an international and
interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 2, March 2005, ISSN 1552-5112
Pancho Villa: Post-Colonial Colonialism, or the Return of the
Americano
The power of understanding consists in this capacity
to reduce the organic whole of experience to an appendix to the
"dead" symbolic classification.
Slavoj Žižek
The cover copy of the
2003, HBO release And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself [ASPVH] sums up how the producers
wanted their film to be viewed: an
"incredible true story of how Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa allowed a
Hollywood crew to film him in battle, altering the course of film and military
history in the process" (DVD cover).
A similar statement appears at the start of the film itself: "The improbability of the events
depicted in this film is the surest indication that they actually did
occur." Incredible and improbable,
but true? Exactly, but in what sense
are we to understand the claim? The
incredible/improbable because we are supposed to be surprised by Pancho Villa's
willingness to let a film crew cover his campaign? Yet by 1914, despite screenwriter Gelbart's claims to the
contrary (DVD commentary), moving picture camera crews had covered the major
military actions from the Spanish American to the Balkans War (de Los Reyes,
Con Villa 36). As for Mexico, it had
served as a movie set for native filmmakers from shortly after the Lumière
brothers introduced their process in 1895, and the Revolution itself had been
turned into newsreels by camera teams from both sides of the border from the
start (de los Reyes, El cine). De los
Reyes lists several U.S. films that had been made on the Revolution before
Thayer arrived in 1914 (Con Villa 38).
No, if our credulity is challenged it must be more by the supposed
details of Villa's contract that obliged him, in exchange for considerable
compensation, to carry out his attacks in the best light or angles for the
cameras. The true claim,
however, goes beyond the mere contractual arrangements, because as Gelbart
boasts in his commentary the filmmakers went to admirable lengths to consult
experts in the field, even to the extent of hiring Friedrich Katz, the leading
Villa historian, and Margarita de Orellana, author of La mirada circular: el cine norteamericano de
la revolución Mexicana 1911-1917 as well as a book on
Villa and Zapata. However, Gelbart's
reference to Katz represents a stumbling block to any analysis of the film
based on its fidelity to truth, because Katz unequivocally denies a cornerstone
of that argument, those details of the contract so ingenuously mentioned above: "The actual contract in fact contained
no such clauses. There was absolutely
no mention of reenactment of battle scenes or of Villa providing good
lighting" (Katz, Life and Times, 325). With this central column of the film's truth claim debunked by
its chief consultant, we must proceed to follow another path of analysis. This is not to deny that many of the
incidental facts are verifiable, because many surely are. More pertinent to understanding ASPVH,
however, is that for all the research the filmmakers boast of, the film
revolves less around historical events central to the Revolution or the
specific significance of Villa's military success, than the peripeteia of the
U.S. filmmakers' project as ASPVH 's plot line, making the film within
the film its central conceit that focuses viewers' attention.
From the start, however, the makers of ASPVH place the movie
simultaneously within and against the tradition of U.S. films on Villa. The movie within the movie conceit allows
the claim that Villa appears as himself, so we are led to believe that somehow
we are seeing a more accurate Villa than before. The film even presents the idea of the interior film to have
originated from Villa, so the U.S. project is a fulfillment of Villa's desire
to become the object of the new media; less obvious is that the framing scene
starts with a letter from Mexico in 1923 that sets off the memory of the 1914
film project; in the end the action returns to the 1923 letter to hear it
narrate Villa's death and pose the question that sets up the apotheosis of ASPVH
's true protagonist, Frank Thayer, the Mutual Film Company representative who
traveled to Mexico to carry out two film projects with Villa. In effect, the 1914 action of the film,
that occupies all but a few minutes at the start and end, appear as an extended
flashback in Thayer's mind. But we are
getting ahead of ourselves.
The opening scenes of the 1914 action emphasize that Villa wants film
coverage, yet his purpose is not only financial. Later in the action, when he no longer needs the money from the
movie, as he clearly states, Villa consents to a second project in order to
communicate his message to the public.
The subaltern wants to speak to correct the negative impression of him
and the revolutionary cause that has been created by his enemies—the Hearst
newspaper syndicate in particular. That
the 1914 film addresses Villa's desire to speak, if not in his own voice—film
was still silent—at least in his own image, can be read as the intention of the
filmmakers, both in 1914 and in 2003, to let him realize that desire to some
extent.
This positioning maneuver, however, is more complicated than it might
seem at first glance, and resembles that of postcolonial criticism. The proposal to reconsider a well-worked
topic in a new way that promises a more direct, more honest treatment with it
implies a critical analysis of—if not a blatant attack on—the practitioner's
own field, a mea culpa for one's politically incorrect professional ancestors,
a finger in the face of current colleagues who still follow their lead, and a
simultaneous declaration of difference between them and the post-colonialist
based on revisionist historical accuracy and often ringing somberly
self-righteous. Here, the ASPVH
filmmakers propose a new, more direct, less mediated encounter with Villa,
implicitly promising to avoid the supposed Hollywood misrepresentations. To anticipate what such a revisionist
project would involve, we should remember that the central
structuring scheme of Hollywood's Latin American colonizing discourse is known
as the Americano in the Great House, (Pettit, Woll, Bruce-Novoa). To undo such
an established colonization pattern, one must attack this paradigm—details of
which we will see below—and perhaps the film could be seen to make a
preliminary attempt by having Villa initiate the venture with his offer to
allow himself to be filmed, thus allowing the filmmakers to claim that they
were simply responding to an expressed desire on the part of Villa, a desire
that would cover both the 1914 and the 2003 projects.
Hence,
the plot is staged as the conflict between the young, idealistic reformer,
Thayer, who finds himself in the position of responding to Villa's
invitation. Once involved and convinced
of Villa's merits, Frank Thayer becomes determined to portray a true image of
the oppressed victims of centuries-long colonization, and the established
discourse of (mis)representation. In
the central narrative line, we follow the sincere efforts of the surrogate
post-colonialist Thayer to present the real Villa even when it requires him, at
the risk of his career, to challenge his boss and uncle, the CEO of Mutual
Films, and the rules of commercial film of his time. Yet, undermining his efforts are film’s inexorable laws, as Derrida
would say, always already in place:
everything sacrificed to the script during shooting—including the
truth—and everything including the script sacrificed to the logic of the final
cut. Thus we see both the attempt to
tell the real story—that supposedly would let Villa himself speak directly as
himself—and the repressive mechanisms that distort the message for
commercial reasons. At a more profound
level, the film encounters the dilemma of all representation: noumena can pass into human discourse only
as reconstructed phenomena according to predetermined patterns. And here we find the loose thread to begin
our deconstruction: despite good
intentions—and their consultants' expertise—the filmmakers seem fixated a
priori on Villa as noumena, unintelligible, savage force, not simply beyond
social acceptability but more significantly beyond representability in
logical discourse, and since Villa personifies the Revolution, it comes off
equally inscrutable. The problem is
that the real Villa is considered too Real in Lacan's sense of the term as that
which remains beyond the discursive order of the symbolic, yet necessary for
its existence. Hence fidelity to
accurate minutia only serves to heighten the gap between what can be captured
through representational discourse and the attempts to convey Villa's
impossibility of being so captured by that discourse except as a baffling
amalgam of contradictions.
To faithfully portray the true Villa to be rescued, the film emphasizes
his dynamic mix of a rational and irrational behavior—a true monster, human yet
not entirely. In one scene his animal
sense awakens him moments before an attack.
Villa functions like a Lacanian trait unaire, an active synapse
between the symbolic and its Real foundation that allows observers to glimpse
the process that has created the incomplete being that confronts us; yet the
trace elements of the Real that are momentarily revealed retain the vagueness
of the amorphous opposite of discourse in that discourse can never fully
encompass them within itself. In other
words, to be true to the Villa they consider true, the filmmakers decide he
must be represented as that which escapes representation.
At the level of the film within the film this functions well.
Villa must be convinced of the need to bring his life under narrative
control even if this means having to pretend to be what he never has been or
ever will be, President of Mexico. Only
in this manner will he be able to film his sincere message about Mexico: "I was forced to sacrifice many lives
in my quest for justice, but in the end I have saved the life of my beloved
Mexico." But when Villa cold-bloodedly
sacrifices an innocent woman by shooting her in the head at point-blank range,
his ends-justifies-the means message becomes too real for his U.S. admirers,
resulting in Thayer's disillusionment and break with him. The question posed by
this scene is what can be done with the Real noumena that always exceeds
symbolization, yet is necessary to its existence in reality. Lacan's answer is that it gets censured back
to silence outside of discourse or reduced to discourse's acceptable
limits. Both operations take place
before our eyes in ASPVH. In the
final version of the film-inside-the-film as premiered in New York in 1914,
Villa the murderer must be hidden from the audience if Villa the hero is to be
seen and heard. The image of the slain
woman, however, is visually too effective to be discarded completely. So Villa is cropped out, while the printed,
explanatory text attributes the savagery to the film's antagonist, the Federal
Government against which Villa fights.
Yet the 2003 audience is privy to the original and the edited version,
just as they have seen multiple scenes of Villa in constant oscillation between
unpredictable, savage menace and good- hearted, determined leader; between
unfettered instinct and shrewd and pragmatic reasoning. This bipolar structure could allow us to
affirm that the apparent plot crisis produced by this edited scene is actually
just the culmination of the oscillation between opposing versions of Villa that
have been present since he first comes on the scene in the film. In this way, the plot is not really about
Villa and his revolution, but about Villa and the revolution as noumena or the
Real, Mutual Film's struggle to convert it into phenomena, and what is lost or
gained in the process, a kind of metafilm on the process of art itself.
To convey
the bipolar, Real Villa, the filmmakers consciously or unconsciously reprised
in ASPVH many elements and images from previous movies about him
and the Revolution, like Viva Villa (34), The Treasure of
Pancho Villa (55), Villa Rides (68), Pancho
Villa (72), becoming an anthology of Hollywood Villana. Doing so undermines its revisionist
purpose. Scenes show us Villa as
irresistible physical force in hand-to- hand fighting but the soft touch for a
pathetic plea; the marksman Villa; the deadly dark clown or calculating
practical joker; the naïvely sincere religious Villa and the scourge of
Catholicism; the children's friend and child sacrificer; the vindicator of the
people and their implicit executioner; the Villa enemy of the rich, yet
respectful of their judgments on cultural values; the protector of abused women
and macho sexual predator.
One can hardly blame the filmmakers for drawing on this catalogue. It represents a history of predecessors who
did their homework to some degree and came to the same conclusion about Villa
as a monstrous force of nature.
Ironically, screenwriter Gelbart's claim that almost everything included
in the film was supported by research, when combined with the use of scenes
that echo previous films, lends those earlier, often criticized versions a
modicum of credence. Yet, by placing an
entirely fictional Sophie's choice scene—the race between brothers that
ultimately decided which will die—at a key moment in the progress towards
Villa's paradox crisis, Gelbart tacitly admits that reality is insufficient to
create the generative core of Villa's brutal self-revelation that produces the
crisis of purpose in Thayer and his break with Villa (DVD commentary). The race sets off a series of deaths among
his followers culminating in the murdered woman mentioned above. Ultimately, the justification for including
this totally fictional scene is no better nor worse than the justification for
inventing the infamous sado-masochism scene in the vilified 1933 Viva Villa: script logic. In each case the scene reveals the dark depths of Villa's
hamartia and sets up the eventual break between him and key supporters. But while Banderas' scene functions in
escalating series of splits between Villa and the people that functions within
the Thayer line of the plot—it explains why Thayer must be called back to
Mexico in 1923 to reconcile himself with Villa's memory—Beery's scene sets up
the denouement in Viva Villa's last scene when Villa is killed, giving
the assassin a motive for shooting Villa who violated his sister and caused her
death. Since Villa's life forms the
plot of Viva Villa, this ending is logical and the motivational
background is necessary, while in ASPVH his assassination can be
explained vaguely by a rumored conspiracy theory voiced off-screen by a minor
character because Villa's life is tangential to Thayer's in the central
plot. Perhaps more important, in its
filmic, visual interest the Viva Villa erotic whipping scene is far
superior to the appeal to sympathy through melodramatic pathos of the ASPVH
race of brothers. And as indicators of
the different orientation that distinguishes the two films, in Viva Villa
the scene conveys Villa's character through direct action while in ASPVH
characterization is a matter of action carried out by other characters that
reflects on Villa. If we compare
filmmaking to writing, Viva Villa is like writing in active voice, while
ASPVH would be written in passive voice.
In effect, the comparison of ASPVH with the
much-reviled Viva Villa cannot be avoided, since the latter is considered
the original template for the stereotype that defined the Hollywood Pancho
Villa cannon. Surprisingly, it leads to
the unexpected conclusion that the older version comes out fairly well. The most repeated attack on Viva Villa
focuses on the casting of Wallace Beery, a foreigner in the main role. Yet Banderas is also a foreigner and
significantly from the one other nation that represents for Mexicans a major
colonizer, Spain. Critics delight in
recalling Beery's butchering of Spanish, but Banderas' struggle to sound
Mexican is often laughable or irritating, especially when attempting clichéd
Mexican profanities. Some of his
facial distortions could be read as parodic tributes to Beery's unique repertoire
of grimaces and hand-to-face gestures.
And the irony of the Spanish Banderas, pretending to be a Mexican
mestizo, castigating the mestizo actor Pedro Armendariz Jr. pretending to be a
Creole Spanish hacendado, is too rich with irony and deconstructive clues to a
globalized film industry to be handled here.
In both cases the studio sought the actor who would attract the largest
audience, a perfectly legitimate business decision. However, the decisions implicitly judge that no Mexican actor has
reached that level. Both decisions were
made in the context of complaints against the industry for using non-Mexicans
to portray them—even more serious ones in the 1934 case in that Mexico a decade
earlier had threatened to ban entire studios for one offense. The ASPVH case represents, perhaps, a
more flagrant misstep in that the filmmakers implicitly and explicitly voiced
sensitivity to a politically correct portrayal of the subject matter and the
sensitivities of the U.S. Latino audience.
Perhaps their error was thinking in terms of a generic Hispanic public
instead of a specifically Mexican one; but then it wouldn't be the first time
Hollywood has made that miscalculation.
Another point of contention is that Beery's portrayal of Villa barely
rose above the level of simple clown, and admittedly, no amount of good will
can erase the moronic lapses in Beery's portrayal. But a comparison of character development in the two films again
favors the earlier version. ASPVH
invests almost no time in Villa's personal background and little in
historical background. Banderas rides
onto the screen in mid battle, throws some dynamite, then gets distracted by
the arrival of the Mutual crew and abandons the battle like an easily
distracted child yelling, "The movies, the movies have come to Pancho
Villa." The little
contextualization comes from a commentary in the voice of the journalist John
Reed. At a later point, after stripping
a hacendado of his property, Banderas states that his father could have entered
the splendid hacienda only to beg for food.
Finally, in a swimming scene we see Banderas' whip-scarred back. Viva Villa, on the other hand,
creates an entire opening episode to show us Villa's father whipped to death
for daring to ask a hacendado for respect while pleading to keep his land, and
then the boy Pancho kills the majordomo who carried out the punishment. By the time Beery rides into battle to play
his own version of childlike games, we know who he is and why he is
fighting—more than know it, we have seen the reasons in visual
terms. In ASPVH we hear
explanations, mostly from the above-mentioned John Reed character, but see
little in cinematic terms. What both
films do offer is a set of images to portray a Villa capable of cruel and
deadly, childlike jokes, but Beery's have a sinister edge Banderas' never
achieve, in part because the script limits his opportunities to try. Both films feature Villa's encounter with
executed corpses of his followers. Banderas orders two hanged bodies cut down
and buried out of respect; Beery has some ten corpses posed, seated as a jury
to hear the case of their killers, dialogues with them, asks them for their
opinion, and only then takes revenge on their killers. When Banderas commits his worst crime in
killing the woman, the best explanation we get, again from Reed, is that
national saviors sometimes tire of their burden. Appropriately, Banderas' Villa commits this crime in a fit of
passion, carried out quickly without thought.
Beery's is motivated by an earlier scene to give it narrative
logic. He carries it out slowly,
considering the best way to make the pain extreme, prolonged, and individually
tailored to his enemy's character, and then calmly enjoys his breakfast while
the condemned man screams in the background.
The most telling difference within similarity lies in the role of U.S.
media in Villa's representation. Both
the reporter in Viva Villa and Frank Thayer who accompanies
Banderas play central roles in representing Villa to the U.S. public, both
convince him to fight a battle from a different direction to suit the their
needs, and both reenter Villa's story at the hour of his death with which the
films end. In Viva Villa, the
reporter is present when Villa is shot.
In response to Villa's request that he write about his death to make it
more impressive, the reporter invents his last words, that include an apology
for anything he did wrong. Beery dies
questioning aloud what he did wrong.
His question drifts over the film in response to the fictional
representation. In ASPVH,
Banderas complains about the fictionalization that falsifies his life, but
pragmatically accepts Thayer's rationale and plays it according to the
script. In the last scene, after Villa
has been killed, Thayer is seen showing his film to Mexicans so they can
remember Villa. The white-washed
Villa—quite literally painted white for a scene as President and thus more
reminiscent of the former dictator Porfirio Diaz than himself—is the last image
shown on the screen and the Mexican people give a standing applause to this white-faced
Banderas pretending to be the president he never was. The central focus of the scene, however, switches at that moment
back to Thayer cranking the projector, just before a series of full color
images reprised from Villa's happier days in the joyous Revolution fill our
screen. But they appear only after the
camera has focused closely on Thayer's face, implying that the glimpse of the
Real Villa are contained in Thayer's memory, like traces of left-over images
that escaped the documentation process of symbolization, yet remain in the
realm of the repressed Real.
The ultimate flaw in ASPVH,
however, is in that despite its revisionist intentions, it faithfully follows
the Great House, Americano paradigm.
This paradigmatic plot for Hollywood films set in Latin America features
a maturation experience of a Usonian youth who upon being forced to travel to
Latin America becomes a man by proving himself in a liminal rite of passage
during a descent into an inferno of semi-primitive chaos that is resolved and
organized by his effort. It often
involves a sexual conquest, the learning of the foreign culture, and the
successful overcoming of personal challenges verging on life and death crises.
The opening episode, instead of personal background on Villa, provides
it for the film project, and within this foundational act, Frank Thayer
unmistakably emerges as its protagonist.
Plot focus slips back and forth between clusters of Mutual Film's CEOs
(Harry Aitken, D.W. Griffith and Thayer) and a starlet. The camera follows the Thayer character from
one nucleus to the other, investing him with visual and narrative gravity. In this opening scene Thayer plays a lackey,
knowledgeable but ineffectual, at the beck and call of his superiors, a sort of
super Best Boy at the service of his uncle, Harry Aitken, the head of Mutual
Films, and D.W. Griffith, the famous director.
In the presence of the starlet he can barely speak, like an
inexperienced adolescent. He is sent to
Mexico in Griffith's stead only because he is Aitken's nephew. When Thayer, now the veteran of months of
running a film crew amid the dangers of warfare and dealing with the
unpredictable Villa, and the starlet meet again in Mexico, the young woman
comments on how he has changed. Soon
they bed each other in a scene in which, as she points out, he is impressively
ready to do a second take almost immediately.
A running motif in the film is Villa's comment on Thayer's testicular
development that ultimately allows him to stand up to Villa himself, twice, and
escape with his life. He has mastered
the challenges of both male and female objects of desire and come off well,
admired for his prowess and potency:
quite literally he can stand up for himself when the situation demands
it of him. His crowing last act of
personal ascendance, however, is selling his life-project—his Villa film—to the
Mexican people themselves as the authentic memory of their assassinated
revolutionary hero.
As in a typical Hollywood Americano film—in which even good-intentioned,
physically capable native heroes lack the organizational intellect to
coordinate large-scale movement and continue them into successful social
reformation—the country and its revolution can only be saved through the
Americano's intervention in the form of organizing the chaotic action of the
native revolutionary. Without Thayer,
the revolution might waste its effort in pointless violence and
destruction. The Villa campaign
reflects this paradigmatic plot line.
As portrayed in ASPVH, the Revolution has no beginning or
end and seems to lead into a repeating loop—as the character of the Jewish
mercenary says near the end, from the vantage of 1923: "Some revolution! The new fuckers are the same as the old
fuckers. The big guys up here still
control everything that's going on down there." The last act of Villa's revolution that we witness, the one that
forces Thayer to break with Villa, is a brutal slaying of an innocent woman
that follows shortly upon the death of two other members of his army who have
been invested with positive value and audience empathy. In other words, when the film closes out
Villa's participation in the 1914 project, he is moving towards
self-destruction through attrition of his followers, a process that taken to
its logical conclusion would leave him alone and back at a beginning we never
saw. But then ASPVH is Villa's
but actually Thayer's story. His
character undergoes a process of development, change, and eventual definition
in kunstlerroman fashion, becoming a successful artist on, we are led to
believe, the basis of the experience we have seen him live in the film. Villa, on the other hand, becomes more
exposed, accumulates scenes, is allowed to confront enemies from local to international
ones, is even shown confronting the workings of the media, but is still the
contradictory character—admired leader cum unpredictable menace—that he was at
the start. When the pressure of battle
squeezes the poles of his bipolarity into unbearable proximity, he explodes in
one of those Lacanian eruptions of the Real that produce an indelible stain on
the ordered surface of representation, a blotch impossible to reduce to
discourse except as the inexplicable and hence unacceptable identity of its
irreducible self: Pancho Villa as
unanswerable question/exclamation mark in the sea of signification (Žižek
15).
At
the end of the 1914 plot line, during the premier of the The Life of General
Villa, Thayer is left to ponder Villa's Real actions, asking
himself, "Why did he kill her? . . . . So coldly, so brutally. It's as if he killed the whole
revolution." Perhaps he will never
find the answer, but at least he must come to a resolution. As John Reed tells him, "You'll find a
way to live with yourself; you'll find a way to live with Pancho, too." The road to understanding, as Žižek says,
"consists in this capacity to reduce the organic whole of experience to an
appendix to the "dead" symbolic classification" (51), but the
proof of one's conclusion would be in the communal acceptance of the "truth"
of that reduction. Thayer's
dilemma is that he finds no consolation in the acceptance of his reduction of
Villa by the U.S. public. He needs
more, and his chance comes nine years later in the letter from Mexico that sets
off the entire memory of the 1914 adventure. With Villa's death, a gap opens in the historical memory,
which the 1923 letter from Mexico, that forms the frame the central action,
laments: "How will the sons of
Mexico remember our Pancho Villa?"
The question sets up the actual denouement, allowing Thayer to fill the
gap with his film as surrogate desired object and himself as its source—the
shot of Thayer reading the letter in his New York office fades into the next of
Thayer cranking the projector in, we assume, Parral, Mexico. He is showing his film to answer the
question of how the Mexican people will remember Villa. Thayer offers them a vision of an ideal
figure to lead them towards their future well-being. As the artist capable of translating the irreducible Real into
crowd-pleasing, symbolic representation capable of moving upper-class
sophisticates in New York or the common people in Mexico, Frank Thayer proves
himself the hero of ASPVH. A
true Americano who saves the great house of the Mexican nation by providing a
key building block in its collective memory.
We still, however, have not addressed the question of the attempt to
contextualize the film in the requests from Latin America to come to its
rescue—one missive for each temporal plot line, 1914 and 1923. For argument sake, above I momentarily gave
it the benefit of the doubt as a sincere effort to set up the post-colonial
intervention as a response to a need expressed by the colonized desirous of
aid. Yet, once we have positioned ASPVH
within Hollywood's Latin American paradigm, the invitation reveals itself as
one of its oldest features. Villa's call for help from a U.S. film and the
letter to Thayer implicitly requesting help to save Pancho Villa from oblivion
are anticipated in a letter from the president of the mythical Latin American
country of Paragonia requesting a mining engineer to save their failing economy
in the archetype of the Americano subgenre into which most Pancho Villa films
fall: the D.W. Griffith supervised,
Douglas Fairbank's 1916 hit, The Americano, filmed for Aitken's new
Triangle Film Corporation, founded in 1915 when he and Griffith broke with
Mutual over the making of The Birth of a Nation. Through an intricate pattern of
associations, The Americano and its elements can be considered part and
parcel of the foundational acts of U.S. film industry. In its reprising of the
letter-of-invitation-for-a-U.S.-expert motif, ASPVH, far from breaking
with the cannon of the colonizing tradition, reaffirms its persistence.
Aurelio de los Reyes wrote that Mutual Film's The Life of General
Villa, "despite its good intentions . . . only offered an acceptable
and pleasing view of the Caudillo. The
plot made no effort to comprehend Villismo as a social movement, what generated
it, what it sought, etc."(61). Unfortunately, his remarks can be extended
to subsequent remakes over the last ninety years, including ASPVH. And in the latter case, this
superficiality can hardly be attributed to ignorance, but does indicate that
the presence of the top authorities, Katz and Orellana, does not guarantee that
they will be fully utilized. Here they
represent a wasted opportunity at any serious historical revision.
ASPVH does teach an important lesson,
however, one drawn from the cover copy and the film themselves: truth, even of the post-colonialist ilk, can
be both improbable and incredible.
Works Cited
The Americano. John Ericson and
Anita Loos, screenplay; John Emerson, director;
D.W.Griffith,
supervisor. Tri-Stone Pictures, 1916.
And Starring Pancho Villa
as Himself. Larry Gelbart, screenplay;
Bruce Beresford,
director. Home Box
Office, 2004.
Bruce-Novoa. "From Paragonia to Parador: Hollywood's Strategy
for Saving Latin
America," Gestos, 6, 11 (Abril 1991); 175‑85.
_________. "The Hollywood Americano in Mexico," Mexico and the United States:
Intercultural Relations in
the Humanities. San Antonio: S.A.C., 1984; 18‑39.
de los Reyes, Aurelio. Con Villa en México, Testimonios de
Camarógrafos Norte
Americanos en la
Revolución 1911-1916. Mexico
City: Universidad Nacional
Autónoma
de México, 1985.
_________. El Cine y Sociedad en México, 1896-1930. Mexico
City: Cinoteca
Nacional, 1981.
Gelbart, Larry.
"Commentary on And
Starring Pancho Villa as Himself," DVD edition,
ob.cit.
Katz, Friedrich. The Life and Times of Pancho Villa.
Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1998.
_________. The
secret war in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican
Revolution.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Orellana, Margarita de.
La mirada circular: el cine norteamericano de la revolución
Mexicana 1911-1917. México, D.F.: Joaquín
Mortiz, 1991.
_________. Villa y
Zapata: la Revolución Mexicana. Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para
la
Ejecución de Programas del
Quinto Centenario: Anaya, 1988.
Pettit. Arthur G. Images
of the Mexican American in fiction and film. College Station:
Texas
A & M U. Press, 1980
Viva Villa.
Ben Hecht, screenplay; Jack Conway, director; David O Selznick, producer.
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an international and
interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 2, March 2005, ISSN 1552-5112