Romancing Yesenia - by Masha Salazkina (Paperback)

About the Book

"This book considers the unexpected and mostly unexamined popularity of the Mexican film Yesenia (Alfredo B. Crevenna, 1971) in the Soviet Union. Set during the Second Franco-Mexican war, this unassuming movie melodrama was based on a successful television series, itself an adaptation of a popular women's romance graphic novel, a genre that was extremely common in mid-century Mexico. Screened in the Soviet Union in 1975, Yesenia became the highest grossing film in the history of Soviet film exhibition, unsurpassed by any movie, foreign or domestic. Based on ticket sales alone, it was seen by an astounding 91.4 million viewes in only the first year of its release. Yesenia's popularity in the socialist bloc, largely unbeknown to its Mexican producers, continued for decades after its initial release as the film migrated from cinemas to television screens and video. Boosted by its success with Soviet audiences, the film enjoyed a similarly spectacular exhibition history in China in the late 1970s, when the country was opening itself up to more international media, paving the way for other Mexican and Latin American productions broadcasted on Chinese television in decades to follow. Approaching this period restrospectively, cognizant of more contemporary developments in the global media, I conceive of this episode in film history through a framework of television culture whose increasing impact, I argue, shaped both the film's Mexican production and its subsequent reception within the Socialist bloc. I also argue that Yesenia's popularity carved out a crucial node within the global circuit of cultural and industrial networks, further enabling Latin American media's transcontinental reach"--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

This book follows the production, transnational circulation, and reception of the highest grossing film in the history of Soviet exhibition, the 1971 Mexican romance Yesenia. The film adaptation of a telenovela based on a wildly popular graphic novel set during the Second Franco-Mexican War became a surprise hit in the USSR, selling more than ninety million tickets in the first year of its Soviet release alone. Drawing on years of archival research, renowned film scholar Masha Salazkina takes Yesenia's unprecedented popularity as an entry point into a wide-ranging exploration of the cultures of Mexico and the Soviet Union in the 1970s and of the ways in which popular culture circulated globally. Paying particular attention to the shifting landscape of sexual politics, Romancing "Yesenia" argues for the enduring importance and ideological ambiguities of melodramatic forms in global popular media.

From the Back Cover

"In 1975 the Mexican melodrama Yesenia took the Soviet Union by storm to become the highest grossing film in the history of film exhibition there--to the anger of Russian elites. We rush to read Masha Salazkina's account to find out how we missed this important chapter in world film distribution history. The answer is that there is no such chapter because no other scholar in the field could pull off this international tour de force--an exhaustive cross-cultural analysis of a single melodrama, a continent-crossing that connects the telenovela tradition with Mexican Golden Age cinema as well as Soviet era melodrama. Salazkina tells us that we should have known that the contemporary 'global-popular' is not new, setting the bar high for another generation of multilingual world culture critics."--Jane M. Gaines, author of Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industry?

"What does film history look like when we bypass the Global North? This is the historiographic provocation at the heart of Romancing 'Yesenia, ' a book that will serve as a model for transnational film histories to come. Salazkina moves with ease between Latin American studies and Russian and post-Soviet studies to reconstruct the unlikely global media circuit between Latin America and the Soviet Union. Offering an account of how the transculturation of the Latin American melodrama through the lens of Soviet vernacular culture produced a transnational affective space, Salazkina also challenges both the national allegorical readings of non-Western texts as well as the European literary and Hollywood film canon of melodrama studies."--Nilo Couret, author of Mock Classicism: Latin American Film Comedy, 1930-1960

Review Quotes

"This book is a welcome and refreshing antidote to the history of cinema that we are so commonly force-fed in which American movie stars took the message of postwar optimism to a welcoming and grateful world."-- "Latin American Review of Book"

About the Author

Masha Salazkina is Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. She is author of World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War and In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein's Mexico. She is also coeditor of Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures and Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema.