Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema, 1988-2012

Abstract

The product of cinephilic passion and impressive erudition, well argued and comprehensive in scope, this book may well be the definitive critical study in English of Mexican cinema at the turn of the new millennium. In several ways, the book picks up where other recent texts addressing contemporary Mexican cinema leave off. Covering filmmaking activity over four presidential sexenios (from Carlos Salinas de Gortari to Felipe Calderón), the analysis extends from the early nineties, when the state loosened its reins on the film industry, and into the period when film exhibition (as opposed to television) became skewed toward the middle and upper classes as the industry was privatized and Mexican producers, actors, and directors began aggressively seeking opportunities abroad (especially in the United States). Hence the term “neoliberal” in the book's title refers to both a new model of film production and distribution and to an ideological reorientation of the mainstream Mexican cinematic message.Through a series of carefully interwoven and meticulously cross-referenced exegeses of a diverse array of films (from authorial statements to generic entertainment), Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado attempts to answer questions that most other scholars have only dared to ask, namely, can a “Mexican” cinema exist without significant state sponsorship, market protection, and promotion? The answer that the author astutely provides is “yes, and no.” No, if one is looking for a renewal of what the author, after film historian Charles Ramírez Berg, calls a “cinema of solitude,” a type of Mexican cinematic exceptionalism whereby, enveloped in formal innovation and bold thematic material, explorations of gendered and cultural identity are hitched to the quest for nationhood, all with the institutional support of the state. Yes, if one is willing to contemplate the postexceptionalist millennial cinema on its own terms, as a middle class–oriented medium that, on the one hand, still features the exhibition of authorial experimentation in the state-run Cineteca Nacional and at film festivals (pp. 196–97, 208), and, on the other, relocates the sociopolitical (albeit with new stakes attached and different degrees of legibility) within the commercial sphere.In narrating the history and mapping the textual landscape of this complex transformation, the author's goal is twofold: first, to demonstrate the resilience of Mexican cinema even in its postnational iterations, and second, to register the stylistic and thematic fallout from the physical and ideological distantiation of the medium from the massive popular audience that was (and continues to be, with televisual reruns of Golden Age favorites) its sustenance. Sánchez Prado largely achieves this goal first by conducting film research on-site, which allows the inclusion of many lesser-known (and less commercially successful) films that he compares to national and international blockbusters, and second by constantly taking into account the targeted audience for each category of film and, by extension, bringing into relief the “spectator-in-the-text.” (Fittingly, the book begins with a graphic description of movie attendance in a working-class neighborhood and ends with references to high-end shopping mall venues with tickets priced at twice the national minimum wage [p. 247n1].) Unlike other strictly chronological or thematically organized studies of Mexican cinema, Sánchez Prado's book is structured into four historically overlapping segments that gradually trace the arc from early nineties uncertainty and disenchantment to post–Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) global initiatives on the part of vanguard auteurs, such as Carlos Reygadas, as well as the Oscar-nominated and Hollywood-bound “three amigos,” Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, and Alejandro González Iñárritu. Each segment focuses on a distinct discursive trend associated with neoliberalism: the nostalgia for, or parodying of, waning mexicanidad (chapter 1), the reinscription of national identity in new genre cinema (romantic comedy, discussed in chapter 2), attempts at critically addressing sociopolitical realities within neoliberal frameworks (chapter 3), and the parenthetical or minimalist referencing of Mexico in new transnational coproductions (chapter 4). One of the strengths of this book is that it is metacritical, engaging in an intense conversation with previous and contemporary studies of Mexican cinema; it is also informed by recent theoretical literature on national cinema, cultural citizenship, narratology (especially the open ending [pp. 118–19]), and cinematic genres, and it hence provides a valuable scholarly resource.The book's main weakness is that Sánchez Prado ultimately drops the discussion of women's cinema and feminist intervention that is rolled out in the first two chapters, and the author shows some timidity in approaching producers as direct sources of information. The conclusion appears to have been written in haste, trying to catch up to 2013 rather than casting a retrospective, synthetic glance. Nevertheless, it is a highly readable book that will easily complement both previous and contemporary texts in a graduate course or add depth to undergraduate survey courses.