Mexican Cinema in the decade of the seventies: a mirage

Abstract

This article is a fragment of a larger research about Mexican cinema and literature, in progress since the year 2006. In it, we reflect on the chapter "Criticism of the pyramid" included in the book Postata by Octavio Paz and we expose a dialogical play between the discourse of cinema and that of literature, by looking at the films Mecánica nacional by Luis Alcoriza (1971), Los albañiles by Jorge Fons (1976) and Renuncia por motivos de salud by Rafael Baledón (1976). These films give an account of the cinema that, with support from the federal government, was starting to be developed in the sixties, and that was only the beginning of a long absence of quality cinematographic productions and of the collapse of what appeared to be the resurgence of a new Mexican cinema.