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Gathering critical kudos along with fistsful of dollars (and euros and yens), Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuaron and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu led the wave of filmmakers that poured out of Mexico around the turn of the millennium.
They did not emerge from a vacuum, Charles Ramirez Berg insists in The Classical Mexican Cinema: The Poetics of the Exceptional Golden Age Films (University of Texas Press). A media studies professor at the University of Texas, Berg writes as if preparing a series of lectures, replete with the sort of repetitions and reiterations designed to latch themselves to the memory of students. Maybe the approach is necessary because the subject is unfamiliar even to film scholars. In Berg’s thesis (supported by reference to the movies themselves) Mexican feature filmmaking came of age by 1919, declined in the 1920s and then entered a Golden Age from 1936 through 1957. He separates the films of the Golden Age in two camps complete with acronyms, Mainstream Mexican Cinema (MMC) and Classical Mexican Cinema (CMC).
As one might guess, in MMC, the larger camp, Hollywood norms were transposed into Mexican settings. By contrast, CMC “were films made by directors in search of a Mexican cinematic aesthetic, a distinctive film form to express lo mexicano (Mexicanness).” While acknowledging that MMC produced many entertaining movies, the CMCs were the films honored in the early years of Cannes and other festivals. Mexico had its own art house, a fact largely forgotten aside from Luis Bunuel’s Mexican sojourn.
Berg details the careers of key exponents of CMC, giving their films a close reading while contextualizing them politically, socially and economically. His other major contribution is exploring the Mexican lane of an avenue that has opened up in the work of other contemporary film scholars—the influence of popular visual media on the early development of cinema. Berg especially cites Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913), an engraver who filled the country’s penny press with distinctly Mexican scenes that prefigured the mise-en-scene of the country’s early films.
