The Classical Mexican Cinema : : The Poetics of the Exceptional Golden Age Films / / Charles Ramírez Berg.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Texas Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Berg, Charles Ramírez,
• Place / Publishing House: Austin : : University of Texas Press, , [2021]; ©2015
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Series: Texas Film and Media Studies Series
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (254 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter 1. Introduction: Retheorizing Mexican Film History -- Chapter 2. Every Picture Tells a Story: José Guadalupe Posada’s Protocinematic Graphic Art -- Chapter 3. Enrique Rosas’s El automóvil gris (1919) and the Dawning of Modern Mexican Cinema -- Chapter 4. The Adoption of the Hollywood Style and the Transition to Sound -- Chapter 5. Mexican Cinema Comes of Age: Fernando de Fuentes in the 1930s -- Chapter 6. The Cinematic Invention of Mexico: The Poetics and Politics of the Fernández Unit Style -- Chapter 7. Luis Buñuel in Mexico -- Chapter 8. Three Classical Mexican Cinema Genre Films -- Chapter 9. Conclusion: What Happened to the Classical Mexican Cinema? -- Notes -- Index