Building upon previous scholarship about Mexican cinema that has re-evaluated low-value film (Monsiváis 2000; Sánchez Prado 2015; Smith 2014; and Ruétalo and Tierney 2011), this book approaches the audiovisual representation of violence in Mexico as a phenomenon bound up in the issue of taste. Turning her attention specifically to the screening of the revolution, femicides, and drug-related bloodshed across various contexts of reception, Niamh Thornton offers a multidimensional perspective on the mediation of local violence as projected and consumed within and beyond Mexico itself. Alongside scholars concerned with the ethical implications of representing brutality, such as Jean Franco (2013), Sayak Valencia (2018), and Oswaldo Zavala (2018), this study also considers the extent to which mediations conscientiously intervene and/or exploit real violence, problematizing conventional notions of value as related to audiovisual production.
A group of figures whom Thornton terms “tastemakers,” comprised of curators,...
University of California Press