Developing History/Historicizing Development in Mexican Nuevo Cine Manifestoes around "la Crisis"

National characterizations of Mexico historically involve periodic crises. Conceptions of Mexican crisis across economic, political, and social contexts deserve critical attention, especially as they configure national identities. Connotations of crisis abound, from rationalism's passage to knowledge and theology's wrestle with faith, to the paroxysm of a disease that leads to recovery or final collapse, to the event that drives a character to the climax and consequential denouement in a narrative; significantly, these ideas all involve an established process that, in the moment of crisis, is jeopardized and, in the moment of correction, is ratified and, epistemologically, becomes knowledge more firmly engrained in the collective.¹ The uses of the term with respect to Mexico's economic history are too numerable to note, but generally they replicate these connotations, whereby an economic system is determined and applied. From an enfranchised viewpoint, crisis appears as a malfunction in systemic operations, an interruption to the ordained and fundamental process, necessarily eliciting angst over the uncertainty of the outcome for sharers who strive for stability.

In the years following World War II, studies of underdevelopment in Mexico and other parts of Latin America prescribe "modern" progress through Westernized industrial growth. Put concretely: "virtually every aspect of the Mexican strategy for development...tends to further enmesh the country in a net of dependent relationships with multi-national corporations, with private American investors, with official U.S. banking institutions, and with American-dominated international bodies like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund" (Hellman 72-3). Coincidentally, the technocracy associated with the classic Hollywood aesthetic and with U.S. multi-national corporate-studios continues pushing across the Americas and the globe. "Quality plummeted but production increased" in Mexican cinema, remarks Carl Mora (99). Through a combination of protectionist laws, exhibition quotas, a state monopoly, stereotypical representations, and studio organization that denies technical and aesthetic innovation, Mexican cinema has become a little big-industry in the world marketplace, according to Alberto Ruy Sánchez (46, 61). Pointedly, Charles Ramírez Berg outlines Mexican cinema's dependence on Hollywood, the political economy of Mexican cinema, and the growing crisis throughout the state due to the lack of quality filmmaking in the 1960s (37).

Given conjectures of crises, Mexican cinema of the 1960s, coinciding with unparalleled economic gains, the rise of the counter-culture, la Onda, a renewal of social activism, and a heightened sense of democracy, deserves closer examination. Particular constituents of Mexican cinema from the 1960s, the self-proclaimed Grupo del Nuevo Cine or Mexican New Cinema Group, address questions of Mexican crisis from a position of disenfranchisement, deconstructing Mexico's institutional structures and the ideologies correlative to them. The group's manifesto documents, theoretical and descriptive statements made by the filmmakers-cultural activists themselves, like their independent film productions, recognize the intersection of economy, politics, art, and community through their remonstrations of dependence. The solutions the Nuevo Cine Group proposes in these statements revolve around various embodiments of independence, fostering a democratic impulse in Mexican culture.

Histories of Mexico tend to overlook the importance of the early-1960s in favor of the tumultuous decade's end and the Echeverría sexenio, marking 1940 to 1970 a "miraculous" industrial period and 1970 as a search for renewed "stability";² many cultural histories follow this periodization.³ General film histories, including Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell's Film History: An Introduction and David A. Cook's A History of Narrative Film, circumscribe Mexican independent filmmaking to this post-1970 period (Cook 798; Thompson 638). More disarming, several studies of Latin American and Mexican cinema ignore the significance of the Nuevo Cine's formative period, from 1960 to 1965, in favor of the post-1970 independent movements (García Tsao; Elena 4-6; Costa; Gustavo García; Hershfield 193). As John King insightfully claims, the Nuevo Cine Group arises in the late 1950s amid a "climate of uneven developmentalism and modernization" (132). In the formulation of this group, according to Ramírez Berg, Mora, and Tomás Pérez Turrent, is "the spark" that electrifies the independent...