Valentino Gianuzzi

If later testimonies are to be believed, around 1927 Peruvian poet Carlos Oquendo de Amat (1905-1936) published in Lima, under the title Celuloide ( Celluloid), a magazine devoted to film news and reviews. Literary historians, however, have surmised that the magazine must have only been a project which never came to fruition, as no copy of the publication, nor contemporary evidence of its existence, has to this day been found. The legend of this magazine has undoubtedly become enrooted in Peruvian literary history because it would have been a project becoming of Oquendo de Amat, the author of 5 metros de poemas ( 5 Meters of Poems) a “cinematic” poetry book (the only one he published in his short lifetime) . This book-object is a collection of eighteen poems printed on one side of several contiguously glued sheets of paper, folded in accordion-like fashion, which can be read more or less as a conventional poetry book, or unfolded to be “viewed” as a continuous canvas, not unlike a movie reel. The legend of the elusive Celuloide has also taken hold because of the common conception of the attraction that cinema held over Peruvian and, in general, Latin American avant-garde poets. And yet Oquendo, who was born in the Andean city of Puno before moving to the capital as a child, infused a handful of the poems of his cinematic book with content which clearly referenced Andean, rather than urban, life. The book has thus traditionally been read under the lens of two of the most important isms of nineteen-twenties Latin American literature— indigenism and vanguardism. Because of its cinematic format, it has been hailed as one of the most paradigmatic examples of the unlimited interest and fascination which Latin American avant-garde writers placed on modern technology. As Mirko Lauer reminds us, however, in the case of the Peruvian avant-garde this fascination was also “a symptom of disagreement between Peruvian culture and the set of technologies that had started to define modernity in the Northern hemisphere since the late eighteenth century.” If this disagreement was evident in the urban cultures of the capital of the country, it became even more visible in the Andean provinces, where modernization provided a sharper, more poignant contrast with the rural world of 1920s Peru.