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ABSTRACT: This article contextualizes the Mexican revolutionary and postrevolutionary historical compilation film that emerged during and after the 1910-17 conflict in relation to similar contemporary practices. I show how nonfilmic materials, specifically a card catalogue/script in actuality film pioneer Salvador Toscano's archive, provide vital information for interpreting how he and others used the form to create cinematic monuments to the ongoing historical process of nation building. As a key component of Mexican cinema culture, the compilation film elevated the idea of the Mexican Revolution to the status of unquestionable historical fact, thus fulfilling a key ideological task of postrevolutionary historical discourse.
KEYWORDS: Mexican cinema, compilation film, documentary film, Salvador Toscano, Mexican Revolution
In an essay first published in 1952, US film critic and historian Richard Griffith lamented the near absence to date of any documentary filmmaking tradition in Latin America. For Griffith, save isolated cases such as the Mexican picture Redes (The Wave, 1934), scripted and photographed by Paul Strand, the continent mostly lacked "a will to use the film for public enlightenment,"1 a state of affairs that Griffith attributed to a general lack of film scholarship, government sponsorship, film equipment, and technical skill on the part of the subcontinent's filmmakers. The historian continued:
Aside from a few health and instructional films, the Mexican Government appears to have abandoned the vein it so fruitfully unearthed with this early film [Redes]. Similarly, while the Mexican fiction film industry has experienced a great revival . . . , there is no sign of interest among its craftsmen in the documentary form, much less in the public purposes to which it could be put. The nearest the Mexicans seem to have come to filming reality is the arty The Pearl from Steinbeck's novel (1947), made with one eye cocked on the US theatrical market.2
Apparently written on the basis of the smattering of Latin American cinema then available to Anglophone filmgoers, it is little surprise that Griffith's paltry contribution on documentary film in the region occupies just over a page, in contrast to the densely documented sections on Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Yet as later historical studies have shown, by the time this essay was published as an appendage to the new edition...