Cinemachismo: Masculinities and Sexuality in Mexican Film

4. Mexico’s Third-Wave New Cinema and the Cultural Politics of Film

4 Mexico’sThird-WaveNewCinemaandthe CulturalPoliticsofFilm    Mexico has an expansive cultural tradition. It is in our interest to increase the presence of our values, our culture, and the art of Mexico. These will benefit from having a privileged status in our international policy. At the same time, we wish to reevaluate our patrimony and promote our exceptional heritage and our rich future. carlos salinas de gortari, 1994 I n the 1989 to 1994 administrative period, the ambitious initiatives of IMCINE Director Ignacio Durán Loera in collaboration with various national and international private and state cultural institutions carried out controversial changes to deregulate and privatize the film industry. Government investments in the film industry were drastically reduced, while at the same time IMCINE aggressively promoted a new generation of filmmakers who formed a putative “new cinema” that heralded an uneven and discontinuous and controversial renaissance in Mexican film culture. This renaissance was augmented by high-profile exhibitions of Mexican art and culture globally, but especially in the United States. Most notable among these events were two major touring retrospectives of Mexican films from the classic and contemporary periods: one took place at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, the other at the University of California, Los Angeles. The touring blockbuster fine arts exhibition “Mexico: Splendor of Thirty Centuries,” held in conjunction with more than 150 cultural events across the United States, was designed to explicate Mexico’s history and culture to U.S. audiences and to reinforce the sense of Mexico as an equal business partner.1 136 Cinemachismo In the early 1990s, cultural theorist Néstor García Canclini reexamined state-cinema relations and asked several provocative questions, most importantly : Is it necessary for the state to continue to fund Mexican films, and are the current levels of state funding allocated for film productions viable and desirable?2 This broad reevaluation was expanded to include the pertinent topics of the importance of cinema in protecting and promoting Mexican national identity as well as the very desirability of government regulation and promotion of national film culture. The 1990s “new” Mexican cinema is the third “new cinema” promoted by the state and the film industry.3 The previous two “new cinemas” emerged in the mid-1960s and in the 1970s, both part of early State and film industry–sponsored initiatives to promote quality “art” films in light of a prolonged crisis in the film industry that paralleled a sociopolitical crisis in Mexico and waning State legitimacy.4 The contemporary cinema-state relationship in Mexico was borne of early 1990s restructuring of State involvement in film through IMCINE. Cinema was envisioned as an integral component of government diplomacy and was particularly important to both the Salinas de Gortari administration and his beleaguered party, the PRI. This chapter focuses on the role of film in light of the Mexican government ’s promotion of globalization, including the deregulation of the market . I discuss Néstor García Canclini’s questions concerning the necessary protection of the film industry via a case study of changes in the representation of mexicanidad in the revolutionary melodrama film genre, for decades the privileged genre for representing national history. I focus on the film adaptation of Laura Esquivel’s novel Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate, Alfonso Arau, 1991), the most commercially successful Mexican film of the early ’90s. The film is a genre hybrid, blending romance, border drama, and revolutionary melodrama; it is simultaneously a family saga and a woman’s picture. Como agua para chocolate, along with several other features and short films, carved an important niche in the competitive U.S. film market, around the world, and in film festival circuits. Beginning with Como agua para chocolate, Mexican film become “an international film critics’ darling” and “audience favorite,” according to B. Ruby Rich, film critic and programmer for the Sundance Film Festival (2001). Arau’s film almost single-handedly paved the way for the success of Amores perros (2000) and Y tu mamá también (2001), which caused an international splash with audiences and critics alike. Close readings of the Como agua para chocolate phenomenon, both novel and film, reveal how the neoliberal policies adopted by the Mexican government in Mexico’s Third-Wave New Cinema 137 the late 1980s contributed in no small measure to the marginalization of narratives and images of the Revolution in state-funded film production. I...