Mexican cinema as petrocinema

Abstract

What if thinking about Mexican cinema in concert with the environment had implications beyond representation? This article brings ecocritical methodologies into conversation with industry studies to propose that reading Mexican cinema in tandem with energy has sweeping repercussions for the study of Mexican cinema. It highlights several potential avenues of inquiry that consider Mexican cinema as petrocinema. These include the film industry’s funding, infrastructure, material footprint and inextricability from the ideology of energy surplus as the driver of modernity. This capacious approach to energy and environment as an ontological question and not just a question of cinematic representation argues that cultural production should be historicized within the infrastructure of fossil-fuelled capitalist modernity.