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Mexi co: The Cel l ul oi d Revol ut i on
Davi d M. J. Wood
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To ci t e t hi s art i cl e: Davi d M. J. Wood ( 2011) : Mexi co: The Cel l ul oi d Revol ut i on, Jour nal of Lat i n
Amer i can Cul t ur al St udi es: Tr avesi a, 20: 4, 449- 461
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MEXICO: THE CELLULOID REVOLUTION
1|. .... .o, .o!oo. c /cc| o/!.|.1 . 2:, |. ....o! ,.o. c |.
M...o ..c!o.c La luz y la guerra: el cine de la Revolucion mexicana (.1
t..o1c to/.c :o.|.. o1 c..o.1c co.. o Moc.) o1 Constructing the Image of
the Revolution: Cinema and the Archive (Zo.oo t..|) + ...o! .....c c |.
Yo Mexico o!..1.o !.|o1co1 |c, |.!1 . M...c c., zocalo . :c./..
2:, ... o o ../co.1 c. o oo!,. c |.. c /cc| |.c...o!, .....o! o1
|.c....o! o..co c |. ..... c |. M...o ..c!o.c . ...o +c |. |.,
|.. 1.o! .| o.. |. .1.c!c..o! .o. ..1 c |. ..c!o.c . !.. 1..co..,
|. ..!o.c /... ...o, o. o1 o.|. ...., |. ....oo!.,,
.cc1..o.c, ....., o1 o.|... c ..o.!. |o 1.. o1 1..... o,
c |.. o..o.., |. c.c c !.. .o. o .oo! o..|.. c |. ..c!o.c, o1 |.
o, . |..| ...o.. .o. o11.. o1 o.. ......1 /, oo1....
On fourteen successive nights in November 2010, crowds massed into Mexico Citys
vast .c.o!c (main square) in their tens of thousands to witness 1c M. ..c, a dazzling
multimedia show that immersed its spectators in 90 minutes of potted national history
relayed through live performance, voice-over narration, reworks, montage sequences
of still and moving images, a meticulously designed light-and-sound display projected
onto purpose-built screens and, most eye-catching of all, onto the monumental edices
that line the plaza.
1
Although underpinned by an account of the historical struggles that
underlie Mexicos troubled political present and peppered with solemn invocations of
collective political agency, individual responsibility, human rights and civic
empowerment, the real attraction of 1c M. ..c, ttingly, lay in the spectacular: the
Metropolitan Cathedral lit up as Mayan pyramid and tropical forest; the bricks of the
National Palace seen, almost felt, to crumble under the force of the devastating 1985
earthquake (a multi-sensorial echo, perhaps, of the ongoing disintegration of the .o1
.. .. of nationhood); the combination of complex strobe lighting, electronic music and
pyrotechnics that provided the shows closing ourish. Hired to mark the centennial
celebrations of the Mexican Revolution under the aegis of the federal governments
Mexico 2010 programme of commemorative events
2
and in accordance with the local
Mexico City governments ongoing policy of promoting high-prole cultural spectacles
in the .c.o!c, the French multimedia troupe Les Petits Francais (headed by Martin
Arnaud and Marilyn Kuentz) struck a rather apposite balance between historical
context and awe-inspiring extravaganza.
Some of the visual and aural strategies and modes of address employed in 1c M. ..c
are of relevance for a discussion of the terms in which cinema has historically registered,
reected and regured a historical event as momentous as the Mexican revolution. As
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 20, No. 4 December 2011, pp. 449-461
ISSN 1356-9325/print 1469-9575 online q 2011 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2011.640316
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the voice-of-god narrator recounted the social injustices of Porrio D azs rule and the
political upheavals that ultimately removed him from power at the onset of the
Revolution, disembodied, intertwining words and phrases roamed across the surface of
the Metropolitan Cathedral, standing as so many signiers of Porrian progress:
Mexico, comunicacion, nacional, telegrafo, credito del pa s (Mexico;
communication; national; telegraph; the countrys credit); and, in enormous
capitals upon the national palace: progreso (progress). A little later, a hotchpotch of
commonplace reformist, revolutionary and democratic battle-cries were projected
not now on the buildings facades, but on the purpose-built screens at the heart of the
.c.o!c: Gobierno por el pueblo, por y para el pueblo; Reparto agrario; Educacion
obligatoria, gratuita y laica; La soberan a nacional reside en el pueblo; democracia
efectiva, sufragio efectivo, no reeleccion (government by and for the people;
agrarian reform; compulsory, free and lay education; national sovereignty resides in
the people; effective democracy; effective suffrage; no re-election). If these verbal
signiers of political change served both to provide a simulation of historical
background and to draw attention to their fragility as decontextualised, unarticulated
and still-unrealised fragments, they also set the scene for the subsequent montage
sequences of lm clips from both revolutionary-era actuality pictures and later narrative
cinema that ctionalises and mythologises the historical event, projected onto the
central screens.
In this recycling of now-auratic lm images into public spectacle, there is a certain
selfconscious celebration of surface and simulacrum, embodied in the conversion of
buildings facades into semantically dense, opaque frames onto which light and images
are projected; in the projection of lm clips onto perpendicular, translucent screens
that allow for an inevitably incomplete, dispersed and partially inverted appreciation
of, for instance, juxtaposed close-ups of iconic stars of Golden-Age revolutionary
melodramas such as Pedro Armendariz and Dolores del R o (Figure 1); and in Les
Petits Francais own description of their work in terms of illusion and the ephemeral.
3
But there is a slippage between such postmodern escapism and a need for referentiality
that can be seen in the very presence of archive footage in 1c M. ..cs montage: a search
for some historical authenticity that also underpinned the popularity of the exhibition
Mexico 200 anos. La patria en construccion on display behind Les Petits Francais
light projections at the National Palace for much of 2010 and 2011.
In this essay I will evaluate two important recent publications that reect on the
nature of this slippage in the cinematic portrayal of the Mexican revolution: Zuzana
Picks (2010) monograph cc.o.. |. io. c |. r.c!o.c c..o o1 |. +..|..
and the weighty volume to !o. , !o o...o .! ... 1. !o r.c!o..c ...oo edited by
Fernando Fabio Sanchez and Gerardo Garc a Munoz (2010). Many of these books key
themes are encapsulated in 1c M. ..c: the relationships between the real historical
event and its incarnation in celluloid, mediated through intertextuality, commodica-
tion, reexivity and an aesthetics of display and spectacle; the generation and
questioning of a national narrative; the storage and appropriation of archival images;
the competing elds of state and private interests and intellectual or artistic agendas;
and the ways in which cinematic images address and are received by audiences. At root,
the question that concerns us here is: what is it that those who produce, promote,
critique, reuse or consume cinema seek in the inscription in celluloid of displays and
narratives of the revolution?
L AT I N AME RI CAN CUL T URAL S T UDI E S 4 5 0
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1c M. ..cs title converts historicity into experience and markets it to a centred,
autonomous, empowered and self-interested individual seduced into the position of
protagonist and witness of history, clearly reecting the logic of a consumer-oriented
neoliberal subjectivity (Leitner, Sheppard, Sziarto and Maringanti 2007) prevalent in
contemporary Mexico. The narrators appeals to social solidarity, however, are not
entirely reducible to neoliberal notions of citizenship. Likewise, both Picks book and the
tome edited by Fernando Fabio Sanchez and Gerardo Garc a Munoz are broadly in
agreement that, from the revolutionary era itself to the present day, cinematic echoes of
the Revolution have only .co|!, tracked hegemonic political discourses surrounding the
historical event that stands as one of the nations dening narratives. Just as Revolution-
era lmmakers were generally directly sponsored by given revolutionary .oo1.!!c (in the
case of Mexican cameramen) or tended in their generation of imaginaries to serve the
geopolitical interests of their government (in the case of US operators), postrevolutionary
lmmakers positioned themselves strategically with relation to the negotiation of
emerging discourses surrounding the ideological meanings of the revolution.
Thus, as Julia Tunon suggests in her reading of Fernando de Fuentes fascinatingly
complex revolutionary trilogy of 19331935 (Sanchez and Garc a Munoz 2010: 209
35), these now-foundational lms in the revolutionary genre emerged as critical
discourses on the corruption and arbitrariness of power, as the still-consolidating
postrevolutionary regime mobilised a reied notion of !o r.c!o..c in its quest to
achieve national reconciliation (Benjamin 2000). But at the same time, the terms in
which they relate the still-recent historical upheaval pregured the conservative
FI GURE 1 Photograph taken during the multimedia show Yo Me xico (Les Petits
Franc ais, Mexico City, 23 November 2010). Photograph by the author.
ME X I CO: T HE CE L L UL OI D RE V OL UT I ON 4 5 1
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nationalism of later Golden-Age takes on the Revolution: the repression, for the most
part, of overt violence and social, class or ideological contradictions; the reguring of
revolutionary struggle in terms of abstract values and morality (betrayal, fear,
impotence, cowardice); and the idealisation of family as a secure but threatened
location of peace and stability (the postrevolutionary metaphor of nationhood o.
...!!...). Matthew Bush (Sanchez and Garc a Munoz 2010: 23776) traces these
latter processes in the 1939 lm adaptation of Azuelas 1915 novel tc 1. o/oc; and
their transformation, in the later 1976 version, into an ultra-violent expression of a loss
of faith in the revolutionary narrative in president Echeverr as post-68 Mexico. Along
similar lines, Jean Franco (Sanchez and Garc a Munoz 2010: 36590), Stephany
Slaughter (Sanchez and Garc a Munoz 2010: 41965), Adela Pineda Franco (Sanchez
and Garc a Munoz 2010: 467513) and Ignacio Corona (Sanchez and Garc a Munoz
2010: 595648) provide respective readings of the promotion of traditional and rural
values in two of Emilio Fernandezs key revolutionary melodramas of the 1940s; the
intersection of gender relations and national imaginaries in a selection of lms centring
on the gure of the c!1o1..o; the guring of the Mexican revolution as various modes of
nostalgic spectacle in a range of US lms set against a revolutionary backdrop, ltered
through the Western genres universal values and the foundational myth of the Wild
West; and the varying characterisations of Zapata in four lms that centre on this
relatively little-depicted gure in the cinema of the Mexican revolution. This last essay
takes us from Elia Kazans reading of the .oo1.!!c through the lens of postwar
Hollywoods universal struggles between good and evil (.o Zooo, 1952) and Felipe
Cazals delicate balance between social critique and a reproduction of ofcial
mythology (i.!.oc Zooo, 1970), to the neoliberal, postmodern and (ultimately, and
arguably) post-PRI collapse of the Zapata myth as a metaphor for a real social basis that
would underlie the revolutionary narrative (Zooo . c|.o..o, Mario Hernandez,
1988; Zooo .! o.c 1.! |..c., Alfonso Arau, 2004).
As we can see in many of these examples, in ideological terms cinematic screen and
political stage have never been fully aligned, for numerous reasons. Firstly, ofcial
ideology surrounding the meaning of the revolution has historically been far from
homogeneous: a point seen most clearly during the revolution itself, when competing
parties contested their notions of revolution and nation as they struggled for political
hegemony, and during the long process of postrevolutionary pacication and national
reconciliation, coinciding loosely with the late silent and early sound (pre-Golden Age)
eras. This is a point that Fernando Fabio Sanchez (Sanchez and Garc a Munoz 2010: 101
67) makes effectively in relation to the production of revolution-era actualities.
However, in contrasting the relative open-endedness of the actualities to the later
compilation documentaries M.c..o 1. o ...oc (Carmen Toscano, 1950) and ic.,o
1. !o r.c!o..c (Jesus H. Abilita/Eufemio Rivera/Gustavo Carrero, 1961/1964), in
which a stable and closed
4
meaning is xed onto the historical events portrayed in the
raw actuality footage they contain, he rather diminishes the complexity of the visual and
discursive strategies at work in the mid-century documentaries.
5
Moreover, as Aurelio de los Reyes (Sanchez and Garc a Munoz 2010: 169207)
demonstrates in his account of Eisensteins ill-fated Mexican adventure in the early
1930s to make his truncated lm ,o. .o M. ..c, the production of lmic discourse,
even in such a personal project as that of Eisenstein, is ltered through a whole range of
factors. Among these are the intermedial aesthetic relations between lm form and
L AT I N AME RI CAN CUL T URAL S T UDI E S 4 5 2
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existing artistic representations of historical events; the reading practices that lie behind
historical research; and personal prejudices determined by existing cultural
conceptions and political leanings (Eisensteins idealised conception of the Revolution
as a popular force). If one overlays onto these factors the network of political,
institutional, methodological and nancial pressures that were brought to bear on
Eisenstein locally from Mexico, from his sponsors in the United States and from his
ultimate political patrons in the Soviet Union, Bourdieus (1993) insistence on the need
to approach an artwork simultaneously both from its internal (formal and aesthetic)
operations and in the context of the external network of social relations in which the
author negotiates his position between a series of elds, in search of symbolic and
cultural capital, becomes highly productive.
In the case of ,o. .o M. ..c, of course, this scenario is further complicated by
the fact that the unnished lm was subject to subsequent reworking and recycling; but
in any case the relationships between lmmakers and the state have historically been
more than a simple question of top-down ideological imposition. An obvious example
is that of the ...c of Luis Echeverr a (19701976), when state sponsorship of cinema
was coupled with a partial ideological opening designed to bring back on board
intellectuals disillusioned with the regime following the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968,
to provide a backdrop of intellectual freedom that might obscure the states role in the
dirty war against leftwing political subversion, and to shore up Echeverr as broad
third-worldist discourse. Without locating his analysis sufciently in the context
of cultural policy under ..|.....c, its contestation from the proponents of an
independent new Mexican cinema or the links between both phenomena and the
then-consolidating continent-wide New Latin American Cinema,
6
Gerardo Garc a
Munoz (Sanchez and Garc a Munoz 2010: 54994) shows how a body of lms made
during the ...c with ofcial support provide a critical revision of previous cinematic
paradigms and archetypes regarding the revolution.
More satisfying proves Hector Dom nguez Ruvalcabas account (Sanchez and
Garc a Munoz 2010: 51548) of the history of censorship behind to c/.o 1.! .oo1.!!c
(Julio Bracho, 1960), made in an era of far closer government control over public
discourse than the 1970s. Even though the state (which had originally sponsored
Brachos lm adaptation of Mart n Luis Guzmans widely appreciated 1929 novel)
succeeded in shelving Brachos masterpiece for a full thirty years after its production,
and even though censorship has to an extent structured the entire history of Mexican
cinema, Dom nguez argues, the very act of censorship fetishises the banned object to
the extent that even the relatively innocuous acquires an air of radical critique. Since,
according to Dom nguez Ruvalcabas reading, to c/.o 1.! .oo1.!!cs fundamental
critique is levelled at the code of deceit, dissemblance and self-censorship on which the
postrevolutionary political systems simulation of democracy rests, the states
censorship of Brachos picture constitutes an act of metacensorship (541) that serves
only to conrm the validity of the lms accusation. In allowing the state to act
rationally on its own terms, the lm thus works ofcial discursive repression against
itself, and the largely unknown (until 1990) but mythic lm becomes in itself a critique
of the system: not as a text that manages to negotiate its way through an authoritarian
bureaucracy in order to proclaim its liberating message, but rather as a reied object
whose very existence undermines the machinery by which the state legitimates itself
and perpetuates its hegemony.
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At stake here is the issue of authenticity: the sense of unease felt at the cynicism
with which the chasm between discourse and intent or, on another level, between
image and referent is (tacitly) acknowledged and manipulated. Sanchez and Garc a
Munozs book is precisely, according to their own statement of intent, an exploration
of the Revolution as a narrative that was overlain onto the real armed movement
through which the idea of the Revolution is formed through an accumulation of
contradictory fragments, dichotomies and afrmations that were perceived as a unied
historical account (15). Yet nowhere is the difculty in unravelling the narrative from
the real armed movement more apparent than in the multiple cinematic incarnations
of Pancho Villa: the subject of a thorough study co-authored by the books two editors
(Sanchez and Garc a Munoz 2010: 277363). Sanchez and Garc a Munoz suggest a
persuasive answer to the question of why Villa gures so much more prominently in
cinema than any other of the revolutionary .oo1.!!c. In a eld of media-savvy generals,
it was Villa who led the pack, creating, mythologising and manipulating his own public
persona in a symbiotic relationship with the US cameramen who made and unmade
Villa as the star of the Mexican revolution (De los Reyes 1985).
7
Sanchez and Garc a
Munoz thus argue that Villa had pre-existed the Revolution [as imagined from the
postrevolutionary 1920s] since 1913, as a bank of mythied stories and images (295)
which would subsequently become devoured by the postrevolutionary state as it
sought to gain hegemony by institutionalising the revolution through its own process of
mythmaking. While contested meanings admittedly surrounded all of the main
revolutionary leaders both during and after the armed conict (OMalley 1986), Villa
was by far the last to be fully institutionalised (his mortal remains were interred in the
Monumento a la Revolucion only in 1966), and in the postrevolutionary imagination
his persona long remained contradictory like no other: vital, manly, spectacular;
awed, cruel, infantile. He could thus be institutionalised even as he was freeing
himself from the connes of the cage of ofcial discourse (Sanchez and Garc a Munoz
2010: 355): the Villa myth could both partake in and resist ofcial discourse at the
same time. Standing as a site of perpetual indetermination, Villa was thus able to
encompass both the desires and frustrations of those eager to see material change as a
result of the revolution, and the need to rein such wild emotions in as the government
sought political stability and consensus across class, regional and ethnic divides.
There is, furthermore, an ontological indetermination that does not just concern
the ctional mise-en-sce`ne of the Villa myth in narrative cinema, but that goes right
back to the nature of what we now consider to be the documentary registers of
revolutionary events. Villa is infamously associated with faked battles mocked-up for
the cameras of the Mutual Film Company with which he struck a lucrative deal in 1914,
partly in his attempt to gain popularity and legitimacy in the US as a strong, modern
leader. Given this originary uncertainty surrounding the authenticity of much actuality
footage of Villa, coupled with the above discussions of the highly ideological nature of
the Revolutionary genre through the history of Mexican cinema, the politics of
simulation critiqued in to c/.o 1.! .oo1.!!c, and the illusory nature of Les Petits
Francais 1c M. ..c show, one might be tempted to argue that the entire edice of the
celluloid revolution is a simulacrum mobilised by so many ideological state apparatuses
and, in some cases, by mercantile interests. Turning to the !co. 1o.. ., the
amalgamation of cinematic revolutionary narratives brought to light in 2010 might then
be read through Bol var Echeverr as broader critique (2011 [2010]), within the
L AT I N AME RI CAN CUL T URAL S T UDI E S 4 5 4
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context of the Latin American bicentennial celebrations, of Latin Americas baroque
modernity: an illusory theatrical version of the European modernity that the Latin
American republics avowedly strove and manifestly failed to imitate, resulting in a
political life that is more symbolic than actual in which, by the nineteenth century,
the national republics began to oat like arrogant islands over the social body of the
continents population. Echeverr a recognises the existence of an Ecuadorian-ness
oating in the air, as it were, articial, evanescent and with many faces which
Ecuadorians recognize and claim as an important feature of what they do and what
they are (61). We would likewise be warned off the search for any sort of national
essence in the cinema of the Mexican revolution, beyond an ethereal Mexican-ness that
provided a vacuous narrative as people (lm audiences) struggled to forge a vague sense
of nationality. Such a reading, however, would reduce the complexity with which lm
viewers and lm narratives tend to interact.
Although he does not make the most of it in his reading of lm adaptations of tc 1.
o/oc, Matthew Bush (whose article I cited above) usefully draws on Raymond
Williams notion of residual cultural elements, which might serve us to go beyond a
rather lapidary notion of the revolutionary narrative as simply an imposition from
above:
The residual, by denition, has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still
active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past,
but as an effective element of the present. Thus certain experiences, meanings, and
values which cannot be expressed or substantially veried in terms of the dominant
culture, are nevertheless lived and practised on the basis of the residue cultural
as well as social of some previous social and cultural institution or formation.
[ . . . ] A residual cultural element is usually at some distance from the effective
dominant culture, but some part of it, some version of it [ . . . ] will in most cases
have had to be incorporated if the effective dominant culture is to make sense in
these areas. (Williams 1977: 1223)
8
In these terms, we might see both the real actuality footage and the ctional
narratives of the Revolution, recycled and recongured throughout the twentieth and
early twenty-rst centuries, as cultural residues that have been partly incorporated into
the various manifestations of dominant discourse, but which hold certain values and
meanings that remain irreducible to hegemonic narratives. Williams notion of the
residual might serve to clarify the (rather undertheorised) concept of the archive that
runs through Zuzana Picks (2010) incisive monograph, cc.o.. |. io. c |.
M...o r.c!o.c.
Rather than structuring her book as a chronological narrative of the lmic
representation of the Mexican revolution, as (roughly) do Sanchez and Garc a Munoz,
Pick closes in on a small number of lms a combination of canonical movies such as
o. .o M. ..c (Sergei Eisenstein 193031/1979) and occ .c to.|c .!!o
(Fernando de Fuentes, 1935); commercial pictures that for one reason or another have
been somewhat overlooked by serious scholarly study such as to o/o1co1o (Emilio
Fernandez, 1944) or +1 :o... to.|c .!!o o u..! (Bruce Beresford, 2003); and
experimental works such as tc .c!!c ..1.1c 1. to.|c .!!o (Gregorio Rocha, 2003)
and 1.o . M...c (Brenda Longfellow, 2001) and organises them thematically in
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order to create a diachronic study of much analytical depth. Her approach to the
accumulating body of visual culture (covering photography, painting and muralism as
well as cinema) as a visual archive of the revolution (Pick 2010: 8), on which both
ofcial and popular culture have drawn by means of citation as they position themselves
in relation to the revolutionary narrative, is not dissimilar (though broader in scope) to
Sanchez and Garc a Munozs discussion of Villa (cited above) as a bank of mythied
stories and images. This archive is not structured by polarised notions of authenticity
and invention, but rather by a cumulative process by which layers of meaning are
informed by and inect existing discourses.
Writing on the issue, briey discussed above, of the purported falsication of
actuality footage of Pancho Villa, with specic relation to Rochas experimental lm tc
.c!!c ..1.1c 1. to.|c .!!o, Pick adopts a rather more nuanced stance that the one I
outlined above with reference to Echeverr as baroque modernity, pointing out
(drawing on Miriam Hansens study of silent lm spectatorship) the hybrid features of
period silent lm practices that mixed authentic locations of newsreels with stage
setups of studio lming (64). Rochas lm, then, reveal[s] image making then and
now as a process, rather than a willful deception (61).
9
Although the presence of
archive footage in the mid-century compilation documentaries M.c..o 1. o ...oc
(1950) and ic.,o 1. !o r.c!o..c (1961/1964, both cited above), or in ction
features such as r.c!o..c c !o c/.o 1. to.|c .!!o (Miguel Contreras Torres, 1931),
responds to a need for authenticity for primary data (210), it is an authenticity
signicantly different to, say, early cameraman Boleslas Matuszewskis positivist
denition of the ribbon of imprinted celluloid as a piece of latent history that only
requires, to reawaken it and relive those hours of the past, a little light passing through
a lens in the darkness (1995 [1898]).
Pick (1624) suggests that ic.,o domineering voice-over narration is
surpassed by the reexive nature of the revolution-era actuality footage it contains, in
which elements of framing, visual composition and duration such as the presence of
internal spectators or the long take generate an internal reexivity that highlights the
moving images condition as spectacle. The observation is a good one although such
features have more to do with the spatial and temporal dimensions of early views in
general, in which contingency was inevitably inscribed in cinemas drive to register and
x movement and lived experience (Doane 2002), than with a visual politics concretely
surrounding the representation of the Mexican revolution. Margarita De Orellana
(n/d) has made a similar point regarding M.c..o 1. o ...oc, but Pick digs deeper
here, focusing on the prevalence in M.c..o, particularly during the sequence on the
1910 celebrations of the centenary of independence, of footage that demonstrates the
performative staging of public affairs which, in turn, were transformed into lmic
discourse. Such internal reexivity constitutes a key element of M.c..o meta-
archival component that visualize[s] the formative role of the archive in the
preservation of identities (27), for by implicating the viewer in the process of
producing meaning (particularly in the closing montage sequence in which actuality
footage and images of the contemporary modernity of 1950 are superimposed in a long
dissolve), the lm also asks us to reect on the role played by the eerie presence of
these by-now antique images in the forging of present-day imaginaries.
Any hope of nding an authentic register beneath the revolutionary spectacle is
further complicated by other determining factors such as racial prejudice and
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commodication. A case in point is a photograph of American tourists viewing the
battle of Ciudad Juarez from the rooftop terrace of the Hotel Paso del Norte, El Paso,
whose inscription markets the location as the only hotel in the world offering its guests
a safe, comfortable place to view a Mexican revolution (Pick 2010: 456), taken by
Pick as emblematic of the politics of display and cultural difference at work in the 2003
picture +1 :o... to.|c .!!o o u..!. This same dynamic, whereby the production
of spectacle is inseparable from the production of identity, reappears in a different form
in the cinema of the Golden Age, in which the nature of the spectacle is determined not
by underlying attitudes of national and racial confrontation, but by the dramatic
imperatives of melodrama, which come to shape the ways in which lm audiences
conceive of their own collective being. There are moments in Emilio Fernandezs
revolutionary melodrama to o/o1co1o, argues Pick, in which star image supercedes
character, spectacle displaces plot (139): it is the prior meanings invested in the gures
of the lms starring actors Dolores del R o and Pedro Armendariz that drive forward
the lms discussion of Mexicanness here, above and beyond diegesis. Thus, in Andre
Gaudreaults terms (1990), the monstrative or exhibitionist function that
predominated in early cinema irrupts, through the presence of the star, into the
narrative mode that, in classical cinema, came to displace it.
But here the star image that is being displayed, or monstrated, is not some brute
reality, but rather a sign that is almost endlessly intertextual: an issue that brings us
back to the earlier discussion of lmic depictions of Pancho Villa. It also recalls Ignacio
Coronas discussion of four movies centring on the gure of Zapata, in which the
passage from mid-century modernity to twenty-rst century postmodernity is marked
by accumulating layers of mediation, textuality and intertextuality that remove the
spectator by degrees from any essence of the .oo1.!!c that might lie within his lm
image. Indeed, in to ..c1.1o (Roberto Gavaldon, 1956) also heavily determined by
the intertextual star image of Mar a Felix national authenticity itself is itself up for
grabs. Pick reads the lm as reecting a wider post-1950 tendency to commodify
history and heritage as foreigners and locals [were] invited to partake in Mexicos
authenticity (Pick 2010: 145).
In her subsequent discussion of r..1 M. ..c .o... (Paul Leduc, 1971), a lm
that, far more than to o/o1co1o or to ..c1.1o, ostensibly addresses the topics of
spectatorship, display and the relationships between the (foreign) observer of the
Revolution and his potential to enter into and transform that reality, Pick notes that the
actors performance style particularly that of Claudio Obregon, who plays the
eponymous American journalist coupled with the use of sequence shots, emphasises
everyday features of behaviour such as hesitation, self-doubt and silence. These traits,
in contrast to the stylised performances of Del R o, Armendariz or Felix, call attention
to the processual construction of identity and self, rather than presenting these
categories as o. o..c!.. Pick appositely points to Reeds gesture at the close of the
lm as he smashes a shop window to steal a camera to replace the one he lost in an
earlier battle, symbolising as it does his decision to abandon the objective pretence of
journalism and his commitment to the revolution (181). She does not, though, linger
on this image, which I take to be emblematic not just of r..1 as a whole but of the
entire debate that we have before us. The window here might be read metaphorically in
various ways: as the fourth wall of objectivity; as a barrier defending the interests of
commerce; as the cinema screen that provides us with a secure, scopophilic space from
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which to observe an alien reality.
10
But this is also a transparent and liminal space that
both allows us to see through to the other side and provides us with a pretext to respect
the boundaries it delimits. In breaking the window an action heavily emphasised by a
lengthy freeze-frame (Figure 2) Reed breaks out from under the parapet, and claims
an .|..o! space of spectatorship from which reality is not simply observed, but also
transformed.
FI GURE 2 Frame enlargement from Reed: Me xico insurgente (Paul Leduc, Mexico,
1971). Image courtesy of Paul Leduc.
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It is to this point, to the ethics of spectatorship, that I would nally like to turn.
While much of the discussion here has been concerned with the discursive and
narrative properties of cinema, one of the main contributions of Picks volume, as is
rightly pointed out by Ignacio Sanchez Prado (2011) (who sees the book as
symptomatic of a distinct visual turn in Mexican cultural studies since 2007), is her
focus on audiences cognition of the celluloid Mexican revolution. Although Pick (5)
claims at the outset of her book an interest in the .....c of the lms she discusses,
rarely does she enter into what Janet Staiger calls a historical materialist approach to
lm reception: a focus on the identities and interpretative strategies and tactics /.co|
/, ..oc. c |. ...o (Staiger 2000: 23) emphasis in original. Pick rather privileges
a reading of the diverse modes of spectatorship that lms mobilise modes of
address, in Staigers terms in order to argue, quite persuasively, that certain lms
(1|. P.!1 io.| and r..1 M. ..c .o... are key examples) reexively cite not only
previous visual renditions of the Mexican revolution, but the very modes of address
through which earlier lms in this case, revolution-era actualities invoked in their
viewer certain forms of spectatorship (which I outlined above in relation to the framing
and temporality of actualities). A related point is made in relation to to o/o1co1o,
which Pick (133) reads as forming part of a wider citizen-forming project aimed at
helping Mexicans come to terms with the abrupt changes in everyday life brought by
urbanisation. Concretely, in the case of to o/o1co1o, this is achieved by encouraging
simultaneous identication with both the glamour and modernity of the urban
environment, on the one hand, and a sentimental attachment to an idealised rural past,
on the other.
What allows Pick to lay so much emphasis on the diverse modes of spectatorship at
work in the cinema of the Mexican revolution is, in part, the selection of lms upon
which she focuses the bulk of her study, which erects a modernist canon in which some
lms sit naturally (,o. .o M. ..c and r..1 M. ..c .o... are obvious examples),
while others, such as to o/o1co1o and to ..c1.1o, are read against the grain. By her
own account, with relation to the period that was perhaps the most productive in its
output of cinema of the revolutionary genre, only a handful of the lms produced
during the golden age of Mexican cinema avoided the totalizing tendencies of ofcial
historiography (8). What, then, of the remaining dozens that do not t into this
schema?
11
Were the audiences of those lms doomed to alienation? Did those lms
oat like Bol var Echeverr as arrogant islands over the social body of those lm
publics? Perhaps only a historical materialist reception study along the lines suggested
by Staiger a kind of study, of course, which is far beyond the bounds of Picks hugely
valuable book could tell us. It seems likely, though, that in the minds of at least some
spectators, something resembling Williams residual cultural elements in dialogue
with but not entirely xed by hegemonic discourse were at work in even the most
mind-numbingly conservative of movies.
The visual archive of the revolution which all of these lms constitute and draw
on, then, would not provoke anxiety over an impossible return to an origin or to the
lost authenticity of a live and mechanically reproducible artform, in the manner of
Derridas archive fever. It would rather suggest that, through the multiple levels of
intertextuality and mediation under which the audiovisual representation of the
revolution is now inevitably buried, some form of affective and even political
engagement with the present might be found. Herein lays the ethical dimension of lm
ME X I CO: T HE CE L L UL OI D RE V OL UT I ON 4 5 9
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spectatorship: the will to transcend dissemblance and simulation, not with a view to
nding a utopian authenticity, but in order to seek out meaning that might serve as a
conduit between the social, the narrative and the aesthetic.
Notes
1 By the account of the event organisers Les Petits Francais, a total of 3 million people
witnessed the show; see their ofcial website www.lespetitsfrancais.fr/references/
yo-mexico.html, which also contains an 11-minute video summarising and publicising
1c M. ..c. My comments on the show are based mainly on my attendance on the
evenings of 20 and 23 November.
2 The Mexico 2010 programme served to mark both the bicentenary of the start of the
independence movement in 1810 (traditionally commemorated on 15 September)
and the centenary of the onset of the Mexican revolution in 1910 (celebrated on 20
November). For more information see its ofcial website, www.bicentenario.-
gob.mx.
3 In its own publicity materials, the troupe asks: How can reality be transformed into
an ephemeral ight of fancy? Creating content, meaning, fantasy, emotion, surprise
and wonder to make reality sublime . . . this is the mission [ . . . ] Les Petits Francais
have set for themselves; http://lespetitsfrancais.fr/the-company/.
4 All English translations are my own unless otherwise specied.
5 I provide a contrasting reading of M.c..o 1. o ...oc in Wood (2009); see also the
discussion below of Zuzana Picks take on these compilations.
6 For a detailed discussion along these lines of lm production during Echeverr as
...c, see Mora (1997 [1982]).
7 On this point, see also De la Vega Alfaro (2010), who offers a panoramic account of
the portrayal of Villa in Mexican narrative cinema; and Katz (1998).
8 Bush (Sanchez and Garc a Munoz 2010: 244) provides his own Spanish translation of
the quotation; I cite a slightly different selection of the passage directly from Williams
original text.
9 See also Keil (2006).
10 It is precisely this space of scopophilia that, Pick argues, breaks down in the nal
shoot-out scene of 1|. P.!1 io.| (Sam Peckinpah, 1969): there is no secure place
from which to watch (173).
11 The exhaustive lmography included in the catalogue of the Cine y Revolucion
museum exhibition of 2010, examined in depth in Claudia Arroyos contribution to
this issue, lists 55 lms (both Mexican and foreign) made between 1937 and 1950
alone related to the revolution (Ortiz Monasterio 2010: 21518).
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David Wood is a researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas, Universidad
Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Latin
American Cultural Studies. His current research project is on compilation and found
footage lm in Mexico.
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