Unlike other Latin American countries, Mexican filmmakers never formed a strong “Third Cinema”

that used conventions of realism and art-cinema to project a radical message. The sixties has been
distinguished by a political radicalization in countries such as Cuba, Brazil and Argentina, all of which
developed a cinema predicated upon social change circulating widely in Latin America and Europe.
“Although in Mexico there were a number of young and amateur filmmakers struggling to redefine
the cinema… their efforts would not circulate outside of Mexico City and had almost no impact
upon the work of the dominant commercial producers”

Mexico’s transnational filmmaking is intrinsically linked to its relaxed immigration policy

for European exiles and war refugees; the country was particularly hospitable to Spanish expatriates
who fled the Civil War and the Franco regime for the more socialist new republic. Beginning in the
1930s, Mexico became a haven for political exiles and the country welcomed them in large numbers
for decades. In 1938, Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40) declared that he would grant as
many as sixty thousand Spanish refugees amnesty in Mexico.23

Buñuel’s films appear equally driven by chance and fate, by real events and artistic genres, and by
the cruelty of the material world and the parables of the religious imagination.

films of Spanish exile Luis Buñuel. The filmmaker fled Spain during the Spanish Civil War
and, after a hiatus of over a decade, reestablished himself as a filmmaker within the Mexican studio
system. Although Buñuel is best known for his links to the surrealist world, I examine his works
through his use of allegory and cruelty in several of his films, including Nazarín (1959) and Símon
del desierto (1965). I deviate from examinations of surrealism, not because I see that mode as
insignificant to the films’ transnational impulses, but in an attempt to understand his integration of
material events and national specificities to institutional phenomena such as the Catholic Church and
authoritarian regimes.

Las Hurdes
In Las Hurdes and Los olvidados, he casts doubt on realism’s perceptions of the poor, even as he
contends with real material conditions.

émigré filmmakers, Buñuel’s screenwriter Luis Alcoriza. A fellow Spaniard and Civil War
exile, Alcoriza wrote several of Buñuel’s early genre pictures, such as El gran calavera (1949), and
also several of his more “serious” films, including Los olvidados (1950) and El ángel exterminador
(1961)

Alejandro Jodorowsky, but whose films nonetheless speak significantly to changes in

Mexico’s avant-garde and genre films. A Chilean of Russian-Jewish descent, Jodorowsky arrived in
Mexico, via Paris, firmly ensconced in avant-garde theater production.

In his cinema, Jodorowsky attempts to link the philosophies of Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty”
to a Mexican national form by enjoining genre styles, avant-garde techniques and Mexican imagery.
Specifically, I trace the emergence of Jodorowsky’s national form and its transnational elements
through two aspects of his films: the use of the “chili western” form in El topo (1970), and the use of
theatrical shock in The Holy Mountain (1973).

Much of the films’ thematics, aesthetics and philosophies are based on the adaptations of
various transnational forms to Mexico. For example, his “chili western” is a re-appropriation of the
Italian western, which is in itself a re-appropriation of the Hollywood form.

the current circulation of Mexican transnational cinema. There are many significant questions that
arise when examining Mexican cinema’s most recent explosion of international hit films. For
example, the success of Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel (2006)—all Iñárritu films—expose the
high mobility and easy fecundity of the popular Mexican melodramatic tradition.

Mexico’s cinematic entrance into global circulation, not merely as a part of cinema’s
Hollywoodization, but as part of complex negotiations of homogenization, globalization, regionalism
and cosmopolitanism.

Continuator ai/ traditiei cinematografului transnational hispano-american inspirat din/bazat pe

relatiile de co-productie si schimburile economice si culturale dintre Spania si America Latina,
cineastii Fernando Solanas si Octavio Getino pun bazele miscarii Grupo Cine Liberación