The Surreptitious Importance of the Nation

Abstract

American Los Angeles fit into a Mexican framework? Two recent studies raise these questions, if only implicitly: Celluloid Nationalism and Other Melodramas : From Post-Revolutionary Mexico to fin de siglo Mexamenca (2003) by Susan Dever, and Mexico City in Contemporary Mexican Cinema (2002) by David William Foster. Their titles rely on signifiers of identity (Mexico and Mexican) while emphasizing transnational and local spaces (Mexamerica and Mexico City) . Dever's and Foster's investigations validate a paradigm, while at the same time challenging it by focusing on non-national geographical categories. Such ambivalence is symptomatic of the instability of two prevalent analytical categories, national cinema and third cinema,1 which film scholars continue to interrogate, reconsider, and, for the most part, maintain. The effort within film studies to rethink these categories has