Manuel Trujillo Durán

Manuel Trujillo Durán (8 January 1871 – 14 March 1933) was a Venezuelan photographer who pioneered film in Venezuela. Trujillo was most successful as a photographer, though he dabbled in other industries and is best remembered for his connections to the fledgling film industry in Venezuela. He became one of the first people from Latin America to learn how to show films; he was thought for many years to be the director of Venezuela's first films, and traveled through Venezuela and Colombia with projectors to introduce cinema to this part of the South American continent.

Early and personal life Manuel María Segundo de la Trinidad Trujillo Durán was born in Maracaibo, Zulia, a prosperous city in northwest Venezuela, on 8 January 1871, to José Trinidad Trujillo and María del Carmen Durán. He had a brother, Guillermo,

At age 14, Trujillo began studying at the Colegio Federal de Varones, where he excelled in arts and sciences. In school he was a contemporary of Udón Pérez, who would become a famous poet. Both knew each other in adulthood, as the men worked next door to each other.

Trujillo married twice; with his first wife, Atilana Maggiolo, he had one child, who died in infancy, and with his second wife, Agripina Altuve, he had five children – two (Roque and Ciro) survived to adulthood.

Though celebrated in his lifetime for various pursuits, Trujillo killed himself by gunshot at his home in Maracaibo on 14 March 1933. His funeral procession took over the city. He then founded the Trujillo y Arraga photographic hall, with the painter Julio Arraga, as an exhibition centre for "photographic art and artistic creation [to come] together". :1366

Film pioneering Trujillo was a photographer by trade and an associate of film technician and entrepreneur Luis Manuel Méndez; through this friendship he learned how to use a Vitascope, and be a film technician, For many years both official records and the general public believed that Trujillo had brought the technology to Venezuela himself. When the film industry grew in Venezuela, and the subsequent development of film scholarship with access to local archives, scholars began to study the early films and found records that showed that Méndez was the person who introduced film to Venezuela after acquiring the film projector in New York City.

When Méndez brought the technology to Maracaibo, it allowed him and Trujillo to show films. It is also possible that Trujillo produced the first Venezuelan films, shown in Maracaibo in 1897, These are titled Un célebre especialista sacando muelas en el gran Hotel Europa and Muchachos bañándose en el lago de Maracaibo. :55 A report in the newspaper Horizontes announced that they were showing films that they had directed. He has been reverently described as "a transhuman entrepreneur of spectacle in Maracaibo and elsewhere [in Venezuela]", and a "journalist, painter and apprentice of everything human", with biographers claiming that "his presence gave wings to Maracaibo, allowed thought and illusions, criticism and theory to circulate".