The Surreptitious Importance of the Nation

Celluloid Nationalism and Other Melodramas Susan Dever Albany: State University of New York Press. 2003. 257pp.

Mexico City in Contemporary Mexican Cinema. David William Foster Austin: University of Texas Press. 2002. 177pp.

Is Mexican cinema a national cinema? Do films shot in Mexican-American Los Angeles fit into a Mexican national framework? Two recent studies raise these questions, if only implicitly: Celluloid Nationalism and Other Melodramas: From Post-Revolutionary Mexico to fin de siglo Mexámerica (2003) by Susan Dever, and Mexico City in Contemporary Mexican Cinema (2002) by David William Foster. Their titles rely on signifiers of national identity (Mexico and Mexican) while emphasizing transnational and local spaces ("Mexámerica" and Mexico City). Dever's and Foster's investigations validate a national paradigm, while at the same time challenging it by focusing on non-national geographical categories. Such ambivalence is symptomatic of the instability of two prevalent analytical categories, "national cinema" and "third cinema,"¹ which film scholars continue to interrogate, reconsider, and, for the most part, maintain. The effort within film studies to rethink these categories has produced research into an array of complex issues, from the lasting effects of colonialism and dependence, and the imaginary coherence of nation-states, to international co-productions, export markets, and global exchanges and trajectories of directors, producers, and actors.² As Stephen Crofts demonstrates, a particularly important shift regarding national cinema has been to downplay the once-privileged site of production in order to consider more completely several additional factors, such as distribution, exhibition, reception, textuality, and national-cultural specificity ("Concepts" 386–88).

My discussion of Dever's and Foster's texts prioritizes the final term listed above, national-cultural specificity. Developed by Paul Willeman, the concept of national-cultural specificity highlights the fissures and connections that divide and unite the different populations that coexist within a territorially-determined nation-state. Willeman proposes that underlining the importance of factors like cultural identification, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and social class exposes the homogenizing, domestically-imperialist drive of national identity and its alleged coherence (209–10). The concept of national-cultural specificity bears on the content of the films that Dever and Foster analyze, as well as on the analytical frameworks that both scholars employ. Dever and Foster call attention to how the films they interpret resist stable constructions of identity within a broader critique of national coherence, which emerges through the development of transnational and local paradigms for filmic analysis. I propose that a national paradigm determines Dever's and Foster's analysis to a degree that is not recognized by both authors' explicitly stated concerns. My reading of their studies responds affirmatively to the following question: do the analytical categories of the transnational and the local ultimately depend upon the national?

Celluloid Nationalism provides Mexicanists and scholars of US-Mexican border culture with an innovative, comparative analysis of melodrama that focuses on how film informs audiences' understanding of local and national communities. A particular strength of Dever's study is its emphasis on the power structures that bolster dominant notions of community, and how films respond to those structures by resisting them, reinforcing them, or doing both. Dever's text analyzes films from two broadly-defined historical moments, mid-twentieth century Mexico and the 1990s in the US and Mexico. The first period of Dever's analysis spans the presidencies of Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–46) and Miguel Alemán (1946–52), a period during which the post-Revolutionary Mexican state continued its ideological consolidation and the domestic film industry flourished.³ Dever's specific analyses—which include readings of Río escondido (1947), Lola Casanova (1948), and Trotacalles (1951)—incorporate pertinent observations on state nationalism and a detailed discussion of how contemporary Mexican audiences respond to mid-century films. Dever's focus on the intersections of cinema, nationalism, and reception appears most clearly and insightfully in her description of María Félix's role as the inaugurator of an indigenous portraiture exhibit in...