Constructing the Image of the Mexican Revolution: Cinema and the Archive

Conclusion: Thoughts on Working with the Archive

Conclusion thoughts on working with the archive Beyond any clichés summoned by films using as a visual and narrative backdrop the events that took place and the actors who participated in Mexico during the period 1910–1917, the revolution was a defining historical moment. It has shaped the modern identity of the country for Mexicans and foreigners alike and has informed to this day the ideology of Mexican nationalism, even as modernist concepts of nationhood are being challenged by globalization. The revolution captured the imaginations of progressive intellectuals and artists in Mexico and elsewhere and sparked their militancy and creativity. Whether their fascination was shaped by direct contact or mediated by representation, they were energized by the nationalist and modernist impulses of the revolution. In due course, they became the protagonists and interlocutors of a dialogue across cultures that endowed the visual archive with a transnational genealogy. To the extent that most appropriated the meanings of the revolution and interiorized its experiences, the narratives and images they produced, primarily in the ensuing decades, affected the ways in which the Mexican Revolution was and is arguably still represented. Thus the revolution is an accumulation of images and myths that make up Mexico’s nationalist and modernist narrative. The political incidents and military milestones, achievements or failings of larger-than-life heroes, and acts of bravery and violence by and against ordinary people that marked the years 1910–1917 inform la Revoluci ón, a master narrative meticulously and selectively reconstructed in the 1920s and celebrated in the 1930s. As the historian Thomas Benjamin explains, “Contemporaries told stories, drew comparisons, and made arguments about recent events in particular ways to justify their actions, to condemn their enemies, to win converts and to do much more. Their talking, singing, drawing, painting, and writing invented la Revolución: a name transformed into what appeared to be a natural and self-evident part of reality and history” (2000, 14). Clearly more than a narrative, because it was painted, photographed, and filmed by Mexicans and foreigners, the constructing the image of the mexican revolution 10 revolution is an extensive archive whose substance, meaning, and pleasure depend on the mutual bearing of visual and mass media on the multiple ways in which history and culture are experienced. What follows is meant as a brief summary of the issues discussed in this book, with emphasis on pervasive themes and modes of representing Mexico and historicizing the revolution. Reaching into the past to reflect the present of a nation and an identity in the making, the visual archive of the revolution has been disseminated in multiple forms. Consisting of period images that have been used to document, celebrate, and mythologize episodes, actors, and settings, it has been evoked and reinterpreted in fiction films. Alongside the images of trains moving people and military equipment across deserts and valleys, rotting corpses and buildings in ruins, are numerous pictures of anonymous peasant soldiers, soldaderas, and children, renowned military and political figures. Whether they are wearing bullet belts across their chests or field uniforms and urban clothes, all look directly at the viewer. The assertive gestures of identity and historical agency in these individual and group portraits exemplify to what extent visual production was a collective process in which producers, subjects, and consumers were equally implicated. In this sense, the visual archive of the revolution is more than a historical record. Its symbolic, rhetorical, and affective power resides in the ability to represent the revolution as an event and a discourse. Integral to this power is an awareness of the role of media in conveying the social and cultural dynamics generated by incidents and actors. Yet, as Monsiv áis points out in regard to the photographs in the Casasola Archive, this imagery is “more than a lesson in history, is (obviously) a visual experience , not a class in national politics. As we do from the films Memorias de un mexicano of Salvador Toscano, Epopeyas de la revolución of Gustavo Carrero, and Fernando de Fuentes’s El compadre Mendoza and ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! . . . we want primary data: we want to understand how— depending on the prevailing cultural scheme of things—the faces of our nation conceal and reveal, and the extent to which we have given up or condemned the gestures and deeds that swept away a whole political, economic and social structure” (1984, 15). Of all the themes of the archive, the most ubiquitous is Villa. At once a historical...