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Between the last years of the 1890s and roughly 1929 when full talkies arrived, films were generally a combination of picture and title cards, or intertitles, which began to be used in the early 1900s. As the film trade was international in nature from its earliest days, intertitles needed to be translated. This chapter offers a brief chronology of the intertitle in film, highlighting the difficulties of translating and adapting title cards with decorative backgrounds and sophisticated animated sequences, either at the time the films were made or today for restoration. It also provides three case studies based on restoration projects conducted at the British Film Institute, showing how language and translation issues play their part in the complex reconstruction process.

This chapter explores the distribution, exhibition, and reception of Hollywood in Havana during the period of US-Cuban rapprochement that followed the 1933 revolution. Towards easing anti-Yankee sentiment throughout Latin America, President Franklin Roosevelt instituted the Good Neighbor Policy, pledging the United States to non-intervention as well as to greater respect and equity for its “sister” republics. Hollywood worked to promote the Good Neighbor Policy throughout Latin America, revising its business practices and its representations of Latin America (to avoid giving offense) and of the United States (to present it as a progressive democracy worthy of hemispheric leadership). This chapter finds that Hollywood’s efforts were well-received in Havana, and played a role in US-Cuban rapprochement. However, anti-imperialist revolutionary Cuban nationalism was not completely suppressed by Pan-American film musicals nor by shared profits and/or improved relationships in Havana’s film business community. Cuban critics and film businessmen (e.g., trade publishers and exhibitors) remained skeptical about US imperial hegemony, a skepticism still confirmed by plenty of Hollywood content and business practices as well as the rise of another US-supported strongman, namely Fulgencio Batista. The chapter ends with the reception in Havana of A Message to Garcia, Modern Times, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

This chapter explores the phenomenon of cinephilia. The literal translation of ‘cinephilia’ is ‘loving cinema’, so basically, a cinephile sees a lot of films. Cinephilia could be seen as a general way of forming a shared identity, a group of like-minded people. It could also be a source of inspiration for film directors in many different ways. Several experimental film directors and media artists have expressed their cinephilia through reflection and experiment by exploring the boundaries of cinema in new approaches to film form, or in expanding their canvas into installations. Cinephilia could be described as a marketing tool within the film trade, and could also be seen as a critical method, a foundation for evaluation. All of these practices of associative cinephilia can be taken as a source for curating film, and assembling surprising weekly programmes or double bills.