During the period in which the cinema emerges and develops as a silent spectacle, the reflection about its relation with the written language and, in a broader sense, with verbal language, is basically organized around three axes: degrees of affinity or discrepancy among the literary genres used as sources and the attributes of cinematographic language; the function of subtitles in this context; the potentialities and limitation "inherent" to the visual-kinetic and verbal languages. The way these issues were dealt with in the Mexican chronicles in the first decades of the 20th century reveals the internal tensions, the resistances and changes of view in the literate sectors of society facing this new art.
literate tradition; silent movies; Mexican cinematographic chronicles