Mexico City in Contemporary Mexican Cinema
Mexico City in Contemporary Mexican Cinema

Author: David William Foster

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2010-06-28

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0292789157

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Just as Mexican national life has come to center on the sprawling, dynamic, almost indefinable metropolis of Mexico City, so recent Mexican cinema has focused on the city not merely as a setting for films but almost as a protagonist in its own right, whose conditions both create meaning for and receive meaning from the human lives lived in its midst. Through close readings of fourteen recent critically acclaimed films, this book watches Mexican cinema in this process of producing cultural meaning through its creation, enaction, and interpretation of the idea of Mexico City. David William Foster analyzes how Mexican filmmakers have used Mexico City as a vehicle for exploring such issues as crime, living space, street life, youth culture, political and police corruption, safety hazards, gender roles, and ethnic and social identities. The book is divided into three sections. "Politics of the City" examines the films Rojo amanecer,Novia que te vea,Frida, naturaleza viva, and Sexo, pudor y lágrimas. "Human Geographies" looks at El Callejón de los Milagros,Mecánica nacional,El castillo de la pureza,Todo el poder, and Lolo. "Mapping Gender" discusses Danzón,De noche vienes,Esmeralda,La tarea,Lola, and Entre Pancho Villa y una mujer desnuda.

Mexican Cinema
Mexican Cinema

Author: Carl J. Mora

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2015-05-07

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0786491876

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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.

Women Filmmakers in Mexico
Women Filmmakers in Mexico

Author: Elissa Rashkin

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2001-04-15

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 0292771096

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Women filmmakers in Mexico were rare until the 1980s and 1990s, when women began to direct feature films in unprecedented numbers. Their films have won acclaim at home and abroad, and the filmmakers have become key figures in contemporary Mexican cinema. In this book, Elissa Rashkin documents how and why women filmmakers have achieved these successes, as she explores how the women's movement, film studies programs, governmental film policy, and the transformation of the intellectual sector since the 1960s have all affected women's filmmaking in Mexico. After a historical overview of Mexican women's filmmaking from the 1930s onward, Rashkin focuses on the work of five contemporary directors—Marisa Sistach, Busi Cortés, Guita Schyfter, María Novaro, and Dana Rotberg. Portraying the filmmakers as intellectuals participating in the public life of the nation, Rashkin examines how these directors have addressed questions of national identity through their films, replacing the patriarchal images and stereotypes of the classic Mexican cinema with feminist visions of a democratic and tolerant society.

Contemporary Mexican Cinema, 1989-1999
Contemporary Mexican Cinema, 1989-1999

Author: Miriam Haddu

Publisher: Edwin Mellen Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13:

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This study examines, contextualizes, and evaluates the significance of contemporary Mexican filmmaking, focusing on the so-called 'cine nuevo' of 1989-1999. Accordingly, the study is divided into three sections, representing the key generic discourses that frame the films' narratives and underlying aims: The first analyzes contemporary Mexican cinema's re-presentation of history on the cinematic screen; and the second part of the book examines the rise in the number of women directors, comparing it with the previous lack of female participation within the filmmaking arena; the last section explores the re-location of cinematic geographies in contemporary cinema.

Making Cinelandia
Making Cinelandia

Author: Laura Isabel Serna

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2014-03-03

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0822376792

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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.

Queer Mexico
Queer Mexico

Author: Paul Julian Smith

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2017-10-16

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 0814342752

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Explores the rich and varied LGBT cinema and television of Mexico since the new millennium. Queer Mexico: Cinema and Television since 2000provides critical analysis of both mainstream and independent audiovisual works, many of them little known, produced in Mexico since the turn of the twenty-first century. In the book, author Paul Julian Smith aims to tease out the symbiotic relationship between culture and queerness in Mexico. Smith begins with the year 2000 because of the political shift that happened within the government—the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was voted out of national office after over seventy years in power. Judicial and social changes for LGBT Mexicans came in the wake of what was known at the time as simply "the change" ("el cambio") at the start of the millennium, bringing about an increased visibility and acknowledgment of the LGBT community. Divided into five chapters, Queer Mexico demonstrates the diversity of both representation and production processes in the Mexican film and television industry. It attempts also to reconstruct a queer cultural field for Mexico that incorporates multiple genres and techniques. The first chapter looks at LGBT festivals, porn production, and a web-distributed youth drama, claimed by its makers to be the first wholly gay series made in Mexico. The second chapter examines selected features and shorts by Mexico's sole internationally distributed art house director, Julián Hernández. The third chapter explores the rising genre of documentary on transgender themes. The fourth chapter charts the growing trend of a gay, lesbian, or trans-focused mainstream cinema. The final chapter addresses the rich and diverse history of queer representation in Mexico's dominant television genre and, arguably, national narrative: the telenovela. The book also includes an extensive interview with gay auteur Julián Hernández. The first book to come out of the Queer Screens series, Queer Mexicois a groundbreaking monograph for anyone interested in media or LGBT studies, especially as it relates to the culture of Latin America.

Aesthetics and Politics in the Mexican Film Industry
Aesthetics and Politics in the Mexican Film Industry

Author: M. MacLaird

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-06-18

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 1137319348

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Evaluating a broad selection of Mexican films produced from the early 1990s to the present, this study examines how production methods, audience demographics, and aesthetic approaches have changed throughout the past two decades and how these changes relate to the country's transitions to a democratic political system and a free-market economy.

Mexican Screen Fiction
Mexican Screen Fiction

Author: Paul Julian Smith

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2014-02-03

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780745680798

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Mexican cinema is booming today, a decade after the international successes of Amores perros and Y tu mamá también. Mexican films now display a wider range than any comparable country, from art films to popular genre movies, and boasting internationally renowned directors like Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Guillermo del Toro. At the same time, television has broadened its output, moving beyond telenovelas to produce higher-value series and mini-series. Mexican TV now stakes a claim to being the most dynamic and pervasive national narrative. This new book by Paul Julian Smith is the first to examine the flourishing of audiovisual fiction in Mexico since 2000, considering cinema and TV together. It covers much material previously unexplored and engages with emerging themes, including violence, youth culture, and film festivals. The book includes reviews of ten films released between 2001 and 2012 by directors who are both established (Maryse Sistach, Carlos Reygadas) and new (Jorge Michel Grau, Michael Rowe, Paula Markovitch). There is also an appendix that includes interviews carried out by the author in 2012 with five audiovisual professionals: a feature director, a festival director, an exhibitor, a producer, and a TV screenwriter. Mexican Screen Fiction will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars and essential reading for anyone interested in one of the most vibrant audiovisual industries in the world today.

Horizontal Vertigo
Horizontal Vertigo

Author: Juan Villoro

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2021-03-23

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1524748897

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At once intimate and wide-ranging, and as enthralling, surprising, and vivid as the place itself, this is a uniquely eye-opening tour of one of the great metropolises of the world, and its largest Spanish-speaking city. Horizontal Vertigo: The title refers to the fear of ever-impending earthquakes that led Mexicans to build their capital city outward rather than upward. With the perspicacity of a keenly observant flaneur, Juan Villoro wanders through Mexico City seemingly without a plan, describing people, places, and things while brilliantly drawing connections among them. In so doing he reveals, in all its multitudinous glory, the vicissitudes and triumphs of the city ’s cultural, political, and social history: from indigenous antiquity to the Aztec period, from the Spanish conquest to Mexico City today—one of the world’s leading cultural and financial centers. In this deeply iconoclastic book, Villoro organizes his text around a recurring series of topics: “Living in the City,” “City Characters,” “Shocks,” “Crossings,” and “Ceremonies.” What he achieves, miraculously, is a stunning, intriguingly coherent meditation on Mexico City’s genius loci, its spirit of place.