Constructing The Image Of The Mexican Revolution

Download or read book Constructing the Image of the Mexican Revolution written by Zuzana M. Pick and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a cast ranging from Pancho Villa to Dolores del Río and Tina Modotti, Constructing the Image of the Mexican Revolution demonstrates the crucial role played by Mexican and foreign visual artists in revolutionizing Mexico's twentieth-century national iconography. Investigating the convergence of cinema, photography, painting, and other graphic arts in this process, Zuzana Pick illuminates how the Mexican Revolution's timeline (1910-1917) corresponds with the emergence of media culture and modernity. Drawing on twelve foundational films from Que Viva Mexico! (1931-1932) to And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (2003), Pick proposes that cinematic images reflect the image repertoire produced during the revolution, often playing on existing nationalist themes or on folkloric motifs designed for export. Ultimately illustrating the ways in which modernism reinvented existing signifiers of national identity, Constructing the Image of the Mexican Revolution unites historicity, aesthetics, and narrative to enrich our understanding of Mexicanidad.

Download or read book Constructing the Image of the Mexican Revolution written by Zuzana M. Pick and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a cast ranging from Pancho Villa to Dolores del Río and Tina Modotti, Constructing the Image of the Mexican Revolution demonstrates the crucial role played by Mexican and foreign visual artists in revolutionizing Mexico's twentieth-century national iconography. Investigating the convergence of cinema, photography, painting, and other graphic arts in this process, Zuzana Pick illuminates how the Mexican Revolution's timeline (1910–1917) corresponds with the emergence of media culture and modernity. Drawing on twelve foundational films from Que Viva Mexico! (1931–1932) to And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (2003), Pick proposes that cinematic images reflect the image repertoire produced during the revolution, often playing on existing nationalist themes or on folkloric motifs designed for export. Ultimately illustrating the ways in which modernism reinvented existing signifiers of national identity, Constructing the Image of the Mexican Revolution unites historicity, aesthetics, and narrative to enrich our understanding of Mexicanidad.

Download or read book Cinesonidos written by Jacqueline Avila and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-16 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During Mexico's silent (1896-1930) and early sound (1931-52) periods, cinema saw the development of five significant genres: the prostitute melodrama (including the cabaretera subgenre), the indigenista film (on indigenous themes or topics), the cine de añoranza porfiriana (films of Porfirian nostalgia), the Revolution film, and the comedia ranchera (ranch comedy). In this book, author Jacqueline Avila looks at examples from all genres, exploring the ways that the popular, regional, and orchestral music in these films contributed to the creation of tropes and archetypes now central to Mexican cultural nationalism. Integrating primary source material--including newspaper articles, advertisements, films--with film music studies, sound studies, and Mexican film and cultural history, Avila examines how these tropes and archetypes mirrored changing perceptions of mexicanidad manufactured by the State and popular and transnational culture. As she shows, several social and political agencies were heavily invested in creating a unified national identity in an attempt to merge the previously fragmented populace as a result of the Revolution. The commercial medium of film became an important tool to acquaint a diverse urban audience with the nuances of Mexican national identity, and music played an essential and persuasive role in the process. In this heterogeneous environment, cinema and its music continuously reshaped the contested, fluctuating space of Mexican identity, functioning both as a sign and symptom of social and political change.

Download or read book Making Cinelandia written by Laura Isabel Serna and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-03 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1920s, as American films came to dominate Mexico's cinemas, many of its cultural and political elites feared that this "Yanqui invasion" would turn Mexico into a cultural vassal of the United States. In Making Cinelandia, Laura Isabel Serna contends that Hollywood films were not simply tools of cultural imperialism. Instead, they offered Mexicans on both sides of the border an imaginative and crucial means of participating in global modernity, even as these films and their producers and distributors frequently displayed anti-Mexican bias. Before the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, Mexican audiences used their encounters with American films to construct a national film culture. Drawing on extensive archival research, Serna explores the popular experience of cinemagoing from the perspective of exhibitors, cinema workers, journalists, censors, and fans, showing how Mexican audiences actively engaged with American films to identify more deeply with Mexico.

Download or read book Mexico on Main Street written by Colin Gunckel and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early decades of the twentieth-century, Main Street was the heart of Los Angeles’s Mexican immigrant community. It was also the hub for an extensive, largely forgotten film culture that thrived in L.A. during the early days of Hollywood. Drawing from rare archives, including the city’s Spanish-language newspapers, Colin Gunckel vividly demonstrates how this immigrant community pioneered a practice of transnational media convergence, consuming films from Hollywood and Mexico, while also producing fan publications, fiction, criticism, music, and live theatrical events. Mexico on Main Street locates this film culture at the center of a series of key debates concerning national identity, ethnicity, class, and the role of Mexicans within Hollywood before World War II. As Gunckel shows, the immigrant community’s cultural elite tried to rally the working-class population toward the cause of Mexican nationalism, while Hollywood sought to position them as part of a lucrative transnational Latin American market. Yet ironically, both Hollywood studios and Mexican American cultural elites used the media to present negative depictions of working-class Mexicans, portraying their behaviors as a threat to middle-class respectability. Rather than simply depicting working-class immigrants as pawns of these power players, however, Gunckel reveals their active participation in the era’s film culture. Gunckel’s innovative approach combines media studies, urban history, and ethnic studies to reconstruct a distinctive, richly layered immigrant film culture. Mexico on Main Street demonstrates how a site-specific study of cultural and ethnic issues challenges our existing conceptions of U.S. film history, Mexican cinema, and the history of Los Angeles.

Download or read book Public Spectacles of Violence written by Rielle Navitski and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-18 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Public Spectacles of Violence Rielle Navitski examines the proliferation of cinematic and photographic images of criminality, bodily injury, and technological catastrophe in early twentieth-century Mexico and Brazil, which were among Latin America’s most industrialized nations and later developed two of the region’s largest film industries. Navitski analyzes a wide range of sensational cultural forms, from nonfiction films and serial cinema to illustrated police reportage, serial literature, and fan magazines, demonstrating how media spectacles of violence helped audiences make sense of the political instability, high crime rates, and social inequality that came with modernization. In both nations, sensational cinema and journalism—influenced by imported films—forged a common public sphere that reached across the racial, class, and geographic divides accentuated by economic growth and urbanization. Highlighting the human costs of modernization, these media constructed everyday experience as decidedly modern, in that it was marked by the same social ills facing industrialized countries. The legacy of sensational early twentieth-century visual culture remains felt in Mexico and Brazil today, where public displays of violence by the military, police, and organized crime are hypervisible.

Download or read book Ghosts of the Revolution in Mexican Literature and Visual Culture written by Erica Segre and published by Peter Lang Limited, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 2013 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The official centenary commemorating the Mexican Revolution of 1910 provided scholars with an opportunity to consider memorialization and its legacies and 'afterimages' in the twentieth century through to the present time. This collection of new essays, commissioned from experts based in Mexico, Europe and the United States, plays on the interrelated notions of 'revisitation', haunting, residual traces and valediction to interrogate the Revolution's multiple appearances, reckonings and reconfigurations in art, photography, film, narrative fiction, periodicals, travel-testimonies and poetry, examining key constituencies of creative media in Mexico that have been involved in historicizing, contesting or evading the mixed legacies of the Revolution. The interplay of themes, practices and contexts across the chapters (ranging from the 1920s through to the present day) draws on interdisciplinary thinking as well as new findings, framing the volume's discourse with a deliberately multi-dimensional approach to an often homogenized topic. The contributors' scholarly referencing of artists, novelists, poets, photographers, foreign correspondents, critics, filmmakers and curators is detailed and wide-ranging, creating new juxtapositions that include some rarely studied material.