Mexico's Cinema: A Century of Film and Filmmakers (review)

This is the best book to date on Mexican cinema. Joanne Hershfield and David Maciel have done a valuable service for those interested in Mexican culture and Latin American cinema by compiling this collection of essays which cover the gamut from the silent period up to the end of the 1990s. They wisely chose to construct an anthology rather than attempt to author a book which, given the lack of rigorous monographs, could well have resulted in a superficial work. They also made an intelligent decision to include authors from both the United States and Mexico, thus offering an unusual selection. Although I do not share their enthusiasm for Mexican cinema--as a long-time resident of that country I have suffered too often from the churros that dominate its screens--I admire their efforts in making these essays available to the United States public.

The most important chapter in this book is Seth Fein's "From Collaboration to Containment: Hollywood and the International Political Economy of Mexican Cinema after the Second World War." Previously published in Film Historia (Barcelona), it has here been reworked to make its argument even more forceful and articulate. In a nutshell, Fein demonstrates how Hollywood's commercial concerns and the United States State Department's ideological mission worked hand-in-glove to keep Mexican cinema from continuing the expansion it had enjoyed during World War II, when it became one of the most important film industries in the world and the source of movies which Latin Americans most wanted to see. He shows how its success contained, ironically, the seeds of its failure: collaboration with the U.S. which was instrumental in its rise would later impose the logic of containment. After reading this chapter, I was left with the feeling that we others writing about Mexican cinema are in swaddling clothes compared to the sophistication of Fein's analyses, which are based on international, multi-archival research. Fein's work on the Mexican film industry and its relation to Hollywood and U.S. foreign policy has now appeared in a number of articles; when they are put into book form they will transform the study of cinema in Mexico, Latin America, and other dependent nations.

The essays on women, which correct the almost absolute neglect of gender in previous books on Mexican cinema, are also significant advances. Patricia Torres de San Martín offers a nice introduction to two early women directors, Adela Sequeyro and Matilde Landeta, but the plato fuerte on this subject is Maciel and Hershfield's chapter, "Women and Gender Representation in the Contemporary Cinema of Mexico." There, they document the traditional exclusion of women from the industry, noting that the union banned women from serving as assistant film directors, thereby denying them a necessary apprenticeship. They then trace the entrance of women into cinema as a result of the rise of feminism, the expansion of the film schools, and the demise of machista unions. Their intelligent discussion of women's movies has convinced me that, if Mexican cinema has a future, it is thanks to the women who are now making it their bailiwick.

Though other chapters lack the in-depth research of Fein's study or the contemporary pull of Maciel and Hershfield's focus on gender, they are vital contributions to our knowledge of Mexican cinema. It will be useful for U.S. readers to have access to the essay by Carlos Monsiváis, who here provides insight into Cantinflas and Tin Tan, the leading Mexican comics. Unfortunately, the translation fails to capture the concatenations which his work has in Mexico. Too, errors in this essay point to problems which may go deeper: when Monsiváis says, "Pedro is, needless to say, Pedro" (p. 50), the surname "Armendáriz" appears within...