Mex-Ciné offers an accessibly written, multidisciplinary investigation of contemporary Mexican cinema that combines industrial, technical, and sociopolitical analysis with analyses of modes of reception through cognitive theory. Mex-Ciné aims to make visible the twenty-first century Mexican film industry, its blueprints, and the cognitive and emotive faculties involved in making and consuming its corpus. A sustained, free-flowing book-length meditation, Mex-Ciné enriches our understanding of the way contemporary Mexican directors use specific technical devices, structures, and characterizations in making films in ways that guide the perceptual, emotive, and cognitive faculties of their ideal audiences, while providing the historical contexts in which these films are made and consumed.
“The prodigious Aldama has done it again. He brings his trademark smarts, panache, and innovation to Mex-Ciné—a tour de force that takes us into the subterranean recesses of the creative and consumptive mind in its making of and interfacing with contemporary Mexican cinema. Drawing on current research on film and cognition, Aldama plants his feet firmly in the first decade of Mexican films made in the 21st century. Then he nimbly guides us on a journey whereby we learn about the processes at work in creating, viewing, and evaluating cinematic narratives. At once precious and persuasive Aldama charts new routes for understanding the interrelationship between Mexican cultural specificity and human universality. Aldama has done for Mexican cinema what Bordwell did with Poetics of Cinema: with grace and ease he imparts deep knowledge of the human mind in its creativity and reception as well as smelts anew powerfully keen tools that enlarge radically our understanding of Mexican cinema, film studies, and cognitive approaches to culture generally.”
—Richard Gordon, Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute, University of Georgia, and author of Cinema, Slavery, and Brazilian Nationalism
“Mex-Ciné provides researchers, filmmakers, film students, and the general reader alike with a document that situates them in the present, vibrant world of Mexican cinema. Aldama’s work takes the pulse of that evolving field even as it enacts sage, critical interventions and sensitive, evocative analyses that push it forward.”
—William Anthony Nericcio, San Diego State University
“Mex-Ciné offers a thoroughly engaging and unique approach to the topic of contemporary Mexican cinema that combines industrial, technical, and socio-political analysis with analyses of modes of reception through cognitive theory. This illuminating and convincing work will no doubt pave a new direction in Mexican film studies.”
—Camilla Fojas, DePaul University
“In Mex-Ciné, Frederick Luis Aldama not only puts recent Mexican films into their historical, cultural, and industrial contexts, but analyzes the films as ‘blueprints’ designed to elicit patterns of thought and emotion in viewers. The book is both an incisive account of Mexican cinema of the last decade, and more broadly, a compelling theory of narrative cinema itself.”
—Carl Plantinga, Calvin College
