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CHAPTER 35
The Dominican Audiovisual Approach
to the Italian Film Experience
By Félix Manuel Lora
Professor of Audiovisual Communication and Cinematographic Arts at
the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra and the Instituto Tecnológico of Santo Domingo
•
Film arrived in the Dominican Republic on the night of August 27, 1900 in the northern city of
Puerto Plata, where the Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe device made its debut at the Teatro
Curiel theater, an ideal setting for this presentation, which featured films first projected in Paris on
December 28, 1895.
This premiere of the film projector was particularly relevant, because the country soon became enamored
with an invention that would revolutionize the way images were experienced. Italian playwright and journalist
Ricciotto Canudo (1877–1923) would later contemplate this revolution in his essay “Manifesto of the Seven
Arts,” published in 1911, regarding it as “art in motion.”
The residents of Puerto Plata were afforded this special opportunity with no small thanks to the initiative
of a traveling businessman who arrived in the city—one of the main maritime ports of the country—on the
Cherokee
steamship in August 1900.
As historian and essayist José Luis Sáez recounts in his book,
Historia de un sueño importado
, Francesco
Grecco was “an Italian businessman who, as was common at that time, had probably acquired a projector and
a camera from the Lumières and traveled throughout the Caribbean, showing off his ‘electrical’ apparatus and
its reliable film handling over and over again.”
1
News about the presentation of the Lumière Cinématographe in Puerto Plata and Santiago was first pub-
lished in the latter city’s
La Redención
and then reprinted in the September 14, 1900 edition of
Listín Diario
in
Santo Domingo.
A year before his arrival in the Dominican Republic, Grecco was in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where he es-
tablished Grecco & Compañía, a company with which photographer Maurice Hargous (1864–1935) was also
involved. After his arrival in the Dominican Republic, his variety show toured La Vega, Santiago, and Santo
Domingo; after another tour of Haiti in February and May 1901, he returned to the Dominican Republic for a
final tour and then left permanently for Europe in March 1902.
Grecco’s sojourn on the island left an impact on both society and entertainment, introducing film as a new
mode of amusement alongside the usual lineup of zarzuela companies, circus shows, and variety troupes.
The residents of the country’s major towns and cities were offered a fresh alternative to their typical evening
entertainment.
This first cinematic relationship between Italy and the Dominican Republic—in terms of presentations
or the industry as a whole—produced a bridge of legacy and collaboration that would stand the test of time.
By 1910, Italy had nearly monopolized the international film distribution market, and the Dominican Re-
public began to regularly import Italian film productions. Among these productions were
Quo Vadis
(1913) and