Celluloid Nationalism and Other Melodramas, livre ebook

Explores issues of representation and rebellion in Mexican and Mexican American cinema.

Explores issues of representation and rebellion in Mexican and Mexican American cinema.

Celluloid Nationalism and Other Melodramas looks at representation and rebellion in times of national uncertainty. Moving from mid-century Mexican cinema to recent films staged in Los Angeles and Mexico City, Susan Dever analyzes melodrama's double function as a genre and as a sensibility, revealing coincidences between movie morals and political pieties in the civic-minded films of Emilio Fernández, Matilde Landeta, Allison Anders, and Marcela Fernández Violante. These filmmakers' rationally and emotionally engaged cinema-offering representations of indigenous peoples and poor urban women who alternately endorsed "civilizing" projects and voiced resistance to such totalization-both interrupts and sustains fictions of national coherence in an increasingly transnational world.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prologue
INTRODUCTION
Of Melodrama and Other Inspirations
Part I : Post-Revolutionary Mexico
1. Re-Birth of a Nation: On Mexican Movies, Museums, and María Félix
2. Las de abajo: Matilde Landeta's Mexican Revolution
3. Pimps, Prostitutes, and Politicos: Matilde Landeta's Trotacalles and the Regime of Miguel Alemán
Part II: Fin de Siglo Mexamérica
4. Neomelodrama as Participatory Ethnography: Allison Anders's Mi vida loca
5. The Last Judgment: Marcela Fernández Violante's Requiem (for) Melodrama
EPILOGUE
Deeds that Inspire Confidence
Notes
Bibliography
Index