Mexican Screen Fictions. Between Cinema and Television by Paul Julian Smith, and: Screening Neoliberalism. Transforming Mexican Cinema, 1988-2012 by Ignacio Sánchez Prado (review)

Mexican Screen Fictions and Screening Neoliberalism are two of the most important academic interventions in the emerging field of Mexican film studies of the last decade. Both books by scholars Paul Julian Smith and Ignacio Sánchez Prado analyze the cinematic productions that emerged in Mexico in the mid 1990s and consolidated in the first decade of the 21st century, after the country entered a decisive neoliberal transformation with the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. With complementary but sometimes conflicting agendas, Smith and Sánchez Prado examine the rise of what Juan Carlos Vargas calls “post-industrial” Mexican cinema. This term refers to the corpus of Mexican productions that gained visibility in a country where the film industry’s very survival is paradoxically possible despite the lack of the proper infrastructure to generate it. While Smith explores the rising viewership that alters the emotional mapping of consumerism, Sánchez Prado analyzes the effects of neoliberalism as it transforms the very notion of Mexican nationalism and its multiple ideological implications. Both books, although polemical, provide an engaging new light to further our understanding of the undeniable force of contemporary Mexican screen fictions.

State financial support and protectionism, Smith explains, which made possible the production of 56 films in 1994, drastically decreased following the implementation of NAFTA policies, resulting in only 14 films in 1995 (Smith 21). By 2011, however, as Sánchez Prado analyzes, Mexico had become the fifth largest market in the world in box office earnings, with an average of 65 to 75 films produced annually since 2006, having consolidated an audience within the middle and upper classes (Sánchez Prado 210). With this new reality as the backdrop, I will review and contrast both books to highlight their many achievements and to engage them critically.

Smith’s study presents an innovating dual approach to audiovisual narrative, combining analyses of films and television series since 2000, while decentering the usual symbolic capital attributed to high- and low-brow productions. He opens his study with a detailed map of what he calls Mexican “audiovisual territory,” delving into the genealogies of contemporary cinema. Here he reviews what he terms “third-way” features, that is, films not intended to garner the international recognition of features by directors such as Alfonso Cuarón or Alejandro González Iñárritu, but neither art films for select audiences by directors like Carlos Reygadas or Nicolás Pereda. In this sense, Smith characterizes the films by the “youthful trio” of Jesús Mario Lozano, Jonás Cuarón and Gerardo Naranjo as blending European and US cinematic traditions, without falling trap to either influence, in order to depict stories centered on teenage drama for mass viewership at the national level.

Another important aspect of Smith’s book is found in his narration of two key film events: the 2009 Morelia Festival, which Smith attended as a juror, and the 2011 Guadalajara Festival, in which he participated as an academic panelist. In narrating these emblematic events of the film industry, Smith explores with rare access and insight the conditions of possibility of recent productions that negotiate for visibility within complicated networks composed of major distributors, industry monopolies, unreliable government support, and a national audience in constant mutation. With the subtle techniques of a cronista, Smith captures the distribution of the sensible in Mexican filmmaking, exposing the power vectors and cultural hegemonies operating in the configuration of the field.

In one of the most provocative reversals of traditional film critique, Smith argues that TV series such as the soap opera Rebelde and popular movies like Salvando al soldado Pérez offer more productive opportunities to understand relevant national imaginaries than sophisticated art films that have little impact on domestic viewership. Against the proclivity of most critics of Mexican cinema, Smith argues that art films are often...