Women's Cinema and Contemporary Allegories of Violence in Mexico

The international success of the Mexican film Amores Perros (dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000) has been acclaimed for initiating a revival in Mexican cinema, which had been floundering since 1994, when the privatization of the film industry, the devaluation of the peso, another economic crisis, and the sexenio change of administration jeopardized the future of Mexican filmmaking. In 1998, the Mexican film industry produced only eleven feature-length films; in 2001, one year after the international release of Amores Perros, that figure had more than doubled to twenty-eight. Still, while films like Antonio Serrano's comedy Sex, Shame and Tears (Sexo, pudor y lágrimas, 1998) did better at the domestic box office than did Hollywood's Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace (dir. George Lucas, 1999), only two Mexican films—Amores Perros and Alfonso Cuarón's Y tu mamá también (2001)—were financially successful in the cinema global marketplace. Conversely, two other films—Sin dejar huella, directed by Maria Novaro and released the same year as Amores Perros, and Maryse Sistach's Perfume de Violeta: Nadie te oye (Violet Perfume: Nobody Hears You) that came out a year later in 2001, never achieved the popular and financial success that Iñárritu's and Cuarón's films did even though both films were recognized at numerous international film festivals and Novaro and Sistach have each produced a number of critically successful films over the previous two decades in an industry that has remained male-dominated.¹

In 2006, the year of Iñárritu's Babel, Cuarón's Children of Men, and Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, thirty-four statesupported Mexican feature films were released (compared to thirty privately funded Mexican films).² Yet, even though the 2006 Hollywood Oscars honored "los tres amigos"—Iñárritu, del Toro, and Cuarón—with a total of sixteen Oscar nominations, few viewers outside of Mexico were able to see the other fifty Mexican films unless they attended one of the major international film festivals at Cannes, Berlin, or Toronto. More importantly, although the aforementioned three films are directed by Mexicans, and international critics refer to them as "Mexican films," none of these Oscar-nominated films were produced in Mexico, none are being distributed by Mexican companies, none are set in Mexico (except a short segment of Babel that takes place on the California–Baja California border), none feature central characters who are Mexican, and, finally, none of the narratives involve Mexico as a geographic or cultural space.

The extent to which films like Amores Perros, or later films such as Babel, Children of Men, and Pan's Labyrinth, are identified as "Mexican" films even though they have little to do with Mexico in terms of subject or institutional affiliations, reveals how the term national functions within the rubric of what has come to be known as a borderless or global cinema. One of the more successful strategies on the part of distribution agencies operating in the global marketplace has involved marketing a category of film that can be called national cinema that refers to films that supposedly exhibit localized or national representations. In this practice, we understand that the label of the national functions as a generic marker for foreign or exotic, with the label of "national" serving as a marketing or branding tool. "National" films do especially well in the art-cinema circuit, which is facilitated by the proliferation of major international film festivals in which national films gain international recognition. At the same time, a national film cannot be "too national." If it wants to appeal to a global audience, a national film must supplement its localness with a global aesthetic that appeals to an audience educated through globalizing models of cinema practices.

Notwithstanding the international success of Iñárritu, Del Toro, and Cuarón's films, it is undeniable that no matter how well a Mexican film does domestically, it will realize a significant profit only if it can find an international audience. Sin dejar huella and Perfume de Violeta were both financed by...