Tastemakers and Tastemaking

Niamh Thornton

Description

Tastemakers and Tastemaking develops a new approach to analyzing violence in Mexican films and television by examining the curation of violence in relation to three key moments: the decade-long centennial commemoration of the Mexican Revolution launched in 2010; the assaults and murders of women in Northern Mexico since the late 1990s; and the havoc wreaked by the illegal drug trade since the early 2000s. Niamh Thornton considers how violence is created, mediated, selected, or categorized by tastemakers, through the strategic choices made by institutions, filmmakers, actors, and critics. Challenging assumptions about whose and what kind of work merit attention and traversing normative boundaries between "good" and "bad" taste, Thornton draws attention to the role of tastemaking in both "high" and "low" media, including film cycles and festivals, adaptations of Mariano Azuela's 1915 novel, Los de Abajo, Amat Escalante's hyperrealist art films, and female stars of recent genre films and the telenovela, La reina del sur. Making extensive use of videographic criticism, Thornton pays particularly close attention to the gendered dimensions of violence, both on and off screen.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Tastemakers and Tastemaking: Questions of Taste, Violence, and Gender

1. Cultural Institutions and Gendered Taste Formation: Nelson Carro and the Cineteca Nacional in 2010

2. Commonplace and Routine: Amat Escalante's Extreme Realism in Los bastardos (2008) and Heli (2013)

3. Reversioning and Thick Contexts: The Cinematic Adaptations of Los de abajo

4. Bodily Excess and Containment: Bordertown (Gregory Nava, 2006) and The Virgin of Juarez (Kevin James Dobson, 2006)

5. Curating Cruelty and Criminality: The Radical Mediation of Kate del Castillo

Conclusion: Ethical Reflections on Legitimation and Taste

Filmography
References
Index

Sujets

• Télévision
• Film
• Caribbean
• Mexico
• History of film
• History of the Americas
• Latin America
• Television
• Visual culture
• Popular culture
• Película fotográfica
• Latin American

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438481142
• Langue: English

Extrait

TASTEMAKERS
and
TASTEMAKING
SUNY series in Latin American Cinema

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado and Leslie L. Marsh, editors
TASTEMAKERS
and
TASTEMAKING
Mexico and Curated Screen Violence
Niamh Thornton
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Thornton, Niamh, 1972– author.
Title: Tastemakers and tastemaking : Mexico and curated screen violence / Niamh Thornton.
Description: Albany : State University of New York, 2020. | Series: SUNY series in Latin American cinema | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020023295 (print) | LCCN 2020023296 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438481135 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781438481142 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—Mexico—History and criticism. | Motion pictures—Aesthetics. | Television—Aesthetics. | Curatorship—Philosophy. | Television programs—Mexico—History. | Violence in motion pictures. | Violence on television.
Classification: LCC PN1993.5.M4 T463 2020 (print) | LCC PN1993.5.M4 (ebook) | DDC 791.430972—dc25
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023295
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023296
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Contents
L IST OF I LLUSTRATIONS
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I NTRODUCTION
Tastemakers and Tastemaking: Questions of Taste, Violence, and Gender
C HAPTER O NE
Cultural Institutions and Gendered Taste Formation: Nelson Carro and the Cineteca Nacional in 2010
C HAPTER T WO
Commonplace and Routine: Amat Escalante’s Extreme Realism in Los bastardos (2008) and Heli (2013)
C HAPTER T HREE
Reversioning and Thick Contexts: The Cinematic Adaptations of Los de abajo
C HAPTER F OUR
Bodily Excess and Containment: Bordertown (Gregory Nava, 2006) and The Virgin of Juarez (Kevin James Dobson, 2006)
C HAPTER F IVE
Curating Cruelty and Criminality: The Radical Mediation of Kate del Castillo
C ONCLUSION
Ethical Reflections on Legitimation and Taste
F ILMOGRAPHY
R EFERENCES
I NDEX
Illustrations
Figure 1 Slow cinema inspired by James Benning in Los bastardos
Figure 2 Opening credits (1939, left, and 1976, right)
Figure 3 The wife (1939, left, and 1976, right)
Figure 4 Macías in death (1939, left, and 1976, right)
Figure 5 Macías’s wife after his death (1939, left) and Macías in death (1976, right)
Figure 6 Lauren/Lopez as reporter
Figure 7 Lauren/Lopez as worker
Figure 8 Teresa/del Castillo finding her way
Acknowledgments
To get from concept to manuscript takes much energy, time, thinking, and most of all support, encouragement, and nurturing. This is done with the help of many individuals too numerous to mention. These include colleagues and peers, friends and families. I am indebted to them all, but am responsible for the final version.
Thank you to the University of Liverpool for giving me research leave in 2011 to carry out interviews and research in Mexico City and for the award of a Santander Grant in 2015 to complete my research in Mexico. To the staff at the libraries at the University of Liverpool for their support in sourcing material and those at Liverpool John Moores University at IM Marsh for the space to complete the writing and editing.
Thank you to Ana García Bergua for her support and sharing her contacts with me so that I could interview individuals who otherwise were unavailable. Thank you to Nelson Carro of Cineteca Nacional de México in Mexico City for being generous with his time, insights, and expertise. To Elides Pérez Bistrain, Genoveva García Rojas, and the rest of the staff at the Centro de documentación at the Cineteca Nacional de México in Mexico City for finding what I needed and directing me to materials that only the archivists know connect to each other.
As a work in progress over years of thinking, presenting, writing, and conversations this has been the product of many conference papers, blog posts, and the insights and questions of others. Sometimes they’ve been the result of me trying out my ideas in the world and realizing where they don’t always make sense to others. I appreciated all of those responses because they helped make this better. Thanks to those who have read and given considered feedback on drafts including Victoria McCollum. Any mistakes are mine, but the feedback has made it better. Thank you to the two anonymous readers who were brilliant critical friends. Their insights helped me to refine this manuscript.
Thank you to the supportive series editors, Ignacio Sánchez-Prado and Lesley Marsh, and to the editorial staff at State University of New York Press including John Raymond for his attention to detail, Ryan Morris and Fran Keneston for their support, and to Rebecca Colesworthy for her positive, careful, and always cheerful guidance throughout the process, but, particularly, as the manuscript was being shepherded through its final stages.
Thanks a million times over to Liz Greene, for her attentive and patient reading of multiple versions and revisions, and always being a supportive editor and critical friend, when it was much needed, and for nurturing me and giving me much love. All this and more made conceptualizing, writing, and finishing this project possible. Without that unstinting, unwavering, and unassailable support, work, and patience, none of this would have been possible.
To Marmaduke and Rua, because distraction is needed to keep me sane. To Dario, just because.
Introduction
Tastemakers and Tastemaking
Questions of Taste, Violence, and Gender
Taste is a nebulous word. Without a qualifier it is meaningless, and with the standard qualifiers of good or bad, it is an unstable and shifting signifier. Premised on its instability through looking at those who make film and television and create value and the systems in which they operate, Tastemakers and Tastemaking: Mexico and Curated Screen Violence examines how taste retains its potency. Tastemakers and tastemaking are terms that draw on a long theoretical trajectory on taste, and simultaneously signal toward a curatorial agency and the cultural context within which tastemakers and tastemaking operate. Professional curatorial practices are not a precondition of tastemaking. Instead, I use the term tastemakers to encompass a wide range of influential or indicative individuals who are both determining and reflective of wider patterns and trends.
Questions of taste and value are attached to works determining their inclusion on syllabi, their success in the marketplace, and their duration through critical reflection. Within this framing, a high/low dyad persists, setting one against the other as if they lie in stark contrast rather than recognizing a slippage between them and ignoring the power structures that uphold both the object and those who decide its value. To forgo the persistent oppositional binary and signal its failings, Tastemakers and Tastemaking: Mexico and Curated Screen Violence considers tastemaking and tastemakers. That is, who decides what is of value and how creatives in film and television produce work that intervenes in questions of taste.
The tastemakers being examined in this book are individuals involved in the creation or selection of film and television works in which gender and violence intersect. Violence has particular salience because it falls outside of the usual considerations of taste as a consequence of being inherently aberrant. To enact violence is to break with social or legal codes, which has to be justified through specific framing. There are parameters and guidelines to these that fit within national or international codes, but none are concerned with taste. Violence is innately excessive because it exceeds normative behavior and its screening is about provoking an affective response, all of which often indicate bad taste. Nonetheless, screen cultures have participated in the validation of violence, often ascribing it high value, but also interrogating its meanings. This leads to slippages that are not easily mapped and require mixed methodologies to unpack. Violence is enacted upon and by gendered bodies; therefore, to comprehend violence it is important to reflect on the ways the gender of the agent or victim can modify or amplify the violent act and how it is read. I propose tastemaking and tastemakers as a productive way of looking at gender and violence, by looking at who and what informs taste through the patterns and anomalies that are evidenced through the case studies.
Tastemakers are not merely gatekeepers, they are also engaging with and building upon ideas, histories, and traditions established by others. To operate in such a contested and complex field is to be bound by preceding norms and expectations of what should be valued and how particular media and forms can be appropriately deployed. Tastemaking as a verb encompasses the action of a tastemaker and the consequences of these actions. The case studies in this book reveal the outcome of the tastemakers’ decisions and the cultural con