brochure for this event

CARMEN TOSCANO
SALVADOR TOSCANO
The Cinema Museum
London
27 March 2013
A National and Family Portrait
A unique compilation of early cinema, the documentary Memorias de un Mexicano shows authentic newsreel footage from the beginning of the 20th century filmed, and collected, by cinema pioneer
Salvador Toscano. The film was produced in 1950 by Toscano’s
daughter, Carmen who, during nearly ten years, selected and edited
material from her father’s archive. She converted the original 16 fps
speed into 24 fps adding sound, script and narration. The film was
exhibited at Cannes Festival in 1954 and declared Mexican Historical
Monument in 1967.
Memorias de un Mexicano depicts a crucial period of Mexican
history: the Revolution that took place between the 1910s and the
1920s. Through a voice over, an invisible narrator tells the story of his
family as well as that of the whole nation. Mexican life at the turn of
the century is shown through popular dances, religious ceremonies,
inaugurations of railways, and official commemorations of the independence centenary. The core of the film, however, is its selection of
the military and political actions that happened since the outbreak of
the Revolution and the fall of Dictator Porfirio Diaz in 1910.
Central to the film is cinema itself: the story begins with the arrival of the Cinématographe Lumière to Mexico City in 1897. Indeed it
was Salvador Toscano himself - a cinematographer and also an entrepreneur - who opened in the same year the first cinema of Mexico
City. The newsreel footage on which Memorias de un Mexicano is
based, shows us the features of early films: the single-shot views of
parades, processions and approaching trains typical of the so called
‘actualities’ coexist with fragments of edited sequences. Interestingly,
the factuality of the original footage and its re-edition in a documentary form, on the one hand, and the multiplicity of its ‘authors’ and of
their respective political aims, on the other, question the alleged
‘realism’ and ‘objectivity’ of early nonfiction films and of the documentary genre itself.
At the crossroad of information and propaganda, this film mixes
historical and individual memory and offers to the 21st century spectator an incredible visual testimony of the early history of Western cinema.
Maria Chiara D’Argenio
Department of Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies [SPLAS]
King’s College London
Strand
London WC2R 2LS
The Cinema Museum
2 Dugard Way
(off Renfrew Road)
London SE11 4TH
Tel.: +44 (0)20 7840 2200
Fax: +44 (0)20 7840 2299
info@cinemamuseum.org.uk
http://www.cinemamuseum.org.uk
Curated and introduced by Maria Chiara D’Argenio
With thanks and acknowledgment to:
Verónica Zárate Toscano, Raymundo Castellanos Juárez, David M.J. Wood,
Guadalupe Ferrer, Antonia Rojas Ávila, Gabriela Garcíadiego del Río,
Martin Humphries
Fundación Carmen Toscano (Mexico); Filmoteca de la Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México (Mexico DF); Department of Spanish, Portuguese & Latin
American Studies, King’s College London; Embajada de México en Reino Unido
Images: 1950 poster of Memorias de un mexicano (Courtesy of the Filmoteca UNAM, Mexico
DF), still from Memorias de un mexicano, portrait of Carmen Toscano, 1898 Mexican poster of
the Cinematograph Lumière, portrait of Salvador Toscano (Courtesy of the Fundación Carmen
Toscano, Mexico)
© Fundación Carmen Toscano
Brochure design: Luis Rebaza-Soraluz and Maria Chiara D’Argenio