Bunuel and Mexico: The Crisis of National Cinema - Paperback

by Ernesto R. Acevedo-Mu?oz (Author)

Though Luis Bu?uel, 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 Bu?uel'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 Bu?uel's achievement and the history of Mexican film.

Ernesto Acevedo-Mu?oz considers Bu?uel'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 Bu?uel'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.

Author Biography

Ernesto R. Acevedo-Mu?oz is Professor of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is author of West Side Story as Cinema: The Making and Impact of an American Masterpiece and Pedro Almod?var.