Aesthetics of Development

This article focuses on the documentary films made by Mexican film pioneers Adriana and Dolores Ehlers. The sisters made films on Mexican industries (such as on the drinking water infrastructure and the oil business) to promote Mexico’s modernity for Mexican and US audiences, as well as US investors. Cinema, I argue, was conceptualized by the Ehlers sisters as a cultural object that could incentivize industrial development and international exchange. Albeit immersed in postrevolutionary developmentalist ideologies, the Ehlers’ vision of and for a modern Mexico did not include identities and practices that signaled indigeneity and tradition. By analyzing one of the only extant primary materials on the Ehlers sisters’ careers, an interview that scholar Julia Tuñón did with Dolores Ehlers in the 1970s, I address how the written and mediated voice represents, without reconstructing, the Ehlers sisters’ cinematic project of Mexican modernity.