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collective livelihood’ (Tuñón, 1993 : 161). This book takes note of current tendencies in film studies and postcolonial theory to look for the excesses, instabilities and incoherencies in texts, which challenge such totalizing projects of hegemony or cultural reification as ‘cultural nationalism’ or ‘ mexicanidad.’ The book also takes note of how the quest for mexicanidad has been critiqued in Mexico as an elaborate game played
From 1943 until 1950, Emilio Fernández was regarded as one of the foremost purveyors of 'Mexicanness,' as one of the most important filmmakers of the Mexican film industry. This book explores the contradictions of post-Revolutionary representation as manifested in Fernández' canonical 1940s films: María Candelaria, Víctimas del pecado, Las abandonadas, La perla, Enamorada, Río Escondido, Maclovia and Salón Mexico. It examines transnational influences that shaped Fernández' work. The book acknowledges how the events of the Mexican revolution impacted on the country's film industry and the ideological development of nationalism. It takes note of current tendencies in film studies and postcolonial theory to look for the excesses, instabilities and incoherencies in texts, which challenge such totalizing projects of hegemony or cultural reification as 'cultural nationalism' or ' mexicanidad.' The book looks at how classical Mexican cinema has been studied, surveying the US studies of classical Mexican cinema which diverge from Mexican analyses by making space for the 'other' through genre and textual analyses. Fernández's Golden Age lasted for seven years, 1943-1950. The book also examines how the concept of hybridity mediates the post-Revolutionary discourse of indigenismo (indigenism) in its cinematic form. It looks specifically at how malinchismo, which is also figured as a 'positive, valorisation of whiteness,' threatens the 'purity' of an essential Mexican in María Candelaria, Emilio Fernández's most famous indigenist film. Emilio Fernandez's Enamorada deals with the Revolution's renegotiation of gender identity.
established topic in French film studies, which has documented the increasing visibility afforded this section of French society since the 1980s. Rather than consider Maghrebis and those of Maghrebi heritage as one sole category – and consequently run the risk of eliding important differences between them – all the works I consider focus specifically on how people of Algerian heritage fare in contemporary French visual culture. Furthermore, as the depiction of Maghrebis and those of Maghrebi heritage in contemporary French cinema is now so well documented, this chapter
toward melodrama and that this suggests a certain feminization in the text, challenging the overt gender ideology of the Revolution. This chapter looks at how melodrama offers a space for subversive pleasure within an otherwise restrictive moral context that challenges gender ideology as it relates to racial identity. Melodrama has occupied an ambivalent position in film studies. In the early days of film theory it was dismissed
form with radical potential in US film studies that classical Mexican cinema has received so much attention over the last decade (Peter Brooks, Thomas Elsaesser, Christine Gledhill). In such texts as López’ ‘Tears and Desire: Women and melodrama in the “old” Mexican cinema’ (1993a), US scholars like her have started to examine the popular appeal and resistive possibilities of melodrama from classical Mexican cinema
Etudes Cinémato-graphiques (IDHEC; that is, the Higher Institute of Film Studies), later replaced by the Institut de Formation et Enseignement pour les Métiers de l’Image et du Son (FEMIS),the most famous cinema school where women were admitted(after taking a competitive entrance examination like all students-to-be) but were strongly advised not to specialise in film direction. Female students were therefore sent to more ‘feminine’ courses of studies, that is, editing, continuity girl, make-up or costumes. This is illustrated by the
been published making this a sometimes Sisyphean struggle. This problem is exacerbated because we are attempting to cover a broad area. Our approach is part film studies, part media studies and part cultural studies within a socio-historical contextualisation. Our positions within each of these academic areas could be further exhaustively broken down, but we leave those who might be interested in the results to do so. The
particularly useful in the emerging field of film studies in the 1960s where the attempt to distinguish different films through generic categorisation proved critically productive. On the basis of primarily what were regarded as the core elements of a film, particularly its iconography, typical themes and plot-lines and even typical stars, critics argued for a series of different and distinctive genres