mexico- the celluloid revolution(1)

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Mexico: The Celluloid Revolut ionDavid M.J. Wood

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David M.J. Wood

MEXICO: THE CELLULOID REVOLUTION

This review essay evaluates two books published in 2010, the centennial year of theMexican revolution: La luz y la guerra: el cine de la Revolucion mexicana (ed.Fernando Fabio Sanchez and Gerardo Garca Munoz) and Constructing the Image ofthe Revolution: Cinema and the Archive (Zuzana Pick). An initial reflection on theYo Mexico multimedia light-and-sound show, held in Mexico Citys zocalo in November2010, serves as a springboard for an analysis of these two books historical, critical andtheoretical accounts of the presence of the Mexican revolution in cinema. Among the key

themes dealt with are the ideological meanings pinned to the revolution in filmic discourse;the relations between cinema, state and market interests; the intertextuality,commodification, reflexivity and aesthetics of spectacle that define and determine manyof these narratives; the notion of filmic images as visual archives of the revolution; and theways in which cinematic images address and are received by audiences.

On fourteen successive nights in November 2010, crowds massed into Mexico Citysvast zocalo (main square) in their tens of thousands to witness Yo Mexico, a dazzlingmultimedia show that immersed its spectators in 90 minutes of potted national history

relayed through live performance, voice-over narration, fireworks, montage sequencesof still and moving images, a meticulously designed light-and-sound display projectedonto purpose-built screens and, most eye-catching of all, onto the monumental edificesthat line the plaza.1 Although underpinned by an account of the historical struggles thatunderlie Mexicos troubled political present and peppered with solemn invocations ofcollective political agency, individual responsibility, human rights and civicempowerment, the real attraction of Yo Mexico, fittingly, lay in the spectacular: theMetropolitan Cathedral lit up as Mayan pyramid and tropical forest; the bricks of theNational Palace seen, almost felt, to crumble under the force of the devastating 1985earthquake (a multi-sensorial echo, perhaps, of the ongoing disintegration of the grandsrecits of nationhood); the combination of complex strobe lighting, electronic music andpyrotechnics that provided the shows closing flourish. Hired to mark the centennialcelebrations of the Mexican Revolution under the aegis of the federal governmentsMexico 2010 programme of commemorative events2 and in accordance with the localMexico City governments ongoing policy of promoting high-profile cultural spectaclesin the zocalo, the French multimedia troupe Les Petits Francais (headed by MartinArnaud and Marilyn Kuentz) struck a rather apposite balance between historicalcontext and awe-inspiring extravaganza.

Some of the visual and aural strategies and modes of address employed in Yo Mexicoare of relevance for a discussion of the terms in which cinema has historically registered,reflected and refigured 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

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the voice-of-god narrator recounted the social injustices of Porfirio Dazs rule and thepolitical upheavals that ultimately removed him from power at the onset of theRevolution, disembodied, intertwining words and phrases roamed across the surface ofthe Metropolitan Cathedral, standing as so many signifiers of Porfirian progress:

Mexico, comunicacion, nacional, telegrafo, credito del pas (Mexico;communication; national; telegraph; the countrys credit); and, in enormouscapitals upon the national palace: progreso (progress). A little later, a hotchpotch ofcommonplace reformist, revolutionary and democratic battle-cries were projected not now on the buildings facades, but on the purpose-built screens at the heart of thezocalo: Gobierno por el pueblo, por y para el pueblo; Reparto agrario; Educacionobligatoria, gratuita y laica; La soberana nacional reside en el pueblo; democraciaefectiva, sufragio efectivo, no reeleccion (government by and for the people;agrarian reform; compulsory, free and lay education; national sovereignty resides inthe people; effective democracy; effective suffrage; no re-election). If these verbal

signifiers of political change served both to provide a simulation of historicalbackground and to draw attention to their fragility as decontextualised, unarticulatedand still-unrealised fragments, they also set the scene for the subsequent montagesequences of film clips from both revolutionary-era actuality pictures and later narrativecinema that fictionalises and mythologises the historical event, projected onto thecentral screens.

In this recycling of now-auratic film images into public spectacle, there is a certainselfconscious celebration of surface and simulacrum, embodied in the conversion ofbuildings facades into semantically dense, opaque frames onto which light and imagesare projected; in the projection of film clips onto perpendicular, translucent screens

that allow for an inevitably incomplete, dispersed and partially inverted appreciationof, for instance, juxtaposed close-ups of iconic stars of Golden-Age revolutionarymelodramas such as Pedro Armendariz and Dolores del Ro (Figure 1); and in LesPetits 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 referentialitythat can be seen in the very presence of archive footage in Yo Mexicos montage: a searchfor some historical authenticity that also underpinned the popularity of the exhibitionMexico 200 anos. La patria en construccion on display behind Les Petits Francaislight projections at the National Palace for much of 2010 and 2011.

In this essay I will evaluate two important recent publications that reflect on the

nature of this slippage in the cinematic portrayal of the Mexican revolution: ZuzanaPicks (2010) monograph Constructing the Image of the Revolution: Cinema and the Archiveand the weighty volume La luz y la guerra: el cine de la Revolucion mexicana edited byFernando Fabio Sanchez and Gerardo Garca Munoz (2010). Many of these books keythemes are encapsulated in Yo Mexico: the relationships between the real historicalevent and its incarnation in celluloid, mediated through intertextuality, commodifica-tion, reflexivity and an aesthetics of display and spectacle; the generation andquestioning of a national narrative; the storage and appropriation of archival images;the competing fields 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 andnarratives of the revolution?

L A T I N A M E R I C A N C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S4 5 0

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Yo Mexicos title converts historicity into experience and markets it to a centred,autonomous, empowered and self-interested individual seduced into the position ofprotagonist and witness of history, clearly reflecting the logic of a consumer-orientedneoliberal subjectivity (Leitner, Sheppard, Sziarto and Maringanti 2007) prevalent incontemporary Mexico. The narrators appeals to social solidarity, however, are notentirely reducible to neoliberal notions of citizenship. Likewise, both Picks book and thetome edited by Fernando Fabio Sanchez and Gerardo Garca Munoz are broadly inagreement that, from the revolutionary era itself to the present day, cinematic echoes ofthe Revolution have only roughlytracked hegemonic political discourses surrounding the

historical event that stands as one of the nations defining narratives. Just as Revolution-era filmmakers were generally directly sponsored by given revolutionary caudillos (in thecase of Mexican cameramen) or tended in their generation of imaginaries to serve thegeopolitical interests of their government (in the case of US operators), postrevolutionaryfilmmakers positioned themselves strategically with relation to the negotiation ofemerging discourses surrounding the ideological meanings of the revolution.

Thus, as Julia Tunon suggests in her reading of Fernando de Fuentes fascinatinglycomplex revolutionary trilogy of 19331935 (Sanchez and Garca Munoz 2010: 20935), these now-foundational films in the revolutionary genre emerged as criticaldiscourses on the corruption and arbitrariness of power, as the still-consolidatingpostrevolutionary regime mobilised a reified notion of la Revolucion in its quest toachieve national reconciliation (Benjamin 2000). But at the same time, the terms inwhich they relate the still-recent historical upheaval prefigured the conservative

FI GU RE 1 Photograph taken during the multimedia show Yo Mexico (Les Petits

Francais, Mexico City, 23 November 2010). Photograph by the author.

M E X I C O : T H E C E L L U L O I D R E V O L U T I O N 4 5 1

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nationalism of later Golden-Age takes on the Revolution: the repression, for the mostpart, of overt violence and social, class or ideological contradictions; the refiguring ofrevolutionary 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 parexcellence). Matthew Bush (Sanchez and Garca Munoz 2010: 23776) traces theselatter processes in the 1939 film adaptation of Azuelas 1915 novel Los de abajo; andtheir transformation, in the later 1976 version, into an ultra-violent expression of a lossof faith in the revolutionary narrative in president Echeverras post-68 Mexico. Alongsimilar lines, Jean Franco (Sanchez and Garca Munoz 2010: 36590), StephanySlaughter (Sanchez and Garca Munoz 2010: 41965), Adela Pineda Franco (Sanchezand Garca Munoz 2010: 467513) and Ignacio Corona (Sanchez and Garca Munoz2010: 595 648) provide respective readings of the promotion of traditional and ruralvalues in two of Emilio Fernandezs key revolutionary melodramas of the 1940s; the

intersection of gender relations and national imaginaries in a selection of films centringon the figure of the soldadera; the figuring of the Mexican revolution as various modes ofnostalgic spectacle in a range of US films set against a revolutionary backdrop, filteredthrough the Western genres universal values and the foundational myth of the WildWest; and the varying characterisations of Zapata in four films that centre on thisrelatively little-depicted figure in the cinema of the Mexican revolution. This last essaytakes us from Elia Kazans reading of the caudillo through the lens of postwarHollywoods universal struggles between good and evil (Viva Zapata!, 1952) and FelipeCazals delicate balance between social critique and a reproduction of officialmythology (Emiliano Zapata, 1970), to the neoliberal, postmodern and (ultimately, and

arguably) post-PRI collapse of the Zapata myth as a metaphor for a real social basis thatwould underlie the revolutionary narrative (Zapata en Chinameca, Mario Hernandez,1988; Zapata: el sueno del heroe, Alfonso Arau, 2004).

As we can see in many of these examples, in ideological terms cinematic screen andpolitical stage have never been fully aligned, for numerous reasons. Firstly, officialideology surrounding the meaning of the revolution has historically been far fromhomogeneous: a point seen most clearly during the revolution itself, when competingparties contested their notions of revolution and nation as they struggled for politicalhegemony, and during the long process of postrevolutionary pacification and nationalreconciliation, coinciding loosely with the late silent and early sound (pre-Golden Age)

eras. This is a point that Fernando Fabio Sanchez (Sanchez and Garca Munoz 2010: 10167) makes effectively in relation to the production of revolution-era actualities.However, in contrasting the relative open-endedness of the actualities to the latercompilation documentaries Memorias de un mexicano (Carmen Toscano, 1950) and Epopeyasde la Revolucion (Jesus H. Abilita/Eufemio Rivera/Gustavo Carrero, 1961/1964), inwhich a stable and closed4 meaning is fixed onto the historical events portrayed in theraw actuality footage they contain, he rather diminishes the complexity of the visual anddiscursive strategies at work in the mid-century documentaries.5

Moreover, as Aurelio de los Reyes (Sanchez and Garca Munoz 2010: 169207)demonstrates in his account of Eisensteins ill-fated Mexican adventure in the early1930s to make his truncated film Que viva Mexico!, the production of filmic discourse,even in such a personal project as that of Eisenstein, is filtered through a whole range offactors. Among these are the intermedial aesthetic relations between film form and


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existing artistic representations of historical events; the reading practices that lie behindhistorical research; and personal prejudices determined by existing culturalconceptions and political leanings (Eisensteins idealised conception of the Revolutionas a popular force). If one overlays onto these factors the network of political,

institutional, methodological and financial pressures that were brought to bear onEisenstein locally from Mexico, from his sponsors in the United States and from hisultimate political patrons in the Soviet Union, Bourdieus (1993) insistence on the needto 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 theauthor negotiates his position between a series of fields, in search of symbolic andcultural capital, becomes highly productive.

In the case ofQue viva Mexico!, of course, this scenario is further complicated bythe fact that the unfinished film was subject to subsequent reworking and recycling; butin any case the relationships between filmmakers and the state have historically been

more than a simple question of top-down ideological imposition. An obvious exampleis that of the sexenio of Luis Echeverra (19701976), when state sponsorship of cinemawas coupled with a partial ideological opening designed to bring back on boardintellectuals disillusioned with the regime following the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968,to provide a backdrop of intellectual freedom that might obscure the states role in thedirty war against leftwing political subversion, and to shore up Echeverras broadthird-worldist discourse. Without locating his analysis sufficiently in the contextof cultural policy under echeverrismo, its contestation from the proponents of anindependent new Mexican cinema or the links between both phenomena and thethen-consolidating continent-wide New Latin American Cinema,6 Gerardo Garca

Munoz (Sanchez and Garca Munoz 2010: 54994) shows how a body of films madeduring the sexenio with official support provide a critical revision of previous cinematicparadigms and archetypes regarding the revolution.

More satisfying proves Hector Domnguez Ruvalcabas account (Sanchez andGarca Munoz 2010: 515 48) of the history of censorship behind La sombra del caudillo(Julio Bracho, 1960), made in an era of far closer government control over publicdiscourse than the 1970s. Even though the state (which had originally sponsoredBrachos film adaptation of Martn 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, Domnguez argues, the very act of censorship fetishises the banned object tothe extent that even the relatively innocuous acquires an air of radical critique. Since,according to Domnguez Ruvalcabas reading, La sombra del caudillos fundamentalcritique is levelled at the code of deceit, dissemblance and self-censorship on which thepostrevolutionary political systems simulation of democracy rests, the statescensorship of Brachos picture constitutes an act of metacensorship (541) that servesonly to confirm the validity of the films accusation. In allowing the state to actrationally on its own terms, the film thus works official discursive repression againstitself, and the largely unknown (until 1990) but mythic film becomes in itself a critiqueof the system: not as a text that manages to negotiate its way through an authoritarianbureaucracy in order to proclaim its liberating message, but rather as a reified objectwhose very existence undermines the machinery by which the state legitimates itselfand perpetuates its hegemony.


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At stake here is the issue of authenticity: the sense of unease felt at the cynicismwith which the chasm between discourse and intent or, on another level, betweenimage and referent is (tacitly) acknowledged and manipulated. Sanchez and GarcaMunozs 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 movementthrough which the idea of the Revolution is formed through an accumulation ofcontradictory fragments, dichotomies and affirmations that were perceived as a unifiedhistorical account (15). Yet nowhere is the difficulty in unravelling the narrative fromthe real armed movement more apparent than in the multiple cinematic incarnationsof Pancho Villa: the subject of a thorough study co-authored by the books two editors(Sanchez and Garca Munoz 2010: 277363). Sanchez and Garca Munoz suggest apersuasive answer to the question of why Villa figures so much more prominently incinema than any other of the revolutionary caudillos. In a field 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 unmadeVilla as the star of the Mexican revolution (De los Reyes 1985).7 Sanchez and GarcaMunoz thus argue that Villa had pre-existed the Revolution [as imagined from thepostrevolutionary 1920s] since 1913, as a bank of mythified stories and images (295)which would subsequently become devoured by the postrevolutionary state as itsought to gain hegemony by institutionalising the revolution through its own process ofmythmaking. While contested meanings admittedly surrounded all of the mainrevolutionary leaders both during and after the armed conflict (OMalley 1986), Villawas by far the last to be fully institutionalised (his mortal remains were interred in theMonumento a la Revolucion only in 1966), and in the postrevolutionary imagination

his persona long remained contradictory like no other: vital, manly, spectacular;flawed, cruel, infantile. He could thus be institutionalised even as he was freeinghimself from the confines of the cage of official discourse (Sanchez and Garca Munoz2010: 355): the Villa myth could both partake in and resist official discourse at thesame time. Standing as a site of perpetual indetermination, Villa was thus able toencompass both the desires and frustrations of those eager to see material change as aresult of the revolution, and the need to rein such wild emotions in as the governmentsought political stability and consensus across class, regional and ethnic divides.

There is, furthermore, an ontological indetermination that does not just concernthe fictional mise-en-scene 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 ofrevolutionary events. Villa is infamously associated with faked battles mocked-up forthe 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, modernleader. Given this originary uncertainty surrounding the authenticity of much actualityfootage of Villa, coupled with the above discussions of the highly ideological nature ofthe Revolutionary genre through the history of Mexican cinema, the politics ofsimulation critiqued in La sombra del caudillo, and the illusory nature of Les PetitsFrancais Yo Mexico show, one might be tempted to argue that the entire edifice of thecelluloid revolution is a simulacrum mobilised by so many ideological state apparatusesand, in some cases, by mercantile interests. Turning to the longue duree, theamalgamation of cinematic revolutionary narratives brought to light in 2010 might thenbe read through Bolvar Echeverras broader critique (2011 [2010]), within the


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context of the Latin American bicentennial celebrations, of Latin Americas baroquemodernity: an illusory theatrical version of the European modernity that the LatinAmerican republics avowedly strove and manifestly failed to imitate, resulting in apolitical life that is more symbolic than actual in which, by the nineteenth century,

the national republics began to float like arrogant islands over the social body of thecontinents population. Echeverra recognises the existence of an Ecuadorian-ness

floating in the air, as it were, artificial, evanescent and with many faces whichEcuadorians recognize and claim as an important feature of what they do and whatthey are (61). We would likewise be warned off the search for any sort of nationalessence in the cinema of the Mexican revolution, beyond an ethereal Mexican-ness thatprovided a vacuous narrative as people (film audiences) struggled to forge a vague senseof nationality. Such a reading, however, would reduce the complexity with which filmviewers and film narratives tend to interact.

Although he does not make the most of it in his reading of film adaptations ofLos de

abajo, Matthew Bush (whose article I cited above) usefully draws on RaymondWilliams notion of residual cultural elements, which might serve us to go beyond arather lapidary notion of the revolutionary narrative as simply an imposition fromabove:

The residual, by definition, has been effectively formed in the past, but it is stillactive 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, andvalues which cannot be expressed or substantially verified in terms of the dominantculture, 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 effectivedominant culture, but some part of it, some version of it [ . . . ] will in most caseshave had to be incorporated if the effective dominant culture is to make sense inthese areas. (Williams 1977: 1223)8

In these terms, we might see both the real actuality footage and the fictionalnarratives of the Revolution, recycled and reconfigured throughout the twentieth andearly twenty-first centuries, as cultural residues that have been partly incorporated intothe various manifestations of dominant discourse, but which hold certain values and

meanings that remain irreducible to hegemonic narratives. Williams notion of theresidual might serve to clarify the (rather undertheorised) concept of the archive thatruns through Zuzana Picks (2010) incisive monograph, Constructing the Image of theMexican Revolution.

Rather than structuring her book as a chronological narrative of the filmicrepresentation of the Mexican revolution, as (roughly) do Sanchez and Garca Munoz,Pick closes in on a small number of films a combination of canonical movies such asQue viva Mexico (Sergei Eisenstein 1930 31/1979) and Vamonos con Pancho Villa(Fernando de Fuentes, 1935); commercial pictures that for one reason or another havebeen somewhat overlooked by serious scholarly study such as Las abandonadas (EmilioFernandez, 1944) or And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (Bruce Beresford, 2003); andexperimental works such as Los rollos perdidos de Pancho Villa (Gregorio Rocha, 2003)and Tina in Mexico (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 theaccumulating body of visual culture (covering photography, painting and muralism aswell as cinema) as a visual archive of the revolution (Pick 2010: 8), on which bothofficial 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) toSanchez and Garca Munozs discussion of Villa (cited above) as a bank of mythifiedstories and images. This archive is not structured by polarised notions of authenticityand invention, but rather by a cumulative process by which layers of meaning areinformed by and inflect existing discourses.

Writing on the issue, briefly discussed above, of the purported falsification ofactuality footage of Pancho Villa, with specific relation to Rochas experimental film Losrollos perdidos de Pancho Villa, Pick adopts a rather more nuanced stance that the one Ioutlined above with reference to Echeverras baroque modernity, pointing out(drawing on Miriam Hansens study of silent film spectatorship) the hybrid features of

period silent film practices that mixed authentic locations of newsreels with stagesetups of studio filming (64). Rochas film, then, reveal[s] image making then andnow as a process, rather than a willful deception (61).9 Although the presence ofarchive footage in the mid-century compilation documentaries Memorias de un mexicano(1950) and Epopeyas de la Revolucion (1961/1964, both cited above), or in fictionfeatures such as Revolucion o la sombra de Pancho Villa (Miguel Contreras Torres, 1931),responds to a need for authenticity for primary data (210), it is an authenticitysignificantly different to, say, early cameraman Boleslas Matuszewskis positivistdefinition of the ribbon of imprinted celluloid as a piece of latent history that onlyrequires, to reawaken it and relive those hours of the past, a little light passing through

a lens in the darkness (1995 [1898]).Pick (16 24) suggests that Epopeyas domineering voice-over narration is

surpassed by the reflexive nature of the revolution-era actuality footage it contains, inwhich elements of framing, visual composition and duration such as the presence ofinternal spectators or the long take generate an internal reflexivity that highlights themoving images condition as spectacle. The observation is a good one although suchfeatures have more to do with the spatial and temporal dimensions of early views ingeneral, in which contingency was inevitably inscribed in cinemas drive to register andfix movement and lived experience (Doane 2002), than with a visual politics concretelysurrounding the representation of the Mexican revolution. Margarita De Orellana

(n/d) has made a similar point regarding Memorias de un mexicano, but Pick digs deeperhere, focusing on the prevalence in Memorias, particularly during the sequence on the1910 celebrations of the centenary of independence, of footage that demonstrates theperformative staging of public affairs which, in turn, were transformed into filmicdiscourse. Such internal reflexivity constitutes a key element of Memorias meta-archival component that visualize[s] the formative role of the archive in thepreservation of identities (27), for by implicating the viewer in the process ofproducing meaning (particularly in the closing montage sequence in which actualityfootage and images of the contemporary modernity of 1950 are superimposed in a longdissolve), the film also asks us to reflect on the role played by the eerie presence ofthese by-now antique images in the forging of present-day imaginaries.

Any hope of finding an authentic register beneath the revolutionary spectacle isfurther complicated by other determining factors such as racial prejudice and


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commodification. A case in point is a photograph of American tourists viewing thebattle 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 guestsa 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 2003picture And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself. This same dynamic, whereby the productionof spectacle is inseparable from the production of identity, reappears in a different formin the cinema of the Golden Age, in which the nature of the spectacle is determined notby underlying attitudes of national and racial confrontation, but by the dramaticimperatives of melodrama, which come to shape the ways in which film audiencesconceive of their own collective being. There are moments in Emilio Fernandezsrevolutionary melodrama Las abandonadas, argues Pick, in which star image supercedescharacter, spectacle displaces plot (139): it is the prior meanings invested in the figuresof the films starring actors Dolores del Ro and Pedro Armendariz that drive forward

the films discussion of Mexicanness here, above and beyond diegesis. Thus, in AndreGaudreaults terms (1990), the monstrative or exhibitionist function thatpredominated in early cinema irrupts, through the presence of the star, into thenarrative mode that, in classical cinema, came to displace it.

But here the star image that is being displayed, or monstrated, is not some brutereality, but rather a sign that is almost endlessly intertextual: an issue that brings usback to the earlier discussion of filmic depictions of Pancho Villa. It also recalls IgnacioCoronas discussion of four movies centring on the figure of Zapata, in which thepassage from mid-century modernity to twenty-first century postmodernity is markedby accumulating layers of mediation, textuality and intertextuality that remove the

spectator by degrees from any essence of the caudillo that might lie within his filmimage. Indeed, in La escondida (Roberto Gavaldon, 1956) also heavily determined bythe intertextual star image of Mara Felix national authenticity itself is itself up forgrabs. Pick reads the film as reflecting a wider post-1950 tendency to commodifyhistory and heritage as foreigners and locals [were] invited to partake in Mexicosauthenticity (Pick 2010: 145).

In her subsequent discussion of Reed: Mexico insurgente (Paul Leduc, 1971), a filmthat, far more than Las abandonadas or La escondida, ostensibly addresses the topics ofspectatorship, display and the relationships between the (foreign) observer of theRevolution and his potential to enter into and transform that reality, Pick notes that the

actors performance style particularly that of Claudio Obregon, who plays theeponymous American journalist coupled with the use of sequence shots, emphasiseseveryday features of behaviour such as hesitation, self-doubt and silence. These traits,in contrast to the stylised performances of Del Ro, Armendariz or Felix, call attentionto the processual construction of identity and self, rather than presenting thesecategories as faits accomplis. Pick appositely points to Reeds gesture at the close of thefilm as he smashes a shop window to steal a camera to replace the one he lost in anearlier 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, lingeron this image, which I take to be emblematic not just of Reed as a whole but of theentire debate that we have before us. The window here might be read metaphorically invarious ways: as the fourth wall of objectivity; as a barrier defending the interests ofcommerce; 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 thatboth allows us to see through to the other side and provides us with a pretext to respectthe boundaries it delimits. In breaking the window an action heavily emphasised by alengthy freeze-frame (Figure 2) Reed breaks out from under the parapet, and claims

an ethical space of spectatorship from which reality is not simply observed, but alsotransformed.

FI GU RE 2 Frame enlargement from Reed: Mexico 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 finally like to turn.While much of the discussion here has been concerned with the discursive andnarrative properties of cinema, one of the main contributions of Picks volume, as isrightly 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 herfocus on audiences cognition of the celluloid Mexican revolution. Although Pick (5)claims at the outset of her book an interest in the reception of the films she discusses,rarely does she enter into what Janet Staiger calls a historical materialist approach tofilm reception: a focus on the identities and interpretative strategies and tactics broughtby spectators to the cinema (Staiger 2000: 23) emphasis in original. Pick rather privilegesa reading of the diverse modes of spectatorship that films mobilise modes ofaddress, in Staigers terms in order to argue, quite persuasively, that certain films(The Wild Bunch and Reed: Mexico insurgente are key examples) reflexively cite not onlyprevious visual renditions of the Mexican revolution, but the very modes of address

through which earlier films in this case, revolution-era actualities invoked in theirviewer certain forms of spectatorship (which I outlined above in relation to the framingand temporality of actualities). A related point is made in relation to Las abandonadas,which Pick (133) reads as forming part of a wider citizen-forming project aimed athelping Mexicans come to terms with the abrupt changes in everyday life brought byurbanisation. Concretely, in the case ofLas abandonadas, this is achieved by encouragingsimultaneous identification with both the glamour and modernity of the urbanenvironment, 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 films uponwhich she focuses the bulk of her study, which erects a modernist canon in which somefilms sit naturally (Que viva Mexico! and Reed: Mexico insurgente are obvious examples),while others, such as Las abandonadas and La escondida, are read against the grain. By herown account, with relation to the period that was perhaps the most productive in itsoutput of cinema of the revolutionary genre, only a handful of the films producedduring the golden age of Mexican cinema avoided the totalizing tendencies of officialhistoriography (8). What, then, of the remaining dozens that do not fit into thisschema?11 Were the audiences of those films doomed to alienation? Did those filmsfloat like Bolvar Echeverras arrogant islands over the social body of those film

publics? Perhaps only a historical materialist reception study along the lines suggestedby Staiger a kind of study, of course, which is far beyond the bounds of Picks hugelyvaluable book could tell us. It seems likely, though, that in the minds of at least somespectators, something resembling Williams residual cultural elements in dialoguewith but not entirely fixed by hegemonic discourse were at work in even the mostmind-numbingly conservative of movies.

The visual archive of the revolution which all of these films constitute and drawon, then, would not provoke anxiety over an impossible return to an origin or to thelost authenticity of a live and mechanically reproducible artform, in the manner ofDerridas archive fever. It would rather suggest that, through the multiple levels ofintertextuality and mediation under which the audiovisual representation of therevolution is now inevitably buried, some form of affective and even politicalengagement with the present might be found. Herein lays the ethical dimension of film


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spectatorship: the will to transcend dissemblance and simulation, not with a view tofinding a utopian authenticity, but in order to seek out meaning that might serve as aconduit 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 peoplewitnessed the show; see their official website www.lespetitsfrancais.fr/references/yo-mexico.html, which also contains an 11-minute video summarising and publicisingYo Mexico. My comments on the show are based mainly on my attendance on theevenings of 20 and 23 November.

2 The Mexico 2010 programme served to mark both the bicentenary of the start of theindependence movement in 1810 (traditionally commemorated on 15 September)and the centenary of the onset of the Mexican revolution in 1910 (celebrated on 20November). For more information see its official website, www.bicentenario.-

gob.mx.3 In its own publicity materials, the troupe asks: How can reality be transformed into

an ephemeral flight of fancy? Creating content, meaning, fantasy, emotion, surpriseand wonder to make reality sublime . . . this is the mission [ . . . ] Les Petits Francaishave set for themselves; http://lespetitsfrancais.fr/the-company/.

4 All English translations are my own unless otherwise specified.5 I provide a contrasting reading ofMemorias de un mexicano in Wood (2009); see also the

discussion below of Zuzana Picks take on these compilations.6 For a detailed discussion along these lines of film production during Echeverras

sexenio, see Mora (1997 [1982]).

7 On this point, see also De la Vega Alfaro (2010), who offers a panoramic account ofthe portrayal of Villa in Mexican narrative cinema; and Katz (1998).

8 Bush (Sanchez and Garca Munoz 2010: 244) provides his own Spanish translation ofthe quotation; I cite a slightly different selection of the passage directly from Williamsoriginal text.

9 See also Keil (2006).10 It is precisely this space of scopophilia that, Pick argues, breaks down in the final

shoot-out scene of The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969): there is no secure placefrom which to watch (173).

11 The exhaustive filmography included in the catalogue of the Cine y Revolucion

museum exhibition of 2010, examined in depth in Claudia Arroyos contribution tothis issue, lists 55 films (both Mexican and foreign) made between 1937 and 1950alone related to the revolution (Ortiz Monasterio 2010: 21518).

References

Benjamin, Thomas. 2000. La Revolucion: Mexicos Great Revolution as Memory, Myth, andHistory. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. NewYork: Columbia University Press.

De la Vega Alfaro, Eduardo. 2010. Los caudillos revolucionarios en el cine eran seis:Pancho Villa. In Cine y revolucion: la Revolucion mexicana a traves del cine, edited byPablo Ortiz Monasterio. Mexico City.


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http://www.lespetitsfrancais.fr/references/yo-mexico.htmlhttp://www.lespetitsfrancais.fr/references/yo-mexico.htmlhttp://www.bicentenario.gob.mx/http://www.bicentenario.gob.mx/http://lespetitsfrancais.fr/the-company/http://lespetitsfrancais.fr/the-company/http://lespetitsfrancais.fr/the-company/http://www.bicentenario.gob.mx/http://www.bicentenario.gob.mx/http://www.lespetitsfrancais.fr/references/yo-mexico.htmlhttp://www.lespetitsfrancais.fr/references/yo-mexico.html


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De los Reyes, Aurelio. 1985. Con Villa en Mexico: testimonios sobre camarografos norteamericanos enla revolucion, 19111916. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico.

De Orellana, Margarita. n/d. Una voz del presente sobre imagenes del pasado. In Imagenesdel pasado, edited by Margarita de Orellana. Mexico City.

Doane, Mary Ann. 2002. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive.Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.

Echeverra, Bolvar. 2011 [2010]. Potemkin Republics: Reflections on Latin AmericasBicentenary. New Left Review 70: 5361.

Gaudreault, Andre. 1990. Showing and Telling: Image and Word in Early Cinema. In EarlyCinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, edited by Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker.London.

Katz, Friedrich. 1998. Pancho Villa. Mexico City: Ediciones Era.Keil, Charlie. 2006. Steel Engines and Cardboard Rockets: The Status of Fiction and

Nonfiction in Early Cinema. In F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truths Undoing,

edited by Alexandra Juhasz, and Jesse Lerner. Minneapolis.Leitner, Helga, Eric S. Sheppard, Kristin Sziarto, and Anant Maringanti. 2007. ContestingUrban Futures: Decentering Neoliberalism. In Contesting Neoliberalism: UrbanFrontiers, edited by Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck, and Eric S. Sheppard. NewYork/London.

Matuszewski, Boleslas. 1995 [1898]. A New Source of History. Film History7 (3): 3224.Mora, Carl J. 1997 [1982]. Decline, Renovation, and the Return of Commercialism,

1960 1980. In New Latin American Cinema, Vol. 2, Studies of National Cinemas, editedby Michael T. Martin. Detroit.

OMalley, Ilene V. 1986. The Myth of the Revolution: Hero Cults and the Institutionalization ofthe Mexican State, 1920 1940. Westport: Greenwood Press.

Ortiz Monasterio, Pablo, ed. 2010. Cine y revolucion: la Revolucion mexicana a traves del cine.Mexico City: Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografa/Cineteca Nacional.

Pick, Zuzana M. 2010. Constructing the Image of the Mexican Revolution: Cinema and the Archive.Austin: University of Texas Press.

Sanchez, Fernando Fabio, and Garca Munoz, Gerardo, eds. 2010. La luz y la guerra: el cinede la Revolucion mexicana. Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes.

Sanchez Prado, Ignacio. 2011. Estrategias para mirar la nacion. El giro visual de los estudiosculturales mexicanos en lengua inglesa. Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 27 (2):44969.

Staiger, Janet. 2000. Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception. New York/London:

New York University Press.Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford/New York: Oxford University

Press.Wood, David M. J. 2009. Memorias de una mexicana: la revolucion como monumento

flmico. Secuencia 75: 147 70.

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 foundfootage film in Mexico.


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mexico- the celluloid revolution(1)

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