Filming Pancho Villa: How Hollywood Shaped the Mexican Revolution

by Margarita de Orellana, Kevin Brownlow (Foreword), John King (Translator)

On January 3, 1914, Pancho Villa became Hollywood’s first Mexican superstar. In signing an exclusive movie contract, Villa agreed to keep other film companies from his battlefield, to fight in daylight wherever possible, and to reconstruct battles if the footage needed reshooting.

Through memoir and newspaper reports, Margarita De Orellana looks at the documentary film-makers who went down to cover events in Mexico. Feature film-makers in Hollywood portrayed the border as the dividing line between order and chaos, in the process developing a series of lasting Mexican stereotypes—the greaser, the bandit, the beautiful señorita, the exotic Aztec. Filming Pancho reveals how Mexico was constructed in the American imagination and how movies reinforced and justified both American expansionism and racial and social prejudice.

224 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2009

Reviews

[Matthew Wilcox]

A pretty cool history of the Mexican Revolution through the eyes of the Americans who went down south to film it. The most interesting part to me was how even after the US turned against Pancho Villa, the Mutual Film Corporation "never let up in their campaign to improve the image of their picturesque hero." It was also cool how de Orellana showed that documentary filmmaking has included a certain level of dishonesty since its inception. Documentarians could have aimed for more honest depictions, but that wouldn't have connected with audiences. It reminds me of something Adorno said in "Minima Moralia": “If the film were to give itself up to the blind representation of everyday life, following the precepts of, say, Zola, as would indeed be practicable with moving photography and sound-recording, the result would be a construction alien to the visual habits of the audience, diffuse, unarticulated outwards.” I sometimes feel like cinema made a serious misstep in the very beginning by making itself in the image of the theatre, and that misstep has never really been corrected. This book shows how that trumped-up, unambiguous storytelling ends up actually shaping our perception of the world.

That stuff at the end about how the US has always defined itself against Mexico and projected its insecurities across the border probably could have been fleshed out a little more, but maybe not--it's a pretty obvious observation.