The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez by Frederick Luis Aldama, and: Critical Approaches to the Films of Robert Rodriguez by Frederick Luis Aldama (review)

With The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez (2014) and Critical Approaches to the Films of Robert Rodriguez (2015), Frederick Luis Aldama has written the first single-author scholarly monograph and edited the first collected volume of scholarship on the work of the most prolific U.S. Latina/o filmmaker to date. The two books share the explicit goal of fostering scholarship on Rodriguez and thus address a glaring lacuna in the existing literature. Less explicit, however, is the role of cognitive studies in these two volumes. Although Aldama and his contributors offer a variety of approaches for interpreting the films of Rodriguez, cognitive methods and frameworks predominate; yet neither volume explicitly articulates why. For readers unfamiliar with cognitive studies, an explanation of the field and its relevance to Rodriguez’s work specifically and to film and Latina/o studies more generally could have been helpful. Nevertheless, these two books advance their common aims, both explicit and implicit, quite admirably, providing readers with important biographical information about the filmmaker, technical insights into his film-making, and a range of thematic, analytical, and methodological approaches for interpreting Rodriguez’s films. Moreover, as firsts in the field that share so much in common, including Aldama himself as well as the impressive community of scholars he has brought together, these two texts reinforce one another catalyzing long overdue scholarly conversations. For these reasons, The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez and Critical Approaches to the Films of Robert Rodriguez promise to become important references for scholars in film, Latina/o, and cognitive studies.

In The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez, Aldama relies heavily on the figure of Rodriguez as director and follows the director’s filmography chronologically. The effect of these choices is that the monograph reads as something of a hybrid between an artistic biography and a comprehensive reference guide. Charles Ramírez Berg, Rodriguez’s former professor at the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin, opens the book with a foreword explaining how the early and unexpected success of Rodriguez’s first film, El Mariachi (1992), launched the filmmaker’s career and shaped U.S. indie cinema of the 1990s. In the volume’s opening chapter, Aldama further contextualizes Rodriguez’s biography and career within historical trends of the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, such as technological developments that democratized filmmaking, the rapid demographic growth of U.S. Latina/os, and the increasing urbanization of U.S. populations. Within these biographical and historical contexts, Aldama crafts a checklist of filmmaking techniques and aesthetic choices common to Rodriguez’s films, and over the next five chapters illustrates how these techniques and aesthetics inform the director’s work from his earliest student films through Machete Kills (2013). The volume faithfully follows the linear chronology of Rodriguez’s films with the exception of the fourth chapter, which presents the Spy Kids movies and Rodriguez’s other children’s films by series rather than date. The book concludes with an interview with Rodriguez conducted by Aldama in 2012.

Aldama’s collected volume, Critical Approaches to the Films of Robert Rodriguez, compiles nine scholarly essays grouped thematically into three sections, a brief reflection by eminent Latina/o Studies scholar Ilan Stavans, a roundtable discussion of films from Rodriguez’s oeuvre not previously addressed in the collection, and a concluding autobiographical afterword by the director’s cousin and collaborator, Alvaro Rodriguez, which Aldama describes as “a flash fiction Künstlerroman” (13). The collection’s scholarly essays illustrate the broad range of possibilities for analyzing Rodriguez’s work within frameworks of film, cognitive, and Latina/o studies. For example, although five of the nine collected scholarly articles adopt cognitive approaches, each offers a unique framework and nuanced reading of Rodriguez’s films. Sue J. Kim employs cognitive concepts...