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Introduction visualizing and romancing the revolution This book is an investigation of the ways in which the cinema participated in the visual constructions of the Mexican Revolution and the processes that shaped and contributed to the dissemination of these constructions on film since the 1930s in Mexico and internationally. It highlights the convergence between film and other visual media, including photography, painting, and graphic arts, to explain the significance of visual technologies in the twentieth century and their mediating role in the forging of the collective memories of a nation. The basic framework of the narrative is the widespread uprising against the regime of President Porfirio Díaz that began in 1910 and the protracted struggle for power that involved the various political and military forces that initially rallied around Francisco I. Madero. While the Mexican people are the protagonists, the narrative singles out such legendary figures as Madero, Pancho Villa, and Emiliano Zapata rather than the countless anonymous men and women—peasants, workers, and Indians—who participated in the revolution. Its subject matter involves popular insurrections and mass mobilizations; anti-insurgency and pacification operations led by government and revolutionary troops under the command of such disparate leaders as Pascual Orozco, Victoriano Huerta, Venustiano Carranza , and Alvaro Obregón; and peace treaties signed between warring factions but never enforced. The battles that produced one million dead in a total population of fifteen million, the insecurity in rural areas, and the loss of property that displaced entire populations within Mexico and across the border into the United States give a social dimension to the revolutionary scenario. The implementation of revolutionary principles, hampered by the opposing agendas of a peasantry fighting for land, a middle class bent on participating in the political process, and a bourgeoisie determined to preserve past privileges, and the ultimate victory of the last two sectors, furnish this narrative with a political, mostly mystifying but sometimes critical perspective. As the Mexican historian Enrique Florescano has written, the revolu-  constructing the image of the mexican revolution tion exceeds events and personalities. In his words, “It is not just a series of historical acts that took place between 1910 and 1917, or between 1910 and 1920, or between 1910 and 1940; it is also the collection of projections, symbols, evocations, images, and myths that its participants, interpreters, and heirs forged and continue to construct around this event” (quoted in Mraz, 1997a, 93). Florescano’s statement provides the critical framework for this book. It suggests the need to include visual production in the study of historical representations and cultural stereotypes and to examine the mass-mediated features and multiple uses of the imagery of the revolution. The story of the Mexican Revolution that emerged is particularly complex because it transpired on an international, as well as national, field of mass production of modernity. This overdetermined set of conditions means that I am looking at the issues of cultural exchange, translation, appropriation, and commodification, which enables me to negotiate the tensions between the cross-cultural and transnational dimensions of the imagery and its nationalist projections within the modernist and contemporary historiography of Mexico. My objective is to map the ways in which the meanings surrounding the revolution have been historicized by films that themselves participated in a wider visual field. I draw attention to the formative and ongoing impact of the imagery produced during the revolution. The modes of representation and spectatorship generated by this imagery were invested with a wide range of meanings regarding how the revolution was experienced by those who participated in and recorded it. This imagery constitutes the visual vernacular of Mexican modernity. It articulates a modernist awareness of the role of images in documenting the dynamics of social and cultural change, constructing a collective imaginary out of multiple identities and experiences. How this awareness was preserved and reconstructed is best exemplified in Memories of a Mexican (Carmen Toscano de Moreno Sánchez, 1950) and Epics of the Mexican Revolution (Gustavo Carrera, 1963), compilation documentaries consisting primarily of footage shot and collected by Mexico’s prominent film pioneers, Salvador Toscano and Jesús H. Abitía, respectively. Media awareness extended across the border into the United States by means of the photographs and weekly newsreels that supplemented journalistic dispatches from the war front, as well as the nascent picture postcard business. As the Mexican film historian Aurelio de los Reyes notes, “Between 1911 and 1920 over 80 American cameramen working either freelance or for various film companies covered...

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