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141 Afterword C Michael Donnelly I come to the pleasure of writing this afterword to Mex-Ciné from a history that crosses all dimensions of the filmmaking and filmgoing experience: from cinematic exhibitor and archivist to producer, DP (director of photography), and much more. This odyssey began at an early age. As a kid I played with still cameras and Super 8 and made home movies and photographs as a form of personal expression.From the Chicago suburbs,where I went to practically every matinee I could get a ride to, I moved to Mexico City. Still a teenager, I was constantly exposed to the cinema and culture of that nation both as a spectator and a participant. Faced with watching awful dubbed versions of my previously favorite TV programs—a distinctly different experience in Spanish—I abandoned the habit, became a television invalid, and headed off to the city’s many movie theaters. There in the dark I would indulge a continuous flow of international and Hollywood movies, subtitled, not dubbed, and for very little money. After migrating back to the United States and living in Los Angeles, I joined a film collective that had leased the neighborhood Fox Theater in Venice, California. The resulting repertory movie theater became an instant local and even national success. For nearly a decade I virtually lived in the theater, working in all capacities, which included, for instance, creating film programs and music acts by day and watching said movies and music acts by night. Watching movies dancing in the dark with a different audience every night was spectacular. Audience participation became my market research for the next month’s bookings. Different screenings elicited different crowd reactions and energy. Why was this? Of course, certain onscreen events like the meditation of La 142 • Mex-Ciné Jette (1962), the car chase in Bullet (1968), the violence of A Clockwork Orange (1971), or the raised hand in Carrie (1976) always got the same reaction, but the response to comedies and dramas often varied. And there was an external dimension to all this, too. Embedded in the audience and just to see what would happen, I found I could make people laugh by simply doing so in the dark along with the film. Maybe I was shilling; maybe my action gave them permission to express themselves. Either way, the insertion of my laughter— and coughs, on other occasions—was infectious. I moved on to film distribution and built a classics film division for Azteca Films, selecting the best of Mexico’s cinema history to service U.S. art theaters and museum venues. Later, for the UCLA Film and Television Archive and in conjunction with IMCINE (Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía), I curated a four-year public touring package and catalog of nearly one hundred Mexican films covering the silent era up to the mid-1980s. That package became the foundation for the archival collection now held at UCLA’s Powell Library. I migrated to the technical side of film production,acting as producer of a number of feature films, serving as an executive with legacy Hollywood tech facilities CFI (Consolidated Film Industries) and Technicolor and frequently working as a director of and contributor to film festivals. In all this I have never forgotten the experiences I gained in the movie theater where the show all comes together. Despite years and dollars spent on film production and critical studies classes, I still cannot profess to have a formal film education. What I learned came largely from a different place: studying enormous quantities of international films and learning from the filmmakers themselves. If something in a film interested me and I had it in my possession,I would study the reel,frame by frame. With access few others had, new worlds opened up for me that I never imagined possible. I developed great respect for the hidden technical mysteries of the creation of cinema art and entertainment. Working hands-on and as an executive in the industry, I experienced the way films are a painstaking construct, an expensive and complicated human effort, planned and implemented with some semblance of control. Films are not just public experiences to be consumed and dismissed, although certainly that is not an entirely inappropriate fate for many. We see reflected well in Frederick Luis Aldama’s Mex-Ciné how producers , directors, and writers control their craft in order to present a more or less consistent and predictable experience other than just for themselves...

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