The Lost Cinema of Mexico

The Lost Cinema of Mexico
Author: Olivia Cosentino
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2022-02-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1683403398

The Lost Cinema of Mexico is the first volume to challenge the dismissal of Mexican filmmaking during the 1960s through 1980s, an era long considered a low-budget departure from the artistic quality and international acclaim of the nation’s earlier Golden Age. This pivotal collection examines the critical implications of discovering, uncovering, and recovering forgotten or ignored films. This largely unexamined era of film reveals shifts in Mexican culture, economics, and societal norms as state-sponsored revolutionary nationalism faltered. During this time, movies were widely embraced by the public as a way to make sense of the rapidly changing realities and values connected to Mexico’s modernization. These essays shine a light on many genres that thrived in these decades: rock churros, campy luchador movies, countercultural superocheros, Black melodramas, family films, and Chili Westerns. Redefining a time usually seen as a cinematic “crisis,” this volume offers a new model of the film auteur shaped by productive tension between highbrow aesthetics, industry shortages, and national audiences. It also traces connections from these Mexican films to Latinx, Latin American, and Hollywood cinema at large. A volume in the series Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America, edited by Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste and Juan Carlos Rodríguez Contributors: Brian Price | Carolyn Fornoff | David S. Dalton | Christopher B. Conway | Iván Eusebio Aguirre Darancou | Ignacio Sánchez Prado | Dolores Tierney | Dr. Olivia Cosentino Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Making Cinelandia

Making Cinelandia
Author: Laura Isabel Serna
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2014-03-03
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0822376792

In the 1920s, as American films came to dominate Mexico's cinemas, many of its cultural and political elites feared that this "Yanqui invasion" would turn Mexico into a cultural vassal of the United States. In Making Cinelandia, Laura Isabel Serna contends that Hollywood films were not simply tools of cultural imperialism. Instead, they offered Mexicans on both sides of the border an imaginative and crucial means of participating in global modernity, even as these films and their producers and distributors frequently displayed anti-Mexican bias. Before the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, Mexican audiences used their encounters with American films to construct a national film culture. Drawing on extensive archival research, Serna explores the popular experience of cinemagoing from the perspective of exhibitors, cinema workers, journalists, censors, and fans, showing how Mexican audiences actively engaged with American films to identify more deeply with Mexico.

The Classical Mexican Cinema

The Classical Mexican Cinema
Author: Charles Ramírez Berg
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2015-09-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1477308075

From the mid-1930s to the late 1950s, Mexican cinema became the most successful Latin American cinema and the leading Spanish-language film industry in the world. Many Cine de Oro (Golden Age cinema) films adhered to the dominant Hollywood model, but a small yet formidable filmmaking faction rejected Hollywood’s paradigm outright. Directors Fernando de Fuentes, Emilio Fernández, Luis Buñuel, Juan Bustillo Oro, Adolfo Best Maugard, and Julio Bracho sought to create a unique national cinema that, through the stories it told and the ways it told them, was wholly Mexican. The Classical Mexican Cinema traces the emergence and evolution of this Mexican cinematic aesthetic, a distinctive film form designed to express lo mexicano. Charles Ramírez Berg begins by locating the classical style’s pre-cinematic roots in the work of popular Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada at the turn of the twentieth century. He also looks at the dawning of Mexican classicism in the poetics of Enrique Rosas’ El Automóvil Gris, the crowning achievement of Mexico’s silent filmmaking era and the film that set the stage for the Golden Age films. Berg then analyzes mature examples of classical Mexican filmmaking by the predominant Golden Age auteurs of three successive decades. Drawing on neoformalism and neoauteurism within a cultural studies framework, he brilliantly reveals how the poetics of Classical Mexican Cinema deviated from the formal norms of the Golden Age to express a uniquely Mexican sensibility thematically, stylistically, and ideologically.

Screening Neoliberalism

Screening Neoliberalism
Author: Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Total Pages: 462
Release: 2014-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0826503527

Cavernous, often cold, always dark, with the lingering smell of popcorn in the air: the experience of movie-going is universal. The cinematic experience in Mexico is no less profound, and has evolved in complex ways in recent years. Films like Y Tu Mama Tambien, El Mariachi, Amores Perros, and the work of icons like Guillermo del Toro and Salma Hayek represent much more than resurgent interest in the cinema of Mexico. In Screening Neoliberalism, Ignacio Sanchez Prado explores precisely what happened to Mexico's film industry in recent decades. Far from just a history of the period, Screening Neoliberalism explores four deep transformations in the Mexican film industry: the decline of nationalism, the new focus on middle-class audiences, the redefinition of political cinema, and the impact of globalization. This analysis considers the directors and films that have found international notoriety as well as those that have been instrumental in building a domestic market. Screening Neoliberalism exposes the consequences of a film industry forced to find new audiences in Mexico's middle-class in order to achieve economic and cultural viability.

The Faber Book of Mexican Cinema

The Faber Book of Mexican Cinema
Author: Jason Wood
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2021-06-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0571353789

Twelve years ago, Amores Perros erupted in the cinemas across the world and announced the arrival of Mexican film-makers. The film-makers profiled in that book have now come of age and have made a decisive impact on the international cinema scene The last few years Mexican film-makers winning the Best Director Oscars 5 times, and Best Picture 4 times: Alfonso Cuaron with Gravity and Roma. Alejandro Inarritu with Birdman and The RevenantGuillermo del Toro with The Shape of WaterThis revised edition of The Faber Book of Mexican Cinema brings this astounding story up to date, as well as profiling the next generation, waiting in the wings.

Mexploitation Cinema

Mexploitation Cinema
Author: Doyle Greene
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2005-08-29
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0786422017

Thanks in large part to an exploitation film producer and distributor named K. Gordon Murray, a unique collection of horror films from Mexico began to appear on American late-night television and drive-in screens in the 1960s. Ranging from monster movies clearly owing to the heyday of Universal Studios to the lucha libre horror films featuring El Santo and the "Wrestling Women," these low-budget "Mexploitation" films offer plenty of campy fun and still inspire cult devotion, yet they also reward close study in surprising ways. This work places Mexploitation films in their historical and cultural context and provides close textual readings of a representative sample, showing how they can be seen as important documents in the cultural debate over Mexico's past, present and future. Stills accompany the text, and a selected filmography and bibliography complete the volume.

Making Cinelandia

Making Cinelandia
Author: Laura Isabel Serna
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014-03-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780822356417

In the 1920s, as American films came to dominate Mexico's cinemas, many of its cultural and political elites feared that this "Yanqui invasion" would turn Mexico into a cultural vassal of the United States. In Making Cinelandia, Laura Isabel Serna contends that Hollywood films were not simply tools of cultural imperialism. Instead, they offered Mexicans on both sides of the border an imaginative and crucial means of participating in global modernity, even as these films and their producers and distributors frequently displayed anti-Mexican bias. Before the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, Mexican audiences used their encounters with American films to construct a national film culture. Drawing on extensive archival research, Serna explores the popular experience of cinemagoing from the perspective of exhibitors, cinema workers, journalists, censors, and fans, showing how Mexican audiences actively engaged with American films to identify more deeply with Mexico.

Multiplatform Media in Mexico

Multiplatform Media in Mexico
Author: Paul Julian Smith
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2019-05-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3030175391

Multiplatform Media in Mexico is the first book to treat the exciting, interconnected fields of cinema, television, and internet in Mexico over the last decade, fields that combine to be called multiplatform media. Combining industrial analysis of a major audiovisual field at a time of growth and change with close readings of significant texts on all screens, acclaimed author Paul Julian Smith deftly details these new audiovisual trends. The book includes perspectives on local reporting on the ground, as covered in the chapter documenting media response to the 2017 earthquake. And, for the first time in this field, the book draws throughout on star studies, tracing the distinct profiles of actors who migrate from one medium to another. As a whole, Smith’s analyses illustrate the key movements in screen media in one of the world’s largest media and cultural producing nations. These perspectives connect to and enrich scholarship across Latin American, North American, and global cases.

Mexican Cinema

Mexican Cinema
Author: Paulo Antonio Paranaguá
Publisher:
Total Pages: 344
Release: 1995
Genre: History
ISBN:

With essays by the most authoritative scholars, this unique study and reference work is the first English-language survey and analysis of Mexican cinema. The book provides extensive coverage of the delirious melodramas (of 'El Indio' Emilio Fernandez and Roberto Gavaldon, many shot by the supremely romantic cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa) and the contemporary successes of Jaime Humberto Hermosillo. It also includes the Mexican work of Luis Bunuel, the surreal, intense dramas of Felipe Cazals and Arturo Ripstein, the innovative work of Paul Leduc, and much more. This lavishly illustrated book also contains notes on over 150 individual films, an extensive dictionary of directors and other personalities, together with filmographies and an extensive chronicle of Mexico's political, cultural and cinematic history in the twentieth century.

Mexican Cinema

Mexican Cinema
Author: Carl J. Mora
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2015-05-07
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0786491876

Mexican filmmaking is traced from its early beginnings in 1896 to the present in this book. Of particular interest are the great changes from 1990 to 2004: the confluence of talented and dedicated filmmakers, important changes in Mexican cinematic infrastructure and significant social and cultural transformations. From Nicolas Echevarria's Cabeza de Vaca (1991), to the 1992 releases of Hellboy director Guillermo del Toro's Cronos and Alfonso Arau's Como agua para chocolate, to Alfonso Cuaron's Y tu mama tambien (2001), this work provides a close look at Mexican films that received international commercial success and critical acclaim and put Mexico on the cinematic world map. Arranged chronologically, this edition (originally published in 2005) covers the entire scope of Mexican cinema. The main films and their directors are discussed, together with the political, social and economic contexts of the times.