José Mojica Marins and the cultural politics of marginality in third world film criticism

El vampiro y el sexo/The Vampire and Sex(René Cardona, 1969): El Santo, sexploitation films and politics in Mexico 1968

“…In rejecting the relevance of low brow popular genres, including sexy films as purely commercial or the product of foreign influences and embracing the 'cine de autor' of the Nuevo Cine movement as reflective of the national zeitgeist, García Riera takes up a position that reflects the cultural biases of the majority of dominant Mexican and indeed Latin American film scholarship and criticism. Most Latin American film criticism follows a 'prescriptive' rather than descriptive idea of 'national cinema,' writing the continent's national film histories according to art cinema models (in the case of García Riera's essay on Mexico 1968 the auteur cinema of Cazals, Fons and Ripstein) and dismissing the sexy comedies, adult films, and other commercial and popular cinemas, even though these films generally attracted the majority of cinema audiences (Tierney 2004;Syder and Tierney 2005, 35; Ruétalo and Tierney 2009). 3 García Riera's position contrasts with that of Schaefer and Williams who underscore the value of studying sex/adult film as part of 'the cultural story of the movies' and as a means of 'engag[ing with] a larger field of: contextual issues: […] not to mention 'the three ps' politics, power and pleasure' (Williams 2008, 9;Schaefer 2005, 89).…”

“…3 For more on why national film histories have ignored Latin America's exploitation cinemas see Ruétalo and Tierney (2009), Syder and Tierney (2005) and Tierney (2004).…”

Gender and Sexuality in Latin American Horror Cinema

“…The character evidences the constructedness of masculinity in Latin America and, more specifi cally, the performativity of machismo, whereby this 3 It is worth noticing that the 'traditional' Brazilian fi lm canon that has gained notoriety among fi lm scholars since the 1960s seems primarily concerned with the notions predicated by both cinema novo and Glober Rocha's aesthetics of poverty . Thus Brazilian horror cinema (as has happened with horror cinema elsewhere) has been overlooked by Latin American fi lm criticism, which has often tended to celebrate a politicised type of cinema over other cinemas (see Tierney 2009 ;Bueno 2012 ). template of male behaviour and sexuality is rendered a learnt behaviourthat is, a practice-more than an innate quality of all men in the continent.…”