The Three Amigos ─ The Transnational Filmmaking of Guillermo Del Toro, Alejandro Gonz嫮ez I鼁rritu, and Alfonso Cuar鏮

This is the first academic book dedicated to the filmmaking of the Mexican born directors Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, and Alfonso Cuaron. The book examines the career trajectories of the directors and presents a detailed analysis of their most significant films. These include studies on del Toro's Cronos/Chronos, El laberinto del fauno/Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy II: The Golden Army; Inarritu's Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel; and Cuaron's Solo con tu pareja/Love in the Time of Hysteria, Y tu mama tambien, and Children of Men. All three have worked in diverse industrial contexts, and between them they have made key films that have changed the nature of filmmaking in Mexico, Hollywood blockbusters, US independent films, 'European' art films, and films that defy easy classification. They have had unprecedented international success and have crossed linguistic, national and generic borders, cutting through traditional divisions created by film markets.

As a result, this book challenges the ways both markets and critics have created clear-cut distinctions between mainstream commercial and independent art cinema, and the ways they have conceptualised US, Latin American and European cinema as discrete entities. The work of the three directors creates new hybrid formations and makes us rethink ways in which we have understood the auteur label. The main theoretical approaches applied in this book to analyse the directors' working practices and texts centre on new readings of auteurism and transnational film theories.

This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students of film studies and Hispanic studies, and general cinema enthusiasts who are interested in the films of the three directors.

Deborah Shaw is Reader in Film Studies at the University of Portsmouth