Echoes of the Mexican revolution: cinematic and museographic approaches to history in the 2010 bicentenary

Abstract

In Mexico in 2010, the double celebration of the bicentenary of independence and the centenary of the revolution triggered a variety of different approaches to those historical periods. The most conspicuous of these was official cultural policy, which sought to legitimise itself through the patronage of cultural and artistic projects that reevaluated the commemorated events and their cultural representation. These projects included the production of a number of fiction films that articulated new perspectives on independence, the Porfiriato, the revolution and the country's present situation. Another project financed under official policy was a museum exhibition about films dealing with the revolution. This article will explore the discursive specificity of these historically oriented projects, focusing in particular on the topic of the revolution and its cultural representation. It will do this by presenting a broad review of this series of fiction films, and through a somewhat more detailed analysis of one of them, Revolution, and of the museum exhibition mentioned above. The article will also reflect on the relation between this film and the exhibition, and on the way in which both projects are positioned in relation to other discourses on history that flourished during the bicentenary.

Notes

1 In an interview, Cazals said that he had consulted, for example, the memoirs of a lieutenant of the general who directed the punitive expedition, John Joseph Pershing (Perches Galván, 2010).

2 The ‘cinema of the revolution’ has been the subject of research in the field of film and cultural studies, in work on the genre in general (Monsiváis, 1978, 1995; Vázquez Mantecón, 2010), on individual films (Podalsky, 1993; Noble, 2005; Wood, 2009), on key directors such as Fernando de Fuentes, Emilio Fernández, Matilde Landeta and Paul Leduc (Mraz, 1997; Dever, 2003; Anievas, 2004; Tierney, 2007; Arroyo, 2011), on specific periods (Miquel, 2010), on themes such as gender identity, romantic love and the caudillos (Tierney, 2007; Vargas, 2010; Arroyo, 2010; De la Vega, 2010), on subgenres such as revolutionary melodrama (Doremus, 2001) and on Hollywood and Europe's contributions to the genre (De Orellana, 1991; Miranda, 2010). A broad-ranging study is that of Zuzana M. Pick (2010), which tackles Mexican and US documentary and fiction film, over a timespan stretching from the civil war to the first decade of the twenty-first century.

3 Based on Jacques Derrida's analysis of the signature in the written text, Brunette and Wills argue that the appearance of the director in his films functions like a signature: ‘Like a signature on a painting, the sight of the director assures us, even more directly than his name in the credits, of the authenticity of the product […] The director authenticates the fact that it is indeed he who is making the film, claiming it as his own. Much more than this, however, his appearance creates the structure of […] a self-reflexive pointing to the fact that “I am writing”. For he is unavoidably writing his “proper name” with his body, and writing visually, in the image and in the other signifying loci of the film’ (1989: 122–23).

4 The construction of this museum was reprogrammed within the project of redesigning the Cineteca Nacional, due to be completed between autumn 2011 and 2012.

5 I would like to thank André Dorcé for his comments on the article, in particular on the topic of cultural policy. Thanks also to Adrien Charlois for his comments on the historical series produced by Televisa for the bicentenary.