Local views, distant scenes: Registering affect in surviving Mexican actuality films of the 1920s

Film History: An International Journal

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 66-87

  Fullerton, John ^a   King, Elaine ^b  

^a STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY   (Sweden)

^b NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149529916     PISSN: 08922160     EISSN: 15533905     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2979/FIL.2005.17.1.66     Document Type: Review

References (27)

1. John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers for Henry Bill, 1848 [1843]), II, Plate IV. According to Mario Humberto Magaña Arara, a Maya guide, this structure no longer exists, conversation with the authors, Oxkutzcab, 28 May 2004.
2. Charles Flandrau, Viva Mexico! A Traveller's Account of Life in Mexico (London: Eland, 1982 [1908]), 30.
3. Tom Gunning, 'Before Documentary: Early nonfiction film and the "view" aesthetic', in Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk (eds.), Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997), 9-24.
4. The title of the album may be translated as, 'Album of the Mexican Railway: A collection of views painted from nature by Casimiro Castro'. All translations from Spanish are by John Fullerton.
5. Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (London: Frank Cass, 1927), 4.
6. Jacques Aumont, 'The Variable Eye, or the Mobilization of the Gaze', trans. Charles O'Brien and Sally Shafto, in Dudley Andrew (ed.), The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 232.
7. James Lastra, 'From the Captured Moment to the Cinematic Image: A Transformation in Pictorial Order', in Dudley Andrew (ed.), The Image in Dispute, 274.
8. See Gerry Turvey, 'Panoramas, parades and the picturesque: the aesthetics of British actuality films, 1895-1901', Film History 16.1 (2004): 9-27.
9. The essay develops a number of points first advanced by Stephen Bottomore in 'Shots in the dark: the real origins of film editing', Sight and Sound 57.3 (Summer 1988): 200-204.
10. A number of travelling shots taken from a moving train documenting Francisco Madera's progression towards Mexico City can be seen in a compilation film, Memorias de un Mexicano (Fundación Carmen Toscano/Archivo Histórico Cinematogáfico/Archivo Toscano Méxicano, Javier Sierra, 1967) compiled from footage shot by Salvador Toscano in 1911. According to the voice-over narration, shots from Durango, Torreón, Saltillo, San Miguel de Allende, Zacatecas, Lagos, León, Silao, Irapuato, Salamanca and Tula are included, many of which are travelling shots taken from the front, rear or side of the train. Two non-consecutive shots taken from a train as it negotiates a sharp curve near Zacatecas are similar in their dynamic effect to the shot taken from the freight train in For Mexico. We have yet to acquire frame enlargements of this footage.
11. Christian Metz, 'The Imaginary Signifier', in Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, Alfred Guzzetti (London: Macmilian Press, 1982), 3-87, 54.
12. See David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 182.
13. Martin Loiperdinger, 'Lumière's Arrival of the Train: Cinema's Founding Myth', The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 4.1 (Spring 2004): 89-118.
14. See Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1993)
15. and Anne Friedberg, 'Trottoir roulant: The Cinema and New Mobilities of Spectatorship', in John Fullerton and Jan Olsson (eds.), Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digital (Rome: John Libbey Publishing - CIC, 2004), 263-276.
16. See Aurelio de los Reyes, op. cit., II, 47
17. and Alejandrina Escudero, 'En la región de las nubes', Aiquimia 18 (May-August 2003): 43-45, 44.
18. Kazimir Malevich, an artist associated with the Bauhaus in the 1920s, was also very interested in aerial photography, see aerial photographs reproduced in Kazimir Malevich, Die gegenstandslose welt (Munich: Bauhausbuch 11, 1927).
19. Published in Mexico City by Decaen, the engraving was coloured by Fordo Ricardo Excamilia. A highly cropped, monochrome reproduction of the engraving can be found in Guillermo Tovar de Teresa, The City of Palaces: Chronicle of a Lost Heritage, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Fundación Cultural Televisa, 1990), I, 18. The title of the book may be translated as 'Mexico City and its Surroundings: A collection of monuments, costumes and landscapes'.
20. Flandrau, Viva Mexico!, 256.
21. See Gunning, 'Before doumentary', 16.
22. See Jennifer Lynn Peterson, 'Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film', in Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp (eds.), American Cinema's Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2004), 191-213, in particular, the concluding section, 204-208.
23. In this context, it is interesting to note that Emperor Maximilian changed the name of the Casa Borda in the grounds of the garden to Edén, see Hugo Arciniega, 'Variaciones sobre el Edén', Alquimia 18 (May-August 2003): 13-21, 15.
24. A reproduction of this photograph appears in Arciniega, 'Variaciones sobre el Edén': 20.
25. Brehme's album of photographs was also published in Germany as Mexiko. Baukunst. Landschaft. Volksleben (1925) and in the USA as Picturesque Mexico (1925).
26. The intertitle can be translated as: 'A romantic corner that attracts the lovers.'
27. See Julio Michaud and Thomas Michaud, Album Pintoresco de la República Mexicana (Picturesque Album of the Republic of Mexico), (Mexico City: Julio Michaud and Thomas Michaud, n.d. [ca. 1849-52]), reprinted in facsimile edition by Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Condumex (Mexico City, 2000), 83.