Emilio Fernandez

the long version

"Emilio Fernandez: Pictures in the margins is the first book-length English language account of Emilio Fernandez (1904-86), the most successful director of classical Mexican cinema, famed with creating films that defined a Mexican school of filmmaking. Rather than offering a classic auteur study this book interrogates the construction of Fernandez as both a national and nationalist auteur (including racial and gender aspects e.g. Fernandez as macho mexicano and indio). It also challenges auteurist readings of his films in order to construct new arguments about the significance of Fernandez and his work." "The aim of this book is to question Mexican criticism's fetishization of its own position on the peripheries of the global cultural economy and the similar fetishization of Fernandez' marginalization as a mixed race (part white and part indigenous) director. This book argues that, as pictures in the margins, classical Mexican cinema and specifically Fernandez' films are not transparent reflections of dominant post-Revolutionary Mexican culture but annotations and re-inscriptions of the particularities of Mexican society in the post-Revolutionary era."--Jacket.