Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema, 1988-2012 by Ignacio Sánchez Prado

Abstract

Sanchez Prado, Ignacio. Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema, 1988-2012. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2014. 304 pp. Kindle Edition. Four meaty chapters, along a meaningful introduction and conclusion, comprise Sanchez Prado's optimistic history of Mexican film that begins distribution crisis that lasted roughly from 1989 to 1994 and ends with subtly evaluated, even 'paradoxical' measure of success. To explore turn-of-the-millennium comeback of Mexican cinema, Sanchez Prado contemplates nearly 260 films and 500 or so written sources. The relatively jargon-free language and adept interdisciplinary swerves for a gripping read, turned all more profound by brilliant close analysis. Sanchez Prado's analytic gifts benefit from his profound understanding of twentieth--and now twenty-first century Mexican history, along his knack for extracting main ideas from muddle of others' academic writing. An additional reason for lucidity of his prose emerges in acknowledgments, where author thanks an undergraduate, whose editorial comments helped make book accessible (viii). The ultimate reason for admirable cogency of this text, however, springs from Sanchez Prado's willingness to deal in nuance. For example, conclusion carefully weighs numbers of 2011 Mexican box office tabulations. Although in 2011, 90 percent of Mexico's box office and screens favored Hollywood cinema, compared to Mexican cinema's mere 7 percent presence, Sanchez Prado elicits a complex from disproportion: the very existence of a 7 percent market share and release of 62 a year is, as paradoxical as it may sound, a success story (210). That sentence alone warrants publication of this book. Sanchez Prado tempers melodramatic tendency that holds sway in much assessment of neoliberalism among liberal arts circles. Perhaps Sanchez Prado's ability to respect nuance stems from his autodidactic, rather than dutifully indoctrinated, approach. Sanchez Prado informs me by email that as a university student he took only one class on film (about the subaltern), though he completed additional coursework in cultural studies thinkers such as Jesus Martin-Barbero, Mabel Morana, and Hermann Herlinghaus. An intimate labor of love seems to spur Sanchez Prado's obsessive, almost starstruck hunt for smallest of articles and longest of books. Screening Neoliberalism catalogues, minutely, range of opinions available on Mexican film, and assimilates them into a nearly seamless argument. That fluidity, of course, requires certain suppressions, which Sanchez Prado himself recognizes, albeit in terms of other critics' habits: Finally, it is important to engage, whenever possible, critical traditions developed around specific films to show how certain studies of interpretation and reception are themselves entangled in same cultural logic deployed by those movies (14). The entanglement on which Screening Neoliberalism bases its argument, that is, presumptions that analysis cannot fully examine, have to do vitality of middle class in Mexico--precisely implicit subject of so many of these films that staged film industry resurrection. Sanchez Prado is not necessarily a fan of neoliberalism--much less of poverty or severe income inequality--but his ultimately hopeful viewpoint leaves at least one topic in this book only vaguely interrogated. How can neoliberalism, a system largely denounced by most critics who anchor Sanchez Prado's main disciplinary fields, coincide a numerically increasing middle class? A satisfying answer may elude literary and film critics. Sanchez Prado asserts powerful sway of middle class as key to industry success without charting reasons for its rise: Thus, in order to survive as an industry, Mexican filmmakers needed to bring middle class back into theaters (5). …