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Preface and Acknowledgments
- University of Michigan Press
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Preface and Acknowledgments C I wrote this book after years of teaching contemporary Mexican cinema, and by “contemporary” I really mean contemporary: Mexican films made mostly in the first decade of the twenty-first century.This focus required me to grow the course in organic syncopation with films newly scripted, shot, spliced, or released. There is something strongly compelling and kinetic about working with the new, and I hope this book conveys the same urgency. My interest in contemporary Mexican cinema, or Mex-ciné, focuses on three key areas: the industry as an industry, the constructedness of films, and viewers’ reception of the finished works. The first area comprises issues of production, distribution, and exhibition histories, as well as conventions of Mexican film storytelling within global cinematic traditions and prototypical patterns. The second encompasses ingredients or elements such as lens type, camera placement, lighting, scene composition, actor/character look and type, costuming, motion, and editing. All films are made according to recipes, algorithms, or blueprints made up of such ingredients, and I find that the tools and concepts of film theory help me understand how the elements of such blueprints work individually and collectively. Moreover, the concept of the blueprint here aims to capture not only all the ingredients that make up the film—from technical devices and structures used to plots, events, and character dialogue and action—but also to convey the sense that all these elements that make up a film are not the result of a single entity. While a filmmaker may have a greater and lesser degree of willfulness involved in the way the elements cohere, the total product is the result of many skilled people: from producers to cinematographers and editors,from light engineers to costume and sound designers, from set and location designers to casting agents and actors, and many many more. Of course, the ways in which directors—along with the many involved xii • Preface and Acknowledgments in the filmmaking process—orchestrate lighting, editing, sound, camera position , and the like when drawing up these blueprints also work to guide their ideal audiences’ thoughts, emotions, and interpretations. This leads to my third interest, the consideration of the cognitive and emotive faculties involved in making and consuming such blueprints. Useful tools in this regard include advances in the cognitive and social neurosciences that deepen our understanding of human memory, emotion, perception, thought, and language. I am especially interested in the way this knowledge helps us to understand the choices made in creating Mex-ciné blueprints, to assess their effectiveness, and to see how this improved understanding can shed light on other aspects of the filmmaking and consuming experience. I am interested, that is, in the mental faculties directors use to imagine and then (through their choices of actors, sounds, lenses, edits, styles, and genres) make a film that will in turn be processed visually and aurally by the ideal audience in ways that trigger specific thoughts and feelings. Here neuroscience and cognitive science have much to teach us about the workings of our faculties of counterfactual thinking, memory, perception, and emotion. My approach, then, centers on the means that directors use to imagine and then make a film with the goal of triggering specific thoughts and feelings in viewers when they process the film visually and aurally. Findings from cognitive science and neuroscience provide ancillary tools for understanding this process globally, as a unitary whole resulting from the use of our faculties of causal inference, memory, perception, and emotion. With paths carved by the likes of David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, who long ago began cutting against various psychoanalytic flora and fauna of earlier decades, and with new technologies available for research in the brain sciences (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging [fMRI], which allows research on active brains, such as those of subjects watching film sequences), I move with cautious confidence forward in my analysis of Mexican films. I mention this last point with a certain caution because there is a tendency in current cognitive, neurophysiological, and evolutionary psychological approaches to film analysis to conflate the perceptual, emotive, and cognitive processes of living, breathing directors and audiences with the fictional constructs in the blueprint. As I’ve written elsewhere, film (like literature, comics , video games, etc.) is not real life, and filmic characters are not the same ontological beast as real events and people. Yes, research showing how human emotions and cognition work can help explain how we make and consume films, but...