Constructing the Image of the Mexican Revolution: Cinema and the Archive (review)

As the first major social movement of the twentieth century, the Mexican Revolution has always been of central importance for the rest of the continent because of its popular ideals based on class struggle, the vibrant culture it produced, the mythology of its heroes, and because it often has been invoked as a model for other social upheavals in the hemisphere. But the Mexican revolution is also important because of what we can call its right timing. The fact that the revolution happened at a time when photography had established itself as both medium and art form and when cinema was becoming the most important means of communication and entertainment in the world meant that a large quantity of visual documents were produced. And although not all of these materials have survived, when they first appeared they shaped the movement itself as well as its perception and have been ever since indispensable, along with paintings and graphic arts, to understanding that period of Mexican history.

Zuzana M. Pick’s book “highlights the convergence between film and other visual media [and] their mediating role in the forging of the collective memories of a nation” (p. 1). Elegantly constructed and intelligently argued, Pick’s book is one of the most significant volumes on Mexican culture published recently and proves just how important the use of new technologies, such as cinema and photography, was for the formation of modern Mexican identity and how these technologies, far from being passive instruments, became mechanisms of negotiation, struggle, appropriation, transformation, and manipulation of the national imagery. Presented here primarily in chronological order, the book offers an overview of the representation of the revolution in film while contributing intelligent commentaries on a dozen crucial films, from silent documentaries to movies from the golden age of Mexican cinema and even contemporary HBO super productions.

The first chapter reviews documents produced in Mexico, particularly those materials filmed by Salvador Toscano and later collected and released as a film with the title Memories of a Mexican (1950), but also a lesser-known film of similar fate, Epics of the Revolution (1964) by Jesús H. Abitía. Although already well-known and extensively written about, Memories of a Mexican is unavoidable since it sets the pace and tone for subsequent films, both fiction and documentary, about the revolution and its protagonists. These films are important not only because “the documentary image was used as a tool of historiography” (p. 12), but also and above all because they testify to the awareness of the possibilities of the medium as a political tool. As Pick writes, because they understood “the value of cinema, the various military leaders sponsored the production and exhibition of documentaries” (p. 13).

The second chapter is focused on materials produced in the United States as well as modern revisions and interpretations of those materials now lost, namely And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (2003) and The Lost Reels of Pancho Villa (2003). The third chapter, one of the most interesting, is an analysis of Pancho Villa, whose legend film pretty much helped to establish, and his transformation from bandit to hero or at least to central character, a transformation interpreted differently by Mexicans and Americans. In contrasting two films produced some ten years after the assassination of Villa, the excellent Let’s Go with Pancho Villa (1935) and Viva Villa! (1934), Pick offers illuminating commentaries on issues of gender and ethnicity while addressing the portrayal of Villa by Wallace Beery “as a scruffy-looking rogue with a disarming grin” (p. 81), which transforms this rebel into a comic bandit. The fourth chapter centers on the presence of Eisenstein in Mexico and turns to his unfinished filmed materials collected later with the title Que Viva México! (1979). Pick argues that Eisenstein, particularly with the episode “Maguey,” is fundamental for the discussion of Mexican post-revolutionary culture...