Cine de Oro: Treasures of Mexican Cinema’s Golden Age

Geopolitical circumstances aligned in the early 1930s to set the scene for a period of Mexican cinema known as its “Golden Age” that lasted until the early 1960s. New studios were set up and their production subsidised from the mid-1930s by the government of President Lázaro Cárdenas. With a sharp drop in films coming from Spain due to the Civil War, a space was opened up for local Mexican production. By 1951, Mexico City was the cinematic capital of Latin America, with 58 soundstages across six studios and a star system to rival Hollywood’s.

The state-backed industry established by Cárdenas aimed to establish a specific Mexican cinematic aesthetic and sensibility, exemplified by the films of director, writer and actor Emilio Fernández, who once claimed “there exists only one Mexico… the one that I invented”.

Together with famed cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, Fernández forged a new cinematic style focused on a rural, traditional, often Indigenous national identity. Fernández and Figueroa’s films of the 1940s and early 1950s present a cohesive cinematic universe made up of human figures dwarfed by epic skies and landscapes littered with cacti, churches and religious statues. Films such as María Candelaria (1943), Enamorada (1946) and The Pearl (1947) gave the Mexican film industry global recognition and prestige, with the first co-winning the major award at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival.

The inevitable decline started with the rise of television, common in Mexican homes by 1956, and a shifting global film industry, but the films of this era provide testimony to the richness and stylistic and generic adventurousness of this classical era of Mexican cinema exemplified by such varied films as El fantasmo del convento (1934), Enamorada, Victims of Sin (1951) and Macario (1960).