New Geographies of Class in Mexican and Brazilian Cinemas

Abstract

Although the Mexican and Brazilian film industries have experienced multifaceted changes in the twenty-first century that are unique to each of them, a transformation shared by both is the increased adoption of a middle-class perspective in internationally successful productions. The dominance of middle-class filmmakers in Latin American cinemas is not new. Latin American filmmaking has been largely dominated by middle-class filmmakers throughout decades, even in the case of socially-engaged films set in locations typically occupied by lower-class characters such as the favela, the sertão, the prison and the brothel, of which emblematic examples abound. The general rise of the middle classes in Latin America in the twenty-first century has been accompanied by an exarcebation of sociospatial segregation due to neoliberalism. The effects of this phenomenon on the film viewing experience (the proliferation of the multiplex) and the subsequent preference for certain narratives and genres have already been noted. This paper builds upon these previous studies and, drawing from Miriam Haddu’s observation that the representation of space in Mexican cinema of the 1990s served to understand 'the changing discourses of national identity,' aims to examine how space also serves to understand the changing ideologies of class in the Mexico and Brazil of the beginning of the twenty-first century. The two internationally successful productions Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas, 2012) and Que horas ela volta? (Anna Muylaert, 2015) are specially suited for this purpose because space in them defines the relationship between classes in a way that differs from earlier cinematic discourses. ©2018 All Academic, Inc.