"Modernizing Mexico on the Screen: Tepeyac and Cinematic Reframings of National Myth" -- Laura Serna

In 1917 the aptly named Colonial Films produced a religious drama, Tepeyac, that retold the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe's miraculous appearance to the Indian Juan Diego.  The film offers viewers multiple opportunities to read Mexico's history as part of its modern identity.  This talk will examine Mexican film producers' attempts to address national subject matter in the cosmopolitan idiom of narrative cinema, and the connections between the politics of gender proposed by the film and Mexican national production during the late 1930s and 1940s, the Golden Age of Mexican cinema.
This talk is sponsored by the Film & Digital Media Department and supported by Porter College Visiting Artists and Lecturers.