Making Cinelandia: American Film and Mexican Film Culture before the Golden Age by Laura Isabel Serna

Abstract

MAKING CINELANDIA: Film and Mexican Film Culture before the Golden Age. By Laura Isabel Serna. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2014.In the 1920s films dominated Mexico's cinemas creating the fear in its cultural elites that Mexico would become a cultural dependent the United States. In Making Cinelandia Film and Mexican Film Culture Before the Golden Age Laura Isabel Serna compellingly argues that rather than acting as a form cultural imperialism (1), films and film culture engaged city dwelling Mexican moviegoers (on both sides the border) in ways that ultimately molded their identities as modern Mexicans beyond the cinema. Borrowing the title a popular Mexican film magazine from the time, Cinelandia, Serna develops the idea Cinelandia as a distinctly Mexican cultural space American film culture as seen through Mexican eyes. She suggests that the Mexican audiences in Mexico translated, appropriated and adapted cinema (its films, its characters and its narratives) in the service not only Mexico's post-revolutionary nation-building project, but also in the production Modern Mexican subjectivities (7, 217). Additionally, she suggests, Mexican filmmakers used U.S. cinema's stories, technologies and films in the push towards Mexican modernity (215). For migrant Mexican audiences in the U.S., who were still bound by affective ties to the nation, moviegoing became a central part their experience modern life and its new models gender and social relationships (183).This was despite the fact that, as Serna points out, pre-sound cinema was profoundly racist both in its depictions Mexico and Mexicans and in its casting extras of color. She notes that Mexican extras were hired to play a range darker and naked ethnicities and also for specifically risky roles (212). She also argues that just because Mexican audiences on either sides the border loved serials, dramas and comedies does not mean that they viewed these films uncritically or were not aware the racial hierarchy silent cinema (11). She suggests Mexican audiences were on the whole resistant to images which denigrated Mexico.The book is divided into two parts. first part The Yanqui Invasion follows cinema's invasion into Mexico-with chapters that explore in turn: how U.S. film companies took control the Mexican market; the role movie theatres and exhibition and the social practice going to the cinema in the post revolutionary nationbuilding project; and the ways the press disseminated film and fan culture that addressed a largely (conceived to be) female audience. …