The Classical Mexican Cinema

"An ambitious book that recognizes and defines the enduring presence of a 'Mexican' way of producing cinematic realities. One of the greatest strengths of The Classical Mexican Cinema is that it integrates both visual and textual analysis. This approach makes the book brilliant, solid, and very attractive." -- Fernando Fabio Sanchez, Assistant Professor of Spanish, California Polytechnic State University, and author of Artful Assassins: Murder as Art in Modern Mexico and La luz y la guerra: El cine de la Revolucion Mexicana

In one of the first systematic studies of style in Mexican filmmaking, a preeminent film scholar explores the creation of a Golden Age cinema that was uniquely Mexican in its themes, styles, and ideology.

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.