Abstract

WOOD, David M.J.. Memories of a Mexican: The Revolution as a Filmic Monument. Secuencia [online]. 2009, n.75, pp.145-170. ISSN 2395-8464.  https://doi.org/10.18234/secuencia.v0i75.1092.

Memorias de un mexicano (Carmen Toscano, 1950) is a feature­length documentary based on news­ reel footage from the archives of cinema pioneer Salvador Toscano. Early critics hailed it as a transparent, "modernizing" portrait of the country's recent past, but this article refutes this notion. It analyzes various sequences in detail to examine the aesthetic and historiographic implications of cinematographic "modernization" linked to a rather authoritarian narrative style: an analogous process to post­ revolutionary historiography that stated that the armed struggle ushered in progress towards an idealized present. The author compares the declaration of the movie as a "historic monument" in 1967 with a subsequent poetic reflection by Carmen Toscano that attributes a polysemic quality to the film and ends by proposing a subjective link between spectator and image.

Keywords : Memorias de un mexicano; Carmen Toscano; Salvador Toscano; cinema; silent movies; documentary cinema; newsreel; Mexican Revolution; archives; heritage.

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