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  1. Dartmouth Libraries
  2. Research Guides
  3. Dartmouth Libraries Guides
  4. Film Studies: National Cinemas
  5. Mexico

Film Studies: National Cinemas

This guide highlights selected resources for various national cinemas.
  • Introduction
  • Streaming services
  • Afghanistan
  • Africa (General)
    • Africa, Northern
    • Africa, French speaking
    • Africa, Sub-Saharan
  • Argentina
  • Australia
  • Austria
  • Benelux
  • Brazil
  • Cambodia
  • Canada
    • Quebec
  • Caribbean area
  • Chile
  • Chinese cinema
  • Colombia
  • Cuba
  • Czechia (Czech Republic)
  • France
  • Germany
  • Great Britain
    • Northern Ireland
    • Scotland
    • Wales
  • Greece
  • Hong Kong cinema
  • Hungary
  • India
  • Indigenous films
  • Irish cinema
  • Italy
  • Japan
  • Korea
  • Latin America
  • Mexico
  • Middle East
    • Egypt
    • Iran
    • Israel
    • Turkey
  • New Zealand
  • Nigeria
  • Nordic cinema
    • Denmark
    • Finland
    • Iceland
    • Norway
    • Sweden
  • Pakistan
  • Palestine
    • Films by Director
    • Documentaries
    • Films by Title
  • Poland
  • Portugal
  • Romania
  • Russia & the Soviet Union
  • Slovakia
  • South Africa
  • South America
  • Spain
  • Switzerland
  • Taiwan
  • Thailand
  • United States
    • Puerto Rico
  • Vietnam
  • Yugoslavia & Former Yugoslav Republics
  • Transnational & diasporic cinema
  • Journals & magazines about film

Subject Librarian

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Lucinda M. Hall
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Contact:
Evans Map Room, Baker-Berry Library
Dartmouth College
25 N Main ST
Hanover, NH 03755
(603) 646-0962
Website Skype Contact: d1128r8@kiewit.dartmouth.edu
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Subjects: Film and Media Studies, Geography, Polar Studies

Other library resource(s)

  • Resource logoDigitalia film library. Mexican cinema
    • Video
    • On Campus or VPN
    Call Number: Streaming video service
    Digitalia Film Library includes a small collection from Mexico.
  • Resource logoMexican cinema from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Niamh Thornton
    • On Campus or VPN
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    ISBN: 9780199791286
    Mexico has had a powerful indigenous film industry, although there have been peaks and troughs. One of the peaks was in the 1930s–1950s, which has been, not uncontroversially, described as the Golden Age (edad de oro) of Mexican cinema. It was a time when studios, modeled after those in the United States and supported by generous government funding through a film bank, made hundreds of films. The short turnover in production frequently led to repetition in narrative, wardrobe, character, set, and technical style. This means of production was cheap and highly productive, and because film was a popular form of entertainment in Mexico and elsewhere, it was lucrative.
  • Resource logoSpanish language cinema from Kanopy by Kanopy
    • Video
    • On Campus or VPN
    • Database
    Call Number: Streaming video
    A collection of Spanish language films from Kanopy. Not all of the films are immediately available for viewing. You may have to request a film to view it.

Introduction to Mexican cinema

Moving pictures were first seen in Mexico on 14 August 1896, at an exhibition of the Lumière Cinématographe in Mexico City. By the following year, newsreels and actualities were being shot by local filmmakers, and by 1905 local entrepreneurs were involved in film production and exhibition. The 1910 Mexican Revolution attracted filmmakers from around the world, and its leader, Pancho Villa, took the title role in US director Raoul Walsh’s first film, an early biopic entitled The Life of General Villa (1914). Mexico has been a magnet for foreign filmmakers ever since, from S.M. Eisenstein (Que viva Mexico, 1931) and Fred Zinneman and Paul Strand (Redes/Nets, 1934) in the 1930s; to Spanish director Luis Buñuel, most of whose films between 1946 and 1960 (including Los Olvidados/The Young and the Damned, 1950) were made in Mexico; as well as blacklisted director Herbert Biberman (Salt of the Earth, 1954) (see hollywood blacklist), and Miguel Littín, exiled from Chile, who made a number of films in Mexico, including Actas de Marusia/Letters from Marusia (1975).   ...

Kuhn, A., & Westwell, G. (2020). Mexico, film in. In A Dictionary of Film Studies. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 18 May. 2021

Searching the online catalog

You can use the subject heading below to find resources in the online catalog. The call number range is also included.

  • motion pictures mexico
    Call number range PN 1993.5 .M4 on Baker Level 4. Please note: this is not the only call number range, but it has the most items.
  • motion pictures mexico history
  • motion picture producers and directors mexico
  • motion pictures, mexican
  • mexico in motion pictures

Introductory reading(s)

  • Cover artMaking cinelandia: American films and Mexican film culture before the golden age by Laura Isabel Serna
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9780822356530
    In the 1920s, as American films came to dominate Mexico's cinemas, many of its cultural and political elites feared that this "Yanqui invasion" would turn Mexico into a cultural vassal of the United States. In Making Cinelandia, Laura Isabel Serna contends that Hollywood films were not simply tools of cultural imperialism. Instead, they offered Mexicans on both sides of the border an imaginative and crucial means of participating in global modernity, even as these films and their producers and distributors frequently displayed anti-Mexican bias. Before the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, Mexican audiences used their encounters with American films to construct a national film culture. ...
  • Cover artMexican cinema by Paulo Antonio Paranaguá; Ana López (trans.)
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .M4 C4913 1995
    ISBN: 9780851705163
    This is the first English-language survey and analysis of Mexican cinema. Featuring essays by the most authoritative scholars, the book considers the Mexican work of Luis Buñuel, the dramas of Felipe Cazals and Arturo Ripstein, the melodramas of "El Indio" Emilio Fernandez and Roberto Gavaldon, the contemporary international success of Jaime Humberto Hermosillo and much more.
  • Cover artMexican national cinema by Andrea Noble
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .M4 N63 2005
    ISBN: 9780415230094
    Mexican National Cinema offers an account of the development of Mexican cinema from the intense cultural nationalism of the Mexican Revolution, through the 'Golden Age' of the 1930s and 1940s and the 'nuevo cine' of the 1960s, to the renaissance in Mexican cinema in the 1990s. Theories of nation, emergent discourses of 'mexicanidad' and the establishment and development of the Mexican industry, towards readings of key film texts and genres.
  • Cover artScreening neoliberalism: Mexican cinema 1988-2012 by Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .M4 S28 2014
    ISBN: 9780826519658
    Cavernous, often cold, always dark, with the lingering smell of popcorn in the air: the experience of movie-going is universal. The cinematic experience in Mexico is no less profound, and has evolved in complex ways in recent years. Films like Y Tu Mama Tambien, El Mariachi, Amores Perros, and the work of icons like Guillermo del Toro and Salma Hayek represent much more than resurgent interest in the cinema of Mexico. In Screening Neoliberalism, Ignacio Sanchez Prado explores precisely what happened to Mexico's film industry in recent decades. Far from just a history of the period, Screening Neoliberalism explores four deep transformations in the Mexican film industry: the decline of nationalism, the new focus on middle-class audiences, the redefinition of political cinema, and the impact of globalization. ...

Selected book title(s)

  • Cover artBored to distraction: cinema of excess in end-of-the-century Mexico and Spain by Claudia Schaefer
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9780791458884
    Examines how recent Mexican and Spanish films act as untroubling distractions from everyday routines.
  • Cover artBuñuel and Mexico: the crisis of national cinema by Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9780520239524
    Though Luis Buñuel, one of the most important filmmakers of the twentieth century, spent his most productive years as a director in Mexico, film histories and criticism invariably pay little attention to his work during this period. The only book-length English-language study of Buñuel's Mexican films, this book is the first to explore a significant but neglected area of this filmmaker's distinguished career and thus to fill a gap in our appreciation and understanding of both Buñuel's achievement and the history of Mexican film. Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz considers Buñuel's Mexican films--made between 1947 and 1965--within the context of a national and nationalist film industry, comparing the filmmaker's employment of styles, genres, character types, themes, and techniques to those most characteristic of Mexican cinema. ...
  • Cover artConstructing the image of the Mexican Revolution: cinema and the archive by Zuzana M. Pick
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9780292721081
    With a cast ranging from Pancho Villa to Dolores del Río and Tina Modotti, Constructing the Image of the Mexican Revolution demonstrates the crucial role played by Mexican and foreign visual artists in revolutionizing Mexico's twentieth-century national iconography. Investigating the convergence of cinema, photography, painting, and other graphic arts in this process, Zuzana Pick illuminates how the Mexican Revolution's timeline (1910-1917) corresponds with the emergence of media culture and modernity. ...
  • Cover artPublic spectacles of violence: sensational cinema and journalism in early twentieth-century Mexico and Brazil by Rielle Navitski
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9780822369752
    In Public Spectacles of Violence Rielle Navitski examines the proliferation of cinematic and photographic images of criminality, bodily injury, and technological catastrophe in early twentieth-century Mexico and Brazil, which were among Latin America's most industrialized nations and later developed two of the region's largest film industries. ...

Finding scholarly articles & journal title(s)

Many publications have articles on Mexican cinema. Our collection does not have journals that cover Mexican cinema exclusively. However, we have several journals which look at Latin American cinema. You can use Film & Television Literature Index to find articles or use the search box at the top of the page. Below are the titles we have in our Library's collection.

  • El Amante: cine by Della Fonte Vecchia
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993 .A435
  • La opinión by I. E. Lozano/ImpreMedia
    • On Campus or VPN
    • Database
    • Newspaper
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    This is the Spanish language newspaper published in Los Angeles, CA. Coverage is scattered from 1992 to the present.
  • Objeto visual: cuadernos de investigación de la Cinemateca Nacional by Cinemateca Nacional
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .V5 O25
    Scattered coverage from 1993 through 2007.
  • Issue cover artStudies in Spanish & Latin American cinemas by Intellect
    • On Campus or VPN
    Call Number: Electronic journal
    This peer-reviewed journal explores the cinemas of Spain and Spanish-speaking South, Central and North America, including the Caribbean and Brazil.
  • U.S. Hispanic Newsstream by ProQuest
    • On Campus or VPN
    • Database
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    US Hispanic Newsstream offers access to the largest collection of leading Hispanic newspapers, news wires, websites and blogs in full text from US publishers in both Spanish and English including El Diario/La Prensa (New York City), La Opinión (Los Angeles), La Prensa (San Antonio) and Extra (Chicago).
  • Resource logoEthnic newsWatch by ProQuest
    • On Campus or VPN
    • Database
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    Ethnic NewsWatch is a full-text collection of the newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press in the United States, published since 1990.
  • Resource logoFilm & television literature index by EBSCO Publishing
    • On Campus or VPN
    • Database
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    Use this index to find articles about Mexican cinema.
  • Resource logoHAPI (Hispanic American Periodicals Index) online by UCLA
    • On Campus or VPN
    • Database
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    HAPI is a source for worldwide information about Central and South America, Mexico, the Caribbean basin, the United States-Mexico border region, and Hispanics in the United States, with coverage from 1970 to the present.
  • Resource logoMedia history digital library by Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research
    • Open Access Icon
    • Database
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    The Media History Digital Library digitizes collections of classic media periodicals that belong in the public domain for full public access. The project is supported by owners of materials who loan them for scanning, and donors who contribute funds to cover the cost of scanning.

    The Collection feature extensive runs of several important trade papers and fan magazines.
  • Resource logoScreen studies collection by ProQuest
    • On Campus or VPN
    • Database
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    A comprehensive survey of current publications related to film scholarship alongside detailed filmographies. This collection includes the FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals Database and the detailed and complementary filmographies created by the American Film Institute (AFI) and the British Film Institute.
  • Resource logoThe web of science citation databases by ISI (Institute for Scientific Information)
    • On Campus or VPN
    • Database
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    The online version of 3 separate ISI indexes: Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index and, Social Sciences Citation Index.

Selected movie titles

Find more Mexican film titles in the library's online catalog.

  • Movie poster artBatalla en el cielo = Battle in heaven by Carlos Reygadas
    • DVD
    Call Number: Jones Media DVD #4117
    A chauffeur that lives an impoverished life with his family turns to crime when he is fed up. When he ruins the chance to make his family wealthy, he puts all of their lives in danger instead.
  • História de amor: especial TV Globo 40 anos by Fabrício Mamberti
    • DVD
    Call Number: Jones Media DVD #10791
    Rosa is a girl like many others, with one foot in reality and one in fantasy. Novels and television have always been a huge part of her life. She meets someone more interesting in the real world, Zeca.
  • Cover artMiércoles de ceniza = Ash Wednesday by Roberto Gavaldón
    Call Number: Jones Media DVD #2754
    Famous Mexican actress Maria Felix plays a rich boat passenger who has been tossed off a ship only to be rescued and then violated by a priest. And that is only the beginning of this rich, sprawling drama.
  • Soy el hijo del gallero by Mario Hernández
    • DVD
    Call Number: Jones Media DVD #4045
    Lázaro must avenge the death of his son and his wife.

Internet resource(s)

  • Academia Mexicana de Artes y Ciencias Cinematograficas A.C. (AMACC)
    • Link
  • Comisión Mexicana de Filmaciones
    • Link
    They exist to help Mexico's film industry to flourish! COMEFILM is all about making it easy for creators and companies to produce. ...

Keeping up with the journal literature

Want an easy way to keep up with the journal literature for a national or regional cinema? And you use a mobile device? You can install the BrowZine app and create a custom Bookshelf of your favorite journal titles. Then you will get the Table of Contents (ToCs) of your favorite journals automatically delivered to you when they become available. Once you have the ToC's you can download and read the articles you want.

You can get the app from the App Store or Google Play.

Don't own or use a mobile device? You can still use BrowZine! It's now available in a web version. You can get to it here. The web version works the same way as the app version. Find the journals you like, create a custom Bookshelf, get ToCs and read the articles you want.

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  • Last Updated: Apr 25, 2025 12:21 PM
  • URL: https://researchguides.dartmouth.edu/nationalcinemas
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Tags: afghanistan, africa, Arts, Australia, Austria, Benelux, Cambodia, Canada, Caribbean, China, Colombia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Czechia, Denmark, Egypt, film_studies, Finland, France, Francophone Africa, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indigenous films, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Netherlands, Nordic cinema, North Africa, Norway, Palestine, Poland, Puerto Rico, Slovakia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, Vietnam, world_cinema, Yugoslavia

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