Escuela de Sirenas”. I saw it on a Saturday with my friends. It was the first Hollywood movie I ever saw. It was very modern and very important. Esther Williams was the name of the actress. It was a fabulous thing, with some pools. A marvelous movie! Right? I thought the acting was great because the clothes were very pretty, the accessories were fun, and the scenery was very pretty too. The dancing was so elegant. Everything was very brilliant and very good.

Screening the movies was a whole mystery. Each movie had like 10 rolls, and since they played it at various theaters at the same time, they would swap the rolls as the movie played. So, one theater would finish playing the first roll, and send it quickly to the next theatre. The whole city had to share the same copy. And so, there were a lot of wait times.

They also started streaming movies at 7 pm at school. The brothers would set up the movies against a grand white wall on the patio. They put the machine on the second-floor balcony, and we sat on metal chairs. I was watching a lot of movies then: ones during the week at school, and then one on Saturdays with my friends. At school, we would watch whatever the Brothers considered a novelty, usually something related to nature, something “healthy”: no comedy and no dancing. I don’t remember those movies so well. However, on Saturdays, we saw the Mexican and Argentinian movies, and that was more fun. Plus, when we went to the theatre, we had candy and soda. We drank a lot of soda. We usually bought lollipops. Lollipops were popular. We also bought gum. Gum was super popular at the time. We felt very fancy.

I haven’t been able to remember the name of the American actresses that were so famous, but I do remember they had the last word on everything beauty and everything fashion. I can only remember Esther Williams in “Escuela de Sirenas”.

I think the cinema was a revolution for Latin America. The American movies had a lot of complications because of the war. The U.S. was fighting the world war around the time I first started going to the theatre. So, they weren’t producing many movies that made it down to Colombia. The cinema revolved around Argentinian and Mexican movies. This was also because of the language: movies in Spanish were more attractive. American movies were more expensive too.

The movie starring Esther Williams caused a big impact on this continent, because one of the main actors was Colombian: Carlos Julio Ramirez. He was so famous. He was maybe the only Colombian that was successful in Hollywood back then.

Everything about “Escuela de Sirenas” was exciting: it was so different from anything I had seen before. The clothes were so different than in the Mexican and Argentinian movies, where the outfits mostly resembled the respective rural areas. And about the plot? I don’t really know… The movie was in English and my friends and I didn’t understand any of it. So, we kind of made it up, made guesses along the way. It was mostly about the dancing and the pools. That’s why it was entertaining. No one really cared about the plot, it was about the dancing, the pools, and the pretty ladies.

It is worth noting that around here, after around 1938, when the war began, the cinema had a strong Latin American influence. Then, after the war, the “American avalanche”  came, and the Latin American productions disappeared from my radar.