El cine de la Revolución: Dangerous Spectatorship and Instrumentalization of the Filmic Image in Martín Luis Guzmán’s El águila y la serpiente

In El águila y la serpiente (1928), Martín Luis Guzmán’s autobiographical narrator returns time and again to his self-appointed role as mediator between lettered culture and the new historical subject of the pueblo. The latter is portrayed in the book as the internal other that makes the Revolution possible, a sublimely violent motor of the social change both desired and feared by Guzmán, who portrays himself as endeavoring to direct it toward constructive ends. Among the tools for doing so he recognizes the increasing importance of new modes of making and circulating photographic media images, and narrates several episodes in which the filmic image – both still and motion picture – is used with the intent to mobilize a popular public. In one frequently cited episode, Guzmán tells how, when revolutionaries gathered at the Convención de Aguascalientes in 1914 see motion picture images of Venustiano Carranza, they explode into a hateful frenzy and one fires his weapon at the screen.

The Convention episode has often been cited in writing on Mexican film, most famously by Carlos Monsivais in his essay “Vino todo el pueblo y no cupo en la pantalla,” in which he uses the anecdote to illustrate the naïveté of the cinema’s popular audience when faced with the filmic image, by emphasizing the revolutionaries’ “indistinción entre sus filias y fobias, y lo que sucede en la pantalla” (53). In one of the few in-depth analyses of the episode, a recent article by Adela Pineda Franco centers on affect, discussing “el encuentro del intelectual con las respuestas afectivas a la Revolución por parte de los contingentes no letrados” (252). Pineda Franco’s insightful and informative essay convincingly demonstrates the role of the episode in Guzmán’s recognition of his own impotence as an intellectual when confronted with the power of affect. I will try to build on Pineda Franco’s essay by examining, in Guzmán’s account, the instrumentalization of the filmic image within the shifting system of remnant and emergent media practices.

In Guzmán’s text the factors of prime importance for the transformation of the field of media practices are two: the sudden national protagonism of the pueblo and the rapid spread of motion picture technology. The encounter between new medium and new audience stymies established practices of instrumentalization that had endeavored to create auratic images of leaders like Venustiano Carranza, and, I argue, announces an interregnum in which the filmic image is uncontrollable and non-auratic, opening space for the emergence of the new practices of instrumentalization that would soon be employed by the classical Mexican cinema, in which the pueblo is interpellated as an organic part of an institutionalized and auratic Revolutionary order.

Earlier in the same chapter of El águila y la serpiente, Guzmán’s account of Carranza’s generous dissemination of portraits of himself in the territory he controls makes evident that these are practices of a remnant discourse network. Friedrich Kittler’s conception of the discourse network, as “the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store and process relevant data” (Kittler 369), is useful for recognizing how specific events might indicate large-scale shifts. A comprehensive account of the shifts in discourse networks specific to early 20^th-century Mexico is beyond the scope of this essay, but Rubén Gallo convincingly articulates them in relatively few words:

In his analysis of European culture, Kittler locates the major shift in discourse networks around 1900. A similar discursive shift occurred in Mexico, but the decisive date was 1920 – the year the Mexican Revolution came to an end, Álvaro Obregón became president, and the government embarked on an unprecedented modernizing campaign encompassing everything from education to urbanism. The Porfiriato’s discourse network – governed by the antitechnological aesthetics of modernismo – quickly ceded ground to a postrevolutionary discourse network, characterized in the political sphere by the country’s rapid modernization and in the cultural...