This paper aims to understand the notion of the “popular” and the “national”, as it was used during the first period of sound films in Colombia (ten feature films made between 1939 and 1945). It argues that filmmakers attempted to create a national cinema merging conventions of Mexican musical comedy with a constructed definition of Colombian folklore, but never achieved commercial success. These films’ failure as popular cinema can be attributed to their contradictory ideological perspective, attempting to collate an elite “national culture” project with the forms and genres of mass media. The paper explores exhibition practices in Bogotá, presenting cinemas as social spaces where the distance between different audiences was inscribed in the codes of ‘good taste’, thus constructing operative definitions and evaluations of the ‘popular’
