The Mexican romantic sex comedy: the emergence of Mexican middlebrow filmmaking in the 1990s

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter (peer-reviewed)peer-review

    Abstract

    This chapter charts the rise of a new genre in Mexican cinema in the 1990s: the romantic sex comedy, a middlebrow cultural form that was born from changes in a national cinema culture that saw the development of the multiplex in Mexican cities, and the development of a new professional bourgeoisie working in new mediascapes. This, together with a funding landscape that was moving away from a state sponsored national arts cinema, resulted in more commercial forms of filmmaking that created a new cinema-going middle class. In the light of these social and cultural shifts, this chapter reinterprets Bourdieu’s notion of the middlebrow (culture moyenne) as a ‘second rate imitation of legitimate culture’ (1999: 323). It argues that what constitutes the middlebrow is not fixed, and can and has changed as the nature of the middle classes themselves changes, and the national context to which it is applied shifts.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationMiddlebrow Cinema
    EditorsSally Faulkner
    PublisherRoutledge
    ISBN (Electronic)9781315630564
    ISBN (Print)9781138777125, 9781138777132
    Publication statusPublished - 1 Apr 2016

    Publication series

    NameRemapping World Cinema: Regional Tensions and Global Transformations
    PublisherRoutledge

    Keywords

    • Middlebrow
    • Alfonso Cuarón
    • Mexican Cinema

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