WOOD Mexican Revolution

DAVID M. J.
WO OD
The Compilation Film of the Mexican Revolution:

History as Catalogue and Monument
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 cata-
logue/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 pic-
ture 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
Film History, 29.1, pp. 30–56. Copyright © 2017 Trustees of Indiana University. doi: 10.2979/filmhistory.29.1.03
31
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 pal-
try 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 of Paul Rotha’s
groundbreaking study Documentary Film (originally published in 1935), Mexico,
along with other Latin American countries, had a considerable history of non-
fiction and historical documentary film production that had much in common
with other regional and global tendencies,3 but that had understandably fallen
beneath Griffith’s radar.4 As we will see below, the armed revolutionary conflict
that afflicted the country between 1910 and 1917 was a crucial period in the local
development of historical documentary and compilation film, during which cin-
ema joined print and graphic journalism as one of the key media through which
citizens became attuned to the country’s ongoing social and political upheavals.
The historical compilation film of the Mexican Revolution dates back to
earlier filmmaking practices in which cameramen recorded historical events
during the early years of the conflict and continued well into the postrevolu-
tionary period. My analysis situates this important tendency of early Mexican
cinema within a broader context of filmmaking practices that would flourish
in other historical and political contexts that are better known to viewers and
scholars worldwide, particularly in the postrevolutionary Soviet Union of the
1920s. Although these pictures were sometimes billed as recopilaciones (com-
pilations) or documentos (documents), the terms compilation film and docu-
mentary were not always used at the time to refer to such productions, which
were commonly labelled as vista (view) or exhibición de vistas (exhibition of
views)—continuing the early cinema terminology—or simply película (film).
Even so, as I will show, historical compilations in 1910s and 1920s Mexico can
be seen to a limited extent as forerunners and contemporaries of a genre later
conceptualized as the “global film” (Vsevolod Pudovkin) and the “compilation
film” (Jay Leyda). Leyda defines the compilation form as a moving picture whose
“work begins on the cutting table, with already existing shots” (emphasis in
original).5 For Leyda, the compilation film exceeds mere newsreel footage (and
we can extend this to the Mexican actuality films that covered recent events for
immediate consumption—common currency during the revolutionary period
in the absence of regular newsreels). Compilation is “a film of idea [. . .], not
DAVID M. J. WO OD | THE COMPIL ATION FILM OF THE ME XICAN REVOLUTION

32
content to be mere records or documents,” drawing substantially on Soviet

conceptions of ideological montage as a practice that “produces something
new, something original” (emphasis in original).6 The Mexican compilations
dealt with here likewise aspire to present ideas that exceed the original func-
tions of the actuality footage they contain, but they do so by accumulating and
narrating filmic documents rather than using principles akin to those of Soviet
montage. I will also argue that these Mexican films shared some common char-
acteristics and ideas with emerging documentary cinema traditions in other
parts of the world. Griffith described the form as a way of “filming reality” with
a view to “public enlightenment,” echoing John Grierson’s earlier foundational
definition of documentary cinema as a mode that “would photograph the living
scene and the living story” using “materials and . . . stories . . . taken from the
raw” both artistically and (in the case of the realist documentary) with a sense
of social responsibility.7 However, while such comparisons are useful and nec-
essary for understanding the compilation form in general, such productions
should also be considered in relation to the political and discursive specificities
of postrevolutionary Mexico.
It is now widely known that Mexican camera operators such as Enrique
Rosas, Salvador Toscano, and the Alva brothers were active in filming and exhib-
iting actualities from the final years of the nineteenth century. However, it was
the armed revolution of 1910 to 1917 that kickstarted the expansion and stylistic
development of what we might call the country’s protodocumentary tradition,
so much so that film historian Aurelio de los Reyes has identified the regime of
President Francisco I. Madero during the early years of the conflict (1911–13)
as the first “golden age” of Mexican cinema.8 As studies in recent decades by
scholars such as Reyes, Ángel Miquel, and Juan Felipe Leal have shown, the war
brought with it an urgent need for information and propaganda, and increased
competition among film entrepreneurs, resulting in the development of inno-
vative war film-reports of greater length and narrative complexity.9 Thus, rev-
olution-era spectators enjoyed the latest European productions (Italian divas
and historical dramas were particularly popular) alongside actualities on the
conflict’s latest developments and, as time went on, historical compilations that
incorporated and recycled those actualities to narrate and present sequences
of events over a much longer time span. Mexico’s early historical compilation
tradition, largely overlooked by scholars elsewhere (despite Leyda’s passing
mention in his pioneering study of the form10), has been identified by some as
being a potential forerunner of the better-known compilations produced during
and after World War One and in the Soviet Union during the following decade.11
Whether or not these Mexican historical compilations would have
met Griffith’s or Rotha’s normative and historically contingent criteria of
FIL M HISTORY | VOLUME 29.1

33
documentary film for (respectively) “public enlightenment” or for the “devel-

opment of the citizen” is debatable,12 since these Mexican films conform to a
political logic quite different from those of the British, American, or Soviet doc-
umentary on which they wrote. Rather than attempting to establish an incipient
tradition of documentary film in 1910s Mexico according to criteria set forth by
Grierson, Rotha, or Griffith, this article considers Mexican documentary output
of these years on its own terms. That is, it seeks to account for the ways in which
this cinema sought less to engage its public in a critical appraisal of the public
sphere, than to raise the idea of the Mexican Revolution to the status of unques-
tionable historical fact, thus fulfilling a key ideological task of postrevolutionary
historical discourse. Even so, comparison of Mexican Revolution compilations
with those produced in the United Kingdom, United States, and Soviet Union
during the same period of time is useful. Mexican compilations share at least
some of the strategic, propagandistic, ideological, and educational aspects of the
documentary cinema that flourished in those countries, even as they advanced
a historiographical agenda that arose from the particularities of revolutionary
and postrevolutionary Mexico.
The first half of this article situates the Mexican revolutionary compi-
lation film in the broad context of contemporary documentary and compila-
tion film both within and beyond Mexico. As I discuss in this section, one key
difficulty in studying the Mexican historical compilation film is that although
film archives (most notably the Filmoteca UNAM) have considerable holdings
of revolution-era footage, almost no silent-era prints of the original release
versions of the historical compilations survive in any form. Indeed, the study of
the compilation film in general, perhaps to an even greater extent than other
cinematic forms, frequently serves as a vivid reminder that films and film frag-
ments exist alongside all manner of intertextual and extraneous nonfilmic or
parafilmic material. Most of what we know of the Mexican historical compila-
tions is reconstructed from secondary materials, primarily detailed screening
programs listing the contents of each reel that can then be compared with
remaining film fragments. With the exception of La historia de la Revolución
(The History of the Revolution, 1928), of which a 35mm nitrate print survives at
the Library of Congress,13 extant footage from Mexican historical compilation
films is preserved as fragments or as parts of later compilations.
In the second half of the article, I use a different type of secondary source
in my analysis of the Mexican revolutionary compilation: a recently discovered
card catalogue from Salvador Toscano’s actuality archive dating from approx-
imately the 1940s. Toscano, one of the era’s most important compilers, exten-
sively saved and preserved both films and documentation from his productions.
The card catalogue in question appears to have served as a script or plan for one

34
of his later documentaries, entitled Los últimos treinta años de México (The Last
Thirty Years of Mexico, ca.1930). While the analysis of this card catalogue obvi-
ously cannot substitute for the study of an edited film, it constitutes an invalu-
able historical document that reveals how the historical compilation in Mexico
was conceived and constructed, above and beyond any information offered by
the analysis of an extant print.14 The material helps us to understand the visual
and discursive properties of the compilation project that Toscano developed
over several decades as he catalogued history and organized its representation
on film according to his own criteria: a project of many years that culminated
in the feature-length sound documentary Memorias de un mexicano (Memoirs
of a Mexican, 1950) edited by his daughter Carmen Toscano.
The structural and discursive clues that the card catalogue offers pro-
vide insights into Toscano’s compilations that we do not have for analogous
films mentioned in the following section. Although no similar materials have
been found pertaining to other contemporary filmmakers, extant filmic and
extrafilmic sources indicate that Mexican compilation film during the 1920s
and 1930s was far removed formally from the modernist experimentation and
ideological montage of Soviet compilers such as Esfir Shub and Dziga Vertov.
While Toscano and his contemporaries undoubtedly worked on the basis of their
own political and ideological leanings, they did not constitute a unified school or
movement in an artistic or a political sense as did their Soviet contemporaries.
Los últimos treinta años de México constituted a singular cinematic iteration of
the long process of nation building on which Mexico embarked following the
armed conflict of the 1910s. As I will show below, the compilation documentary
in the years following the Mexican Revolution can be seen as part of a broader
cultural politics of nationalism that worked to naturalize and to consolidate the
political and ideological settlement that emerged during the postrevolutionary
era.
REVOLUTION AND COMPILATION
In a sense the Mexican compilation tradition arose from the production and
exhibition practices in place during the early years of the revolution. Most pre-
revolutionary actualities constituted brief, temporally and spatially delimited
views of particular places, people, or events. However, titles such as Fiestas pres-
idenciales en Mérida (Presidential Celebrations in Mérida, 1906), Viaje a Yucatán
(Trip to Yucatán, 1906), Entrevista Díaz-Taft (Díaz-Taft Interview, 1909), and the
various films on the 1910 centenary of independence celebrations were longer
and more ambitious in their attempts to narrate prolonged events that occurred
over many days and in diverse locations.15 Essentially, such films were (more or

35
less) chronologically ordered programs of discrete, sequential views covering a

single event: the Díaz-Taft interview, for instance, compiled forty episodes from
President Díaz’s return journey from Mexico City to Ciudad Juárez to meet his
US counterpart. Reyes has observed that Entrevista marks an important devel-
opment in Mexican film style, since the Alva brothers were careful in selecting
which scenes to include and exclude, and even slightly altered the chronology
of the events in order to create a more coherent narrative of the journey and to
highlight the presidential meeting at the end.16 The dramatic intent that such
films display, and the nature and the rhythms of their temporal and spatial
ellipses, seem to be linked above all to a practical communicative necessity.
They thus appear to have functioned like the “visual newspaper” that Robert C.
Allen identified in US cinema as early as the Spanish-American War of the late
nineteenth century.17
When liberal leader Francisco I. Madero rose up against the dictatorial
regime of Porfirio Díaz in 1910, actuality filmmakers took up the challenge to
record and, frequently, to celebrate the promise of democratization that made-
rismo brought to the Mexican political sphere.18 In the following years, the
revolution occupied much screen time both in Mexico and north of the border.
But while the United States had a vibrant newsreel industry at the time, with
Pathé, Universal Animated Weekly, Hearst, Mutual, and Selig all sending cam-
era operators south to film the conflict between 1913 and 1917,19 Mexico had no
widespread and systematic newsreel industry. In its place, Mexican cameramen
and exhibitors continued the prerevolutionary practice of shooting and screen-
ing actuality views of single recent events that were usually exhibited within
longer programs.20 Bullfights, journeys, and funerals of prominent political and
military figures, and troop mobilizations, maneuvers, and parades all proved
to be popular topics.21
Meanwhile the practice of compiling views to narrate events occur-
ing over a longer time span continued to expand. Pictures of 1,000m or more
recounted a number of specific key events during the conflict:
• Francisco Madero’s successful rebellion in Ciudad Juárez (May
1911) followed by his subsequent journey by train to Mexico City;
• the ensuing power struggles in Puebla between Madero and
the federal government and the respective rebellions against
President Madero’s government by General Pascual Orozco in
Chihuahua and by General Félix Díaz in Veracruz, both in 1912;
• the ultimate overthrow of Madero resulting in the so-called
Tragic Ten Days of bloody conflict in the streets of Mexico City
in February 1913;

36
• Emiliano Zapata’s battles in the state of Morelos in 1914 and

the US invasion of the port of Veracruz in 1914;
• the campaigns of the ultimately victorious Constitutionalist
forces of Venustiano Carranza and Álvaro Obregón across
Mexico in 1914–16.22
Most of the events portrayed in these feature-length compilation programs

of actuality footage would later become enshrined in official history as key
moments in the unfolding of the revolution.
It was a relatively small step from these assemblages of footage on particu-
lar events to what film scholars have variously termed compilation or anthology
films on the Mexican Revolution, which narrated longer historical processes.23
Films such as Hojeando el año de 1910 (Leafing Through the Year 1910, 1911) and
Hojeando 1911 (Leafing Through 1911, 1911)—whose metaphorical titles liken
the cinematic image to the pages of a newspaper or other written chronicle—
likely compiled preexisting footage to commemorate the recent past. However,
Miquel identifies November 1911 as the date that “the first historical films pro-
duced in the country” premiered in the capital’s cinemas: three compilations
on the struggles of Madero including the commandingly titled Historia de la
Revolución, desde la toma de Ciudad Juárez hasta la salida del licenciado León
de la Barra (History of the Revolution, from the Taking of Ciudad Juárez to
the Departure of Mr. León de la Barra, 1911) with a length of 2,245m.24 As the
war went on, some of the most prominent film exhibitors compiled updated
historical narratives on the conflict by recycling preexisting footage: Salvador
Toscano’s various versions of the Historia completa de la Revolución (Complete
History of the Revolution, 1912, 1913, 1915, 1916, 1920, 1927, some versions in
collaboration with Enrique Echániz Brust); the multiple incarnations of Jesús H.
Abitia’s La campaña constitucionalista or Ocho mil kilómetros de campaña (The
Constitutionalist Campaign, or An Eight-Thousand Kilometer Campaign, 1914,
1915, 1919, 1921) and Álvaro Obregón (1929); and Enrique Rosas’s Documentación
nacional histórica, 1915–1916 (National Historical Documentation, 1915–1916,
1916). Miguel Ruiz also made Reconstrucción nacional (National Reconstruction,
1917). Previous scholarship (such as that by Reyes, Miquel, and Leal cited above)
has shown that these compilations combined historical narrative with political
point-scoring or propaganda in varying degrees.
As the release dates of these films testify, the practice of historical com-
pilation continued well into the postrevolutionary period of the 1920s and
beyond, apparently serving both as historical commemoration and as a con-
duit for nationalist sentiment as the postrevolutionary regime consolidated its
power. Although the revolution was no longer the order of the day during these

37
years, exhibitors across Mexico and even in the southern border states of the
United States found sufficient interest among filmgoers to exhibit historical
compilations of up to thirty-five reels in length: programs of up to nine to ten
hours screened over various sessions on successive days. In 1927–28 Salvador
Toscano showed one of his longest films, variously titled Revolución mexicana
(Mexican Revolution), Historia completa de la Revolución mexicana (Complete
History of the Mexican Revolution), or Historia de la Revolución mexicana (His-
tory of the Mexican Revolution) in cities including Monterrey, Tampico, Salinas
Victoria (Nuevo León), Torreón, and Puebla, as well as a condensed, nine-reel
version in Mexico City.25 A further nine-reel compilation premiered in May–
June 1928,26 also entitled Historia de la Revolución mexicana and processed in
the Julio Lamadrid laboratory with bilingual English–Spanish intertitles, is
currently undergoing restoration at the Library of Congress.27 Although this
film has not been attributed to any given compiler or editor, the selection and
structure of the material bear a striking similarity to Toscano’s Complete Histo-
ries.28 A different compilation, Momentos de la Revolución en México (Moments
of the Revolution in Mexico, 1928), also exhibited in Mexico City in early June
1928, is likewise unattributed. Similar pictures were screened well into the
1930s, often simply updated versions of the same films, and mostly following
a generic narrative structure that gave a chronological account of what were
presented as the key moments in recent Mexican history. Mexican Revolution
appeared briefly on the capital’s screens in June 1933, edited by collector and
exhibitor Edmundo Gabilondo with material filmed by the Alva brothers;29
The History of the Mexican Revolution was screened in Monterrey to mark the
anniversary of the revolution on November 20, 1935;30 and De Porfirio Díaz a
Lázaro Cárdenas (From Porfirio Díaz to Lázaro Cárdenas, 1940) premiered
in Mexico City in June 1940.31 As mentioned above, these films served a com-
memorative function, acting as a form of visual archive of national history for
cinema audiences.
As well as these broad-brush national histories, a number of biograph-
ical documentaries compiled footage of key figures and revolutionary leaders
upon their deaths, such as Emiliano Zapata en vida y muerte (Emiliano Zapata
in Life and Death, 1919), two films on the life of Francisco Villa screened in
the second half of 1923 (one made by Salvador Toscano and Antonio Ocañas,
the other by collaborators of Enrique Rosas), and the aforementioned Álvaro
Obregón. In a somewhat lighter twist of the historical compilation genre, extant
published sources suggest that the 1940 movie Recordar es vivir (To Remember
Is to Live) cut historical revolution-era actuality footage together with excerpts
from fiction films featuring popular industrial movie stars such as Lupe Vélez,
Fernando Soler, and Mario Moreno (popularly known as Cantinflas). Here, the

38
commemoration and monumentalization of recent national history merged

with a nostalgic homage to some four decades of filmmaking in Mexico.32
Scholars are divided about the extent to which actuality films of the rev-
olutionary era were positivist expressions of impartiality or the ideologically
partisan vehicles of a compliant bourgeoisie. Reyes holds that during the early
days of the conflict, some Mexican actuality films can be described as a proto-
typical form of cinéma vérité (“cine-verdad”), emphasizing the precepts of objec-
tivity, impartiality, and a commitment to the real on which they were based.
He writes, in relation to Revolución orozquista (Orozco’s Revolution, 1912), that:
“cameramen were good witnesses; and nothing seemed more logical than to
show both sides of the Revolution. That way the audience would appreciate the
totality of the events and would not be fooled . . . They simply observed, ‘casting a
glance’ at the events; they showed ‘the truth.’ ”33 Under the military dictatorship
of Victoriano Huerta (1913–14), argues Reyes, such intentions were “deformed”
as film was employed in the interests of successive ruling factions.34 Other
scholars, including Andrés de Luna, Juan Felipe Leal, and Aleksandra Jablon-
ska, critique such a reading, stressing the extent to which actuality film was
systematically placed at the service of power on all sides throughout the war.35
Indeed, few would question the politically partisan nature of the revolution-era
compilations of Jesús H. Abitia, who set out specifically to document and to
raise support for the campaigns of Constitutionalist leader and future president
Álvaro Obregón. Abitia had the privilege and limitation of being embedded as
official cinematographer and propagandist to Obregón’s army, and the footage
he filmed sufficed to complete his Constitutionalist compilations.36 Toscano, a
businessman rather than an embedded reporter, had more operational auton-
omy than Abitia, but his own Constitutionalist sympathies are evident. In 1915
Toscano wrote on the “reactionary machinations” and the “insubordination”
of popular leaders Villa and Zapata, who were deeply engaged in battle with
Constitutionalist generals Obregón and Venustiano Carranza, proposing that
his latest Historia completa de la Revolución be screened to convince the public
that “reason and justice are on the side of Carranza and that Constitutionalism
offers guarantees and order.”37
In this sense, the Mexican compilations shared a propagandistic intent
with their counterparts on the First World War and the Russian Revolution, and
some years later, on World War Two.38 But beyond the partisan orientation that
individual cameramen, compilers, and exhibitors lent to moving images, the
notion of the revolution-era actuality and compilation film as a positivist form
of cine-verdad holds weight, even in its most blatantly ideological uses, when
compared to contemporary practices north of the border. US feature films on
the Mexican Revolution, such as A Trip Thru Barbarous Mexico (1913) and The Life

39
of General Villa (1914),39 in line with a broader tendency in American newsreels

of the time, frequently placed actuality images alongside faked, reconstructed,
or acted scenes, or touristic views of exotic Mexico. Mexican war pictures were
frequently billed in the United States as heroic feats filmed in dramatic and
dangerous circumstances, “showing scenes of terrific fighting” and “photo-
graphed under fire.”40 As film scholars Zuzana Pick and Margarita de Orellana
have shown, in the written word as well as in still photographs and in moving
images of the Mexican War as seen from the north of the border, a keen sense of
visual dominance merged with the conversion of the conflict into a “continuous
suspense narrative.”41 A 1912 screening of The Mexican Revolution of Madero and
Orozco in the border town of Brownsville, Texas, for instance, obeyed just this
logic, purportedly featuring “moving pictures of actual occurrences on the field
of Battle” and offering “a good clear view of the whole war.”42 Compilation film
here offers up war as a tourist spectacle, in the same way that Americans gazed
at the battle raging just over the border in Ciudad Juárez in 1911 from the priv-
ileged vantage point of the Hotel Paso del Norte’s roof garden in El Paso, Texas:
“the only hotel in the world offering its guests a safe, comfortable place to view
a Mexican revolution,” according to a contemporary postcard.43
Mexican productions on the war by no means overlooked the high drama
of the battle scenes; they sometimes spliced reconstructed scenes with docu-
mentary footage or passed off images of military exercises as real battle footage.
Moreover, the publicity surrounding war documentaries sometimes stressed
stirring action sequences and melodramatic moral polarities as part of their
sensational appeal. Sangre hermana, o la Revolución zapatista (Fraternal Blood,
or the Zapatista Revolution, 1914), for instance, was billed as a “sentimental as
well as interesting” film about “the horrors of a war between brothers,” featuring
“hand-to-hand combat between federal and Zapatista soldiers” and “bridges
and trains being blown up, and haciendas and villages burnt to the ground.”44
Even so, Mexican filmmakers and exhibitors on the whole maintained a more
sober discourse than their American counterparts, persistently selling their
actualities and compilations primarily on the strength of their credibility and
authenticity, both in extrafilmic material and in the narrative structure of the
films themselves. The common practice in posters and newspaper advertise-
ments of listing in detail the contents of each reel tended to emphasize the
precision and exhaustiveness with which the compilations covered histori-
cal events, underlining such films’ status as empirical evidence of a historical
process. Extremely long release titles had a similar effect. Notwithstanding
the clearly partisan agendas that compilers sometimes had, producers and
exhibitors often took pains to convince the public that their films were more
coherent and closer to reality than those of their rivals: their compilations were

40
sold on the strength of their “faithfulness to historical truth,”45 and they were
“not to be confused with others that merely present isolated events of little inter-
est.”46 This insistence on historical compilations as faithful records of events
continued into the 1920s and 1930s, and their claims to objectivity eventually
converted the genre into an agent of official historiography about the recent
past. This discourse of veracity also fed into the postrevolutionary politics of
memory and commemoration: as the years went by, the supposed raw actuality
that these films offered was repackaged as a truthful means of reliving and
commemorating past times or, for those too young to have lived the revolution
in the flesh, of seeing and feeling for themselves the hardships experienced by
their parents’ generation. Newspaper advertisements for the 1940 compilation
De Porfirio Díaz a Lázaro Cárdenas celebrated the arrival of an “extraordinary
film of historical reminiscence,” assuring potential viewers that “your grandfa-
ther, your father, you yourself, your relatives and your friends probably feature
in this fascinating film.”47
These social and historiographical functions of Mexican Revolution and
postrevolution-era compilation films arose out of a particular set of both prac-
tical and ideological needs. As Miquel has noted, the revolution-era compilation
genre derived partly from the practice among some actuality filmmakers and
exhibitors of keeping personal collections of footage in the hope of exploiting
them commercially at a later date,48 as opposed to the usual practice of discard-
ing material after its initial run. Although there was considerably less public
demand for such footage after the armed conflict, Jesús H. Abitia, Salvador
Toscano, and the Alva brothers all organized and catalogued their collections
during peacetime, sometimes working alongside film exhibitors and collectors
(Edmundo Gabilondo, collaborator of the Alva brothers) or family members (Sal-
vador Toscano with his daughter Carmen). This practice went hand in hand with
the production of new, updated feature-length compilations (mentioned above)
that were still commercially exploited, albeit sporadically, in movie theaters
across Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s.
Over the years these sizeable actuality collections became both personal
and collective heritage,49 sometimes the object of bitter wranglings over issues
of authorship and intellectual property; and they eventually served to consol-
idate their holders’ reputations as the pioneers of cinema in Mexico. However,
early attempts to harness them for the public good on a larger scale had limited
success; the efforts of both Edmundo Gabilondo (in 1933) and Salvador Toscano
(in 1937) to sell footage to the postrevolutionary state for propaganda, didactic,
and/or preservation purposes proved fruitless.50 Abitia’s collection (which was
almost fully catalogued) was largely consumed by fire in 1947, and his 1920s
compilation Ocho mil kilómetros de campaña languished for decades in the

41
house of Álvaro Obregón’s widow until Abitia’s son rescued it in 1960.51 It was
not until the release of the sound compilations Memorias de un mexicano (1950)
and Epopeyas de la Revolución (Epics of the Revolution, 1963) on cinema and tele-
vision screens that the revolution-era footage became available to a much wider
public. Memorias’ slick editing, sound design, and narrative form was much
praised when the documentary premiered in 1950, with critics celebrating Car-
men Toscano’s achievements in “modernizing” the now-vintage silent footage of
the revolution, making it relevant and stimulating for contemporary viewers.52
In the following section, I explore in greater depth the close association
between the practical logic of compiling as cataloguing and the ideological role
that this mode of filmmaking occupied in the consolidation of the postrevolu-
tionary state. I focus on the compilation practices of Salvador Toscano, who, as
the filmographies for the period cited here attest, was among the most prolific
compilers of the revolutionary and postrevolutionary eras.
THE LAST THIRTY YEARS OF MEXICO:
COMPILATION AS NATION BUILDING
The often arbitrary practices of film collectors and the inaccessibility of their
holdings have had a significant impact on the ways in which historians have
conducted research on early actuality film in Mexico. Film historian Aurelio de
los Reyes has remarked that his own attempts to consult Edmundo Gabilondo’s
collection during the late 1960s and early 1970s were severely limited by the
collector’s refusal to screen his footage in any systematic way for academic
study, a problem compounded because Gabilondo had “chopped the footage
up” and removed the intertitles as he worked on his own (unfinished) compi-
lation film on the revolution.53 At that time Salvador Toscano’s collection was
inaccessible,54 but subsequent research on his film archive, first by Fernando
del Moral González and more recently by Reyes, has shown it to be in a similar
state of fragmentation. The extant Gabilondo collection now at the Filmoteca
UNAM and the sound feature-length compilations Memorias de un mexicano
and Epopeyas de la Revolución contain traces of the earlier catalogues of the Alva
brothers, Toscano, and Abitia collections respectively.55 However, both histor-
ical records and the current state of the collections suggest that at least until
the mid-twentieth century, new compilations of these collections were generally
reedited from previous arrangements of the footage. The silent-era compilations
discussed in the previous section, therefore, have mostly failed to survive.56
A sui-generis card catalogue unearthed some years ago at the Toscano
archive sheds light on the nature of the compilation process during the silent
and early sound eras in Mexico as well as on the narrative transitions such
films underwent during the postrevolutionary years.57 The catalogue, entitled

42
Los últimos treinta años de México (The Last Thirty Years of Mexico), consists of
a series of over five hundred index cards, each bearing a typed description of a
scene from recent Mexican history; in most cases, a series of individual positive
or negative film frames corresponding to the scene described is attached with
mounting corners.58 While most images are individual film frames, others are
pairs of edited positive frames: in many cases a descriptive intertitle is matched
to corresponding frames of the scene it describes. Many of these splices do not
follow the cinematic logic of the film editor linking scenes, but rather the visual
and archival logic of the cataloguer assembling a series of shots according to
specific criteria (in this case the event depicted on a given card).59 The collection
is ordered in roughly chronological order, allowing for a degree of narrative
license that slightly alters the order of events for dramatic or rhetorical effect.
It contains an assortment of silent-era frames—some of them first-generation
prints dating back to the revolution era itself and some of them later copies from
the 1920s—and sound-era positive and negative work prints.60
The material appears to date back to the mid-1940s when Carmen Tos-
cano organized and catalogued her father Salvador’s collection with a view to
compiling the sound documentary Memorias de un mexicano, initially designed
as a spectacular showcase of the valuable but neglected Toscano collection.61
The card-catalogue collection served both as a reference to Toscano’s actu-
ality archive and as an illustrated script of an earlier lengthy, chronological
compilation film of Mexican public life from 1900 to 1930 that, by Carmen
Toscano’s account, Salvador Toscano screened over many years. To my knowl-
edge no record of Los últimos treinta años de México’s public release has ever
been located, and no print survives under this title, which Carmen Toscano
used when she called on Mexico’s National History Museum (again in vain) to
preserve the Toscano collection in 1948. Her appeal to the institution focused
on preventing further mutilation of the print, emphasizing its value as national
heritage.62 The card catalogue bears close similarity in structure and vocabulary
to a script penned by Salvador Toscano around 1920 entitled Los últimos veinte
años de México: De Porfirio Díaz a Venustiano Carranza (The Last Twenty Years
of Mexico: From Porfirio Díaz to Venustiano Carranza).63 This suggests that
though it is likely that the index cards themselves were created by Carmen Tos-
cano, the organizational structure and discourse of the card catalogue closely
adheres to Salvador’s silent-era compilations. The same narrative structure and
coverage of events, though not the narrative voice, are carried through fairly
faithfully into Carmen’s documentary Memorias de un mexicano. It is thus fitting
that Salvador Toscano is credited as scriptwriter of Memorias in its 1950 release,
despite having had little to do with Carmen’s final organization and editing of
the material.

43
A cursory glance at the card catalogue reveals the diverse origins of the
footage in the Toscano compilation, much of which was exchanged, bought, or
obtained by other means from rivals and collaborators. The variety of title cards
and intertitle designs reveals that the collection/compilation draws substan-
tially on Salvador Toscano’s own earlier actualities and compilations. Among
these are La historia de la Revolución mexicana (ca.1920), Las fiestas del cente-
nario de la consumación de la independencia en la capital de la República (The
Celebrations of the Centenary of the Consummation of Independence in the
Capital of the Republic, 1921), and Veinticinco años de vida en la historia de Méx-
ico, 1903–1928 (Twenty-Five Years of Life in the History of Mexico, 1903–1928,
ca.1928). But it also draws upon an entire array of Mexican and foreign pictures
whose original meanings and historical contexts were likely far removed from
those that the Toscano project attributed to them. Some examples are: El señor
general don Porfirio Díaz en París (General Porfirio Díaz in Paris, 1913); A Day
with Carranza (1914?) and Typical Mexican Aspects (1918), both filmed by the
American George D. Wright and the latter under the auspices of Venustiano
Carranza’s Constitutionalist government; an English-language actuality on
the Reparto de tierras por Lucio Blanco (Land Redistribution by Lucio Blanco,
1913) in the state of Tamaulipas; an as-yet unidentified actuality on the patriotic
celebrations in the city of Mexicali, Baja California, in September 1917 (with
bilingual English-Spanish intertitles); and various films by the Alva brothers
and by Enrique Rosas. Many frames have applied color (mostly tinted) in various
shades of red, blue, orange, or green, most notably those extracted from Camus’s
Porfirio Díaz film, Wright’s A Day with Carranza, and intertitles that Salvador
Toscano and the Alva brothers prepared for their own historical compilations.
Such material stands in striking contrast to the faded black-and-white images
to which viewers of Mexican Revolution footage have grown accustomed, at
least since the release of Memorias de un mexicano in 1950. In aesthetic and
film-historical terms, the card catalogue lays bare the extent to which Toscano’s
works are, as Arthur Elton observed in 1955 with regard to the compilation film,
analogous to the “palimpsest and parchment.” They are “fragments, sometimes
fragments of fragments, often defaced by time, and applied to purposes of his-
torical reconstruction rarely contemplated by the original authors” (figs. 1 and
2).64 Following the work of German media theorist Bernhard Siegert on “cultural
techniques,” the study of this source obliges us to view the construction of mean-
ing in Mexican compilation films as a result not just of semantic processes but
also of material actions.65
Indeed, the study of the card catalogue also sheds light on the semantic
malleability of the footage contained in the Toscano compilations and on the
narrative transitions that it underwent between the revolution era itself and the

44
Fig. 1: Example of an index card from the card catalogue/script of the film Los últimos treinta
años de México, Archivo Histórico Cinematográfico, boxes 66–67. The typed legend reads:
“His favourite outing was to the Bois de Boulogne, perhaps remembering his happy moments
of repose in our magnificent Bosque de Chapultepec.” The card, corresponding to the period
shortly before ex-president Porfirio Díaz’s death in Parisian exile in 1915, displays both tinted
and black-and-white 35mm frames attached to the card on mounting corners. These are appar-
ently variously cut from exhibition and work prints of the 1913 film El señor general don Porfirio
Díaz en París (General Porfirio Díaz in Paris). Frames are also attached to the reverse of the card,
while an accompanying card bears sound-era copies with space for the soundtrack, presumably
part of the production process of Memorias de un mexicano (1950). (Image courtesy Filmoteca
UNAM, Fondo Salvador Toscano)
monumental midcentury compilation Memorias de un mexicano. Miquel has

observed that Toscano’s narrative style evolved from the partisan and prosely-
tizing voice adopted during the armed revolution itself to the calmer and more
distanced idiom of the cinematic historian as the postrevolutionary regime
consolidated throughout the 1920s and 1930s: a symptom of both Toscano’s own
greater maturity as a filmmaker and a broader spirit of national reconciliation
as the armed conflict receded into the past, for the most part, and the ruling
faction tightened its grip on power.66 Even so, The Last Thirty Years bears traces
of unhealed wounds—ways of narrating history that would gradually fall out of
use. As the warring factions meet at the crucial Aguascalientes Convention in
1914, the Constitutionalist leader Venustiano Carranza, with whom Toscano’s
sympathies lay, is described in comfortingly statesmanlike terms. His rivals,
popular leaders Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Villa, on the other hand, are fre-
quently described as vulgar bandits, unthinking bringers of violence and terror
to the innocent civilian population. Zapata, though, is ultimately redeemed in
death: after being ambushed and killed by government forces in 1919, his humble

45
Fig. 2: Detail of the card shown in fi gure 1 above (top row, second set of frames from the left).
The frames are attached to the cards individually or in pairs of frames corresponding to related
scenes, or as in this example, matching images with intertitles from the original fi lm (this inter-
title reads: “The automobile awaits the General. His faithful chauffeur, Antonio”). Th is intertitle
card, like many others, is tinted. (Image courtesy Filmoteca UNAM, Fondo Salvador Toscano)
coffin “imprisoned” his bloodied remains; his struggle against the “iniquitous
submissions” of the Mexican peasantry is vindicated.67 The villainous Villa,
on the other hand, is described in irrational and animalistic terms that are
strongly reminiscent of the American greaser fi lms that demonized the leader
in the latter years of the revolution. In Toscano’s script Villa, “the spoilt child of
fortune, capricious and blind,” is characterized by an “indomitable arrogance”

46
and a “feline grin”; his death is an act of fate, poetic justice for the “thousands of
tombs that he caused to open.”68
Such characterizations of the various revolutionary leaders, in contrast
with the far more conciliatory tone of the 1950 compilation Memorias de un mex-
icano, closely match the changing values that Mexican political and historical
narratives of the time ascribed to them, and the gradual consolidation of the
idea, originating in the 1920s, of the great “revolutionary family” that formed the
ideological basis of the institutionalized revolution.69 What is rarely in question
in the silent or sound compilations, however, is what the historian of photogra-
phy John Mraz terms the “Great Men” version of history that to an even greater
extent characterizes the popular “Graphic Histories” of the revolution compiled,
published, and reedited by Gustavo Casasola from the 1940s: historical photo-
graphic albums based on the archive of Casasola’s father, the revolution-era
photographer Agustín Casasola.70 According to such a vision, history is made
and driven forward by the actions of a select group of powerful and dynamic
political and military leaders, over and above economic, social, or other forces.71
Such a vision of history clearly served to legitimate the ruling elites’ hold
on political power during the decades following the revolution, passing over
any meaningful reflection on the ongoing social and economic injustice that
persisted following the armed conflict of 1910 to 1917. It depends partly on a
narrative act of distancing such leaders from the realm of everyday life to elevate
them to the status of mythic or enshrined historical figures: the rebel leader
Pascual Orozo is likened to Achilles; the martyred liberal president Francisco I.
Madero is a Christ figure; Carranza and Villa are, respectively, “the new Danton
and Robespierre.”72 Just as the actuality footage becomes separated from its
original status as a filmic record of everyday events, these figures are no longer
flesh-and-blood military or political leaders, but rather celluloid monuments to
a heroic national history. As such, they share with (noncinematic) monuments
more generally a double function as both static signifiers of the past and emo-
tive objects through which the onlooker or spectator can engage actively with
a society’s sense of itself.73
In some cases, the anonymous masses or lesser-known protagonists of
history receive a similar treatment. For example, in his 1920 script, Los últimos
veinte años de México, Toscano describes a poor but proud indigenous woman,
bearing aloft a patriotic revolutionary flag in the early days of the revolution, in
a degree of precise detail that attests to Toscano’s concern that cinema should
act as a positive record of reality: “24 May 1911. The celebrated anti-reelec-
tionist Antonia Díaz. Popular orator requesting General Díaz’s resignation.” In
the 1930 version, the same image remains spatially and temporally rooted but
is now used to denote a wider spirit of antigovernment feeling. The text that

47
accompanies this frame in the card catalogue reads: “Antonia Díaz, popular
anti-reelectionist from the state of Puebla, inciting the people to rebel.”74 By the
time it was recompiled in Memorias de un mexicano in 1950, however, the same
footage was entirely freed of its spatial and temporal specificity, now symboliz-
ing a general dissatisfaction among the populace and widespread jubilation at
the revolutionary leader Madero’s victory over the government troops in Ciudad
Juárez. The indigenous woman is no longer Antonia Díaz of Puebla in late May
1911 but a metonym of a generalized spirit of rebellion that swept through Mex-
ico at that time. She illustrates, in the words of Memorias’ narrator, that “rebel
flags were now waving almost everywhere.”75
As Pudovkin wrote in 1947, just as Carmen Toscano was cataloguing and
compiling her father’s archive, it was precisely through this act of freeing news-
reel footage from a “merely informational” function that everyday actuality film
could be raised to the high-art status of documentary cinema.76 For Pudovkin,
the creation of abstract meanings in films such as Frank Capra’s Prelude to War
(1942), through a combination of montage and spoken commentary, rendered
such pictures “fully international” and enabled them to reveal “real truth about
a people” by showing “the historical essence of each phenomenon.”77 A decade
earlier, Grierson had written in a similar vein, albeit in rather more circumspect
terms, on the achievements of the March of Time series, which overcame news-
reel’s traditional tendency to “dither . . . on, mistaking the phenomenon for the
thing in itself,” by finding ways to be “penetrating and, because penetrating,
dramatic.”78 For Grierson, although March of Time had not yet achieved “higher
cinematic qualities,” the series was important in having adopted a journalistic
spirit of comment and critique into film form: a key cinematic contribution to
Grierson’s cherished ideal of “a revitalized citizenship and . . . a democracy at long
last in contact with itself.”79 Griffith’s interest in film for “public enlightenment”
noted at the beginning of this article obeys a similar logic.
Mexican compilations failed to register significantly beyond national
borders from the 1920s to the 1940s before the international success in 1950 of
Memorias de un mexicano and, indeed, failed to attract large audiences in Mex-
ico during the postrevolutionary years. Perhaps this was because they lacked
formal and narrative innovations that might have made them capable of com-
municating the drama of the Mexican Revolution to a broader global public
on a more abstract or emotional level. Furthermore, narrative discourse in
evidence in the card catalogue studied here suggests that although Toscano’s
compilations strove to bring new meanings and interpretations to old footage,
they did not do so according to the critical and analytical criteria that Leyda
wished to find in the genre; as Bill Nichols points out, Leyda favored histor-
ical revision through analytical editing and “a dialectic of voice and image”

48
over emotive and abstracting uses of archive footage.80 The long takes and the
chronological structure of the few extant examples of silent-era Mexican com-
pilation editing, though, suggest the accumulative logic of the film catalogue
far more than any attempt to create a dynamic analytical montage. But rather
than measure the Mexican compilations against Pudovkin’s, Leyda’s, or Grier-
son’s judgments, we might consider them in terms of their own functions in the
context of postrevolutionary Mexico.
Political, cultural, and cinematic discourses in postrevolutionary Mexico
were frequently concerned with agrarian and labor rights, moralization, liter-
acy, national cohesion, Mexicanness, and the centrality of revolution: issues
that only partly overlapped with the issues of democracy and citizenship that
concerned the British left of which Grierson was a part. Following the armed
conflict, intellectuals and artists, such as Diego Rivera, Saturnino Herrán, Man-
uel Ponce, José Vasconcelos, Manuel Gamio, and many others, strove to recast
Mexican nationhood by appealing, in different degrees, to popular, folk, and
indigenous culture as the cornerstone of a new, mestizo identity that might help
transform the country’s rural masses into modern Mexicans.81 Toscano’s compi-
lations are far from many contemporary artists’ “exaltation of the peasantry,”82
but in appealing to classical rather than native Mexican cultural referents,
they approach Vasconcelos’s conviction that the Mexican masses needed to
be “raised” to universal civilization by bridging folk culture with the “edifying
values” of European literature, history, and philosophy.83 Toscano, an engineer
by trade, spent much of his career filming, exhibiting, collecting, and compiling
actuality film while he held governmental positions in the ministries or direc-
torates of public works, industry, forestry, hunting and fishing, and highways.84
Indeed, we might consider his historical compilations as filmic analogies of his
work as a midranking highway engineer, a position in which he was instrumen-
tal in expanding the modernizing postrevolutionary nation’s road network, and
in which he oversaw part of the initial phases of the Mexican stretches of the
Pan-American Highway.85 By historicizing the revolution, by casting it as an
inevitable and cataclysmic event that was beyond the agency of ordinary Mexi-
cans, Toscano demonstrated cinema’s power to record, collect, and show its key
episodes, just as his highways proved the state’s power to connect the emerging
postrevolutionary nation, the dark days of internecine conflict safely behind it.
His compilations buttressed the idea that the revolution and national modern-
ization were inexorable.86 Moreover, by teaching Mexicans their own recent
history through the filters of classical mythology and the French Revolution,
he helped them to view themselves as agents of an ongoing civilizing project.
Toscano’s historical films, like those of his contemporaries Jesús H. Abi-
tia, the Alva brothers, and other compilers, thus operated firmly within the

49
political logic of postrevolutionary Mexico. These compilations functioned less

to create critical democratic citizens, as did classical Griersonian documentary
(as well as the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s, before the Stalinist turn to social-
ist realism), and more to forge among their spectators a sense of historical pride
and a will to build a greater nation: in short, to create good Mexicans. Like other
didactic Mexican films of the period, they seek to educate their viewers, but
not necessarily on the same formal or ideological basis as their better-known
European, US, or Soviet contemporaries.87 The fragments of historical actuality
footage that they contain are neither constructivist building blocks that signal
a new modernist cinematic praxis nor signifiers of a Marxist-inspired political
utopia. We might say that they are Griersonian in that they take and interpret
real material “from the raw” with a sense of social responsibility, but they do not
dramatize that material in the same artistic manner as the films that Grierson
produced or celebrated. Rather, they are scraps of the past that accumulate
before our eyes as powerful evidence of how collective history played out, pur-
porting to provide their viewers with an experience of living the recent past
that combined emotional engagement with a sense of historical truthfulness.
Their images bear both a grandiose aura of permanence and a sense of imme-
diacy that enables the everyday viewer to access them, integrating them into
her understanding of public history. In this way, they engage the viewer in the
manner of celluloid monuments.88
Notes
1. Richard Griffith, “Documentary Film Since 1939: North and Latin America,” in Documentary Film:
The Use of the Film Medium to Interpret Creatively and in Social Terms the Life of the People as It
Exists in Reality, by Paul Rotha with Sinclair Road and Richard Griffith (New York: Hastings House
Publishers, 1952), 341.
2. Griffith, “Documentary Film,” 341–42. Griffith refers here to Emilio “El Indio” Fernández’s social
melodrama La perla (The Pearl, 1947).
3. Some recent scholars of documentary cinema tend to prefer the less normative and categorical
term nonfiction. In the Mexican case, though, film historian Aurelio de los Reyes maintains the
relevance of the Griersonian usage of the term documentary to describe practices in Mexican film
production from 1915. He identifies eleven documentary categories, including newsreels and com-
pilation films; see “El documental de la posrevolución, 1915–1942,” in Cine mudo latinoamericano:
Inicios, nación, vanguardias y transición, ed. Aurelio de los Reyes and David M. J. Wood (Mexico City:
Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM, 2015), 109–32. Other scholars, such as Juan Felipe
Leal and Ángel Miquel, have used the term documentary to refer to a whole range of informative
and propagandistic materials; Miquel refers to a number of functions and subcategories, includ-
ing information films, propaganda films, war films, bullfighting films, and history films; see Ángel
Miquel, En tiempos de revolución: El cine en la ciudad de México, 1910–1916 (Mexico City: Dirección
General de Actividades Cinematográficas, UNAM, 2013); Juan Felipe Leal, El documental nacional
de la revolución mexicana, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Juan Pablos Editor/Voyeur, 2012). I agree with these

50
scholars that the term documentary is useful for ease of reference, but care must be taken not to
project Griersonian overtones ahistorically onto revolution-era productions. There is insufficient
space here to debate the issue in depth; in this article I use the term documentary in line with the
scholarship mentioned above.
4. For subsequent Spanish-language scholarship on silent-era Mexican film production, see, for
instance, José María Sánchez García, “Bosquejo histórico y gráfico de nuestra producción cine-
matográfica durante la era muda,” in Enciclopedia Cinematográfica Mexicana, 1897–1955, ed. Ricardo
Rangel and Rafael E. Portas (Mexico City: Publicaciones Cinematográficas, 1955), 36–103; Aurelio
de los Reyes, Cine y sociedad en México, 1896–1930, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones
Estéticas, UNAM, 1981, 1993); Paulo Antonio Paranaguá, ed., Cine documental en América Latina
(Madrid: Cátedra, 2003); Eduardo de la Vega and Rosario Vidal Bonifaz, “Cine y propaganda política
regional: El caso de Alma Tlaxcalteca (Ángel E. Álvarez, 1931),” Espiral 14, no. 42 (2008): 127–43,
accessed November 6, 2013, http://www.redalyc.org/pdf/138/13804205.pdf.
5. Jay Leyda, Films Beget Films: A Study of the Compilation Film (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 9.
6. Ibid., 27, quoting Marcel Martin.
7. John Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary,” in Grierson on Documentary, ed. and comp. Forsyth
Hardy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 145–56.
8. Reyes, Cine y sociedad, 1:122.
9. In addition to the works cited above, important studies include Aurelio de los Reyes, Filmografía
del cine mudo mexicano, 3 vols. (Mexico City: Filmoteca UNAM, 1986, 1994, 2000); Ángel Miquel,
Acercamientos al cine silente mexicano (Cuernavaca: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos,
2005); Miquel, En tiempos de revolución; and Leal, El documental nacional de la revolución mexicana.
I am indebted to these authors’ detailed filmographies of the prerevolutionary, revolutionary, and
postrevolutionary periods.
10. Leyda, Films Beget Films, 113–14.
11. Reyes, Cine y sociedad, 1:122; David M. J. Wood, “Cine documental y Revolución mexicana: La
invención de un género,” in Fragmentos: Narración cinematográfica compilada y arreglada por Salva-
dor Toscano Barragán, 1900–1930, ed. Pablo Ortiz Monasterio (Mexico City: Conaculta, Imcine, Uni-
versidad de Guadalajara, 2010), 41–53; and Ángel Miquel, “Documentales mexicanos con historias
revolucionarias,” Archivos de la Filmoteca 68 (2011): 81–95.
12. Rotha with Road and Griffith, Documentary Film, 50.
13. I have been unable to examine the Library of Congress print for this article; my source is an
incomplete 16mm copy held at the Imperial War Museum in London.
14. Since the bulk of this article was researched and written, the Filmoteca UNAM has made consid-
erable progress in preserving and cataloguing much of the Toscano archive in a project led by film
historian Aurelio de los Reyes, following an agreement reached between the Toscano Foundation
and the Filmoteca in 2011. Future research on this topic will benefit greatly from the new possibility
of analyzing filmic and nonfilmic materials alongside one another.
15. Fiestas presidenciales en Mérida was 3,000m long. For Entrevista Díaz-Taft, the filmographies by Reyes
and by Leal, Barraza, and Jablonska give respective lengths of 850–1,000m and 1,200m; see Reyes,
Filmografía, 1:53; and Juan Felipe Leal, Eduardo Barraza, and Alejandra Jablonska, Vistas que no se
ven: Filmografía mexicana 1896–1910 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México,
1993), 107. The Alva brothers’ film on the Independence celebrations was 4,000m long. In his
1898–1935 filmography of Salvador Toscano, Miquel distinguishes between “films with one shot,”
which predominate before the revolution but persist until 1920; “films with various shots,” which
also appear frequently during the prerevolutionary and revolutionary years, continuing until 1923;

51
and “feature-length films,” which narrate both recent events and historical processes in more detail
from 1911; see Acercamientos, 125–63.
16. Reyes, Cine y sociedad, 1:96–98. Reyes writes at length on the widespread dramatic use of the
apotheosis in the cinema of the period.
17. Robert C. Allen, “Contra the Chaser Theory,” Wide Angle 3, no. 1 (1979): 4–11. The symbiotic relation-
ship between actuality films and the printed press during this period is an interesting one that might
be further explored elsewhere; Miquel states that documentary cinema in early twentieth-century
Mexico developed as “a branch of journalism”; Miquel, “Documentales mexicanos con historias
revolucionarias,” 81. Moving-image and print journalism were similar in their coverage of events,
with evident disparities between the two media insofar as range of coverage and the dynamics of
production and dissemination. In turn, newspaper archives have been one of the most important
sources at the disposal of film historians and preservationists researching the period.
18. Madero took up arms against Díaz following his defeat to the incumbent in the rigged presidential
elections of June 1910. For English-language histories of the revolution, see John Womack Jr., “The
Mexican Revolution, 1910–1920,” in Mexico Since Independence, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1991), 125–200; and Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, 2 vols. (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
19. For detailed filmographies and analyses, see Aurelio de los Reyes, Con Villa en México: Testimonios
de camarógrafos norteamericanos en la Revolución, 1911–1916 (Mexico City: Instituto de Investi-
gaciones Estéticas, UNAM, 1985), 386–91; Margarita de Orellana, Filming Pancho: How Hollywood
Shaped the Mexican Revolution (1991; repr., London: Verso, 2009), 169–93.
20. On this note, Reyes has claimed that in Mexico the practice of producing and exhibiting “views” in
the style of the Lumière brothers persisted in the Mexican documentary tradition until as late as
1942; see “El documental de la posrevolución, 1915–1942.”
21. Films were often screened as part of programs that also included variety and musical numbers; see
Reyes, Cine y sociedad, vol.1, and Miquel, En tiempos de revolución, for details on exhibition practices
in Mexico during the revolution.
22. For a detailed filmography of long revolution-era films, see Miquel, En tiempos de revolución,
259–312.
23. Ángel Miquel and I have both used the term compilation; Aurelio de los Reyes tends to use anthol-
ogy. Note the difference between Reyes’s use of the term anthology film in the Mexican context and
the common English-language usage, which refers to an omnibus or portmanteau film. Films were
frequently exhibited under alternative titles; I do not list them all in full here for reasons of space. My
main sources are the filmographies cited above by Reyes, Miquel, and Leal; see also Un pionero del
cine en México: Salvador Toscano y su colección de carteles (Mexico City: UNAM, Fundación Carmen
Toscano, 2003), CD-ROM; María Luis Amador and Jorge Ayala Blanco, Cartelera cinematográfica
digital, 1912–1989 (México City: Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos, UNAM, 2011),
CD-ROM. Miquel, “Documentales mexicanos,” collates and organizes information on most of these
historical compilations from different sources.
24. Reyes, Filmografía, 1:77; Miquel, En tiempos, 67–72, 277. The cited film was also known as Revolución
en Ciudad Juárez con todos sus detalles hasta la salida del señor presidente interino Francisco de la
Barra (Revolution in Ciudad Juárez in All Its Details Until the Departure of the Interim President
Francisco de la Barra). León de la Barra, a porfirista, was interim president from May 1911, when
Díaz went into exile, until Madero took office on November 6, 1911, two weeks before this film’s
premiere.
25. Poster collection, Archivo Histórico Cinematográfico, Fundación Carmen Toscano (hereafter AHC).

52
26. El Universal, May 31, 1928, sec. 1, 8.

27. The bilingual intertitles suggest that this film was likely screened in the southern United States,
given the interest that the Mexican Revolution had generated historically among US audiences. On
a similar note, Salvador Toscano screened his compilation 25 Years of Life in the History of Mexico in
Laredo, Texas, on October 10 and 11,1929; Laredo (TX) Times, October 10, 1929, 3.
28. It is thus likely that Lamadrid or one of his laboratory employees compiled the footage drawing at
least partly on the Toscano material. This is a good example of the multiple and overlapping origins
of compilation films that constitute one of the key challenges that the form holds for scholars and
archivists alike. I am grateful to Kim Tomadjoglou for pointing this out to me.
29. El Universal, June 14, 1933, sec. 1, 6.
30. El Porvenir, November 20, 1935.
31. El Universal, June 22, 1940, sec. 2, 9. According to Edmundo Gabilondo, De Porfirio Díaz a Lázaro
Cárdenas is simply a sound version of his own 1933 compilation; Edmundo Gabilondo Mangino,
Entrevista con el Señor Edmundo Gabilondo Mangino, realizada en la Ciudad de México el día 2 de
febrero de 1974, por Aurelio de los Reyes (Mexico City: Instituto Mora, Archivo de la Palabra, 1974).
Both compilations are almost identical in structure to the 1928 picture processed in the Lamadrid
laboratory.
32. El Universal, January 15, 1941, 9.
34. Ibid., 1:140.
35. Andrés de Luna, La batalla y su sombra: La revolución en el cine mexicano (Mexico City: Universi-
dad Autónoma Metropolitana, Xochimilco, 1984); Juan Felipe Leal and Aleksandra Jablonska, “Los
rollos del cine revolucionario,” in El documental nacional de la Revolución mexicana: Filmografía,
1915–1921, by Juan Felipe Leal (Mexico City: Voyeur, 2012), 155–231.
36. Álvaro Obregón, Ocho mil kilómetros en campaña (1917; repr., Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 2009), 243–44, 522; Ángel Miquel, “Jesús H. Abitia, fotógrafo y cineasta,” Imagofagia:
Revista de la Asociación Argentina de Estudios de Cine y Audiovisual 8 (2013), accessed November
8, 2013, www.asaeca.org/imagofagia.
37. Memorandum by Salvador Toscano, 1915, p.41, file 9, box 11, AHC.
38. Leyda, Films Beget Films, 17–18, 22–31, 49–72.
39. In a similar vein, we might mention the later Mexican/US borderlands compilation La venganza
de Pancho Villa (ca. 1935), discovered by Mexican filmmaker Gregorio Rocha while researching his
documentary Los rollos perdidos de Pancho Villa (The Lost Reels of Pancho Villa, 2003) and now
preserved at the Library of Congress.
40. Advertisement for the Mutual picture The Battle of Torreón (1914) in Moving Picture World, May 23,
1914, 1215, reproduced in Orellana, Filming Pancho, 60.
41. Orellana, Filming Pancho, 8.
42. Poster for The Mexican Revolution of Madero and Orozco (1912), reproduced in Un pionero del cine
en México.
43. See Claire F. Fox, The Fence and the River: Culture and Politics at the U.S.-Mexican Border (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 81–82; David Dorado Romo, Ringside Seat to a Revolution:
An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juarez, 1893–1923 (El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntus Press,

53
2005); and Zuzana M. Pick, Constructing the Image of the Mexican Revolution: Cinema and the Archive
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 45–46.
44. Advertisement for Sangre hermana (1914) reproduced in Miquel, En tiempos de Revolución, 189. I
am grateful to Rielle Navitski for pointing this out to me.
45. Advertisement for Reconstrucción nacional (1917), in Juan Felipe Leal, El documental nacional de la
Revolución mexicana, 44–45.
46. Poster for La historia completa de la revolución de 1910 a 1915 (1915), reproduced in Un pionero
del cine en México.
47. El Universal, June 22, 1940, sec. 2, 9; and El Universal, June 24, 1940, sec. 1, 10.
48. Miquel, “Documentales mexicanos con historias revolucionarias,” 88.
49. Jesús H. Abitia calculated that his original collection comprised 1 million ft. of footage, most of
which was destroyed in a fire in 1947; Jesús H. Abitia, “Memorias de un fotógrafo constitucionalista,”
El Universal, Februrary 22, 1959, sec. 4, 5–8. Edmundo Gabilondo estimated in 1977 that he held
over 250 reels (around 250,000 ft.) of material filmed by the Alva brothers, on top of the material
that he had already deposited in the Filmoteca UNAM; Margarita García Flores, “El cine nunca
muere,” La Onda (suplemento de Novedades) 208, June 5, 1977, 7–8. Gabilondo subsequently lost
a substantial proportion of his collection in a fire, including a good many original nitrate prints; at
present the Filmoteca UNAM’s Gabilondo collection consists of 370 reels, all of which are acetate
positive prints (including new prints produced by the Filmoteca). Ángel Martínez, conversation with
author, Filmoteca UNAM, April 8, 2014. By Carmen Toscano’s account in 1947, her father Salvador’s
collection amounted to some 100,000 ft.; Carmen Toscano to Chico Alonso (draft), 9 March 1947,
folder 1, box 26, AHC. Reyes lists these three collections as the most important holdings of Mexican
Revolution actuality footage; Cine y sociedad, 1:15–16.
50. Gabilondo Mangino, “Entrevista con el Señor Edmundo Gabilondo Mangino,” 2; Ángel Miquel,
Salvador Toscano (Mexico City: Universidad de Guadalajara, Gobierno del Estado de Puebla, Uni-
versidad Veracruzana, UNAM, 1997), 91–92. During the 1940s Carmen Toscano also tried in vain
to sell her father’s collection to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to the British Museum in
London, and to the National History Museum in Mexico City. For the MoMA correspondence, see
Iris Barry to Salvador Toscano, 14 May 1942, folder 9, box 21, AHC; Iris Barry to Carmen Toscano de
Moreno Sánchez, 12 August 1942, folder 1, box 26, AHC.
52. I discuss this issue at length in David M. J. Wood, “Memorias de una mexicana: La Revolución como
monumento fílmico,” Secuencia 75 (2009): 147–70. The National Institute for Archaeology and
History named Memorias de un mexicano a “historical monument” of the nation in 1967. In this
earlier publication, I offer a historical and formal analysis of the 1950 documentary Memorias de
un mexicano, rather than of the earlier silent compilations that are the focus of the present article.
53. Aurelio de los Reyes, “El cine,” in Reflexiones sobre el oficio del historiador (Mexico City: Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México, 1995), 131–43, 135. Reyes was, though, instrumental in the gradual
sale of a good part of the Gabilondo collection to the Filmoteca UNAM during the 1970s.
54. Reyes, Cine y sociedad, 1:15. The first piece of historical research based on a thorough examination
of the Toscano archive is Miquel, Salvador Toscano. The collection was managed by the family-run
Toscano Foundation (established as such in 1992) until 2011, when it was deposited in the Filmoteca
UNAM.
55. As mentioned above, Reyes has recently organized the Gabilondo and Toscano collections in collab-
oration with the Filmoteca UNAM. As a result of this project, three programs of revolution-era actu-
ality footage were screened at the Thirty-Second Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, 2013.

54
56. The Filmoteca UNAM’s Gabilondo collection contains some intertitles and around three reels of
footage edited by Gabilondo as part of his own compilation project. The Filmoteca is also currently
researching the possibility that the Toscano collection contains a ten-reel cut of Abitia’s silent-era
compilation Ocho mil kilómetros de campaña, which formed the basis for Epopeyas de la Revolución
(1963). Ángel Martínez, conversation with author, Filmoteca UNAM, April 8, 2014.
57. The collection is not entirely unique, however. Further inquiry might explore the parallels between
the Toscano card catalogue and the Josef Joye and Davide Turconi collection of 35mm nitrate film
frames from early cinema; see Il Progetto Turconi/The Turconi Project, accessed July 17, 2014, http://
www.cinetecadelfriuli.org/progettoturconi.
58. Los últimos treinta años de México, boxes 66–67, AHC. The collection, now held at the Filmoteca
UNAM, was digitalized by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Claudia Garay, and the author in 2009 as part of
the Cinema and Revolution Project, backed by the Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (Imcine).
For a more detailed analysis, see David M. J. Wood, “Revolución, compilación, conmemoración:
Salvador Toscano y la construcción de caminos en el México posrevolucionario,” in Reyes and
Wood, Cine mudo latinoamericano, 87–108; Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, ed., Fragmentos: Narración
cinematográfica compilada y arreglada por Salvador Toscano Barragán, 1900–1930 (Mexico City
and Guadalajara: Conaculta, Imcine, Universidad de Guadalajara, 2010).
59. I am grateful to Gregorio Rocha for pointing this out to me. In his television documentary on the
Toscano archive, Rocha argues persuasively that it must have been the writer Carmen Toscano,
and not the filmmaker Salvador Toscano, who attached the film frames to the index cards as she
organized her father’s archive during the 1940s; Toscanito: coleccionista de historias (Mexico City:
Canal 22, 2010).
60. The soundtrack is printed on only very few positives; most of the sound prints have a blank space
for the soundtrack.
61. As part of this task, Carmen Toscano arranged, first at Paramount Pictures in Los Angeles and sub-
sequently at the Cinematografía Latinoamericana studios in Mexico City, for a selection of footage
to be stretched from silent speed to twenty-four frames per second in order to accommodate the
contemporary sound format.
62. Carmen Toscano, Secretaría de Educación Pública, undated draft, file 1, box 26, AHC; Carmen
Toscano to Silvio Zavala, 22 January 1948, file 1, box 26, AHC.
63. Los últimos veinte años de México: De Porfirio Díaz a Venustiano Carranza, script, file 18, box 11, AHC;
Miquel, Salvador Toscano, 79. I am grateful to Ángel Miquel for showing me a copy of this script.
64. Arthur Elton, “The Film as Source Material for History,” ASLIB Proceedings 7, no. 4 (1955): 207–39,
207.
65. Jussi Parikka, “Afterword: Cultural Techniques and Media Studies,” Theory, Culture and Society 30,
no. 6 (2013): 147–59.
66. Ángel Miquel, “Las historias completas de la revolución de Salvador Toscano,”in Fragmentos, 23–37.
67. Los últimos treinta años, cards 374–77.
68. Los últimos treinta años, cards 280, 319, 346, and 457, respectively.
69. See Ilene V. O’Malley, The Myth of the Revolution: Hero Cults and the Institutionalization of the Mexi-
can State, 1920–1940 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986); and Thomas Benjamin, La Revolución:
Mexico’s Great Revolution as Memory, Myth, and History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000).
70. John Mraz, Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2009).

55
71. Elsewhere Mraz links such a style with the work of ninteenth-century historian Thomas Carlyle, who
applies a similar logic to events such as the French Revolution.
72. Los últimos treinta años, cards 124, 312, and 323, respectively.
73. As Robert Nelson and Margaret Olin point out, “the term monumentality suggests qualities of
inertness, opacity, permanence, remoteness, distance, preciosity, and grandeur. Yet monuments are
prized precisely because . . . they are also living, immediate, and accessible”; Robert S. Nelson and
Margaret Olin, eds., Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003), 3.
74. Los últimos treinta años, card 139.
75. English translation taken from the English-language release version of Memorias de un mexicano.
76. Vsevolod Pudovkin, “The Global Film,” Hollywood Quarterly 2, no. 4 (1947): 327–32. Carmen Toscano
was clearly conversant with practical and theoretical debates on Soviet montage: in her father’s
biography she claimed that his style of visual narration in his 1911 film La toma de Ciudad Juárez
y el viaje del héroe de la Revolución D. Francisco I. Madero (The Capture of Ciudad Juárez and the
Journey of the Hero of the Revolution Francisco I. Madero) made him a forerunner of Pudovkin’s
theory of montage; see Carmen Toscano, Memorias de un mexicano (Mexico City: Fundación
Carmen Toscano, 1993), 106.
77. Some years later, Jay Leyda would draw on Pudovkin’s notion of the “global film” in describing the
characteristics of what he called the “compilation film”; Films Beget Films, 65–67.
78. John Grierson, “The Course of Realism” [1937], in Forsyth Hardy, ed., Grierson on Documentary
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 199–211.
79. Grierson, “The Course of Realism,” 202.
80. Bill Nichols, “Remaking History: Jay Leyda and the Compilation Film,” Film History 26, no. 4 (2014):
146–56.
81. Rick A. López, Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, and the State after the Revolution (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
82. Ibid., 18.
83. Ibid.,134.
84. Miquel, Salvador Toscano, 67–94.
85. Ibid., 86.
86. Thomas Benjamin describes this as the “reification” of the Mexican Revolution: a tendency in polit-
ical discourse that dates back to the early years of the armed conflict itself; La Revolución: Mexico’s
Great Revolution as Memory, Myth, and History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000). Toscano
was, though, not necessarily a fervent believer in the discourses with which he framed his compi-
lations; Miquel notes that he was “an eminently pragmatic man, dedicated to his business interests
and lacking clearly defined political convictions”; Miquel, Salvador Toscano, 83.
87. On Mexican nonfiction film during the 1920s, see Reyes, Cine y sociedad, vol. 2.
88. See the definition of monumentality by Nelson and Olin cited in n73 above. For further discussion
of cinematic monumentality in Memorias de un mexicano, see my article “Raiding the Archive:
Documentary Appropriations of Mexican Revolution Footage,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video
28, no. 4 (2011): 275–91.

56
David M. J. Wood is a researcher at the Institute for Aesthetic Research at the

National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and has published widely
on Latin American documentary and experimental cinema. He is the author
of a monograph on the Bolivian filmmaker Jorge Sanjinés (forthcoming) and a
member of the editorial board of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.
He holds a PhD in Latin American cultural studies from King’s College London.

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DAVID M. J.

The Compilation Film of the Mexican Revolution:

ABSTRACT: This article contextualizes the Mexican revolutionary and postrevolutionary

KEYWORDS: Mexican cinema, compilation ﬁlm, documentary ﬁlm, Salvador Toscano,

nearest the Mexicans seem to have come to filming reality is the

Apparently written on the basis of the smattering of Latin American cinema

DAVID M. J. WO OD | THE COMPIL ATION FILM OF THE ME XICAN REVOLUTION

content to be mere records or documents,” drawing substantially on Soviet

FIL M HISTORY | VOLUME 29.1

documentary film for (respectively) “public enlightenment” or for the “devel-

DAVID M. J. WO OD | THE COMPIL ATION FILM OF THE ME XICAN REVOLUTION

FIL M HISTORY | VOLUME 29.1

less) chronologically ordered programs of discrete, sequential views covering a

DAVID M. J. WO OD | THE COMPIL ATION FILM OF THE ME XICAN REVOLUTION

• Emiliano Zapata’s battles in the state of Morelos in 1914 and

Most of the events portrayed in these feature-length compilation programs

FIL M HISTORY | VOLUME 29.1

DAVID M. J. WO OD | THE COMPIL ATION FILM OF THE ME XICAN REVOLUTION

commemoration and monumentalization of recent national history merged

FIL M HISTORY | VOLUME 29.1

of General Villa (1914),39 in line with a broader tendency in American newsreels

DAVID M. J. WO OD | THE COMPIL ATION FILM OF THE ME XICAN REVOLUTION

FIL M HISTORY | VOLUME 29.1

DAVID M. J. WO OD | THE COMPIL ATION FILM OF THE ME XICAN REVOLUTION

FIL M HISTORY | VOLUME 29.1

DAVID M. J. WO OD | THE COMPIL ATION FILM OF THE ME XICAN REVOLUTION

monumental midcentury compilation Memorias de un mexicano. Miquel has

FIL M HISTORY | VOLUME 29.1

DAVID M. J. WO OD | THE COMPIL ATION FILM OF THE ME XICAN REVOLUTION

FIL M HISTORY | VOLUME 29.1

DAVID M. J. WO OD | THE COMPIL ATION FILM OF THE ME XICAN REVOLUTION

FIL M HISTORY | VOLUME 29.1

political logic of postrevolutionary Mexico. These compilations functioned less

DAVID M. J. WO OD | THE COMPIL ATION FILM OF THE ME XICAN REVOLUTION

FIL M HISTORY | VOLUME 29.1

DAVID M. J. WO OD | THE COMPIL ATION FILM OF THE ME XICAN REVOLUTION

26. El Universal, May 31, 1928, sec. 1, 8.

FIL M HISTORY | VOLUME 29.1

DAVID M. J. WO OD | THE COMPIL ATION FILM OF THE ME XICAN REVOLUTION

FIL M HISTORY | VOLUME 29.1

DAVID M. J. WO OD | THE COMPIL ATION FILM OF THE ME XICAN REVOLUTION

David M. J. Wood is a researcher at the Institute for Aesthetic Research at the

FIL M HISTORY | VOLUME 29.1

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