Scott L.
Baugh | Special In-Depth Section
Developing History/Historicizing
Development in Mexican Nuevo Cine
Manifestoes around “la Crisis”
Scott L. Baugh
Texas Tech University
National characterizations of Mexico historically involve
periodic crises. Conceptions of Mexican crisis across economic,
political, and social contexts deserve critical attention, especially
as they configure national identities. Connotations of crisis
abound, from rationalism’s passage to knowledge and theology’s
wrestle with faith, to the paroxysm of a disease that leads to re-
covery or final collapse, to the event that drives a character to the
climax and consequential denouement in a narrative; significantly,
these ideas all involve an established process that, in the moment
of crisis, is jeopardized and, in the moment of correction, is rati-
fied and, epistemologically, becomes knowledge more firmly
engrained in the collective.1 The uses of the term with respect to
Mexico’s economic history are too numerable to note, but gener-
ally they replicate these connotations, whereby an economic sys-
tem is determined and applied. From an enfranchised viewpoint,
crisis appears as a malfunction in systemic operations, an inter-
ruption to the ordained and fundamental process, necessarily elic-
iting angst over the uncertainty of the outcome for sharers who
strive for stability.
In the years following World War II, studies of underdevel-
opment in Mexico and other parts of Latin America prescribe
“modern” progress through Westernized industrial growth. Put
concretely: “virtually every aspect of the Mexican strategy for
development…tends to further enmesh the country in a net of
dependent relationships with multi-national corporations, with
private American investors, with official U.S. banking institutions,
and with American-dominated international bodies like the World
Bank or the International Monetary Fund” (Hellman 72-3). Co-
incidentally, the technocracy associated with the classic Holly-
wood aesthetic and with U.S. multi-national corporate-studios
continues pushing across the Americas and the globe. “Quality
plummeted but production increased” in Mexican cinema, remarks
Carl Mora (99). Through a combination of protectionist laws,
exhibition quotas, a state monopoly, stereotypical representations,
and studio organization that denies technical and aesthetic inno-
vation, Mexican cinema has become a little big-industry in the
world marketplace, according to Alberto Ruy Sánchez (46, 61).
Pointedly, Charles Ramírez Berg outlines Mexican cinema’s de-
pendence on Hollywood, the political economy of Mexican cin-
ema, and the growing crisis throughout the state due to the lack of
quality filmmaking in the 1960s (37).
Given conjectures of crises, Mexican cinema of the 1960s,
coinciding with unparalleled economic gains, the rise of the
counter-culture, la Onda, a renewal of social activism, and a height-
ened sense of democracy, deserves closer examination. Particu-
lar constituents of Mexican cinema from the 1960s, the
self-proclaimed Grupo del Nuevo Cine or Mexican New Cinema
Group, address questions of Mexican crisis from a position of
disenfranchisement, deconstructing Mexico’s institutional struc-
tures and the ideologies correlative to them. The group’s mani-
festo documents, theoretical and descriptive statements made by
the filmmakers-cultural activists themselves, like their indepen-
dent film productions, recognize the intersection of economy,
politics, art, and community through their remonstrations of de-
pendence. The solutions the Nuevo Cine Group proposes in these
statements revolve around various embodiments of independence,
fostering a democratic impulse in Mexican culture.
Histories of Mexico tend to overlook the importance of the
early-1960s in favor of the tumultuous decade’s end and the
Echeverría sexenio, marking 1940 to 1970 a “miraculous” indus-
trial period and 1970 as a search for renewed “stability”;2 many
cultural histories follow this periodization.3 General film histo-
ries, including Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell’s Film His-
tory: An Introduction and David A. Cook’s A History of Narrative
Film, circumscribe Mexican independent filmmaking to this post-
1970 period (Cook 798; Thompson 638). More disarming, sev-
eral studies of Latin American and Mexican cinema ignore the
significance of the Nuevo Cine’s formative period, from 1960 to
1965, in favor of the post-1970 independent movements (García
Tsao; Elena 4-6; Costa; Gustavo García; Hershfield 193). As John
King insightfully claims, the Nuevo Cine Group arises in the late
1950s amid a “climate of uneven developmentalism and modern-
ization” (132). In the formulation of this group, according to
Ramírez Berg, Mora, and Tomás Pérez Turrent, is “the spark”
Vol. 34.2 (2004) | 25
Baugh | Developing History/Historicizing Development in Mexican Nuevo Cine Manifestoes around “la Crisis”
that electrifies the independent revolution starting in the mid-1960s
with the First Competition of Experimental Cinema in August of
1964 and continuing into the 1970s (Ramírez Berg 46; Mora 101-
7; Pérez Turrent 95). As Shifra M. Goldman and Ramírez Berg
assert, Mexican economic and political dependency on U.S. capi-
talism, parallel to Mexican film culture’s dependence on Holly-
wood, requires “rewriting the history of Mexican art” (Goldman;
Ramírez Berg 37).4 Rewriting this history demands, according
to one Nuevo Cine manifesto, a sociological approach sensitive
to the ideological forces structuring Mexican cinema and the eco-
nomic pivots of its existence (Michel “Mexican” 52).
In this essay, I examine the function of Nuevo Cine Group
manifestoes within a framework of social scientific approaches to
the history of Mexican political economy. I argue that in their call
for independence, the manifestoes critique the official discourse of
modernity and development that dominate studies of Mexico and
the Latin American global region more broadly. These manifes-
toes, thus, ensure the filmmakers freedom of expression and tech-
nical innovation outside the strictures of the Mexican film industry,
foster a democratizing cultural space within Mexico’s cinema, and
engender national and cultural identifications for Mexican cinema
audiences—all seeds for the larger cultural transformative project
that continues in the years to follow. As such, examining these
manifestoes in this light recasts the history of Mexican democracy,
one that reimagines crisis and contests dependency.
Mexico’s History of Dependence
Perhaps more than any other country throughout Latin
America, Mexico has served as an exemplary model, a template,
for Latin American “development,” and as a result a particular
incarnation of dependence appears within historical orientations
toward Mexican sociology and political economy. Raymond
Vernon, Henry G. Aubrey, William Glade, among others point to
Mexico’s “style” of economy as an “instructive” and “strategic”
case for nations of Latin America to emulate (Vernon 3-5; Aubrey
506; Glade “Enigma” 367; Glade “Revolution” 3, 5; Sturmthal
183). Through a modernization perspective, these studies advan-
tage a discreet tack and argue that Mexico experiences from the
close of World War II to 1970 “a process of continuous evolu-
tion,” tracking its growth qualitatively in correlation to its “spe-
cial closeness” to the United States (Vernon 177; Glade “Enigma”
367). Industrialization holds the promise of development for
Mexico, according to a modernizationist perspective, because
“advanced countries point in this direction” (Aubrey 522; Mosk
32-3). Mexico’s “social evolutionary character” with its “deep-
seated feelings of national and political pride,” self-perpetuating
psychological beliefs, and collective social attitudes provides some
explanation for the “interruptions” in its own development and
for its own “backward” “slum culture” (Reynolds 3; Aubrey 522-
3; Vernon 177; Glade “Revolution” 11-1; Lewis 14-7, 20-1).
26 | Film & History
Development in the style of the Western world, for many of the
modernization theorists, not only holds the future of economic
prosperity for Mexico, but more importantly gives life-blood to
its “vital force,” its political and social institutions, and its culture
(Mosk 33-5; Vernon 1-2; Aubrey 548-50). The official history of
Mexico’s political economy, based on modernization theory,
propagates a fundamental social and cultural western dependence.
In March of 1961, President Kennedy delivers before mem-
bers of the United States Congress and Latin American diplomats
the “Preliminary Formulations” for what would become the Alli-
ance for Progress. This statement for an alliance across the Ameri-
cas, though offering an idealization of liberal democracy and
pan-American unity in its pursuit of dignity and freedom, actually
highlights many of the modernizationist theories of development
of Mexico. In its earliest embodiment, the Alliance for Progress,
through the Organization of American States (OAS) in partnership
with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), seeks solutions
to hunger, poverty, unemployment, and other social ills by subsi-
dizing industrialization. The initially ten-year program implements
a Westernized developmental scheme throughout the Americas to
support enrichment of the spiritual and intellectual life and culture
of Americans, to effectuate, as a matter of course, the “revolution
of the Americas” (Kennedy 474). The Alliance for Progress repre-
sents similar agencies and policies of the 1960s and 1970s that
advantage the United States, its economic and political policies, as
well as its cultural values over those of Mexico. In the tradition of
Andre Gunder Frank, dependency theorists such as Víctor L. Urquidi
directly address inter-American biases in a refutation of modern-
ization, declaring such practices of the first-world as exploitive of
Mexico (138, 15). Urquidi examines the relationships and the terms
of trade between Mexico and other countries, determining that it is
unclear as to whether foreign market activity helps or hampers
Mexico’s economy, especially given its predilection toward state
intervention and its reliance on foreign capital, arguing that influ-
ence and benefit depends on who retains the “stronger position”
(15, 54). Jesus Silva Herzog even more directly links Mexico’s
dependency through foreign investment and internal political inter-
vention to the “certain deterioration of Mexico’s economic devel-
opment” (31). In a more romantic vein, Frank Tannenbaum indicates
the extent to which Mexican government subsidization, Western
investment in the pursuit of industrial development, and a conse-
quential “ideal of bigness” sacrifice a more purely Mexican “phi-
losophy of little things” (243-5). Dependency theory articulates
the unfairness of terms of trade associated with developmentalism
and Mexico’s dependency on Western influences further associ-
ated with these terms, citing an ethnocentric bias ingrained in de-
velopmental models that advocate ideological and entrepreneurial
interests of Western multi-national corporations and are supported
by Mexican governmental policies (Cosío Villegas 122, 127;
González Casanova 61; Silva Herzog 32-3).
Even before the 1970s, studies of Mexico’s political

economy adopt comparative methodologies in line with world-
system approaches, critically reviewing modernizationist conclu-
sions. Immanuel Wallerstein proposes in his The Modern
World-System a sociological paradigm adapted from dependency
theory but grounded in scientific systems methodology: the world
operates as a system, organized into core, richer states and pe-
ripheral, poorer states, the terms of trade among which are his-
torically unfair and unequal; thus, studies must assess nation-states
individually as well as holistically within the workings of the
world-system. Wallerstein’s systemic view explains congruences
between economic and secular trends within Mexico, demonstrates
how institutional mechanisms—including bureaucratic force, ideo-
logical commitment, and semi-peripheral/middle-class mobiliza-
tion—remain in place, and consequently critiques the domination
of first-world nations (Capitalist 20-6, 36, 222-4). Fernando
Henrique Cardoso among other world-system sociologists exam-
ines Mexico’s economy and its hemispheric and global placement
and harshly criticizes the unfair terms of trade and the depen-
dence at the root of Mexico’s industrial development (Cardoso
Dependency 154, 160; González Casanova 56). Gustavo Lagos
claims that overcoming underdevelopment and eliminating exter-
nal dependence go hand-in-hand, claiming the UN-sanctioned
right of state sovereignty over resources and wealth in accordance
with norms set at the national, regional, and global levels (153-6).
For Lagos, Johan Galtung, and other world-system theorists, at
once this requires new economic policies and practices in Mexico
and the other parts of Latin America within a multi-leveled, poly-
centric ideological “struggle” and a reorientation to the socio-
political and cultural values associated with them (Lagos 156-9;
Galtung 175-6, 184).
Wallerstein and others characterize the ideology behind
counter-hegemonic models as a democratizing force (“Depen-
dence” 275, 287). Even more specifically, Lagos likens social
change in Mexico and other Latin American countries to a demo-
cratic system of government with checks and a balance-of-power,
neither wholly capitalist nor socialist but guided in the pursuit of
humanist liberation (140). Pablo González Casanova argues con-
vincingly that a reversal of the pattern of Mexico’s dependence
on the United States—economically, politically, and socially—
invites the urgently needed redistribution of wealth within Mexico
and fosters a democratizing force (193). More than static terms
of economic and political policy, gaining independence within
Mexico equates to a greater democratic and humanistic project
concerning Mexicans’ material and spiritual well-being, a “revo-
lution of being” (Silva Herzog 36; Lagos 132-33).
Historically, where stability is not achieved—economically
and politically, first, and, by extension, socially and culturally—
the hot-button term, “crisis,” has been invoked. Samir Amin, ar-
guing from a peripheral viewpoint, finds that re-investment of
profits within a dependent economy perpetually increases the
control of foreign capital and the self-sufficiency of its sources
Scott L. Baugh | Special In-Depth Section
(Unequal 250-53). Disequilibria in production or realization of
value amounts to a “crisis” as perceived from a centralized (and
enfranchised) standpoint and can be extrapolated to a “political
crisis,” a “social crisis, or an “ideological crisis” (Amin Class
229-30). Fernando Henrique Cardoso put forward a similar point,
that within Latin American countries like Mexico relying on west-
ern-dependent developmentism the results are a monopolistic
control over the local economies, a fragmentation of the local
bases, and an integration of only the more advanced parts into an
international system (“Dependency” 89-90). Cautious of the ten-
dency to de-politicize national and transnational values particu-
larly associated with the peripheral position within the
world-system, Cardoso, like Amin, Wallerstein, and other sys-
tems theorists, aim to “define another style of development” in
Mexico and the rest of Latin America based on “alternative strat-
egies” and a “will to revolutionize”: “denunciation of
marginalization as a consequence of capitalist growth, and the
organization of unstructured masses, are indispensable tasks of
analysis and practical politics” (“Towards” 299, 301; “Depen-
dency” 95). Wallerstein’s notion of a “strategy of self-reliance”
and other post-structuralist conceptions of Mexican development
gravitate away from dependence and toward carefully balanced
global interdependence and community-based independence (“De-
pendence” 275).
Certainly other variables—among them urbanization and
housing, education and suffrage patterns, international mass me-
dia, tradition and customs, etc.—must be factored; however, there
is strong evidence for especial strains of similarities among eco-
nomic, political, social, and cultural changes that occurred in post-
WWII Mexico, especially as these strains of similarities revolve
around issues of dependence and independence. Mexico’s cin-
ema industry in the 1960s offers a microcosm of how state-subsi-
dized and politically motivated corporations acquiesce to the
western-dominant development model and foster a spirit of de-
pendency to the detriment of Mexican democracy. Given the
methodologies of the world-system theorists, studies of Mexican
cinema and culture must consider both Mexican national con-
cerns as well as the nation’s placement within the Latin American
global region and the world, as Randal Johnson advances (“Belly”
208). A most striking example of cultural expression of liberal
democratic resistance to dominant economic and socio-political
practices can be seen in Nuevo Cine manifestoes of the early 1960s.
Mexican Cinema in a Crisis
Mainstream Mexican cinema through the 1950s and beyond
can best be described as dependent on the institutional structure
of the Mexican government, what Octavio Paz refers to as “el
ogre filantrópico,” a “philanthropic ogre,” in this era of state protec-
tionism. Mexico’s economic dependence corresponds to an equally
gripping dependence on foreign investments, especially from U.S.
Vol. 34.2 (2004) | 27
Baugh | Developing History/Historicizing Development in Mexican Nuevo Cine Manifestoes around “la Crisis”
corporations. Parallel to concrete forms of dependence are con-
ceptual dependencies, as Mexican cinema in its vertically-inte-
grated industrialized system, models its practices and its
aesthetics after the Hollywood paradigm and the larger cultural
and ideological trends of the West; paradoxically, this remains
effectively at odds with the ideals of liberal democracy and
Mexico’s fair and competitive positioning within the global free-
enterprise system.
In the late 1950s, several filmmakers and intellectuals joined
together in reaction against these forms of dependency suffocat-
ing Mexican cinema, forming del Grupo Nuevo Cine, the Mexi-
can New Cinema Group. Among the first orders of business were
establishing a publication, Nuevo Cine,5 and in its first issue in
1960 publishing the group’s manifesto. The manifesto was col-
lectively authored by members of the Nuevo Cine group, includ-
ing José de la Colina, Rafael Corkidi, Salvador Elizondo, J. M.
García Ascot, Emilio García Reira, J. L. González de Léon,
Heriberto Lafranchi, Carlos Monsiváis, Julio Pliego, Gabriel
Ramírez, José María Sbert, and Luis Vicens.6 The “Manifiesto
del Grupo Nuevo Cine” concisely outlines grievances over the
condition of Mexican cinema and other forms of cultural expres-
sion more generally of the period and offers several suggestions
for renovation of the Mexican film industry and, by extension,
Mexican culture. The first level of its argument, in fact, deals
directly with economic aspects of Mexico’s film industry, includ-
ing production, distribution, and exhibition apparatuses as well
as unionization. The New Cinema Group cites “monopolies” con-
trolled by relatively few executives of state-protected corpora-
tions as an endemic problem in Mexico’s film industry: “limitations
imposed by circles that, in fact, monopolize the production of
movies” (33). This is similar to federal protection offered to multi-
national and foreign-invested Mexican corporations favoring in-
dustrialization in other fields. Also, similar to the restrictions on
import goods that are fundamental to Mexico’s import-substitu-
tion industrialization (ISI) program, the film industry, through
government protection, controls foreign film exhibition and man-
dates quotas for domestic studio-film exhibition (34).
Among its many objectives, the “Manifiesto” proposes the
creation of auxiliary bodies such as specialty magazines and aca-
demic journals, a film archive and preservation institute, and a
training facility within the national university as well as protec-
tion for cinema clubs and the film festival, Reseña de Festivales,
all of which aim to foster a film culture and appreciation among
Mexican students of film. The Nuevo Cine Group acknowledges
that “oppositional alliances” composed of government, corporate,
and union agencies prevent the renovation of the studio-based
system in Mexico (33). In particular, according to the “Manifiesto,”
unions, with their affiliated strength, lock new filmmakers out of
employment opportunities where a promotion of new filmmakers
and technicians is urgently needed (33). Significantly, “an inde-
pendent cinema” can “overcome the depressed economic state of
28 | Film & History
Mexican cinema” (“Manifiesto” 33).
Bookending the Nuevo Cine Group’s “Manifiesto” are two
historical surveys of the previous half-century of Mexican cinema,
both of which are authored by Nuevo Cine filmmakers and like-
wise both proffering directed points on the economic structure of
Mexico’s state-subsidized studio corporation-based film industry.
Thus, within these surveys there are argumentative statements that
function like manifestoes from the filmmaker-activists’ perspec-
tive. In 1960, Emilio García Reira,7 in his Medio Siglo de Cine
Mexicano/Fifty Years of Motion Pictures in Mexico, historically situ-
ates the post-WWII film culture within two significant patterns from
Mexico’s earliest film periods, often referred to as el Cine de Oro
or the Golden Age. The first pattern García Reira recognizes in-
volves the shift in style for filmmakers, including Emilio Gómez
Muriel, Carlos Navarro, and Juan Bustillo Oro in the 1930s and
Emilio Fernández, Roberto Gavaldón, Chano Urueta, Julio Bracho,
Gabriel Figueroa, among others in the 1940s, from experimenta-
tion and innovation to “a decidedly commercial” and more stable
market (25-7).8 This first pattern results in a national cinema that
is unalterably formulaic and low in quality (García Reira 21). García
Reira’s second pattern enforces the first: innovative film projects,
veering from the stylistic formula or offering themes of national
custom and indigenous folklore, are disallowed due to “the indus-
trialization” of filmmaking (21, 24-5).
Productions are subject to approval by government agen-
cies as well as the production companies, which are even more
directly influenced by political pressure, and entry into filmmak-
ing by new artists is restricted by those same corporations and
unions. García Reira explains that provocative film productions:
have been systematically rejected by their financial
interests…at the moment we find ourselves with thirty
old directors conveniently installed, with no artistic sense
or ambition whatsoever, protected by union rights and
happily supported by their producers, in this way shut-
ting the doors to an eager and newer generation. (22)
As Charles Ramírez Berg has argued convincingly in Cinema of
Solitude, García Reira points to the “hybrid mixture” of Mexican
nationalism and U.S-influenced commercialism in a distinctly fla-
vored Mexican film culture, but García Reira argues that in this
flavor are “the worst of Hollywood influences” (28). Producers,
those few “magnates who hold the financial reins of the indus-
try,” ignore all thoughts “except the money he can make out of a
picture” (García Reira 31). Unions, and in particular the Worker’s
Union of Mexican Cinematographic Productions/Sindicato de
Trabajadores de la Producción de Cinematográfica de la
República Mexicana (STPCM) founded in March of 1945 with
its political ties to church and state, have drawn an “iron curtain”
before new-comers to filmmaking in Mexico (García Reira 28-
32). Mexican cinema of this period, leading up to the 1960s,

emulates “the American companies that they took as their model”
and, more specifically, the economic structure of the country
(García Reira 23, 26). The dependency upon which García Reira
argues the film industry is founded relies on Mexican state poli-
tics, corporate and social institutions that politics directly influ-
ence, and foreign influence especially from the United States;
moreover, this dependency generates an inferiority within national
cultural expressions. Mexico’s “only hope” lies in independent
artists, such as Adolfo Garnica and Giovanni Korporaal, who in
the tradition of Luis Buñuel work on the margins tackling serious
national interests in innovative approaches and counteract the
dependency that modernizationism and industrial development
impose (32).9
A later survey appears in a 1965 issue of Film Quarterly by
Manuel Michel,10 editor, writer, and assistant director to Jomí
García Ascot11 of En el Balcón Vacío/On the Empty Balcony, a
1961 film that realizes the call of these manifestoes. In his “Mexi-
can Cinema: A Panoramic View,” Michel partially follows the
outline of the original “Manifiesto” published some five years
earlier. Michel demonstrates the need for a serious magazine, an
academic journal, and book publications devoted to the study of
film in Mexico, for support of cinema clubs, and for a film library
to preserve and make accessible Mexico’s filmic expressions, all
aiming to remediate the “isolation” detracting from Mexican cin-
ema (“Mexican” 53, 47). The inferior quality of Mexican cinema
derives from “the complexity of the problems of an underdevel-
oped economy”: “the struggle for a national bourgeoisie engaged
in industrialization” generates the commercial thrust of Mexican
film production and, as a result, a pattern of censorship and mo-
nopolistic control over the national film culture (Michel “Mexi-
can” 47). Struck by bankruptcy, internal and global market
collapse, loss of investment capital, and, yet, the Mexican film
industry at the close of the 1950s favors the elite few with the
fortune of profits, distilling Mexico’s uneven distribution of wealth
(Michel “Mexican” 46).
Michel characterizes Mexico’s film business as a “mo-
nopoly” with the four pillars of production and finance, distribu-
tion, exhibition, and labor organization “modeled after
Hollywood,” funded by foreign investors, and under Mexican state
and corporate domination (“Mexican” 50, 52-3). State interven-
tion reveals itself through the National Film Bank/Banco Nacional
Cinematográfico12 and the General Film Administration/Dirección
General de Cinematográfia, both of which are responsible for
hegemonic control and “censorship of a political and moral char-
acter” (Michel “Mexican” 53). The organizational structure, a
“well laid-out development,” functions like a machine: “as a kind
of pump which extracts money for the benefit of a limited group
of privileged people who have made fortunes while sheltered from
risks by government agencies” (Michel “Mexican” 53). Credit
for film business is granted from the Film Bank through a special
commission, the Comisión de Adelantos, consisting of agents and
Scott L. Baugh | Special In-Depth Section
managers of state-subsidized and producer-invested distribution
companies, clearly based on internal political connections and
the commercial viability given its star talent and not necessarily
on artistic or aesthetic merit (Michel “Mexican” 53).
Even more so than in Hollywood’s studio system, Mexican
film focuses on the appeal of stars—Dolores del Río, Pedro
Armendáriz, and María Félix through the 1940s (Michel “Mexi-
can” 49-50). Like García Reira, Michel makes note of some few
potentially provocative filmmakers who, over time, contribute to
the commercial migration and erode the national cinema’s aes-
thetics—especially Juan Bustillo, Ferando de Fuentes in the 1930s,
and carrying forward with Alejandro Galindo, Chano Urueta, and
Roberto Galvadón in the 1940s and 1950s (“Mexican” 48-50).13
State-run agencies, corporate executives, and film artists and union
technicians themselves conspire to set in place restrictions to “close
the doors to all newcomers” and, thus, deprive Mexico an authen-
tic national cinema in place of a western-dependent Hollywood
imitation (Michel “Mexican” 48-9). To elevate the level of aes-
thetic and philosophical inquiry within Mexican film culture,
Michel claims, Mexico must “attain true independence” (“Mexi-
can” 49). Referencing the work of Benito Alazraki, Carlos Velo,
and Giovanni Korporal, Michel claims that independent produc-
tions will provide “hopes of all of us who aspire to a better cin-
ema,” a cinema of “authentic creativity” and aesthetic and
philosophical engagement (“Mexican” 46-7, 52).14
In Michel’s and García Reira’s criticisms, we see in paral-
lel to the whole of Mexico’s political economy an industrial struc-
ture in cinema, enforcing a Western-dependent developmental
model in the aim of modernity. This parallel structure appears in
several other manifesto statements by Nuevo Cinema film artists,
including one by Michel on censorship and another by Salvador
Elizondo that explicitly articulates the types of “crises” experi-
enced in Mexican cinema and throughout the country.
The year before he writes his “Panoramic” survey, Manuel
Michel devotes a brief statement in 1964 to the role of censorship
in Mexico’s film culture. “La Censura en el Cine Mexicano”
spells out several of the most impairing forms of censorship, re-
vealing government intervention disguised by “the pseudonym of
supervision” (298). Political and corporate powers control scripts
even before they begin production, advising scenes cut and themes
eliminated (Michel “Censura” 299). If a scene that features “po-
litical definance” and “insinuating dialogue,” “rebeldías políticas,
diálogos insinuantes,” appears in a film and is considered severe,
censorship is exacted through state bureaus at the point of exhibi-
tion (Michel “Censura” 299). Censure of the production, distri-
bution, and exhibition all fall under the control of the Mexican
state through the agency of the General Film Administration/
Dirección General de Cinematográfia, instituting the Law of the
Film Industry, “la Ley de la Industria Cinematográfica,” ratified
during the Alemán administration (Michel “Censura” 298).15
Most significantly, where the government controls the economics
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Baugh | Developing History/Historicizing Development in Mexican Nuevo Cine Manifestoes around “la Crisis”
of the film industry, it “enacts a dependency” on the part of both
the artist and the spectator to corporate and political powers (Michel
“Censura” 298). Moreover, this dependency initiated over eco-
nomic measures within the film business conditions other aesthetic
and cultural issues within Mexican cinema and society at large.
Salvador Elizondo’s “El Cine Mexicano y la Crisis,” appear-
ing in 1962 in the final issue of the Mexican New Cinema Group’s
journal, Nuevo Cine, takes advantage of a plural-authorial voice,
echoing the liberal-democratic collectivism of the original
“Manifiesto.” More directly than in any of the other manifestoes,
Elizondo addresses the issue of “crisis” and stability at the root of
the hierarchical power structures built into its economic basis. “For
the first time in history,” claims Elizondo, “the three entities of cor-
porate producers, guild members, and government officials con-
front one another in their sponsorship of the economic crisis of the
Mexican film industry” (37). Producers, for their part, contribute
to the high cost of production of formulaic fare; unions maintain a
“closed-door policy,” “una política de puerta cerrada,” regarding
the in-flow of new filmmaking talent; and state intervention deliv-
ers censorship and financial discrimination (Elizondo 38). Between
1958 and 1962, Mexican cinema lost a large part of its “zone of
influence” in foreign markets, especially in Cuba, Venezuela, and
Colombia in Latin America and in Latino circuits in the United
States, due to producers raising the expenses of filmmaking with-
out considering the quality of the films (Elizondo 38-40). Unions,
too, should acknowledge partial responsibility according to
Elizondo, because their conservative policy-making regarding new
members “has impeded for many years the renovation of film crews”
and, therefore, prevents innovation in filmmaking (41). Producers
show great support for this “closed-door” policy in the unions be-
cause in part it prohibits variations to the expectations of spectators
and provides a stable venue for formulaic cinema, strikingly simi-
lar to the types of stability sought by core state governments and
multi-national corporations in the world marketplace (Elizondo 41).
Perhaps most to blame, though, according to Elizondo, the
financial institutions, primarily the National Film Bank, control all
domestic accounts and credits loaned to state-subsidized film com-
panies (40). Through its own financial responsibility to produc-
tion, distribution, and exhibition sponsorship, the Film Bank often
incurs loss of capital as a result of the difference of interests among
these three entities (Elizondo 40-1). While this circularity in
Mexico’s film industry offers a sense of security, administrative
control, and seeming stability, its own economic principle is a det-
riment to the nation. “Crisis” can be seen, as it can in the greater
history of Mexican political economy, as moments of interruption
or malfunction within the film industry; however, Elizondo signifi-
cantly points out that this crisis in the film industry not only matters
economically but also enables censorship. This crisis, argues
Elizondo, unlike previous crises, “manifests not so much as a con-
flict of interests between producers and workers as it does an all-
out suspension of all film activity, in fact” (37). In this suspension
30 | Film & History
of cinematic activity, filmmakers and their audiences open a space
in which to critically examine and re-envision Mexican national
and cultural identity. Elizondo’s redefinition of “crisis” embodies
a democratic impulse in the call for independence.
Elizondo criticizes Mexican cinema’s moribund practices as
predictable, solely consumption-oriented, and formulaic. In a sa-
tirical sweep, Elizondo describes how Mexican film producers
within this system of unionized crews and state subsidization would
approach a film like A Bout de Souffle, Breathless (by Godard with
Truffaut and featuring Belmondo and la Seberg), assigning instead
Cecil B. DeMille to direct and casting Vivien Leigh and Marcello
Mastrianni (42). Independent exhibition affords the best solution
to this economically and politically grounded “system of tabula-
tion” ruling Mexican cinema (Elizondo 42, 44). Elizondo reveals
how more than adding to the foreign film distribution to the interior
of Mexico, “in this moment in which independent exhibitors can
become at the same time producers, the power of federal arbitra-
tion presently between the unions and producers will be seen to
break by the intervention of this third force” (44). As witnessed in
other manifestoes of the Nuevo Cine Group, the modernized devel-
opmental models that drive Mexico to Western-dependent economic
and socio-political policies meet oppositions in a liberal-democratic
drive for independence.
Que Onda
Salvador Elizondo’s sport, formularizing Breathless for as-
sured commercial success in an Americanized global marketplace,
hints at a crucial point: even though there are several similarities
between the earliest formulation of the Nuevo Cine Group in
Mexico and “new wave” filmmaking groups in other countries in
roughly the same time period, Nuevo Cine’s reaction to Mexico’s
dependency on Western-style economic development crystallizes
a distinguishing and all-telling difference. While Mexico’s insu-
larity from the “third world” (precisely because of its ties to the
United States) distinguishes it from most other countries in the
Latin American global region, it shares with these a dependent-
developmental position within the world economic and social
system (Burton “Marginal” 4; López 7; Chanan 2-3; Johnson Cin-
ema 99, 121, 218-9). Distinctions between New Mexican Cin-
ema and the “New” cinemas of Europe are even clearer, however.
British “Free Cinema,” Italian Neo-Realism, German Das Neue
Kino, French Nouvelle Vague, the “Personal,” “Structural-Mate-
rialist,” and “Indy” movements occurring in the United States of
this period all share the basis of G7 national economies that are
“developed” according to modernizationism—not “underdevel-
oped,” not dependent, as is Mexico and its counter-cultural cin-
ema. “New” cinemas of the “developed” countries and even the
established Mexican commercial cinema cannot offer the poten-
tial for alternative expressions to help reclaim Mexican national
and cultural identity. The Nuevo Cine Group manifesto state-
ments, however, expound on economically-based arguments about

the film industry to redress issues pertaining to cultural formula-
tions of mexicanidad.
One of the calls of the “Manifiesto del Grupo Nuevo Cine”
involves “protection for the Reseña de Festivales,” an annual
screening review that “exposes Mexican film artists and audi-
ences to the best films and their makers throughout the world”
(34). This point, supported by Manuel Michel in his “Panoramic
View,” exposes the restrictions on distribution and exhibition of
foreign films in Mexico, the quotas placed on studio-produced
(and foreign-invested) commercial fare, and more generally
emulates the pattern of import-substitution developmentalism
that has left Mexico a debtor nation. Michel links the “com-
plexity of the problems of underdevelopment” to “isolation of
the Mexican cinema from authentic Mexican culture and from
the aesthetic and cultural trends of foreign cinematography”
(“Mexican” 47). Several of the manifestoes acclaim the influ-
ence of Buñuel and repine the lack of international exchange
with more filmmakers, artistic movements, and philosophical
investigations (Michel “Mexican” 51; García Reira 30-1;
Elizondo 37). In his statement on censorship, Michel illustrates
omissions to Mexican culture: “Throughout the world, to a
greater or lesser extent, filmic expression informs cultural life,
the assimilation to it and the reflection of it,” profoundly influ-
encing social activism (“Censura” 302). Elizondo judges the
production companies to blame for the economic crisis afflict-
ing Mexican cinema:
The government, as always, proves to be the “easy
mark” in this situation, because it is the main share-
holder of so many distribution companies through the
Film Bank, now seen besieged by producers who, in-
voking a deplorable situation for the laborers, demand
a subsidy to continue making churros. The day when
the producers get their subvention will be a return to
the old state of things, and nothing will clear up all of
the debates that have promoted this crisis. (40-41)16
Mexico stands in stark contrast to France and its Nouvelle Vague,
according to Elizondo, where a similar economic crisis decreased
production costs by more than half, “the quality of the films
produced by the young directors permitted France to regain some
markets and take hold of others where they had been inconsis-
tent” (42). García Reira points out that independent produc-
tions in the U.S. have successfully been produced “on a
shoestring budget” (21). Reinforcing the stability of Mexico’s
studio system, parallel to its dependent economy, Michel re-
marks, is a “fossilization” of its talent, where “no renewal” has
occurred as it has in European and United States cinemas and
no “independent agencies like the ones that have emerged out-
side of Hollywood” (“Mexican” 46). As part of Mexico’s
counter-cultural movement, the “Manifiesto” and other filmmak-
Scott L. Baugh | Special In-Depth Section
ers’ statements reveal an objective of the Nuevo Cine Group: to
renovate the Mexican cinema and break state and corporate
monopolies through “the production and open exhibition of an
independent cinema” (33).
La Onda, the Mexican “wave” of counter-culture, while
the issues revolving around its history are extremely complex,
is fundamentally different from its United States and Western
European complements as a result of its economic basis. Cardoso
warns that socio-political policies reinforcing industrialization
in Latin America can attempt to maintain “a stable relationship
between nationalism and populism” (Dependency 149). In a
1971 report submitted to the Inter-American Development Bank
and acting on behalf of the Latin American Institute for Eco-
nomic and Social Planning, Raúl Prebisch acknowledges that,
in this era a number of economic studies—by Pearson, Tinbergen,
Rockefeller, Jackson, Peterson, alongside Prebisch’s—concen-
trate on international development and agencies advocating in-
dustrial development (Herrera v-vii). Prebisch’s report describes
the climate of the era with respect to social activism:
These problems are not always discussed in Latin
America with the necessary objectivity, since the at-
mosphere is increasingly charged with emotion. There
is a great deal of ferment and unrest among the youth
of the region, which is not merely a form of conta-
gion, although it involves some degree of violence that
is imitative of what is happening elsewhere. The atti-
tude of nonconformity apparent among the younger
generations, as well as among those who have long
left youth behind, has roots that strike very deep.
Poverty in the rural areas, social marginality in the
cities, glaring disparities in income distribution, lim-
ited opportunities for dynamic personalities in a wide
range of human actitivies…Perhaps one of the princi-
pal problems arising in Latin America is that of re-
solving the contradiction between the rising
generations’ legitimate desire to take part in the solu-
tion of the major problems of community life and the
hesitant or piecemeal response—if any—made by
political and social movements with a view to trans-
lating their dynamic energy into effective forms of
action. (242)
Prebisch further illuminates “development discipline,” where
models of dependent developmentalism can be extended “by co-
ercive measures” in the aim of security and stability (241). The
state maintains a “monopoly on institutional coercion and vio-
lence,” according to Randal Johnson, “which inevitably functions
as a component of its policy toward culture” (“Belly” 206).
Nuevo Cine manifestoes enact a non-violent defiance against
the monopolies of the Mexican film industry, suggestive of a dem-
Vol. 34.2 (2004) | 31
Baugh | Developing History/Historicizing Development in Mexican Nuevo Cine Manifestoes around “la Crisis”
onstration against the agents enforcing industrial development and
a subversion of other forms of hegemony in Mexican society. In
their own brand of passive resistant activism as witnessed in their
manifestoes, the Nuevo Cine contributes to the democratizing pro-
cess of la Onda and help to reconceive Mexican crises.
Otro Lado/An “Other” Side of
Mexican Crisis
Is cinema not only an industry but also an art? The Nuevo
Cine Group manifestoes engage this most basic question, as articu-
lated by García Reira, facing Mexican filmmakers in the early 1960s
(1, 21). Where the initial level of argumentation in these docu-
ments takes up economic and labor issues, the logical progression
leads to issues surrounding aesthetics and their socially active func-
tion, especially as they foreground a reconceptualization of crisis
by striving toward freedom of expression and independence.
Nuevo Cine Group manifestoes invoke the ideal of free ex-
pression, a constitutional right for Mexican citizens and a bed-
rock principle for liberal democracies.1 Although on the surface
certain similarities exist between these points and auteur concep-
tions of the film-artist, the performative function of this freedom—
for both filmmaker and spectator within the context of this film
culture—more directly enacts a democratizing process and a con-
demnation against the modernization-oriented dependency that
cripples Mexican cinema and society at large. The “Manifiesto,”
for example, endorses the “new promotion of filmmakers” who
“demonstrate the capability to make a new cinema in Mexico”
(33). In support of this promotion of new film talent, the Nuevo
Cine Group affirms “that the creative filmmaker has rights equiva-
lent to the writer, the painter, the musician to express him- or
herself with freedom” (“Manifiesto” 33). Free expression, then,
does not advocate a “particular type of cinema” over another but
rather a system of operations and a culture that “allows a free
play of creativity, with the diversity of aesthetic, moral, and po-
litical positions that it implies” in contrast to the traditional rigid-
ity and developmental dependence of the state-supported film
industry in place (“Manifiesto” 33).
García-Reira echoes the “Manifiesto,” demonstrating the
significance of a filmmaker’s vision, especially on the part of the
director, to the artistry, the “creative authenticity,” and the “defi-
nite ideology” of the work (21, 29). Michel indicts the Mexican
film industry’s dependent developmentalism by pointing out that
engaging in industrialization denies filmmakers their “freedom
of expression,” thus resulting in a conformity to tradition and state
politics and a “veiling of cultural problems” (“Mexican” 47, 53).
Citing the industry’s domineering “supervision” as “unconstitu-
tional,” Michel reveals intentional ambiguity in the laws regulat-
ing the Mexican film industry whereby certain institutions—the
army, the police, banks, for instance—are “untouchable” and de-
voted to portray “an image of society clean of any disgraces”
32 | Film & History
(“Censura” 300-1). Dependency resulting from Mexico’s
modernizationist developmental programs establishes the eco-
nomic base of the film industry and leads to “political, cultural,
and aesthetic repression” (Michel “Censura” 299).
Elizondo admonishes the leaders in the film industry, and
in particular studio executives, for predetermining the quality of
Mexican films and their audiences’ tastes, “precisely defined ac-
cording to the exigencies of the underdeveloped markets” (42, 46).
Operating solely within the “terms of ‘business’” obligates the pro-
duction companies to make what Elizondo names “el cine-
promedio,” “the average-film” (44). By insisting on using
“arguments economic in character” instead of “confronting the de-
plorable quality of the films,” the producers rob a democratic im-
pulse from Mexican culture in its promotion of modernizationist
development models (Elizondo 39).2 In terms of the director’s vi-
sion of artistry, technical innovation, and socio-political relevance,
Michel acknowledges noteworthy, if faultering, attempts to “break
away from the patterns of commercial movies,” especially in small
gauge (16mm and 8mm) and short formats as part of an alternative
cinema within independent culture (“Mexican” 51).
In its pursuit of “quality” cultural expressions, the Nuevo Cine
Group counteracts the dependency that hampers Mexican society
by joining together in support of films and filmmaking that de-
nounce the modernizationist development model. Focused prelimi-
narily on economic and political arguments, the manifestoes extend
their scope to examine the influence of Mexico’s dependent eco-
nomic strategies to Mexican cultural identification. Independent
productions not only counteract the business of commercial cin-
ema and allow artists freedom of expression, but perhaps most im-
portantly, they inform their spectators, especially Mexican
audiences, with a validation of national and cultural identity.
The Mexican New Cinema Group “Manifiesto” proposes
six numbered objectives, all aiming toward the formation of an
independent cinema, a more discursively open space for cultural
expression and artistic experimentation. While this must neces-
sarily happen in the margins of society, at least initially the film-
makers admit, the New Cinema Group “expects to count on the
support of the film-conscious public,” el “público cinematográfico
consciente,” one with a growing awareness of the importance of
film and other mass-mediated forms of cultural expression (34).
Through the aesthetics of this medium, García Reira suggests, a
potentially symbiotic relationship exists between cinema and au-
dience in the spiritual growth of Mexican citizens individually
and collectively (21). As independent films renew interests in
folk and indigenous customs and socially relevant issues, they
break the monopolistic hold the commercial industry has on
Mexico; this film culture, then, mobilizes the masses toward lib-
eral-democratic activism (García Reira 29-32).
Michel, in his “Panoramic View,” laments that the commer-
cial industry has suffered as it has not reflected the “convulsive
moments that have shook the country,” that it has produced films

“lacking a philosophy and an aesthetic” related to Mexican na-
tionalism, mexicanidad, and a poetic intuition (48-50). Indepen-
dent cinema offers “hopes for renovation” in film and more broadly
cultural expression in 1960s Mexico (Michel “Mexican” 52).
Elizondo demonstrates how an independent cinema—starting
grassroots with exhibitors, which can become producers as well—
not only uncovers the pretext under which production companies
have used unions as leverage for state subsidization and to increase
the volume of production and capital, but even more importantly
serves as the dominant factor in recovering socially-aware and tech-
nically innovative filmmaking (43-4). The kinds of independently
produced films necessarily address the “stratas characteristic of
audiences in Mexico,” ensure “diversification of product,” and carry
with them a greater “liberty of action,” “libertad de acción,” for the
different parties involved in the business, in the creation, and in the
viewership (44). Michel acknowledges that film has an entertain-
ment value, but claims that “by its same nature” a “greater destiny”
resides in its “mode of aesthetic, ideological, and poetic expres-
sion,” which censorship and restrictions within the corporate-sys-
tem have enervated (“Censura” 302).
“Truly catastrophic,” Michel claims, the political rhetoric
of commercial films, serving the studio system and the larger so-
cial order it endorses, programs the audience through a
“réfoulement,” a repression of concepts from which the masses
of spectators must consciously break free (“Censura” 302). In-
dependent cinema can offer alternative filmmaking strategies for
artists, but more importantly as it disrupts the stability of the
modernizationist developmental paradigm, it provides viewers la
conciencia, a liberating space in which to formulate national and
cultural identification (Michel “Censura” 302). In more concrete
terms, this psychic “spirit of defiance,” “el espíritu de rebeldía,”
translates into organizing protests, enacting boycotts, and claim-
ing an independent identity (Michel “Censura” 302). If crisis
can be interpreted as lapses or interruptions in the function of a
system, then crisis as applied to 1960s Mexico might be democ-
ratizing moments in which independence can be sought and gained.
Salvador Elizondo, alongside his Nuevo Cine compatriots,
prophesizes that, in the unification of independent cinema in
Mexico within plans for democratic equality, a “new state of equi-
librium,” “nuevo estado de equilibrio,” can emerge, further re-
solving issues surrounding Mexico’s various economic,
socio-political, and cultural crises (46).
Conclusion
How successful were the Nuevo Cine filmmakers in instigat-
ing change in Mexican cinema or, more generally, in the economy,
the socio-politics, and the cultural order in 1960s Mexico? If we
measure success in quantitative numbers of actual films produced
outside of the state-supported studio industry and distributed do-
mestically and internationally by the members of the Mexican New
Scott L. Baugh | Special In-Depth Section
Cinema Group, we find little evidence of impact. In fact, in the late
1960s, the state produces almost ninety percent of all Mexican
films.19 Moreover, the pattern, which so many of the manifestoes
mention—new artists emerge on the filmmaking scene only to be
enveloped by commercialism and the hegemony of the industry—
resurfaces in the late-1960s and 1970s, as the studios live on with
several New Cinema members adding to their ranks or simply fad-
ing away or changing occupations altogether.
In April of 1974, then-President Luis Echeverría, as part of
his apertura democrática liberalization program for the film in-
dustry before an assembly at the capital estate, formally invites
Mexican film artists to unite with state forces to produce films of
social criticism and self-awareness: “you must feel this with moral
authority, aesthetic capability and imaginative force, so that, to-
gether, all of us can better Mexico” (qtd. in Treviño 26). Ap-
pointed by his brother and newly instated President, Rodolfo
Echeverría enacts this directive as head of the Film Bank through
financially-centered strategies of rebuilding the Mexican studio
system—crediting film production at the state-operated Studio
de las Américas, Conacite Uno, Conacite Dos, Conacine, which
added to Churubusco’s production and Operadora de Teatros’s
distribution state-protected oligopoly. Ramírez Berg notes that
during Echeverría’s sexenio, sixty percent of Mexico’s theaters
are state-owned and the state distributes ninety-five percent of all
domestic fare in this new era of Mexican liberalism, merely am-
plifying the tradition of state protection witnessed earlier (44).
Censures do lax under the Echeverrías, yet independent produc-
tions are quantitatively no more plentiful than in the 1960s as
commercialism in the flavor of what Franco Moretti calls
“Hollywood’s planetary diffusion” still reigns (90, 100).
And yet, a number of the objectives outlined in the
“Manifiesto” and other Nuevo Cine statements are realized in this
new era: security of creative rights due to state liberalism and a
consequential lift of censorship; the union-sponsored film and
screenplay competitions and other festivals providing venues and
creating an impetus for independent and foreign productions;
founding of libraries, film archives, and the Centro Universitario
de Estudios Cinematográficos (CUEC) film department at UNAM,
headed by Nuevo Cine Group member Manuel García Casanova;
establishment of film publications. Starting in 1966, new film-
school generations begin arriving on the scene with independent
energy. In that same year, Mexican audiences see the release of
two independent films by Servando González, El Escapulario and
Los Mediocres, the latter produced by González in 1962 follow-
ing his powerful debut with Yanco. Independent filmmaking, es-
pecially in small-gauge, low-cost, and experimental and short
formats does increase, culminating with the world-wide attention
to Alberto Isaac’s En Este Pueblo No Hay Ladrones, which won
second prize at the 1964 Competition of Experimental Cinema,
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo in 1969, and work by Paul Leduc,
including Reed: Mexico Insurgente in 1970.
Vol. 34.2 (2004) | 33
Baugh | Developing History/Historicizing Development in Mexican Nuevo Cine Manifestoes around “la Crisis”
Some gains extend into Echeverría’s liberalization programs,
including the establishment of the Cineteca Nacional film preser-
vation archive and the Centro de Capacitación film school and,
more in the mainstream, the renewal of the Ariel awards through
the Academia Mexicana de Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficas.
In the early 1970s a new film journal funded by the Fondo de Cultura
Económica, Otro Cine, first appears, which carries forward the spirit
of independence from the Nuevo Cine. Perhaps even more clearly
in terms of aesthetics, the initiatives of the Mexican New Cinema
can be fairly traced into the technically innovative Super-8 move-
ments in Mexico and throughout Latin America: articulated by
Alfonso Gumucio Dagrón; Sergio García in his Hacia el 40˚ Cine/
“Towards a Fourth Cinema”; the founders of the First Independent
Cinema Competition in the collectively authored “Eight Millime-
ters Versus Eight Million”; and the whole of the superocheros.20
Although conceding that its membership is male-dominant, with
Nancy Cárdenas as the sole female member, Elissa Rashkin points
to the independent movement of the Mexican New Cinema Group
enabling a feminist film culture to emerge as it is “extremely re-
vealing” of the “cultural left in Mexico” (60-1).
Mostly untranslated for English-language readers, the mani-
festo documents of the Nuevo Cine have been overlooked to a large
degree, symptomatic, as Julianne Burton suggests, of the “disso-
ciation between marginal cinematic practices and ‘mainstream’ criti-
cal theory” and equally the “asymmetrical nature of cultural
exchange between developed and underdeveloped spheres” (“Mar-
ginal” 4). Close examination and interpretation of these manifes-
toes reviews historical and sociological treatments of development
and modernity in Mexico’s post-WWII political economy. Instead
of favoring modernizationist industrialism, this study retraces the
steps Mexico has taken toward liberal democracy, revisiting the
cultural transformation of the 1960s, especially through Mexican
independent cinema. As such, the Nuevo Cine Group reimagines a
Mexican cinema and a counter-culture integral to la Onda. The
Nuevo Cine Group manifestoes rewrite the history of national and
cultural identification, in Mexico as part of the elusive quest for
mexicanidad and throughout the Americas within a larger democ-
ratizing movement, and offer an alternative perspective on Mexi-
can crisis through its articulations of independence.
Notes
1 Consider Reinhart Koselleck’s “Some Questions Regarding the Conceptual
History of ‘Crisis’” for a fuller discussion.
2 See Hamnett, Léon-Portilla, de la Torre Villar, and Kirkwood for example.
3 Consider Mosier and Bethell, for example.
4 John King makes this point in a global-regional context, addressing Latin
American cinemas and their reactions to the Cuban revolution, on the one
hand, and Western-capitalist developmentalism, on the other (67). Julianne
Burton notes the Nuevo Cine’s production co-operative, alongside Brazil’s
Cinema Novo’s, as an artistic and social-activist experiment (“Film Artisans”
178-9); elsewhere, she demonstrates that Latin American documentary of
34 | Film & History
the 1960s and 1970s grew “hand in hand with social and political ferment”
(“Toward” 25). Zuzana M. Pick references Mexican cinema in her larger
Latin American project, arguing that revolutionary films oppose dominant
production and cultural models (4-5, 18, 28). Jesús Salvador Treviño rightfully
points out that Mexico’s mid-1960s and 1970s cinema serves as a reaction to
Latin American politics and international economics (27).
5 The journal Nuevo Cine first appears in April of 1961 and runs for seven
issues through August 1962.
6 José de la Colina finds success in the 1970s as a screenwriter, for example in
Naufragio and El Señor de Osanto, along with writing in other fields. Rafael
Corkidi serves as director of photography in several important films of the
late 1960s and 1970s: Tamayo, Fando y Lis, and El Topo; in the late-1970s he
begins directing and continues through the 1990s. José Miguel García Ascot
collaborates as a writer for the New Cinema calling card, En el Balcón Vacío
and, earlier in 1955, for Raíces. José Luis González de Léon directs La Gran
Caída in 1958 and serves as an assistant director for El Topo. Carlos
Monsaivaís performs in the 1965 En Este Pueblo No Hay Ladrones and the
1967 Los Caifanes but makes a greater impact in decades to follow through
his critical and creative writing. Other members who join later include: José
Baez Esponda, Armando Bartra, Nancy Cárdenas, Leopoldo Chagoya, Ismael
García Llaca,Alberto Isaac, Paul Leduc, Eduardo Lizalde, Fernando Macotela,
and Francisco Pina.
7 Emilio García Reira stands as one of the most influential figures in Mexican
cinema, offering several often-cited histories and critical works in the field.
García Reira’s film work includes technically collaborating with Jomí Garcá
Ascot on the important En el Balcón Vacío, scriptwriting and performing in
En Este Pueblo No Hay Ladrones, and appearing in Leduc’s Reed.
8 The films of Emilio Gómez Muriel receiving the most attention in the New
Cinema Group statements include: Redes produced with Fred Zinnemann,
La Guerra de los Pasteles, and works produced and written by Salvador
Elizondo including Sentencia and La Dama de Alba. Juan Bustillo Oro’s
notable film work is Los Dos Monjes in 1934 and grows exponentially more
commercial in following years. Emilio Fernández, perhaps more than any
other filmmaker, represents the height of Mexico’s “Golden” era, establishing
a tradition of commercialism and Hollywood-influenced popular work. The
Nuevo Cine Group writers generally acknowledge that his career begins with
strong showings with Flor Silvestre, María Candelaria, and La Perla, growing
more commercially-driven with Bugamblia and Las Abandonados, and
decidedly falling in quality with Río Escondido, La Red, Una Cita de Amor,
and other later films. Perhaps more so than any other non-director, Gabriel
Figueroa and his cinematographic style form the base of the “Golden”
Mexican studio aesthetics, according to the New Cinema Group writers. An
important factor is the range of filmmakers with whom Figueroa works,
from Luis Buñuel to Ismael Rodriguez and Emilio Fernández; perhaps more
important, though, is his prolificness, shooting eight films in 1949 and ten in
1952, for example, suggestive of the factory style of the system.
9 Nuevo Cine Group manifestoes point to Garnica’s ¡Viva la Tierra! and
Korporaal’s El Brazo Fuerte, among others. Acevedo-Muñoz and Mora,
among others, acknowledge the influence of Buñuel on the Nuevo Cine Group
(Acevedo-Muñoz 149-50; Mora 107). Perhaps no other filmmaker marks
more clearly successful work that contrasts to the trends and aesthetics of the
Mexican studio system, according to the New Cinema Group writers; they
note his Nazarín, El Río y la Muerte, Ensayo de un Crimen, Las Aventuras
de Robinson Crusoe, Abismos de Pasíon, El, El Bruto, Una Mujer sin Amor,
Los Olvidades, El Gran Calavera, stressing films he produced in Mexico
and ranging across esoteric as well as popular work.

10 Michel, like other New Cinema manifesto writers, earns in the years after
1965 a reputation for his other writing, especially his histories of Mexican
and French cinema and television. Among his film work are a number of
UNAM-produced short documentaries such as Presencia de Africa co-written
by fellow New Cinema Group member Manuel González Casanova.
11 Jomí García Ascot follows the highly influential En el Balcón Vacío with El
Viaje in 1976.
12 The Film Bank is first formed in 1941. From 1951 to 1953, the Film Bank
becomes fully federalized and bureaucratically consolidates all distribution
under what is called the “Garduño plan” after the then-director Eduardo
Garduño. State credits fall under the control of the corporate distributors,
effectively securing distribution for only the producers within the distribution
network, practically closing the system to independent productions. See
John King for a fuller discussion (129-30).
13 Among de Fuentes’ influential films are Vamanos con Pancho Villa and Allá
en el Rancho Grande. Alejandro Galindo’s film work of this period leading
up to the 1960s includes Espaldas Mojadas, Campeón sin Corona, among
others.
14 Alazraki’s film work includes Raices, which is co-written with a number of
Nuevo Cine members including J. M. García Ascot and Carlos Velo.
15 See Marcela Fernández Violante’s discussion of Mexican film laws for more
information.
16 Elizondo refers to commercial movies as “churros.” Churros are a type of
pastry very common in Mexico and very cheap to make and buy; as a result,
commercial films and other cheaply made products are sometimes referred
to by this term. The importance of the connotation extends beyond the price
of the product, but also its mass-produced nature, its familiarity, as well as its
lack of nutritional value and bland flavor.
17 Article VII of the Mexican Constitution guarantees individuals protection
from censorship; article VI provides as a right freedom of expression, although
subjectively qualified: “unless it offends good morals” or “disturbs the public
order.”
18 Even more specifically, Elizondo questions whether Mexican markets actually
gain at the box office from films with the standard “pandering aesthetic”/
“estética rufiana”; here Elizondo makes special reference to the work of
Marco Antonio Campos and Gaspar Henain, better known as Viruta and
Capulina, who team up in over thirty films between 1957 and 1967, like Dos
19
Tontos y un Loco (39).
See Mora’s appendix, which outlines the history of Mexican film production
(143-238). Also consider statistical information provided by Heuer and
Schnitman.
20 See the special issue of Wide Angle guest-edited by Jesse Lerner.
Films Cited
Las Abandonados. Dir. Emilio Fernández. Clasa-Mohme, 1945.
Abismos de Pasíon. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Plexus, 1954.
Allá en el Rancho Grand. Dir. Ferando de Fuentes. Cinexport, 1937.
Las Aventuras de Robinson Crusoe. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Olmec-Ultramar-UA, 1954.
A Bout de Souffle [Breathless]. Dir. Jen-Luc Godard. Beauregard-Criterion, 1960.
El Brazo Fuerte. Dir. Giovanni Korporaal. Undistributed, 1958.
El Bruto. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Plexus-Columbia, 1953.
Bugamblia. Dir. Emilio Fernández. Clasa-Mohme, 1945.
Los Caifanes. Dir. Juan Ibáñez. América, 1967.
Campeón sin Corona. Dir. Alejandro Galindo. Clasa, 1946.
La Dama de Alba. Dir. Emilio Gómez Muriel. Clasa, 1950.
Scott L. Baugh | Special In-Depth Section
Los Dos Monjes. Dir. Juan Bustillo Oro. Proa, 1934.
Dos Tontos y Un Loco. Dir. Miguel Morayta. Filmadora-Chapultepec, 1961.
El. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Omnifilms, 1953.
En el Balcón Vacío. Dir. Jomí García Ascot. Ascot-Torre, 1961.
En Este Pueblo No Hay Ladrones. Dir. Alberto Isaac. Grupo-Claudio, 1965.
Ensayo de un Crimen. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Talbot-New Yorker, 1955.
El Escapulario. Dir. Servando González. Yanco, 1966.
Espaldas Mojadas. Dir. Alejandro Galindo. PeliMex, 1953.
Fando y Lis. Dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky. Cannon-Fantoma, 1967.
Flor Silvestre. Dir. Emilio Fernández. Clasa-Mundiales, 1943.
La Gran Caída. Dir. J. L. González de Léon. Undistributed, 1958.
El Gran Calavera. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Ultramar-Bauer, 1949.
La Guerra de los Pasteles. Dir. Emilio Gómez Muriel. Clasa, 1944.
María Candelaria. Dir. Emilio Fernández. Clasa-Mundiales, 1944.
Los Mediocres. Dir. Servando González. Yanco, 1966.
Naufragio. Dir. Jaime Humberto Hermosillo. Conacite I, 1978.
Nazarín. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Connoisseur-Altura, 1959.
Los Olvidades. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Ultramar-Mayer/Kingsley-Connoisseur, 1950.
La Perla. Dir. Emilio Fernández. PeliMex-RKO, 1945.
Presencia de Africa. Dir. Manuel Michel. UNAM, 1964.
Raíces. Dir. Benito Alazraki. Harrison, 1955.
La Red. Dir. Emilio Fernández. Reforma-Fine Arts, 1953.
Redes. Dirs. Emilio Gómez Muriel and Fred Zinnemann. Azteca-Garrison, 1936.
Reed: Mexico Insurgente. Dir. Paul Leduc. Ollín-Connoisseur-New Yorker, 1973.
Río Escondido. Dir. Emilio Fernández. Clasa-Mohme, 1948.
El Río y la Muerte. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Clasa-Bauer, 1955.
El Señor de Osanto. Dir. Jaime Humberto Hermosillo. Churubusco-Azteca, 1972.
Sentencia. Dir. Emilio Gómez Muriel. Clasa, 1950.
Tamayo. Dir. Manuel González Casanova. UNAM-STIC, 1967.
El Topo. Dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky. Douglas-Abko, 1970.
Una Cita de Amor. Dir. Emilio Fernández. Clasa-Unipromex, 1958.
Una Mujer sin Amor. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Ultramar-Plexus, 1952.
Vamanos con Pancho Villa. Dir. Ferando de Fuentes. Clasa, 1936.
El Viaje. Dir. Jomí García Ascot. Ascot, 1976.
¡Viva la Tierra! Dir. Adolfo Garnica. San Sebastián Festival [Spain], 1959.
Yanco. Dir. Servando González. Yanco-Jerand, 1964.
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