Ways to remember the war: violence in photography and documentary film of the Mexican Revolution

Photography and documentary film had a leading role in the construction of the memory of the Mexican Revolution and the definition of the new national identity. This stage of construction and definition meant privileging and marginalizing certain images, while, thanks to their ambiguity or semantic weakness, they were reassigned meanings to others, with the purpose of forging a suitable Revolution, that is, a Revolution that corroborated the premises of nationalist rhetoric. This paper analyzes how this process of "editing" had repercussions in the representations of the violence of photography and documentary film, one of the most polemical aspects of the revolutionary movement to the extent that, besides chaos, shows incompatible cultural, political and social projects.