Beyond the Backdrop: Set Design, National Identity, and Immersive Worlds in Mexico's Golden Age Cinema

Abstract

This thesis argues that the film set in Mexico's Golden Age cinema was not a passive backdrop but a primary ideological agent in the construction of Mexicanidad — the state-sponsored national identity forged in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Through a spatial analysis of the collaborative work of director Emilio Fernández and art director Javier Torres Torija across three canonical films: María Candelaria (1943), Río Escondido (1947), and Maclovia (1948), this study demonstrates how designed cinematic environments actively materialized a hyper-real vision of the nation, engineering a collective social fantasy for a post-revolutionary population. Drawing on Giuliana Bruno's theory of the “inhabitable image,” Ulrike Kuch's concept of architectural montage, Renée Tobe’s spatial imagination, and Stephen Prince's notion of the hyper-real, this thesis repositions art director Javier Torres Torija as a co-author of national consciousness rather than a decorative technician. Each film operates through a distinct mode of spatial fantasy: María Candelaria constructs a pure, pre-modern Eden in Xochimilco’s floating gardens, staging indigeneity as a mythic and untouchable origin point; Río Escondido deploys architecture as a didactic tool, encoding the state’s civilizing mission in the contrast between a crumbling village and a solid schoolhouse; and Maclovia transforms the island of Janitzio into a folkloric, export-ready spectacle, packaging an idealized vision of Purépecha culture for mass consumption across Latin America. Together, the films reveal the precise mechanisms by which cinema participated in a broader cultural project, architecturally forging an inhabitable Mexico.