Women filmmakers in Mexico were rare until the 1980s and 1990s, when women began to direct feature films in unprecedented numbers. Their films have won acclaim at home and abroad, and the filmmakers have become key figures in contemporary Mexican cinema. In this book, Elissa Rashkin documents how and why women filmmakers have achieved these successes, as she explores how the women's movement, film studies programs, governmental film policy, and the transformation of the intellectual sector since the 1960s have all affected women's filmmaking in Mexico. After a historical overview of Mexican women's filmmaking from the 1930s onward, Rashkin focuses on the work of five contemporary directors—Marisa Sistach, Busi Cortés, Guita Schyfter, María Novaro, and Dana Rotberg. Portraying the filmmakers as intellectuals participating in the public life of the nation, Rashkin examines how these directors have addressed questions of national identity through their films, replacing the patriarchal images and stereotypes of the classic Mexican cinema with feminist visions of a democratic and tolerant society.
In the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, Stridentism (estridentismo) burst on the scene in the 1920s as an avant-garde challenge to political and intellectual complacency. Led by poets Manuel Maples Arce, Germán List Arzubide, and Salvador Gallardo; prose writer Arqueles Vela; painters Fermín Revucltas, Ramón Alva de la Canal, Leopoldo Mendez, and Jean Charlot; and sculptor Germán Cueto, the Stridentists rejected academic conservatism, celebrated modernity and technological novelties such as the radio, cinema, and the airplane, and sought to transform not only written and visual language but also everyday life through the creation of new aesthetic spaces and new approaches to the urban environment. By 1928 the movement had dispersed, but its iconoclastic spirit lived on in other forms, mergingin into and influencing other movements of the 1930s and beyond. This history of Stridentism as a multifacted cultural phenomenon joyfully recreates the spirit of 1920s Mexico. Bringing together original research and critical analysis, it explores the ways in which the Stridentists pushed the limits of the collective imatgination in an era of conflict and change.
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