Spanish Films in Moody Library: Film Criticism

Though Luis Bunuel, one of the most important filmmakers of the twentieth century, spent his most productive years as a director in Mexico, film histories and criticism invariably pay little attention to his work during this period. The only English-language study of Bunuel's Mexican films, this book is the first to explore a significant but neglected area of this filmmaker's distinguished career and thus to fill a gap in our appreciation and understanding of both Bunuel's achievement and the history of Mexican film.

From the origins of the New Spanish Cinema in the 1950s to the end of the last century, Burning Darkness features essays on a selection of essential films by Spain's most important directors, including Pedro Almodovar, Luis Bunuel, Victor Erice, Ventura Pons, and others. Contributors focus on current theoretical debates and issues of representation, politics, cultural identity, and aesthetics. Rather than historically surveying Spanish films, the book encourages a deep reading of these essential works and the ways they cast light on specific aspects of Spanish society and its recent history. Accessibly written, it will appeal not only to students and scholars but also to anyone interested in Spanish cinema.

In this book, Sergio de la Mora offers the first extended analysis of how Mexican cinema has represented masculinities and sexualities and their relationship to national identity from 1950 to 2004. He focuses on three traditional genres (the revolutionary melodrama, the cabaretera [dancehall] prostitution melodrama, and the musical comedy "buddy movie") and one subgenre (the fichera brothel-cabaret comedy) of classic and contemporary cinema. By concentrating on the changing conventions of these genres, de la Mora reveals how Mexican films have both supported and subverted traditional heterosexual norms of Mexican national identity.

From its early beginnings in 1896 to its present condition, the historical development of Mexican filmmaking is traced here. Of particular interest are the great changes in Mexico’s film industry from 1990 to 2004: the confluence of talented and dedicated filmmakers, the important changes in Mexican cinematic infrastructure and the country's significant social and cultural transformations.

Mexican National Cinema offers an account of the development of Mexican cinema from the intense cultural nationalism of the Mexican Revolution, through the "Golden Age" of the 1940s and the Nuevo Cine of the 1960s, to the renaissance in Mexican cinema in the 1990s.

This describes the current state of Mexican cinema, a vibrant, creative industry with an uncertain future. On the one hand, Mexico supports fine direction, photography, acting, production, music, and postproduction facilities. There's remarkable talent and potential in the country. But there's also economic strife, political instability, class conflict, and an inconsistent social fabric. In 12 essays, specialists and researchers from both sides of the border examine various aspects of the history and the current state of Mexican cinema.

This book constitutes the first in-depth cultural analysis of a period generally held to be the golden age of film production in Spain. Its focus on the work of five directors between 1942 and 1964 seeks to dispel the myth that movie making of early Francoism consisted exclusively of propaganda exercises. Using Gramscian hegemony theory, the volume offers an original perspective on the comic possibilities of subverting State populism and maps a filmmaking tradition that persists, in the figure of Pedro Almodóvar, to the present day.

Throughout the 1980s and '90s, "women's cinema" in Mexico flourished. Challenging conventional representations of women, female filmmakers began telling their own stories. In Women Filmmakers in Mexico: The Country of Which We Dream, Elissa J. Rashkin undertakes a rigorous, compelling examination of the history of film by Mexican women.