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Article Excerpt
In recent years Mexican cinema has exploded on screens in the United States. Films such as Amores perros, Y tu mamd tambien, and El crimen del Padre Amaro made it to US art-houses and slightly beyond creating something of a sensation here. This is not to mention that a Mexican novelist and script writer, Guillermo Arriaga, and director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, who both collaborated on Amores perros, recently worked together on 21 Grams (2003) which was made in the US with a multi-national cast. The success of Alfonso Cuaron--previously of Y tu marne tambien fame and director of the most recent installment in the Harry Potter saga, is something that no one needs to read about again. This present issue contains articles that not only look at the current wave of films to hit the screens in the US, but also those that have not quite made it and others which were made well before. In this way the articles here can be read as providing a specific context, however incomplete, to the current interest in Mexican cinema. Since this journal is published in the US, it is perhaps worthwhile here in the introduction to look more generally at some ways that Mexican cinema has been received in the US. It is also of interest here to look at how the pressures of globalization, largely from the US and particularly from Hollywood, affect Mexican cinema and its context. In many ways Mexican cinema responds to and or is made within a context created by two delimiting paradigmatic structures that each maintain something of a culture monopoly. Hollywood represents the "trans-national" globalizing culture that exerts influence from without while nationalist concerns both limit and support discourse from within. Cronos, a film made by Guillermo del Toro, is a film that responds to each of these exigencies in a way that offers a possible way out of their limitations.
Cronos is perhaps the perfect film to study the confluence of the internal and external forces I want to study because it was released in 1992 during the discussions of NAFTA. It was also one of the first of the current wave of Mexican cinema and cineastes to enter the US. Del Toro released the film in 1992 and it led to his entry into Hollywood with Mimic (1994) and other "B" type or thriller movies including the recent Hellboy (2004). From the US perspective, the recent wave of Mexican cinema as well as of directors, writers, and cinematographers might be seen as a "Boom." (1) This cinematic "Boom" is similar to the well-known literary one of the 60s and 70s which ignored the long history of Latin American literature as well as the work of other writers not belonging to the select group. The cinematic "Boom" ignores the fact that Mexican cinema's history is at least as long as that in the US. It is a tradition that begins in 1896 when Bon Bernard and Vayre showed the first frames ever filmed in Mexico, including General Diaz Strolling Through Chapultapec Park (Garcia 5). This present "Boom" also leaves out many directors and script writers for different reasons, some dealing with projected popularity. The fact that all the Mexican directors gaining fame in the US, however limited, are men overlooks the existence of women filmmakers, a fact also disregarded by many students of Mexico. Mexican women directors do exist, however, as proven in Elissa Rashkin's excellent book, Women Filmmakers in Mexico: The Country of Which We Dream.
Though US cinema, that is to say Hollywood, remains largely in a state of amnesia regarding Mexican cinema's long history, the reverse is not true. The history and development of cinema in Mexico in some ways mirrors that in the US (Scott). So close was their development at some points that some classic Hollywood films such as Dracula were filmed almost simultaneously with a Spanish-speaking cast for distribution to Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries. Mexican cinema perhaps has much in common with Hollywood especially if we look at "the Golden Age" of Mexican cinema. Hollywood's pithy formulaic movies as well as other films representing the great cinematic traditions and innovations have played on Mexican screens. From one of the first films ever made, Arrival of a Train (Garcia 5), to the most recent Hollywood blockbuster, US cinema seems to make its way to Mexico, although the reverse is not always true; Mexican cinema in general does not appear on US screens. Mexican cinema also includes the noteworthy contributions of women such as Matilde Landeta relatively early on in its history. (2) Many exiles from European political upheavals came to Mexico where they contributed greatly to the cup tural scene including cinema. A few of the great names of cinematic innovation such as Serguei Eisenstein and Luis Bunuel (who first made a go of it in Hollywood but left in disgust) even made some of their most important films in or about Mexico. Even though foreign influences have been present in Mexican cinemas, film has played an important role in the formulation of a national identity in Mexico as has most forms of culture such as muralism.
In spite of the role cinema has played in the forging of a Mexican national identity, as the presence of Bunuel and Eisenstein prove, foreign films and filmmakers have always been present in Mexico, thus allowing for the possibility of trans-national influences. However, in recent years, with the rise of globalization and the implementation of NAFTA, we have seen a disproportionate amount of pressure exerted on traditional modes of cultural production caused by globalization. This pressure inspires a sense of crisis expressed by critics (Bartra) and filmmakers (Ripstein in this issue). Though many onlookers view artistic interchange across geo-political borders as a positive benefit of globalization and the trans-national nature of cinema, this paradise of free-trade and free-exchange of ideas and products is not without its problems. Cronos, coming as it does at the beginning of the recent "Boom" or current wave of Mexican cinema, as well as during the debates over NAFTA, portrays many of the problems and fears created by globalizing processes; it also imagines a solution to them that does not require a return to more limiting, nationalistic models. Before delving into a reading of Cronos with a look to some of the problems and possibilities the film proposes with regard to globalization, it is first necessary to examine the globalizing context surrounding the production of Cronos and other cinema in Mexico.
Aside from watching television or surfing the net, there is no better way to participate in globalization's cultural imaginary than going to the movies. Another way of putting this is to observe that the two most forceful arms in the creation and support of globalizing cultural practices are cinema, the internet, and television. Particularly for those of us who live in parts of the world and in economic situations that allow easy access to technology, the virtual border and cultures that mix there are present on a daily, minute by minute basis. (3) As Garcia Canclini postulates in his book La globalizacion imaginada, technology has created a virtual border. We confront this border and make border crossings of our own each time we turn on our computers and connect to the internet or whenever we turn on the television or enter one of the many multiplex cinemas that have cropped up across the country. Of course, this is not to also say that real geographic borders do not exist in a complex, real reality that is both painful and regularly fatal to a large portion of human civilization. Recognition of the problematic border, the one that "cuts and bleeds" to paraphrase Gloria Anzaldua, reminds us that the virtual border we see on screens, both silver and small, is a fantasy mediated by a powerful culture industry whose grips reach across political boundaries. However, the daydream of globalization as it portrays itself allows us to think of a polyglot, poly-cultural agora where everything mixes together and creates new possibilities, new imagined communities; a place where inclusion and discursive practices are symmetrical. The installation piece America, InSite 94 by Yukinori Yanagi (also studied by Garcia Canclini in La globalizacion...
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