Bunuel and Mexico

The Crisis of National Cinema

Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780520239524
• eBook ISBN: 9780520930483
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Though Luis Buñuel, 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 first book-length English-language study of Buñuel's Mexican films, this book explores a significant but neglected area of this filmmaker's distinguished career and thus fills a gap in our appreciation and understanding of both Buñuel's achievement and the history of Mexican film. Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz considers Buñuel's Mexican films—made between 1947 and 1965—within the context of a national and nationalist film industry, comparing the filmmaker's employment of styles, genres, character types, themes, and techniques to those most characteristic of Mexican cinema. In this study Buñuel's films emerge as a link between the classical Mexican cinema of the 1930s through the 1950s and the "new" cinema of the 1960s, flourishing in a time of crisis for the national film industry and introducing some of the stylistic and conceptual changes that would revitalize Mexican cinema.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Mexican Cinema in the Time of Luis Buñuel
• 2. Buñuel and Mexico
• 3. Los Olvidados and the Crisis of Mexican Cinema
• 4. Genre, Women, Narrative
• 5. On the Road: Subida al Cielo and La Ilusión Viaja en Tranvía
• 6. Masculinity and Class Conflict: Buñuel’s Macho-Dramas
• Conclusion. From Buñuel to “Nuevo Cine”
• Filmography of Luis Buñuel
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index