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.
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.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1934.
Woll, Allen
L. The Latin Image in American film. Los
Angeles: UCLA, 1977.
Žižek, Slavoj. Enjoy
Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York:
Routledge, 2001 (51)
an international
and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 2, March 2005, ISSN 1552-5112