Screening Neoliberalism

Ignacio Sanchez Prado

Description

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.

Sujets

• Latin American Studies
• Histoire
• Latin America
• Mexico
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 30 juin 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826519672
• Langue: English

Extrait

SCREENING NEOLIBERALISM
SCREENING NEOLIBERALISM
TRANSFORMING MEXICAN CINEMA, 1988–2012
IGNACIO M. SÁNCHEZ PRADO
Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville
© 2014 by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2014
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file
LC control number 2013034449
LC classification number PN1993.5.M4S28 2014
Dewey class number 791.430972--dc23
ISBN 978-0-8265-1965-8 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8265-1967-2 (ebook)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Reinvention of Mexican Cinema
1. Nationalism Eroded: Mexican Cinema in Times of Crisis
2. Publicists in Love: Romantic Comedy, Cinema Privatization, and the Aesthetics of the Middle Class
3. The Neoliberal Gaze: Reframing Politics in the “Democratic Transition”
4. The Three Amigos and the Lone Ranger: Mexican “Global Auteurs” on the National Stage
Conclusion: Mexican Cinema after Neoliberalism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing a book about Mexican cinema means being in a state of dialogue and exchange with two wonderful scholarly communities: Mexicanists and Latin American film specialists. This book has benefited from constant conversations with members of both groups. At the expense of possibly forgetting someone, and realizing that very many colleagues touch one’s work during a long-term project, I want to thank the following people (in strict alphabetical order) for the dialogues and debates, as well as for the invitations to present my work and for helping me work through some ideas and materials: Susan Antebi, Ericka Beckman, Steve Bunker, Irma Cantú, Cristina Carrasco, Gabriela Copertari, Rosana Díaz Zambrana, Linda Egan, Craig Epplin, Oswaldo Estrada, Sebastiaan Faber, Manuel Gutiérrez, Anne Hardcastle, Hermann Herlinghaus, Emily Hind, Robert McKee Irwin, Horacio Legrás, Ilana Luna, Joshua Lund, Misha MacLaird, Kathleen Newman, Dianna Niebylski, Anna Nogar, Joanna Page, Pedro Ángel Palou, Andrew Paxman, Ana Peluffo, Adela Pineda, Juan Poblete, Sarah Pollack, Sara Poot-Herrera, Brian Price, Carolina Rocha, Eva Karene Romero, Anne Rubenstein, Victoria Ruétalo, José Ramón Ruisánchez, Fernando Fabio Sánchez, Jacobo Sefamí, Georgia Seminet, Helena Simonett, Carolina Sinitsky-Cole, Nohemy Solórzano-Tompson, Sam Steinberg, Juana Suárez, Dolores Tierney, Patricia Tomé, José del Valle, John V. Waldron, Tamara Williams, Edward Wright-Ríos, and Oswaldo Zavala.
The research underlying this book was conducted at Washington University in Saint Louis, which has been a great source of institutional support. Two faculty research grants and a grant from the International and Area Studies Program funded parts of my research project. The support from the Offices of the Dean of Arts and Sciences and the Dean of the Graduate School, as well as the Office of the Provost, was invaluable. I want to thank my department chairs in Romance Languages (Elzbieta Sklodowska and Harriet Stone) and International and Area Studies (James V. Wertsch and Timothy Parsons) for their continuing support. A special mention is reserved for Mabel Moraña, my mentor and the director of Latin American Studies. She is always there for me, and my work has been personally, intellectually, and professionally influenced by her. My colleagues and the staff in Romance Languages and Literatures, International and Area Studies, and other areas of Washington University in Saint Louis provide an enviable academic context for any scholar. I deeply thank all of them.
The ideas in this book have been road-tested by a wonderful group of students, both graduate and undergraduate. I want to thank all the students in my Mexican Film in the Age of NAFTA seminar, who heard most of the arguments in this book and helped me make them better and more accessible. I also want to thank three students—Nadia Mann, Alyse Rooks, and Ania Wojtowicz—who helped me find archival materials as my volunteer research assistants. Another student, Olivia Cosentino, read parts of this book from the perspective of an undergraduate student and was instrumental in helping me make the book accessible. Four graduate students—Britta Anderson, Megan Havard, Sara Potter, and José Montelongo—helped at different stages of research and revision too. Finally, I want to thank Anna Eggemeyer’s clinical eye for helping me catch those pesky language issues that I miss as a second-language speaker.
The ability to research Mexican cinema is tied to the wonderful work performed by many people in the country’s cultural institutions. I need to recognize the Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (IMCINE), the Cineteca Nacional, and the Filmoteca de la UNAM, because their combined efforts make Mexican cinema available for scholarly inquiry. My mother, María del Carmen Prado, helped me find and secure many films and books when I was unable to conduct research on site, and she has become at times more apt in finding materials than myself. I also want to thank Vanderbilt University Press in general and Eli Bortz in particular for believing in this project and for being stellar and professional people to work with. The two readers of the manuscript were very generous in their endorsement and useful in their comments. Joell Smith-Borne was very helpful during the production process, and Peg Duthie did an exceptional job as a copyeditor. And of course, I want to thank my wife, Abby Hathaway, without whose love, personal support, and company I would have never been able to complete this book with success and sanity.
INTRODUCTION
The Reinvention of Mexican Cinema
Going to the movies in Mexico City in the mid-to-late-1980s was a unique—and uniquely surreal—experience. Most film theaters at the time were part of a State-owned conglomerate named Compañía Operadora de Teatros S. A. (COTSA), largely made up of huge single-screen venues scattered all over the city. Many of these sites had a long history. For instance, Cine Ópera, located in the working-class neighborhood of Santa María la Ribera, abandoned for many years afterwards, and now a concert venue, opened its doors as a cinema in 1949 with a seating capacity of about 3,500 spectators. Known as a jewel of Art Deco style, Cine Ópera premiered with a showing of Una familia de tantas , Alejandro Galindo’s melodrama about the clash between traditional Mexican family values and the Americanized modernity of the time. From its inception, Cine Ópera was part of an important transformation in the practice of cinema that took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s, thanks to the tidal wave of modernization during the administration of President Miguel Alemán. Andrea Noble recalls this period: “Prompted by the formation of an emergent middle class, whose values were imitative to some large degree of North American cultural models, these films focused on the disintegration of traditional family bonds in the wake of modern social mores, displaying in so doing varying degrees of anxiety about the process” (102). Una familia de tantas , Noble argues, was peculiar because it offered “a more progressive narrative that endorses the positive benefits that modernity is implied to bring to the family and society more generally” (103). The fact that Cine Ópera opened with such a movie was telling: it was part of a wave of renewal in Mexican cinematic production and consumption made possible by an increasingly urbanized middle class.
By the late 1980s, the iconic status of Cine Ópera, as well as the memory of the cultural significance invested in its foundations, had disappeared. I personally remember going frequently to Cine Ópera as a child, mostly to see Hollywood movies of the day, thanks to the fact that the theater manager was an old friend of the family who allowed us to watch them for free. The experience of watching a movie there was both exciting and unpleasant. On the one hand, the theater presented the films on a magnificently large screen, which gave a larger-than-life sense to the already spectacular movies of the era. On the other, the theater was full of small and large inconveniences that, for many people, became reason enough not to spend their money there. The floor was consistently sticky, thanks to layers upon layers of spilled soda and food residue. The popcorn from the concession stands was so unbelievably stale that I sometimes wondered why my mother kept purchasing it (perhaps she was compensating for not paying admission). Most incredible of all, the theater had a cat running around the seats: its function was to chase mice enticed by the same food that made the floor sticky. It is thus not surprising that the 3,500 seats of the theater—at least those that were not broken—were for the most part empty. The advent of video and the possibility of watching movies on the emergent cable systems had allowed the middle class to avoid theaters like Cine Ópera altogether. Tomás Pérez Turrent documents that, between 1989 and 1991, “992 movie theaters were closed and 10,082 video clubs had opened” in the country and, perhaps more importantly, most of the closed cinemas “had exhibited primarily Mexican films” (111). The issue here is that this transition took place mostly because of lackluster film attendance, which undercut exhibitors’ financial viability, even when the showings were financed by the State. Th