Revolution and Rebellion in Mexican Film

Revolution and Rebellion in Mexican Film
Author: Niamh Thornton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2013-08-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1441128689

Revolution and Rebellion in Mexican Film examines Mexican films of political conflict from the early studio Revolutionary films of the 1930-50s up to the campaigning Zapatista films of the 2000s. Mapping this evolution out for the first time, the author takes three key events under consideration: the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920); the student movement and massacre in 1968; and, finally, the more recent Zapatista Rebellion (1994-present). Analyzing films such as Vamanos con Pancho Villa (1936), El Grito (1968), and Corazon del Tiempo (2008), the author uses the term 'political conflict' to refer to those violent disturbances, dramatic periods of confrontation, injury and death, which characterize particular historical events involving state and non-state actors that may have a finite duration, but have a long-lasting legacy on the nation. These conflicts have been an important component of Mexican film since its inception and include studio productions, documentaries, and independent films.

The Mexican Revolution on the World Stage

The Mexican Revolution on the World Stage
Author: Adela Pineda Franco
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2019-07-23
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1438475624

The first major social revolution of the twentieth century, the Mexican Revolution was visually documented in technologically novel ways and to an unprecedented degree during its initial armed phase (1910–21) and the subsequent years of reconstruction (1921–40). Offering a sweeping and compelling new account of this iconic revolution, The Mexican Revolution on the World Stage reveals its profound impact on both global cinema and intellectual thought in and beyond Mexico. Focusing on the period from 1940 to 1970, Adela Pineda Franco examines a group of North American, European, and Latin American filmmakers and intellectuals who mined this extensive visual archive to produce politically engaged cinematic works that also reflect and respond to their own sociohistorical contexts. The author weaves together multilayered analysis of individual films, the history of their production and reception, and broader intellectual developments to illuminate the complex relationship between culture and revolution at the onset of World War II, during the Cold War, and amid the anti-systemic movements agitating Latin America in the 1960s. Ambitious in scope, this book charts an innovative transnational history of not only the visual representation but also the very idea of revolution.

Celluloid Nationalism and Other Melodramas

Celluloid Nationalism and Other Melodramas
Author: Susan Dever
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2003-07-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780791457634

Explores issues of representation and rebellion in Mexican and Mexican American cinema.

Tastemakers and Tastemaking

Tastemakers and Tastemaking
Author: Niamh Thornton
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2020-12-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1438481144

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.

Imagining the Mexican Revolution

Imagining the Mexican Revolution
Author: Tilmann Altenberg
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2014-08-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1443865702

“Mexico’s 1910 Revolution engendered a vast range of responses: from novels and autobiographies to political cartoons, feature films and placards. In the light of the centennial commemorations, contributors to this original collection evaluate the cultural legacy of this landmark event in a series of engaging essays. Imagining the Mexican Revolution is a rich resource for those interested in ways in which literary and visual culture mediate our understandings of this complex historical phenomenon.” – Professor Andrea Noble, Durham University “This collection of essays by leading and emerging Mexicanists is a distinct and welcome contribution that enhances public and academic understanding of Mexico’s rich revolutionary heritage. It makes available some of the most cutting-edge thinking from the field of Mexican cultural studies on the literary and visual representations produced over a period of one hundred years in Mexico and in other countries.” – Dr Chris Harris, University of Liverpool “In fascinating detail, the essays of this landmark book examine the complexity of the post-revolutionary years in Mexico. But the findings also have applications for other cultures of the world where ideologies of fascism and socialism have competed and media manipulation has existed. Among the volume’s many excellent features are its illustrations.” – Professor Emeritus Nancy Vogeley, University of San Francisco

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.

Prostitution and Sex Work in Global Cinema

Prostitution and Sex Work in Global Cinema
Author: Danielle Hipkins
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2017-10-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3319646087

This volume brings together international scholars to engage in the question of how film has represented a figure that for many is simply labelled ‘prostitute’. The prostitute is one of the most enduring female figures. She has global historical resonance and stories, images and narratives surrounding her, and her experiences, circulate transnationally. As this book will explore, the broad term prostitute can cover a variety of experiences and representations that are both repressive and also have the potential to empower women and disrupt cultural expectations. The contributors aim to consider how frequently 19th-century narratives of female prostitution—hence the label ‘fallen women’—are still recycled in contemporary visual contexts, and to understand how widespread, and in what contexts, the destigmatization of female sex work is underway on screen.

The Films of Arturo Ripstein

The Films of Arturo Ripstein
Author: Manuel Gutiérrez Silva
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2019-10-24
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3030229564

This book gathers eleven scholarly contributions dedicated to the work of Mexican director Arturo Ripstein. The collection, the first of its kind, constitutes a sustained critical engagement with the twenty-nine films made by this highly acclaimed yet under-studied filmmaker. The eleven essays included come from scholars whose work stands at the intersection of the fields of Latin American and Mexican Film Studies, Gender and Queer Studies, Cultural Studies, History and Literary studies. Ripstein’s films, often scripted by his long-time collaborator, Paz Alicia Garciadiego, represent an unprecedented achievement in Mexican and Latin American film. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Ripstein has successfully maintained a prolific output unmatched by any director in the region. Though several book-length studies have been published in Spanish, French, German, and Greek, to date no analogue exists in English. This volume provides a much-needed contribution to the field.

Slave Revolt on Screen

Slave Revolt on Screen
Author: Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2021-05-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1496833120

Recipient of the 2021 Honorary Mention for the Haiti Book Prize from the Haitian Studies Association In Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games author Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall analyzes how films and video games from around the world have depicted slave revolt, focusing on the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). This event, the first successful revolution by enslaved people in modern history, sent shock waves throughout the Atlantic World. Regardless of its historical significance however, this revolution has become less well-known—and appears less often on screen—than most other revolutions; its story, involving enslaved Africans liberating themselves through violence, does not match the suffering-slaves-waiting-for-a-white-hero genre that pervades Hollywood treatments of Black history. Despite Hollywood’s near-silence on this event, some films on the Revolution do exist—from directors in Haiti, the US, France, and elsewhere. Slave Revolt on Screen offers the first-ever comprehensive analysis of Haitian Revolution cinema, including completed films and planned projects that were never made. In addition to studying cinema, this book also breaks ground in examining video games, a pop-culture form long neglected by historians. Sepinwall scrutinizes video game depictions of Haitian slave revolt that appear in games like the Assassin’s Creed series that have reached millions more players than comparable films. In analyzing films and games on the revolution, Slave Revolt on Screen calls attention to the ways that economic legacies of slavery and colonialism warp pop-culture portrayals of the past and leave audiences with distorted understandings.