Resources on Mexican Silent Cinema

ENGLISH-LANGUAGE WORKS

Drew, William M., and Esperanza Vázquez Bernal. "El Puño de Hierro: A Mexican Silent Film Classic." Journal of Film Preservation 10, no. 66 (2003): 10–22.

The essay examines two rare examples of surviving Mexican feature films from the 1920s—El puño de hierro (The Iron Fist) and El tren fantasma (The Ghost Train), produced in the city of Orizaba in the state of Veracruz—and the life of their director, Gabriel García Moreno, who also worked in the film business in Mexico City and in Hollywood. The authors stress how the films combine the appeal of nonfiction views rooted in the local context with narrative conventions that circulated internationally (particularly those of US adventure serials).

Fullerton, John. Picturing Mexico: From the Camera Lucida to Film. New Barnet, UK: John Libbey, 2014.

This large-format, abundantly illustrated book examines pre- and protocinematic forms of visual culture in Mexico between 1830 and 1910. Much of Picturing Mexico focuses on the painted panoramas and illustrated travel narratives produced by explorers Frederick Catherwood and John Lloyd Stephens before and after visits to Mayan archaeological sites in Mexico and Central America, while a final chapter traces a broader history of picturesque imagery in Mexican lithographs, photography, early film, and the illustrated press.

García Blizzard, Mónica. "Whiteness and the Ideal of Modern Mexican Citizenship in Tepeyac (1917)." Vivomatografías 1, no. 1 (2015).

This essay examines how Tepeyac, a rare surviving Mexican fiction film of the 1910s, presents the ideal modern Mexican citizen as white and upper class, even as its narrates a foundational national myth of racial and religious mixture. The film recounts the apparition of Mexico's patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe, to a young indigenous man during the colonial period, incorporating a modern frame story in which prayers to the Virgin help a young, upper-class couple weather their separation when one of them takes a dangerous voyage to war-torn Europe. García Blizzard highlights moments in the film that signal its ideological contradictions, such as the couple's visit to the basilica of the Virgin, where the light-skinned leads mingle with an ethnically diverse crowd of nonactors.

García Rodríguez, Irene. "Mimí Derba and Azteca Films: The Rise of Nationalism and the First Mexican Woman Filmmaker." In Women, Ethnicity, and Nationalism in Latin America, edited by Natividad Gutiérrez Chong, 170–94. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007.

Grounded in an examination of newspaper accounts, this essay examines stage actress Mimí Derba's work both behind and in front of the cameras in the Azteca Films Company, which produced several of Mexico City's earliest feature films. The piece includes detailed discussion of the films' critical reception.

Gunckel, Colin. Mexico on Main Street: Transnational Film Culture in Los Angeles before World War II. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015.

In this monograph, Gunckel presents a thoroughly researched account of Mexican moviegoing in Los Angeles before World War II. Using a range of primary sources, including newspaper accounts and advertising, Gunckel explores the tension between mass culture and emerging postrevolutionary Mexican nationalism that characterized the migrant Mexican community in Los Angeles during this period. Gunckel shows how migrants actively engaged filmic texts and the extratextual spaces of the film industry, which included local movie theaters, the Spanish-language press, and Hollywood's back lots. The book includes a chapter that focuses specifically on the comedia ranchera as an intermedial, transnational genre.

López, Ana M. "Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America." Cinema Journal 40, no. 1 (2000): 48–78.

This foundational essay surveys the introduction and development of cinema in Latin America. The essay's comparative approach identifies shared forms and thematic preoccupations including local views, representations of national identity, and early documentary appeals to cinematic objectivity. Based on careful research in secondary sources from Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, López posits that early Latin American cinema reflected global trends and regional iterations of an incipient modernity.

Navitski, Rielle. "Spectacles of Violence and Politics: El automóvil gris (1919...