Los cines donde vi mi cine

Abstract

In this essay I intend to develop a tour through the cinemas that I frequented in Mexico City, mainly during my childhood and my youth (1974-2013), to understand the morphology of a city that changes constantly, in accordance with the idea posed in this dossier of the city as a palimpsest in which the effacement preserves the trace of that erased, in which the changes promote new practices and new uses, and in which the subjects reconcile between the absent and the new. I rest on the belief that the city is also its cinemas, but I am aware, however, that I am not telling the story of its splendor. Thus, I reflect on my experience in and of the city through its movie theaters: I reflect about its structure, the practices that they made possible, the traces they left, how they disappeared, what replaced them. With this route through the "immediate past" I intend to understand these tensions that, at the time, were unnoticeable because I experienced them as incremental innovations, but now manifest themselves as radical, embodied in new material conditions, and other senses, functions and habits.

Keywords

• city
• cinema
• forms of sociability
• decline
• mexico city 20th century