Close Up on the Mexican Revolution: Memory and Archive in Taboada Tabone's Documentary Films

Abstract

Going beyond a critical review of Francesco Taboada's filmic approach to the Mexican Revolution, this article explores its political aesthetics for both reconstructing historical memory and challenging national state and media memorializing discourses of the Revolution. A nostalogic approach (in a Blochian sense) to historical memory, Taboada's search for surviving stories resonates with past and present contestations of Mexican modernities, rekindling subalternist narratives of insurgency and political malaise that resonate with current national territorial and cultural disputes with a deeply rooted utopian flavor. Taboada's films theorize a visual multiperspectivism and non-synchronicity born of a nostalgia more in synch with Ernst Bloch's cognitively dynamic sense of this term – a memorializing process whose utopian vitality is always present, always shaping the elusive present and rewriting a presumably already narrated past.

Notes

 1 This and all subsequent translations are the author's, unless otherwise noted.

 2 Taboada explained that it is, in fact, the desert of Samalayuca located between Villa Ahumada and Ciudad Juárez (Chihuahua state); it is also known as the Pancho Villa desert (personal communication, July 15, 2011).

 3 The two shorts in question, ¡Vámonos a la Revolución! (Let's Join the Revolution!, 2008) and El Mensajero (The Messenger, 2010) are 16 mm fictional accounts based on the memories of some of the old Zapatistas interviewed, more specifically Alberto López Becerra and the messenger Feliciano Mejía. Although López Becerra is from the north and was interviewed in Nuevo León, his story was adapted to the Zapatista context (Taboada, personal communication 8 Aug. 2011). Subsequent to this, all films will be referenced by their acronyms, LUZ, PV, 13P, VR, EM, RA, and LHSA.

 4 For Taboada Tabone's own descriptions, see http://www.francescotaboada.com/. As another web-site explains, in Los últimos Zapatistas “These men and women are chapters of unjust history, abandoned wisdom, banners for Mexico's underprivileged …. they are the Forgotten Heroes” (http://www.indieplaya.com/VideoDetails.do?navLoc = 0%2C4%2C1&vid = 58&linkType = Browse&resultIdx = 14#). The focus on a “forgotten” history is dominant and interpreted more or less literally. A review which notes in brief Taboada Tabone's technical manipulations, Ronnie Scheibb's, echoes similar emphases (see http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117921776?refcatid = 31), among others.

 5 There is an amalgam of published reports regarding the commission's various mutations, inconsistencies, and scandals in the national and international press.

 6 Titled Bi-Centenario, these collectible texts began appearing in April 2009 and ran throughout 2010, until the end of the celebrations. The last volume, “Adios al bicentenario” (Good Bye to the Bicentenary), appeared in Nov. 2010, making it clear that in this project Proceso sought in large part to dissect how the state would respond to the celebrations and to offer, as well, an alternative perspective (Alvarado Álvarez).

 7 As such, Taboada Tabone's films converse closely with revisionist works like Thomas Benjamin's Mexico's Great Revolution as Memory, Myth, and History (2000) and Ilene V. O'Malley's The Myth of Revolution: Hero Cults and the Institutionalization of the Mexican State, 1920 –1940 (1986), more nuanced readings of the ways in which mythologies of the Mexican Revolution evolved within, and integrated, popular and institutional memories.

 8 “México is a country” he says, “where the essence of popular feeling (sentir popular) has created different versions of history which differ from place to place, from language to language, and which many times counter written, official or academic, versions of the country's history” (2009: 160–161).

 9 For definitions of “surplus” as “inexhaustible latency” in Principle of Hope, see pp. 150, 156–159, 164; for ideas in Bloch of the difference between Plato's notion of anamnesis and the notion of anticipatory consciousness as an act of cognitive production, see pp. 8, 140–142, 147.

10 This is Chanan's only mention of Taboada and, logically, LUZ the only film he references.

11 The Zapatista soldier in question was Manuel Carranza Corona, whose death and subsequent burial in 1999 were captured in the film.

12 One story Taboada repeats often relates how one of the Zapatista elders in Tepoztlán, Morelos (Felipe Ramos Vargas) spoke of remembering that his “grandparents' revolutionary zeal started the revolution”. When probed further about who the grandparents were he clarified that he was referring to Cuauhtémoc. As Taboada puts it, this belief in a colonial indigenous resistance figure whose presence is evoked much nearer to the present is exemplary of the way imaginaries of liberation are built among popular Mexican communities (personal interview).

13 http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/nacion/185923.html.

14 Francesco Taboada, personal communication, July 15, 2011. As Taboada explained it, Photoshop was used to create scratches and other changes to make the images appear old.

15 Taboada, personal interview. The alluded scheme, though visible, is by no means consistent, as various recollections combine at times divergent shot choices.

16 Kind of like a Twilight Zone effect, this could be super 8 film taken from a fast-moving car (PV is, among other things, somewhat of a road documentary).

17 In LUZ Taboada allowed uncut testimonies to structure the historical narrative; some of this occurs as well in PV (Taboada, personal communication 8 Aug. 2011).

18 The irony is enriched by the fact, not stated in the film, that the mountains in the background are Hollywood's, not Mexico's; though the film takes a position in this respect citing California and between parentheses “(formerly Mexico)” in the credits (PV, Taboada, personal interview).

19 An interview of Taboada conducted by Hugo Chávez in his radio and TV show “Aló Presidente” appears included in the DVD menu of LUZ.