Beyond Documentary? Rethinking Mexican “Nonfiction” Film, c.1935-1955

• In Event: Fragmentary Archives, Contingent Histories: Fieldwork in Cinema Studies

Abstract

Mexican cinema scholarship from the 1930s to the 1950s has tended to focus its historiographic and analytical energies on the fiction feature film, seen as the dominant mode of production in the country during the so-called “Golden Age” of Mexico’s film industry. Meanwhile the history of Mexican documentary film is largely unwritten or at best exceptionalist and canonical (save some notable exceptions, such as the silent period and, to an extent, the “new cinemas” of the 1960s and 1970s).

Recent research, however, has begun to dig around the edges of established ways of conceiving and periodising Mexican cinema, with film and media historians and analysts taking an increasing interest in previously little-known filmmakers or production agencies. This is due partly to changing relationships between scholars and archivists, and partly to an ongoing transition in the ways in which cinema and media scholarship define the criteria and limits of their objects and methodologies of study. This paper intervenes in this emerging field, asking how future research might take on board the expanding range of types and genres of moving image production (propaganda shorts, newsreels, amateur film...), supports and media (standard and non-standard film gauges, film and television), and cultural/geopolitical identification (local, national, transnational and diverse modes of collaborative cinema/media production) that frame a potential alternative analysis of the Mexican “documentary” or “nonfiction” tradition. This theoretical and methodological mapping will help frame future research which aims for a deeper understanding of the dynamics of film production in Mexico that ran in parallel to, and frequently underpinned, the much better known fiction feature industry of the time.

Author

• David M Wood, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México