Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Introduction: Culture Monopolies and Criticism: A Way Out?

2004; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/dis.2005.0024

1522-5321

John V. Waldron,

Cultural Industries and Urban Development

Introduction: Culture Monopolies and Mexican Cinema:A Way Out? John V. Waldron (bio) In recent years Mexican cinema has exploded on screens in the United States. Films such as Amores perros, Y tu mamá también, and El crimen del Padre Amaro made it to US art-houses and slightly beyond creating something of a sensation here. This is not to mention that a Mexican novelist and script writer, Guillermo Arriaga, and director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who both collaborated on Amores perros, recently worked together on 21 Grams (2003) which was made in the US with a multi-national cast. The success of Alfonso Cuarón—previously of Y tu mamá también fame and director of the most recent installment in the Harry Potter saga, is something that no one needs to read about again. This present issue contains articles that not only look at the current wave of films to hit the screens in the US, but also those that have not quite made it and others which were made well before. In this way the articles here can be read as providing a specific context, however incomplete, to the current interest in Mexican cinema. Since this journal is published in the US, it is perhaps worthwhile here in the introduction to look more generally at some ways that Mexican cinema has been received in the US. It is also of interest here to look at how the pressures of globalization, largely from the US and particularly from Hollywood, affect Mexican cinema and its context. In many ways Mexican cinema responds to and or is made within a context [End Page 5] created by two delimiting paradigmatic structures that each maintain something of a culture monopoly. Hollywood represents the "trans-national" globalizing culture that exerts influence from without while nationalist concerns both limit and support discourse from within. Cronos, a film made by Guillermo del Toro, is a film that responds to each of these exigencies in a way that offers a possible way out of their limitations. Cronos is perhaps the perfect film to study the confluence of the internal and external forces I want to study because it was released in 1992 during the discussions of NAFTA. It was also one of the first of the current wave of Mexican cinema and cineastes to enter the US. Del Toro released the film in 1992 and it led to his entry into Hollywood with Mimic (1994) and other "B" type or thriller movies including the recent Hellboy (2004). From the US perspective, the recent wave of Mexican cinema as well as of directors, writers, and cinematographers might be seen as a "Boom."1 This cinematic "Boom" is similar to the well-known literary one of the 60s and 70s which ignored the long history of Latin American literature as well as the work of other writers not belonging to the select group. The cinematic "Boom" ignores the fact that Mexican cinema's history is at least as long as that in the US. It is a tradition that begins in 1896 when Bon Bernard and Vayre showed the first frames ever filmed in Mexico, including General Díaz Strolling Through Chapultapec Park (García 5). This present "Boom" also leaves out many directors and script writers for different reasons, some dealing with projected popularity. The fact that all the Mexican directors gaining fame in the US, however limited, are men overlooks the existence of women filmmakers, a fact also disregarded by many students of Mexico. Mexican women directors do exist, however, as proven in Elissa Rashkin's excellent book, Women Filmmakers in Mexico: The Country of Which We Dream. Though US cinema, that is to say Hollywood, remains largely in a state of amnesia regarding Mexican cinema's long history, the reverse is not true. The history and development of cinema in Mexico in some ways mirrors that in the US (Scott). So close was their development at some points that some classic Hollywood films such as Dracula were filmed almost simultaneously with a Spanish-speaking cast for distribution to Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries. Mexican cinema perhaps has much in common with Hollywood...