Mexican Cinema Research Articles

Buñuel and México: The Crisis of National Cinema (review)

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 261 at the end of the text might have been profitably pruned, though the author's scholarly zeal may serve the budding specialist. The plot summaries , too, bear abbreviation. The decision to translate some but not all of the quotations is perplexing—no systematic pattern is discernible —and surely responds to the press's marketing illusions. One must also take to task the manuscript's copy editors for allowing typographical errors and other slips to mar a product that in substantive respects does the press proud. Johnson's book is a notable contribution to the writings on gender and nation that have been streaming into the forum of late. In a climate where "value" is shunned and no text suffers alongside any other, this appreciation of the novel as socio-historical document and purveyor of messages leaves to wallow in their nostalgia those still tied to the assessment of literature qua literature, which means that the book, like its seasoned author, is very much of John W. Kronik Cornell University Buñuel and México: The Crisis of National Cinema The University of California Press, 2003 By Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz's valuable contribution to the still growing corpus of Buñuel studies takes aim at two critical axioms that have long shaped—or inhibited—considerations of the director's Mexican career. The first, grounded in Bufiuel's status as an international art cinema auteur and propagated in part by the director himself, dismisses the bulk of the Spanish exile's Mexican productions as forgettable, commercial films motivated by the simple need for economic survival. The second, rooted in a contrary emphasis on national cinemas and cinematic nationalism, offers an endorsement of Bufiuel's outsider standing by denying his role, and that of his films, within the history of Mexican cinema. In opposition to both these positions, Buñuel and México argues for the "Mexicanness" of Bufiuel's Mexican films, or at least for those features made between 1946 and 1965 and financed and produced within the context of the Mexican film industry and destined primarily for domestic audiences. (It should be noted that he distinguishes between "festival-bound international projects" such as The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Nazarin, El angel exterminador and the French language, Cek s'appelle l'aurore and Le mort dans ce jardin, among others, and Bufiuel's "truly Mexican films" [149].) Acevedo-Muñoz offers a series of persuasive arguments for recognizing the full extent of Bufiuel's integration into the national film industry in Mexico: his participation via his producers in government financing schemes and his work in government supported studios; his (sometimes reluctant) embrace of rhe reigning star system; and his films' engagement with recurring national themes and debates regarding the legacy of the Mexican revolution, the conflict berween tradition and modernity and the role of gender in sustaining or questioning dominant definitions of national identity. Nevertheless , in making the case for a Mexican Buñuel, Acevedo-Muñoz doesn'r seek to undo previous conceptions of a surrealist Spanish or European auteur Buñuel. Instead his explorations of the cultural, political and industrial contexts of the director's Mexican films offer a corrective or amplification to auteurist readings drawing on the notion of the "industrial auteur" developed in Judith Mayne's work on pioneer female Hollywood director Dorothy Arzner (13). Likewise, the "crisis of national cinema" cited in the book's subtitle refers not to Bufiuel's role in the breakdown of national cinema as a critical paradigm but rather to his place with respect to Mexico's "Golden Age" of the 1940s and 1950s, a moment when Mexican cinema served the dual and even contradictory goals of projecting a vision of national cultural policy and providing a model of a national (or continental ) popular cinema capable of challenging Hollywood's domination across Latin America. 262 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Acevedo-Muñoz presenrs a complex and nuanced account of Bufiuel's relations with and role wirhin rhe Mexican film industry of the period. Bunuel immersed himself in rhe modes of production and concomitant narrative and rhematic strategies of...

Arturo Ripstein et la subversion du mélodrame

ABSTRACT- While in France for a long time we had known Mexican cinema only through the movies from Emilio Fernandez, « the Indian », and those from Luis Buñuel, Arturo Ripstein stood out in 1994 with the release of three long- length films in a short time : The Castle of Purity (1972), This Place without limits (1977) and The Empire of Wealth (1985), as well as his selection at the Cannes's Festival for his fourth movie, The Queen of the night (1994), coproduced by Mexico, the USA and France. In all his movies, and especially the latest ones, Deep Crimson (1996) and No Letter for the Colonel (1999), written with the scriptwriter Paz Alicia Garcíadiego, Arturo Ripstein while adapting melodrama emphasizes its darkness and confines its neurotic and delirious characters within a world where any hope is excluded.

El idiota superviviente: Artes y letras españolas frente a la "muerte del hombre," 1969-1990 (review)

262 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Acevedo-Muñoz presenrs a complex and nuanced account of Bufiuel's relations with and role wirhin rhe Mexican film industry of the period. Bunuel immersed himself in rhe modes of production and concomitant narrative and rhematic strategies of popular genre cinema, a process which, the book argues, allowed him to consolidate his earlier artistic foundations in surrealist aesthetics and ethnographic interests (most apparent in his 1932 documenrary Las hurdes) into a new hybrid, "popular surrealism ," that would transcend the Eurocentric elitism of the original French surrealists (2). Chapter three, devoted to Los olvidados, explores the convergence of specific national, transnational and biographical factors that led to the creation of perhaps the signal expression ofthat vision. Acevedo-Mufioz's reading oÃ- Los olvidados considers rhe film in tandem with Octavio Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude, published the same year as the film's release (1950). At the time of the film's premier Paz proved one of its strongest defenders against Mexican critics who lashed out against what diey saw as an outsider's pitiless portrayal of urban squalor and social decay. Looking beyond mere historical coincidence for the sources of rheir shared critical vision of post-Revolutionary Mexican society, Acevedo-Muñoz locates the roots of the affinities between Paz and Buñuel in their cosmopolitan intellectual backgrounds and similar interactions with the European surrealisr group. Both men develop the perspective necessary to formulate their critique of Mexican society and character, he argues, through the deployment of a form of "ethnographic surrealism" that would put familiar national realities under the microscope of a distancing aesthetic-analytic vision (64). Buñuel and México is particularly welcome for the attention it devotes to the majority of the director's Mexican films that were nor so overtly critical and that but for their illustrious parentage would have (and indeed have) been passed nearly undetected as one more family drama, melodrama, or comedy. AcevedoMu ñoz is careful not to make excessive claims for rhe subversive intent of films such as Susana, Una mujer sin amor or El rÃ-o y k muerte. As he notes with regards to Susana, many apparent signs of aesthetic or ideological dissidence, "the film's over-the-top flamboyance and aesthetics of excess [...] exemplified by [the protagonist's] willingness to frame herself as specracle," were in fact more the norm than the exception and "perfectly acceptable in contemporary Mexican melodrama" (89). What the author does claim for Bufiuel's films is a kind of prescient role in revealing the incipient crisis in rhe Mexican classic cinema model and the exhaustion of its narrative and thematic formula as well as its inadequacy in responding to a larger political and cultural crisis. He draws support for that position as well as for his overall argument regarding the fundamenral place of Buñuel within the history of Mexican cinema from the embrace of Buñuel by the "Nuevo Cine" generation of filmmakers and intellectuals in the 1960s. Acevedo-Muñoz finds powerful evidence Bufiuel's legacy in Mexico in the writings published in rhe short-lived journal of rhe same name by figures such as Paz, Carlos Monsiváis, Carlos Fuentes and Emilio GarcÃ-a Riera and later in rhe works of "New Cinema" filmmakers, Alberto Isaac, Felipe Cazáis, Paul Leduc, Arturo Ripstein and Jaime Humberto Hermosillo. Kathleen M. Vernon State University of New York at Stony Brook El idiota superviviente: Artes y htras españolas frente a k "muerte del hombre, " 1969-1990 Ediciones Libertarias, 2003 Por Eugenia Afinoguénova En un libro de extraordinaria intensidad y reflexión, Eugenia Afinoguénova nos invira a pensar los lÃ-mites de la subjetividad contempor ánea y nos guÃ-a a través de una propuesta alternativa que las artes y las letras españolas produjeron desde finales de los sesenta hasta principio de los novenra. El tÃ-tulo traza la tensión Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 263 entre los dos conceptos centrales del libro: el idiota y la muerte del hombre. Según la autora, frente a la defunción del sujeto filosófico anunciada por el estrucruralismo franc...

Turning Pages on Latin American Film and History Studies

In a room, alone, with parchment in hand, Aureliano impatiently reads, skipping pages at a time, to decipher his own conception and to prophesize himself in the very act of reading, as if looking into a mirror. In his existence, we can see all of Latin and all of humanity. Thusly Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude draws to conclusion, with a reader knowing that a certain type of existence is created in the reading of a text and can end at the bottom of the last page. Perhaps this is an overly romantic image in which to introduce the second special issue of Film & History (34.2) on Latin American film and history or in which to describe the countless Latin-Americanist academics lost in the labyrinths of discipline-bound programs. In its one hundred years of history, has Latin American cinema experienced a similar form of solitude through that are symptomatic of the kinds of disciplinary insularity and institutional isolation that one witnesses in most of the area studies and especially of the marginalized, financially disadvantaged, and over-determinedly inferior third area? Does the mask that Octavio Paz describes as the shield one wears in the labyrinth of solitude to self-efface and defend oneself from the glare of the outside world fit Latin Americanists and the texts they read? Or has this tradition eroded in recent decades, as James C. Scott convincingly argues, as the transcripts, hidden behind disguise of the mask, have become themselves respectable public performances and socio-politically viable expressions? This second special issue on Latin can only reset the table for further discussions of these and other timely issues in contemporary Latin American studies. In its emphasis and through the articles collected herein, the issue does, however, assemble a collective of voices that reinvigorates the interdisciplinarity and collegial exchange necessary for Latin American to continue to progress in the 21st century. And, of course, these issues do not apply only to Latin American scholars, artists, and teachers, but they reach across the Amcricas and around the globe, to community-building and citizenship-formation required for our future, as William F. Flores articulates (15-17). Thus, these articles, the guest editors hope, appeal to readers of this journal and incite further investigations of this elusive field. In Teresa Hoefert de Turegano's The International Politics of Cinematic Coproductions: Spanish Policy in Latin America and Scott L. Baugh's Developing History/Historicizing in MexicanNuevo Cine Manifestoes around 'Ia Crisis' both authors borrow from economics and social-science paradigms to read articulations of alternative production models in Latin American cinema. Teresa Hoefert de Turegano argues that shifts in global-regional and national characters of Latin of the 1990s owe in part to changes in government policy, the prominence of Spanish coproductions, and the consumption of the coproduced films in Latin American and other markets. As such, national and cultural identities are shaped by this redefinition of film production. Scott L. Baugh also focuses on national and cultural identity-formation, specifically in the productions of the Mexican Cinema of the early 1960s. In an examination of the multiple conceptualizations of independent in the manifestoes of the group of filmmakers first claiming the Nuevo Cine in Mexico, Developing History/Historicizing Development calls for a reconsideration of the various notions of crisis used to describe Mexican society and culture and the history leading up to Mexico's revolutionary 1970s New Wave. Nohemy Solorzano-Thompson, in Vicarious Identities: Fantasies of Resistance and Language in juan Ibanez's Los caifanes (1966), likewise takes an inter-disciplinary approach to reading the crises of Mexico's mid 1960s through the cult classic, Los caifanes. …

Transatlantic Traffic in Recent Mexican Films

In this paper I treat the recent resurgence of Mexican cinema (praised from Kinetoscopio to The Economist) as a test case for Manuel Castells's theory of ‘the interaction between technology-induced globalization, the power of identity (gender, religious, national, ethnic, territorial, socio-biological), and the institutions of the state' (1997, p. 2). Focusing on relations between Mexico and Spain, I examine the various and overlapping regulatory regimes which still frame audiovisual production in Europe and Latin America; address the increasingly powerful commercial dimension by offering corporate studies of two innovative Mexican producers, Altavista and Anhelo; and, finally, give an account of the two best known films in the so-called renaissance: Amores perros and Y tu mamá también. While these two famous features are not technically co-productions (and indeed have been praised for their sense of locality) I argue that they participate in a newly intense economic and cultural exchange between Latin America and Europe through the transatlantic reach of their parent companies (Compañı´a Iberoamericana de Entretenimiento [CIE] and Omnilife, respectively) and their idiosyncratic casting of Spanish actresses in central roles.

Mexico City in Contemporary Mexican Cinema (review)

Mexico City in Contemporary Mexican Cinema (review)

Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America

As its cover announces, the book reviewed here is a new edition, not a revised one. Magical Reels’s previously published chapters are unchanged since their original appearance in 1990. The new edition’s new addition is an afterward, covering developments during the last century’s last decade. This substantial final chapter offers John King’s cautious, yet shrewd, observations about macro issues—such as transnationalism, globalization, and neoliberalism—pertinent to (Latin American) cinema’s contemporary history (and intellectual discourse about mass culture). It also replicates the earlier chapters’ admirable mixture of material and representational analysis as well as their nation-by-nation survey of Latin American filmmaking. In doing so, this new final chapter makes good use of recent works about fin de siglo filmmaking to explore the interplay of contemporary economic patterns and cultural production. The previous chapters, however, do not benefit from interpolation of significant scholarship published since 1990 about pre-1990 Latin American film.Magical Reels’s cover photograph indicates, too, what is different and the same about its millennium edition. As with the earlier version, the current one features a production still, depicting a heterosexual couple, from an “internationally acclaimed” Mexican film (that is, one well-received in U.S. and European art house film circuits). An image of María Rojo and her dance partner from María Novaro’s Danzón (1991) replaces one of Pedro Armendáriz and Dolores del Río from Emilio Fernández’s María Candelaria (1943). This change announces the most obvious difference between this edition and its predecessor: coverage of the 1990s. It also perpetuates Mexican cinema’s dominant visibility within English-language scholarship about Latin American film. To a large degree this is derived from the overrepresentation of internationally influential films (that is, relative critical and commercial “successes” in North America and Europe) in scholarly discourse about cinema. It is often a story of “winners,” judged as such by their presence among elite audiences outside of Latin America more often than by their resonance among popular ones within the region. This too-common convergence of international market and scholarship belies Magical Reels’s comprehensive geocultural scope. However, by displaying, in the first case (1990), an iconographic marker of canonical film history, and in the second (2000), a widely identifiable contemporary commercial symbol, the book’s cover anticipates its broad audience. Neither film represented was mere quotidian fodder, but international film-festival fare; both feature not just any actors but movie stars; each is the work of an auteur.Magical Reels is essentially a political history of culture. Its top-down approach foregrounds national production and individual accomplishment. It focuses more on the formation of famous filmmakers, state policies, and business ventures than on life in and around the movie theater. The impact of economic and political power on filmmaking takes precedence over that of cinema on national and international history. Its representational analysis privileges particular plots and genres over discursive patterns and practices. But Magical Reels is particularly effective in demonstrating the centrality of state intervention and (more recently) nonintervention in the development of Latin American culture industries. And students and scholars of not only mass media but almost every other aspect of twentieth-century Latin American history—including state formation and national identity, economics and business, revolution and international relations, art and ideas, class, race, and gender relations, to name a few—will find much to add to their respective historiographies. This underlines a broader point implied by Magical Reels, but one that deserves explicit enunciation: the integral relationship between the historical study of audiovisual culture and “the rest of ” history. Film (and radio and television) is not a short subject preceding “real” history’s feature presentation. Rather it offers a fresh field on which to engage issues that generate far-reaching empirical insights relevant to noncinematic historical analysis.Any historical synthesis—especially one of such prodigious scope—demands analytic compromises. Magical Reels does not undermine its indispensability to readers who seek comparative analysis of cinematic developments within Latin America. King’s linkage of broad political and economic developments to specific national cinematic practices suggests the need for more monographical research about Latin America film culture (broadly defined) that probes interactions between screen and society as well as production and politics. Such micro-level historical studies, ones that intensively investigate archives and thickly contextualize films, will provide building materials for new syntheses. These will relate our present understanding of production trends and auteurs to cinematic history that lies beyond the screen. In the meantime, Magical Reels remains the most useful English-language introduction to Latin American film. The new edition’s after-ward merits the attention of all scholars already familiar with its predecessor. And the entire work remains foundational not only for those interested in Latin American cinema but in the history of twentieth-century Latin America, generally.

Bunñuel's Heights: Abismos de Pasión

This article deals with Abismos de Pasión, the Mexican film version of Wuthering Heights which Spanish director Luis Buñuel shot in 1954. It describes how Emily Brontë's novel fascinated this director, who discovered it through his study of Surrealism. In his adaptation, Buñuel uses the universe created by Emily Brontë as a vehicle to express his personal obsessions. However, the final result is surprisingly close to the original.

Titanic's wake

Early in 1997, I photographed the Mexican film set for Titanic: this was part of an earlier project called Dead Letter Office, a title owed obliquely to Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener. Bartleby's mysterious refusal to work may have begun with his job as a post office clerk sorting undeliverable mail. Re-reading the story, I suddenly imagined that it was difficult and even spiritually challenging to send a letter the short distance from Tijuana to San Diego, even if Hollywood movie-making had crossed the line.

Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity Ignacio Corona (bio) Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity. Jeffrey M. PilcherWilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources Inc., 2001. 247 pp. Well into the second half of his Cantinflas and the Chaos of the Mexican Modernity, Jeffrey M. Pilcher provides the conceptual key of a book that interweaves a discussion of the private-public divide with a study of the national in the intricate context of popular culture, the film industry, and politics in post-revolutionary Mexico. Pilcher explains how writers of the Hiperión group, influenced by Samuel Ramos' and Octavio Paz' celebrated essays on the Mexican psyche, remained fascinated by the figure of the pelado, a term used for a Mexico City slum dweller and a character immortalized and sanitized by Cantinflas (Mario Moreno), the country's most popular film star. "Intellectuals—the author claims—sought to unlock the contradictions of Mexican society through an examination of its leading celebrity" (155). Such is precisely the perspective adopted by Pilcher himself, who has written one of the most significant studies on a major figure of Mexican cinema to date. And, while some critics may find objectionable the seemingly facile association of the actor's biographical narrative with the narrative of a country in its convoluted quest for modernity (the unquestioned assertion of the book), those looking for relevant cultural interpretations will not be disappointed. Biographies remain an important interpretive genre for historical understanding motivated by cultural, social, political and/or aesthetic demands. Literary critics and historians alike of ten attribute a certain epistemological quality to biographies, endowing them with a function as cultural trope or potential epochal synthesis. Outside academic circles, biographies remain one of the strongest niches of a book market that always favors tales of the powerful and famous and the endless re-elaboration of [End Page 155] the myth of individuality through the construction of icons. This ostensibly North American phenomenon can also be observed in Latin America, as evident in a number of recent well-publicized biographical novels and studies on luminaries (i.e., Evita), modern day revolutionaries (i.e., Che Guevara), and the always popular caudillos (i.e., Francisco Villa)—not to mention controversial autobiographies or memories (i.e., Salinas de Gortari). Pilcher's biographical study is strongly grounded in primary and secondary research source materials. Particularly noteworthy is his use of film reviews and published interviews that span almost a 50-year period and intersect with numerous dimensions of Mexican cultural and political history. The author attempts to avoid the glorification of inevitability , fate and pure greatness that permeates an of ten-hyperbolic genre the so-called biography of the great. His study describes how Mario Moreno the historical character became trapped by his own comic persona, something the actor attests to—painfully at times—when dealing with serious topics, such as union politics. But most importantly, this balanced view is the result of the study's social analysis of urban humor and culture that contextualizes the comedian's contributions to popular culture. The symbolic embodiment of Mexican culture and politics in an individual trajectory is an interesting proposition, but one that stands in contrast to current theoretical approaches, such as the New Cultural History trend in Mexico and the U.S. with its penchant for interpretations of the subaltern focusing on collectivities or communities. However, this biography is consistent with that trend's interest in the study of popular culture, rural migration, elite formation, social agency, ritual and performance, and constructions of gender and identity, among other topics. Studies associated with the New Cultural History approach coincide in analyzing the mechanisms of official discourse, the shaping of dominant ideologies, the forging of the nation-state, and the development of nationalistic culture in general. Eric Van Young points out several major features of this new historical discourse: (1) the study of mentalities, if by this one means the perduring mental structures that motivate individual or group behaviors, and the symbolic systems people use to explain the world around them; 2) a particular, though by no means exclusive, interest in subordinate groups in history; 3) a certain turn toward inductivism in the writing of history; and...

Running the United States-Mexican Border: 1909 through the Present

A very large number of films have been and continue to be made about the border by both the United States and Mexican film industries. This is due primarily to the highly unusual nature of the United States-Mexico border itself, and because of various factors ranging from the Mexican Revolution of 1910, to the emergence of Westerns as the primary product of the United States film industry, and other economic, sociocultural, and technological reasons. This study is dedicated to an overview of the border films and strives to explain some of the major cultural, technological, historical, and economic factors that spurred them. It is broadly divided into three sections. The first establishes the conventions of the border in the popular mind, focusing attention on the role first of mass-produced dime novels, and subsequently of popular films. The second section reviews some of the most salient of those border conventions. The third shows how contemporary Chicano/Latino border films function to subvert and debunk those same conventions. Numerous films from American and Mexican studios and by independent Chicano producers made between 1909 through the present are cited and reviewed in historical context.

Fan Letters to the Cultural Industries: Border Literature about Mass Media

The concentration of the Mexican and U.S. cultural industries in cities outside of the border region and the intermittent outsourcing of Hollywood movies to production facilities in Baja, California, have had a marked impact on the literary practice of "fronterizo" 'border' intellectuals. This essay discusses the theme of the cinema in three narratives by authors from the U.S.-Mexico border region: "Hotel Frontera" ("Border Hotel"), by Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, "Canícula," by Norma Elia Cantú, and "The Magic of Blood," by Dagoberto Gilb. These narratives provide ethnographic information about the reception of nationally distributed mass media in the border region; at the same time they produce a contestatory discourse that challenges the manner in which the border and its populations have been portrayed and employed in the U.S. and Mexican film industries. The study of film culture must take into consideration patterns of consumption as well as production, and literature about mass media is one arena through which it is possible to focus on both of these processes simultaneously. Fronteriza/o writing about cinema reveals a desire to inhabit popular cinematic genres such as film noir and the western while at the same time retaining a critical stance towards them. This ambivalence is understood as a localist response to the marginalization of fronteriza/o cultural production in a bi-national context, rather than as general suspicion toward visual mass media on the part of "traditional" literary intellectuals.

Visualizing Mexico: The Interplay of Mexican Graphic Arts and Film in the 1930s and 1940s

The article seeks to trace and particularize the nature of the interplay between Mexican graphic art and film in the 30s and 40s, in relation to the strategic revision of monolithic definitions of mexicanismo in cinematic visualizations of autocthony. It looks at the evidence of tactical readjustments of the objectives of nation-conscious, civic-minded work during a period in which the visual media have too readily been subsumed under the rubric of a hegemonic cultural nationalism. It explores the points of convergence between the collaborative work of director Emilio Fernández and cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, and the monochromatic figurative and reproductive paradigms of the Taller de Gráfica Popular and modern photography, in pursuit of a representational practice and visual currency which was resistant both to the 'mexicanismo a la yanqui' of Hollywood vehicles and the fashionable pastiche of folkloric elements exemplified by the comedia ranchera. It seeks to account for the particular aesthetic strategies deployed discursively on the screen and points to the foundational dependence on existing simulacra in the construction of visualized cultural referents. It posits the idea that the problematization of identity in terms of conceptual strategy, plasticity and spectacle evidenced in cinematography amounts to a structural modality in the emergence of a nationalist mythology in the arts, predicated on crisis and rupture, but reliant on pictorial composition, the still image and the consecration of an aestheticized ethnicity.

A Career in Perspective: An Interview with Arturo Ripstein

n April 1997 Arturo Ripstein, Mexico's most renowned film director, confronted Eresto Zedillo in the Mexican president's first meeting with the statesupported film community since he took office in December 1994. On behalf of IMCINE (the state-funded Mexican Film Institute created in 1983) and its primary beneficiaries and administrators, Ripstein appealed to the president: A country without film is a sad country. This less than positive view of Mexico today is also held by other major players in that country's artfilm world, who are convinced, as is Ripstein, that without state subsidies the national art cinema would not

By Popular Demand: I Will See Danzón Until I Can't Stand it Anymore

Mexican filmmaker María Novaro challenges populist stereotypes by presenting an antipatriarchal and dynamic representation of the popular. Novaro's film Danzón (1991) fulfills both popular taste and expectations while also problematizing them. The author uses French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of “taste” and “intention” to respond to the question, How could the same Mexican film, Danzón, be liked by intellectuals at Cannes Film Festival and low-income workers in Mexico? The author also reviews Mexico's cultural politics and its history of representing the popular.

Culture Across Borders: Mexican Immigration and Popular Culture (review)

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 305 Culture Across Borders: Mexican Immigration andPopufar Culture University of Arizona Press, 1998 Edited by David R. Maciel and Maria Herrera-Sobek The 1995 Immigration Enforcement Act, the recent doubling of the Border Patrol force, numerous English-Only initiatives, and California's Proposition 187 all clearly attest that immigration—particularly immigration from Mexico—is once again a politically expedient issue in the United States. But as David R. Maciel and Maria HerreraSobek note in their introductory review of the growing field of immigration studies, despite the continued impôt tance of Mexican immigration to both nations, surprisingly little has been written about the cultural or artistic representations that these immigration processes have inspired. This volume brings together scholars from the fields of art history and criticism, cultural studies, film analysis, folklore, cultural history, literary criticism, and political science for an interdisciplinary exploration of the cultural aspects of Mexican immigration on both sides of the border. In the first article in the collection, '"What Goes Around Comes Around': Political Practice and Cultural Response in the Internationalization of Mexican Labor, 1890-1997," Juan Gómez-Quiñones and David R. Maciel provide an excellent historical framework through which both the migratory movements of Mexican immigrants and related political and cultural practices can be better understood. Gómez-Quiñones and Maciel assert that the developing international capitalist system is the propelling force that drives immigration, and that it is necessary to understand the connections between changing economic forces and the cultutal and political ideologies that arise in response to Mexican immigration . The authors summarize the historical development of these economic transformations and the resulting waves of Mexican immigration and then connect these changes to particular political, legal, and cultural responses such as the perennial scapegoating of Mexican immigrants for U.S. economic decline despite hard empirical data to the contrary. GómezQui ñones and Maciel's article provides a critical historical context for the other articles in the collection. Although the subject matter investigated in the articles that follow includes a diverse range of popular cultural productions, the authors share a general conceptual approach to the study of culture. Drawing on elements from the writings of Herbett Marcuse, Zygnunt Bauman and Clifford Geertz, Maciel and Herrera-Sobek explain that any genuine culture arises from the marginal or ascending classes and consists of a set of 306 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies ideals that guides and actualizes behavior towards a liberating transformation of society. In the essays, the various cultural texts and genres studied tend to be assigned to one of three cultural groups: North American (Anglo), Mexican, or Chicano. The patterns in the forms, functions, or meanings of the texts are then interpreted and compared within their historical and cultural contexts using a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches. Alberto Ledesma's article compares Mexican and Chicano literary narratives involving immigration and explores the problematic relationship between Chicano literature and its representations of undocumented immigration. Next, Victor Sorrell employs the concept of cultural mestizaje in a semiotic reading of more than eighty Chicana/o and Latina/o popular artists stressing the myriad ways in which the experience of immigration shapes these artists' work and in which this art works to reshape the meanings of immigration. David R. Macial and Maria Rosa GarciaAcevedo discuss the treatment of Mexican immigration in film and describe the distinct ideological representations of Mexican immigration in Mexican cinema, the Hollywood style, and Chicano cinema. Maria Herrera-Sobek then examines the important aesthetic, emotional, and ideological functions of corridosand canciones'in Mexican immigrant films. Finally, José Reyna and Maria Herrera-Sobek analyze the thematic, ideological and linguistic patterns in jokes and jests about immigration collected from Chicana/os. Well-written, insightful and engaging, these investigations of the cultural representations of the Mexican immigrant experience will prove both useful and enjoyable reading for all students of "border" culture. But unfortunately, much of the textual analysis fails to fully articulate the connections between the cultural representations and their specific socioeconomic and historical-political contexts. For example, a collection of essays exploring popular cultural productions seems incomplete without critical attention to the differing economic constraints...

The American Buñuel: The Young One and the Politics of Exile

PARTV TRAVELLING DIRECTORS THE AMERICAN BUNUEL: THE YOUNG ONE AND THE POLITICS OF EXILE MARGARITA DE LA VEGA-HURTADO University ofMichigan, Ann Arbor Luis Buñuel is variously referred to as the great Spanish filmmaker, the director who invigorated Mexican Cinema and gave impulse to the nuevo cine, and a great "auteur" in the French tradition, transformed after coming to Paris and becoming a Surrealist, who made his best films in France, where he had the freedom to express his personal vision. Since his death in 1983, Buñuel has been reinserted into a Spanish national artistic genealogy that includes Goya, VaUe-Inclán, Lorca, Picasso, and Dalí, and his work has been analyzed as exemplary of Spanish character and national identity. For a filmmaker who Uved most of his life in exüe and who only directed two or three films in Spain, this is a curious destiny. The director himself spoke in several interviews about being Spanish, French, and Mexican, together or separately. Perhaps Buñuel is best understood as a universal human being whose films focused on the absurdity of daily life and on bringing to the screen the complex web of reaUty where the objective and the subjective intermingle. In this essay, I am interested in bringing out a different Buñuel, the American one. In his autobiography, Buñuel tells of having made two "American films:" Robinson Cmsoe in 1952 and The Young One in 1960. Both were made in EngUsh using American actors, in coUaboration with the same American producer and screenwriter, and were distributed by a major US studio. Robinson Cmsoe was made early in BuñuePs Mexican period, giving him a chance to experiment with color for the first time. The decision to adapt a universaUy known novel, and to make two versions, of varying length, in English and in Spanish, indicates an effort to reach a wide audience. The Young One addresses an American subject and takes place in a specific Southern location. Made the same year as Viridiana, as Buñuel returned to work in Europe, it falls at the end of the director's Mexican period. Robinson Cmsoe has been the subject of a number of analyses whüe The Young One tends to be dismissed as a minor work, but neither is weUrepresented in the EngUsh-language bibüography. 01998 NUEVO TEXTO CRITICO Vol. XI No. 21/22, Enero a Diciembre 1998 238____________________________________MARGARITA DE LA VEGA HURTADO Víctor Fuentes, in his exceUent study of Buñuel's Mexican period,1 postulates that the two films made by Buñuel in English are examples of the HoUywood director he might have been, if chance and the industry had allowed . I disagree, since it is hard to imagine Buñuel working in HoUywood, particularly during the McCarthy repression and witch-hunting period, those "years of the Toad" as Dalton Trumbo caUed them. Irrespective ofwhere and how they were made, however, this pair of films constitutes the most approximate instance of Buñuel working within the HoUywood classical narrative style, whose principal characteristic, according to David Bordwell,2 is that aU stylistic markings are subordinated to narrative cohesion and structural logic. Buñuel was always interested in and attracted to HoUywood cinema and wanted to learn from it. After the scandalous success of L'Age d'Or, he traveled to HoUywood in 1930 to learn the studio mode of production and related technical skills. During his two years at Filmófono, the production unit he directed in Madrid during the short-Uved Spanish RepubUc (193536 ), he clearly chose to make films with broad popular appeal, based on the narrative conventions that he had observed and analyzed in Hollywood, whUe experimenting with the formal elements of melodrama and the dialectical relationship between sound and image. That experience would also be essential to his subsequent work in Mexico, where he consistently brought his films in early and under budget. Buñuel moved to Mexico in 1946, after eight frustrating years in the United States during which he had moved back and forth between New York and HoUywood. In the movie capital, he had supervised the Spanish dubbing of several films for Warner...

Women’s Pictures: Identity and Representation in Recent Mexican Cinema

Cet article examine trois films produits récemment par des réalisatrices mexicaines qui remettent en question la façon dont le cinéma classique mexicain représente la femme par l'intermédiaire de figures archétypes tels que les mères vertueuses et victimes, les jeunes filles séduites et abandonnées, et las malas mujeres (méchantes femmes.) L’article suggère que, même si tous les films réalisés par des femmes ne peuvent être catégoriquement qualifiées de «féministes», il est necessaire de les situer a l’intérieur d'un contexte qui tient compte des rapports matériels que les femmes entretiennent avec les notions d’identités sexuelles, de race, de religion et de classes sociales.

Mexican cinema

Mexican cinema

The Border in American and Mexican Cinema

The Border in American and Mexican Cinema