Año 4, No. 1. Enero-Junio (2022)

It is proposed a reflection on the concept of culture in the field of social sciences, which allows us to understand the relevance of cultural industries in the production and reproduction of symbolic systems in contemporary societies. Understanding the meaning of the concept of culture allows us to understand the pre-eminence that the usual production of the mass media has in the formation and socialization of individuals in contemporary societies.It is the socio-historical conditioning factors and the economic and industrial nature of the various cul-tural industries that allow us both to fruitfully relate the mass media to each other and to other forms of mass entertainment, and to establish the specificities of each one. All of them are characterized by the industrial and standardized production of messages; they are cultural industries. Following some clues provided by Albert Breton, Augustin Girard, Armand Matellart and Enrique Busta-mante, we will try to understand how cultural industries work and how they are organized; and what are the dif-ferent modes of production of cultural goods.We will explain the organization and functioning of cultural industries and their various facets: socio-politi-cal, cultural and economic. From the last facet, we will ap-proach the study of the three sectors of the film industry -production, distribution and exhibition-, the specific way in which filmmaking is organized. In the end, all these elements will allow us to propose a model for the study of the production, distribution and exhibition systems in the Mexican film industry.