The Mexican Revolution in Documentary Cinema of the Silent Era (1910-1917)

Abstract

This paper analyses documentaries from the silent era of cinema during the Mexican Revolution, specifically those made during the heat of the armed conflict between 1910 and 1917. The objective is to reflect on the way in which filmic images contributed to forging the myth of the Revolution as Mexicanity and, based on this mythification, to problematize the temporality of the images and their social and political evolution. It is argued that documentaries from the revolutionary period contributed significantly (along with other cultural practices: painting, literature, theatre) to the structuring of a social imaginary that conceived the armed struggle as a sign of identity. Analysis of the documentaries shot during the revolutionary process will show how these filmic images made a historicity of the Revolution legible and, at the same time, inscribed a new cultural matrix that instituted, for example, the rebellious peasantry as a discourse on which to build this new Mexicanity. Thus, the Revolution as Mexicanity was established as a new socio-political paradigm on which was cemented the populist nationalism that would be shaped as a cultural ethos within Mexican society throughout the twentieth century.