Carl J. Mora Mexican Cinema: Reflections of a Society, 1896-1980.
University of California Press, 287 pages, $29.50

This book is an excursion to a far country—not the Mexico of geographic proximity, but of popular imagination. That country can only be visited in a darkened motion-picture theater, where a society consciously or unconsciously projects its hopes and fears onto the screen. In an important sense, then, Carl Mora, a Mexican-American scholar and editor of distinction, has vindicated both as an art form and as a social document one of the most vigorous film literatures in Latin America and indeed the world. That such vindication is necessary at all indicates that there is something of a problem with film criticism in Mexico and elsewhere, including, unfortunately, at our own universities.

Insofar as the Mexican film industry is concerned—or, for that matter, Mexico itself—the state of public knowledge in this country is so sparse that it would be asking too much for a book of this sort to be a “critical history.” Rather, it is a catalogue raisonné arranged in chronological order, embellished with some remarks on the economic and political environment in which the industry has had to develop. This presents some problems, as we shall see. Nonetheless, there are a number of interesting things going on in this book.

First, Mora is using film history to hold up to American readers a (for them) new and different face of Mexico—a face that may occasionally repel but that