A brief look at the major trends in the history of the national cinema of Peru suggests that the relationship between the development of the moving image and the onset of modernity in that country has always been awkward. Many have argued that the advent of cinema coincided in most parts of the world with the decades when modernity was already ‘at full throttle . . . a watershed moment in which a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space’. However, the reality for the majority of Latin American countries was quite different. As Ana M. López points out, it simply is not possible to link the rise of cinema in that part of the world to ‘previous large-scale transformations of daily experience resulting from urbanization, industrialization, rationality and the technological transformation of modern life’. Such developments were only just starting to emerge, so that as cinema was launched across the world, modernity in Latin America ‘was above all a fantasy and a profound desire.
