Carlos A Gutiérrez. Handbook of Film Studies. Editor: James Donald & Michael Renov. Sage Publications. 2008.
Mexico has a remarkable audio-visual history. Once a country that boasted a vigorous film industry, Mexico has been a large and influential creator of cultural capital and a key player in transnational media flows. It has produced more than 5,000 films, equal to the combined production of all other Latin American countries (see Paranagua, 1995: 12). Yet, despite the existence of a considerable literature that treats the subject of Mexican cinema both at home and abroad, its study remains largely entrapped in questions of ‘the national’ and ‘the popular’ as well as of ‘national specificity’. Many other aspects of Mexican cinema remain overlooked or are practically ignored.
As is the case with comparable countries such as India, Mexican cinema shows the pressing need to create more accurate ways to study notions of ‘national cinema’, particularly those gathered under ‘Third World’ and postcolonial theories, since the traditional categories have proved themselves to be inadequate. Many scholars still succumb to the theoretical temptation to postulate a unifying aesthetic for non-Euro-American cinema. In doing so, they only create more dead ends for the study of these nominally ‘other’ cinemas. In addition, the persistent Eurocentrism of Film Studies, paired in some cases with the ethnocentrism of film scholars in Mexico, has prevented a much needed dialogue concerning the position of the study of Mexican cinema within the larger context of world Film Studies. This, it could be argued, is evident from the limited role that Mexican film scholars and critics have played in the international arena.
This chapter tells the story of cinema studies in Mexico from the earliest reviewers to present-day trends in film criticism and theory. This history provides a context in which to address questions not only about the current study of Mexican cinema within Mexico, but also about how the particularity of Mexican cinema might be incorporated into larger debates about ‘Third World’ cinema in Film Studies internationally.
The First Film Reviewers
The arrival of Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope and Vitascope in Mexico at the end of the nineteenth century, along with Auguste and Louis Lumiere’s ‘cinematographe’ projector, coincided with the hegemony of the French- influenced positivism in Mexico. President Porfirio Diaz’s regime undertook an ambitious programme of modernization and industrial development that provided a sympathetic ideological context for the new invention. As in other parts of the world, many of the first writings on film in Mexico consisted of impressionistic accounts of the technological phenomenon or were mere reviews of the spectacle, which often included moral judgments. The columnists borrowed terms from theatre and other visual arts to describe the film experience, even though they underestimated cinema as a form of artistic expression (Miquel, 1992: 23).
At the same time, some journalists and writers began to value the new invention for its scientific possibilities, which usually led them to prefer actuality over fiction film. Some years later, the armed insurrection against Diaz’s dictatorship that turned into the Mexican Revolution provided fertile ground for the development and practice of documentary filmmaking, which some scholars have later argued was ‘Mexico’s principal contribution to world cinema’ (de los Reyes, 1995: 71). Many writers at the time praised the Mexican Revolution and World War one documentaries for their informational, educational and even historical value. However, this trend was short-lived and by 1916 actuality films were seen as a propagandistic tool.
The first regular film columnists began to appear in local newspapers at around this time. In El National, Jean Humblot was a passionate promoter of film as an art form (Miquel, 1992: 247). Hipolito Seijas, under the pseudonym of Rafael Perez Taylor, and Carlos Noriega Hope, alias Silvestre Bonnard, also wrote for El Universal. The Nicaraguan- born Francisco Zamora wrote for Excelsior. Whatever the claims of those writers, the poet and essayist Alfonso Reyes and the novelist Martin Luis Guzman are generally considered to have been the first true film critics in Mexico. Both were members of the ‘Ateneo de la Juventud’, the cultural group that produced some of the leading intellectual figures in the country and that ultimately overthrew positivism as the dominant discourse in the country. Reyes and Guzman shared the pseudonym ‘Fosforo’ in the weekly Espana, edited in Spain by Jose Ortega y Gasset, and they developed a serious yet engaging approach to cinema as an art form.
By the early 1920s, fiction once again dominated Mexican screens, under the hegemony of the North American industry. This decade saw the rise of new film critics. Cube Bonifant, under the pen-name Luz de Alba, was one of the first women to write about film in Mexico and one of the first critics to pay serious attention to the filmmaker as an auteur; the film critic Jorge Ayala Blanco has called her ‘the first solid antecedent of film criticism in Mexico’ (quoted in Rivera, 1990: 12). The criticism of Jaime Torres Bodet, who twice served as Secretary of Education, was published under the name ‘Celuloide’ in the magazine Revista de Revistas and shows a cultural and literary rigor rare for the time.
The National Project and the Film Industry
In the 1920s, Mexico was recovering from the devastating effects of the Revolution. The government of the day launched an ambitious national cultural campaign in which intellectuals, artists and filmmakers were to play an active role. The project was driven by a modernist quest to discover (or create) mexicanidad, an ‘authentic’ Mexican identity, through the cultivation of uniquely Mexican cultural and artistic values that would reconcile and blend the cultures of pre-Hispanic and modern day Mexico. This quest for an identity was to become a persistent legacy in the country for much of the twentieth century. Key academic figures in the movement were the anthropologist Manuel Gamio, architect of Mexican indigenismo; the philosopher Samuel Ramos, who argued that in order to understand Mexican culture one had first to understand the Mexican mind and considered that the best tool for doing so was Adlerian psychology; and the educator Jose Vasconcelos, head of the National University of Mexico and Secretary of Education, who coined the concept of ‘raza cosmica’ with reference to mestizo culture. This national project, which permeated all of the country’s disciplines, laid the ground for the creation of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI)—the political party that would rule the country for more than sixty years.
The advent of sound in film, and hence the need for films in the national language, created an opportunity for a Mexican industry to conquer its domestic market, as happened in a number of countries around the world. The determined attempt to create a local film industry was based on the idea of ‘nationalizing’ Hollywood—in other words, adapting the Hollywood model of infrastructure to Mexican conditions, which meant in part combining state and private production, distribution and exhibition (Monsivais, 1995: 117). Many film critics and intellectuals would actively participate in this burgeoning Mexican film industry as screenwriters, and even as impresarios. Among them were Noriega Hope, the renowned poet and playwright Xavier Villaurrutia, who wrote about film in the magazines Hoy (1937-41) and As( (1941-43); the novelist and political activist Jose Revueltas who wrote for Hoy and decades later published the film theory book El conocimiento cinematografico y sus problemas ([1965] 1981); and Juan Bustillo Oro, who directed some silent films and wrote in El Universal before returning to filmmaking. In 1931, thanks to the initiative of the influential journal Contemporaneos, Mexico’s first film society was created with an executive committee composed of well- known artists and intellectuals.
The Mexican film industry demanded its own publications for the promotion of its stars, and this led to the birth of Mundo cinematografico, El cine grafico, Mexico cinema, Cinema reporter, Diarioflmico mexicano and Cine continental. These magazines were mostly self-congratulatory and lacked any serious criticism of popular Mexican cinema. The 1940s and the 1950s witnessed international success for the industry. This was the ‘Golden Era of Mexican cinema’, a time when it became one of the strongest and most profitable industries in the country and when it was able to ‘function imperialistically in most Spanish-speaking countries of the continent, which lacked a film industry of their own’ (Ayala Blanco, quoted in de la Vega Alfaro, 1995: 86). The very success of the industry seemed to inhibit any serious critical study—with a few notable exceptions. Besides Villaurrutia, the poet Efrafn Huerta, the Spanish-born Francisco Pina and Alvaro Custodio developed a consistent approach to cinema and were more critical of the Mexican film industry. For several years Huerta wrote about film for such publications as Diario de Mexico, El Figaro, Cinema Reporter, Mexico Cinema and Esto. Pina wrote for Novela semanal cinematografica, for the cherished cultural supplement ‘Mexico en la cultura’ of the newspaper Novedades, and for the magazine Siempre!; Custodio, who had already regularly written for publications in Belgium, France and Cuba, wrote for Excelsior.
By the 1950s the Mexican film industry was showing many signs of decay. Bernal Mendez and Santos Mar’s El embrollo cinematografico (1953) and Miguel Contreras Torres’ El libro negro del cine mexicano (1960) denounced industry excesses and warned of a looming crisis. At the same time, the country was showing encouraging signs of a new cinephilia, partly influenced by the emergence of the ‘European art cinema’, and partly because of the flourishing of new film societies such as the one at the National University and at the Instituto Frances de America Latina (IFAL). Also noteworthy was the creation of Resena de Acapulco, a film festival that would contribute to the emerging film culture among the younger generations. And, in 1957, the magazine Septimo Arte, edited by Francisco Zarate and published by Universidad Iberoamericana, showed the pressing need for an aesthetic approach to the study of film. Following in the footsteps of Villaurrutia and Huerta, the renowned Mexican intellectuals Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz would also write about film from time to time.
Nuevo Cine
Influential French auteur theories as well as notions of the ‘New Latin American cinema’ were championed by the group that created the magazine Nuevo Cine—among them Emilio Garc a Riera, Jom Garc a Ascot, Manuel Michel, Jose de la Colina, Salvador Elizondo, Tomas Perez Turrent, Carlos Monsivais and Jorge Ayala Blanco. Although short-lived—it published only seven issues between 1961 and 1962—the magazine had a tremendous impact on film criticism and Film Studies in Mexico.
Using fashionable concepts such as mise en scene and auteurism, this young generation of film critics and aspiring filmmakers looked again at Mexican cinema to study its ‘alienating effects’ (Pick, 1982: 230) and (sometimes influenced by foreign film critics such as George Sadoul) re-evaluated the work of local filmmakers—Luis Bunuel, Emilio ‘El Indio’ Fernandez, Fernando de Fuentes and Alejandro Galindo. The Nuevo Cine group also made an incursion into filmmaking with the low-budget independent feature En el balcon vacto (1961). The burgeoning of film culture in Mexico was consolidated by the creation of the Filmoteca de la Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) in 1960, which was the first official film archive in the country, and the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematograficos (CUEC) also at the UNAM in 1963, the first film school in Mexico. Also influential was an experimental film competition organized by the trade union Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Produccion Cinematografica. This aimed to ‘renovate the artistic and technical structure of the national industry’ (Perez Turrent, 1995: 95) by offering young directors an opportunity to access the film industry. In these promising circumstances, the end of the 1960s saw the publication of two seminal works: Garcia Riera’s Historia documental del cine mexicano ([1969-78] 1992-97) and Ayala Blanco’s La aventura del cine mexicano ([1968] 1979).
As has been widely acknowledged, 1968 marked a milestone in the political history of Mexico. Just ten days before the beginning of the Olympic Games in Mexico City, the government crushed a student rally and massacred several participants. This act of repression polarized the country. The incoming president, Luis Echeverr a, saw the cracks in the political system and created an astute strategy for transforming the image of Mexico through cinema, presenting it both at home and abroad as a democratic and liberal state.
Between 1970 and 1976 the state not only became the major film producer but also largely controlled distribution and exhibition. It was no coincidence that the president named his brother, a well-known actor and president of the actor’s guild, to serve as the head of the Banco Nacional Cinematografico. In this apparently exciting new era, a double discourse reigned: those willing to join the system would benefit greatly, but those who opposed it would be completely marginalized. Many of the members of Nuevo Cine were incorporated in the state’s film project along with many young filmmakers. Even the term ‘Nuevo Cine’ became part of the official discourse. Garcia Riera would later reassess Echeverrfa’s administration:
In the final analysis, the new Mexican cinema has served the official ideology, and its supposedly militant character, the political commitment claimed for it, its revolution from within were never more that an imposture. It is more exact to give it the label that suits it: that of an auteur cinema. Not a stylistic revolution, a collective project, a group social commitment, nor even a movement … (quoted in Lerner, 1999: 7)
Two important legacies of this time were the creation of the Cineteca Nacional in Mexico City in 1974, and the Centro de Capacitacion Cinematografica (CCC), the country’s second film school. At the time, a dissident group known as the ‘superocheros’ who saw 8mm film as an effective means of breaking with industrial cinema and experimenting with new narrative forms, denounced filmmakers such as Felipe Cazals, Arturo Ripstein, Paul Leduc, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, along with their ‘spokespersons’ Garcia Riera and Perez Turrent, for participating in the state’s film project under the banner of an ‘independent’ cinema (Menendez et al., [1972] 1999: 37). One of the members of this group, Sergio Garcia, wrote the manifesto ‘Towards a Fourth Cinema’ (1999: 70). Eventually some filmmakers who were members of this group, such as Gabriel Retes and Alfredo Gurrola, went on to work with 35mm film, while Garcia continued to teach film and to write in a number of publications.
The Rupture
Inevitably, with the state being a major player in filmmaking, the Mexican film industry was profoundly influenced by political factors. Echeverrfa’s successor as president dismantled much of his political project, and filmmaking suffered as a result. The residual structure of the national film industry was destroyed once and for all and independent producers who specialized in low-budget genre films exploited its remains. As an ominous sign of the times, in 1982 a fire destroyed the Cineteca National, and with it many invaluable film prints, negatives, documents and archives. Nevertheless the 1980s, the ‘lost decade’ as some have referred to it, saw the creation of the Mexican Film Institute (Instituto Mexicano de Cinematograffa, IMCINE) as well as the leading academic centre for Film Studies in Mexico: the Centro de Investigacion y Estudios Cinematograficos (CIEC) at the Universidad de Guadalajara. CIEC has maintained a close relationship with the
Guadalajara Film Festival which was created that same year and is still the only academic program in the country that offers a Masters degree in Film Studies.
At around this time a personal clash between Mexico’s two foremost film historians and critics, Garcia Riera and Ayala Blanco, divided the country’s film community and would continue to polarize it through the coming decades. This feud also helped to establish two hegemonic lines of study that are still in place: one historiographical, the other semiotic and post-structuralist, the former more institutionalized and delineated than the latter.
Garc a Riera founded the magazines Imagenes and Dicine. The latter, subsequently edited by Nelson Carro, Susana Lopez Aranda and Leonardo Garcia Tsao, was published bi-monthly between 1984 and 1997, and for some years it was the most consistent and important film magazine in Mexico. In addition to producing the six-volume Mexico visto por el cine extranjero (1987-90), a detailed account of Mexican references in world (and especially Hollywood) cinema from 1894 until 1986, Garcia Riera also revised his Historia documental del cine mexicano (1992-97) and expanded it to 18 volumes. This massive work provides a thorough account of all Mexican film productions from 1929 to 1976. Garcia Riera was also one of the founders of CIEC and remained its director until his death in 2002.
Ayala Blanco, for his part, completed La busqueda del cine mexicano (1986a) and La condition del cine mexicano (1986b) as further instalments in his rigorous analysis of Mexican cinema. He also published with Marfa Luisa Amador Cartelera cinematografica (1985-99), a collection of historiographical books on film exhibition in Mexico. He has taught at CUEC, while writing as a film columnist for Excelsior and later for El Financiero. More recently, Ayala Blanco has published Lafugacidad del cine mexicano (2001), La grandeza del cine mexicano (2004) and La herejia del cine mexicano (2006), which incorporate the work of some local video artists into his study of local cinema.
The 1980s saw the emergence of a new generation of often prolific film scholars, many of them related to CIEC, who specialized in the historiographical aspects of the emergence of Mexican filmmaking and its film industry—an emphasis possibly motivated by a kind of nostalgia for the extinct film industry and the lost Cineteca Nacional archives. Among these scholars areAurelio de los Reyes (1983a; 1983b; 1995), Eduardo de la Vega (1995; 2001) Angel Miquel (1992), Margarita de Orellana, Federico Davalos and Moises Vinas (1992). In addition, scholars like Patricia Torres San Mart n (2001) and Julia Tunon (1998; 2000), also linked to CIEC, and more recently Margara Millan (1999) at UNAM, have incorporated feminist perspectives and placed particular emphasis on the history of women filmmakers in Mexico. Also noteworthy is the work of Norma Iglesias (1991) for its take on the US-Mexico border in Mexican cinema.
Through his extensive research and publications, the cultural essayist and former Nuevo Cine member Carlos Monsivais prepared the ground for the re-evaluation and recontextualization of Mexican popular cinema and helped to focus attention on some overlooked filmmakers and genres. Among the critics who have followed his example and extended it to include studies of film stars and audience reception are Carlos Bonfil (1994), Rafael Avina (1997), Jose Felipe Coria (1997), Andres de Luna (1985), and Gustavo Garc a (1986) along with novelist and journalist Paco Ignacio Taibo I (1986; 1991).
Mexican Film Studies North of the Border
The 1970s saw the birth in the US and Europe of an academic interest in ‘Third World’ cinema, although it was primarily in terms of the ideological struggle that these films exemplified. Notions of ‘Third Cinema’ fuelled by the ‘New Latin American Cinema’ movement provided, in the words of Chon A. Noriega, ‘a theoretical paradigm that in many ways restricted critical interest to the radical cinema of the 1960s and 1970s’ (2000: xii). For many years, the terms ‘Third World Cinema’ and ‘Third Cinema’ would be erroneously interchangeable, thus leading to notions that all texts produced in these countries were ‘necessarily allegorical’ (Jameson, 1986: 69). Furthermore, the ‘Third Cinema’ movement, in order to justify its existence, scorned the popular cinema of the ‘Third World’ countries, thus reinforcing the prevailing academic underestimation of the popular cinema produced in these countries. In this context, Mexico’s peculiar case of an existent film industry and large-scale state participation meant that references to the country in the literature of ‘New Latin American Cinema’ at the time were mostly relegated to side notes and footnotes. It was at around this time, in 1974, that Mexican journalist Beatriz Reyes Nevares published Trece directores del cine mexicano; in its English translation two years later as The Mexican Cinema: Interviews with Thirteen Directors (1976), this was almost certainly the first book devoted to Mexican cinema to be published in the US.
It was only in the 1980s that Mexican cinema became a point of reference in debates about ‘Third World cinema’. This was due largely to film scholars working in the US and the UK, some of whom had previously written about ‘New Latin American Cinema’, such as Julianne Burton-Carvajal (1981; 1983; 1986; 2003), Michael Chanan (1983), John King (1990; 1993), and Chon A. Noriega (2000), along with a new wave of scholars such as Carl J. Mora (1989), Charles Ramirez Berg and Ana M. Lopez (1993). These scholars have drawn on studies by their Mexican counterparts to provide historical context, but they have brought new and fresh approaches, including feminist, queer and cultural theories to Mexican cinema research and criticism.
A seminal book in English is Mexican Cinema (1995), edited by the Paris-based Brazilian film scholar Paulo Antonio Paranagua, which features essays by some of the leading Mexican scholars. The publication of an anthology offering such a broad overview has allowed the next generation of scholars, including David R. Maciel (1990), Joanne Herschfield (1996; Jesse Lerner (1999), Jeffrey M. Pilcher (2001), David William Foster (2002) and Andrea Noble (2005), to make more specific studies of Mexican cinema, such as Lerner’s account of the ‘superocheros’ movement. Paradoxically, some of the more finely grained research into Mexican cinema has been done abroad, mainly in the US and the UK.
Current Challenges
The current prospects for Film Studies in Mexico are not promising. The 1990s saw the appearance—and disappearance—of the film journals Intolerancia, edited by Gustavo Garcia, and Nitrato de plata, edited by Jose Mar a Espinasa, and the apparently inexorable growth of American-style entertainment magazines such as Cine Premier, 24 x segundo and Cinemania. The only current film research and criticism publications in Mexico are Estudios cinematograficos, published quarterly by CUEC, and the online journal www.elojoquepiensa.com, edited by CIEC.
Cultural studies is just beginning to flourish in Mexican academia, but so far its limited connection with film criticism has produced a somewhat timid impact on the study of film. Special mention, however, should be made of the Argentinean-born scholar Nestor Garc a Canclini, who has opened up new possibilities through his research into Mexican cultural industries and audience reception within the current context of ‘globalization’ (Canclini, 1994). What is also noticeable, despite some high-profile exceptions, is how few people are undertaking textual analysis. Serious research into Mexican cinema in Mexico is almost completely dominated by historiographical work.
Questions about ‘East/West’ and the ‘postcolonial’ that have had wide currency elsewhere have been of marginal relevance in Mexican academia: the terms of the debate have simply not resonated locally. The country has considered itself, in Paz’s words, a ‘distinct version of western civilization’ (1980: 402). Whereas the term ‘postcolonial’, as Robert Stam has pointed out, ‘tends to be associated with Third World countries that gained independence after World War II’ (Stam, 2000: 294), Mexico gained its independence from Spain in the nineteenth century. Another easily overlooked factor is that most of the pre-dominant literature in Film Studies is in English and has not been translated into Spanish; many film critics in Mexico are not fluent in English. In these circumstances, more consistent and more effective communication channels between film scholars at home and abroad are clearly desirable. A successful model was the conference held in Guadalajara in 1997 that gathered film scholars from different countries working on Mexican, Latin American and Chicano cinemas and that led to the publication of the anthology Horizontes del segundo siglo: Investigation y pedagogfa del cine mexicano, latinoamericano y chicano (Burton-Carvajal et al., 1998).
In 2000, the long entrenched PRI lost the presidential elections. As a result, at the beginning of the twenty-first century Mexico has witnessed the emergence of new debates around old cultural issues, including questions about the viability of a new nationalist cultural project under the current hegemonic international order, the degree of participation of the state in cultural practices and the political role of intellectuals. These not-soon-to-be-concluded debates are pivotal to the future of film practice and Film Studies in the country. At the same time, Mexican cinema has been experiencing a comeback in the international arena. Some of its films have achieved great critical and box- office success and some Mexican filmmakers working abroad have won unprecedented recognition. A vibrant experimental video art scene in different parts of the country has allowed young artists to explore new ways of linking aesthetics to current political, social, sexual and national identity issues. Indigenous people in different regions of the country have been undertaking diverse media projects in order to represent themselves without intermediaries.
But if the landscape of film and video production is changing rapidly, the study of film in Mexico remains largely trapped within the paradigms of earlier decades. The international resurgence of Mexican films, along with Argentinean and Brazilian films, has been accompanied by critical responses trumpeting the birth of yet another ‘New Latin American cinema’. That old impulse to lump all non-Hollywood and non-European films together in one restrictive ‘Third World’ category provides a poor guide to understanding the complexities of particular ‘national’ cinemas—including Mexican cinema. More relevant would be a study of particular modes of film production, distribution and exhibition in the context of today’s global geopolitics. The study of Mexican cinema could benefit greatly from drawing comparisons, not just with the cinemas of Latin American countries like Brazil, but also with culturally dissimilar cinemas (India, Egypt, Turkey) that have nonetheless shared similar economic, industrial and political experiences.
Paul Willemen has asserted that,
it must be acknowledged that comparative studies in cinema do not yet exist. What is worse, given the current insufferably ethnocentric bias of film theory, it may well be a while before this urgently needed discipline of comparative studies displaces the kind of Film Studies currently being inflicted on university and college students. (1994: 207)
If we are to develop a deeper understanding of non-European cinemas and move beyond the impulse to place ‘Third World’ films into one oversimplified category, Willemen’s statement should have been taken seriously into consideration more than a decade ago.