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Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 261 at the end of the text might have been profitably pruned, though the author's scholarly zeal may serve the budding specialist. The plot summaries , too, bear abbreviation. The decision to translate some but not all of the quotations is perplexing—no systematic pattern is discernible —and surely responds to the press's marketing illusions. One must also take to task the manuscript's copy editors for allowing typographical errors and other slips to mar a product that in substantive respects does the press proud. Johnson's book is a notable contribution to the writings on gender and nation that have been streaming into the forum of late. In a climate where "value" is shunned and no text suffers alongside any other, this appreciation of the novel as socio-historical document and purveyor of messages leaves to wallow in their nostalgia those still tied to the assessment of literature qua literature, which means that the book, like its seasoned author, is very much of John W. Kronik Cornell University Buñuel and México: The Crisis of National Cinema The University of California Press, 2003 By Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz's valuable contribution to the still growing corpus of Buñuel studies takes aim at two critical axioms that have long shaped—or inhibited—considerations of the director's Mexican career. The first, grounded in Bufiuel's status as an international art cinema auteur and propagated in part by the director himself, dismisses the bulk of the Spanish exile's Mexican productions as forgettable, commercial films motivated by the simple need for economic survival. The second, rooted in a contrary emphasis on national cinemas and cinematic nationalism, offers an endorsement of Bufiuel's outsider standing by denying his role, and that of his films, within the history of Mexican cinema. In opposition to both these positions, Buñuel and México argues for the "Mexicanness" of Bufiuel's Mexican films, or at least for those features made between 1946 and 1965 and financed and produced within the context of the Mexican film industry and destined primarily for domestic audiences. (It should be noted that he distinguishes between "festival-bound international projects" such as The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Nazarin, El angel exterminador and the French language, Cek s'appelle l'aurore and Le mort dans ce jardin, among others, and Bufiuel's "truly Mexican films" [149].) Acevedo-Muñoz offers a series of persuasive arguments for recognizing the full extent of Bufiuel's integration into the national film industry in Mexico: his participation via his producers in government financing schemes and his work in government supported studios; his (sometimes reluctant) embrace of rhe reigning star system; and his films' engagement with recurring national themes and debates regarding the legacy of the Mexican revolution, the conflict berween tradition and modernity and the role of gender in sustaining or questioning dominant definitions of national identity. Nevertheless , in making the case for a Mexican Buñuel, Acevedo-Muñoz doesn'r seek to undo previous conceptions of a surrealist Spanish or European auteur Buñuel. Instead his explorations of the cultural, political and industrial contexts of the director's Mexican films offer a corrective or amplification to auteurist readings drawing on the notion of the "industrial auteur" developed in Judith Mayne's work on pioneer female Hollywood director Dorothy Arzner (13). Likewise, the "crisis of national cinema" cited in the book's subtitle refers not to Bufiuel's role in the breakdown of national cinema as a critical paradigm but rather to his place with respect to Mexico's "Golden Age" of the 1940s and 1950s, a moment when Mexican cinema served the dual and even contradictory goals of projecting a vision of national cultural policy and providing a model of a national (or continental ) popular cinema capable of challenging Hollywood's domination across Latin America. 262 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Acevedo-Muñoz presenrs a complex and nuanced account of Bufiuel's relations with and role wirhin rhe Mexican film industry of the period. Bunuel immersed himself in rhe modes of production and concomitant narrative and rhematic strategies of...

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