Mexican Cinema

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course is intended as an overview of Mexican cinema, from its famed "Golden Age" in the 1940s and 1950s, up to contemporary productions. The aim is to reflect simultaneously on Mexican culture, history, and society, and on the language of film and its interpretation. Our goal is to expand what we know about Mexico through the way its cinema has tackled questions of difference (class, gender, regional, and race-based), modernization, political unrest, inequality, violence, and love. Crucial to our academic setting, we will ask what films offer as objects of knowledge in their own right, and not merely as illustrations. What does it mean to analyze a film? What are the tools we use to read and write about them as cultural products? We will consider classic fiction features along short, experimental, and documentary films. Works discussed include Él (Luis Buñuel, 1953), Macario (Roberto Gavaldón, 1960), Canoa (Felipe Cazals, 1975), Perfume de violetas (Marisa Sistach, 2001), Tempestad (Tatiana Huezo, 2016), among others.