Watch the 1896 Movie The Pistol Duel, a Startling Re-Creation of the Final Days of Pistol Dueling in Mexico

One some­instances hears lament­ed the ten­den­cy of films to depict Mex­i­co — and in par­tic­u­lar, its cap­i­tal Mex­i­co Metropolis — as a menace­en­ing, rough-and-tum­ble place the place human life has no val­ue. Such con­cerns change into close to­ly as outdated as cin­e­ma itself, hav­ing first been raised in response to a tough­ly thir­ty-sec­ond-long movie referred to as Duel au pis­to­let from 1896. The French title owes to its hav­ing a French direc­tor: Gabriel Veyre, a con­tem­po­rary of the cin­e­ma-pio­neer­ing Lumière broth­ers who first left France for Latin Amer­i­ca as a way to display their ear­ly movies there.

On his trav­els, Veyre each exhib­it­ed Lumière movies and made his personal. “Between 1896 and 1897, he direct­ed and professional­duced 35 movies in Mex­i­co,” writes Jared Wheel­er at Moviego­ings. “Lots of these movies fea­ture the Mex­i­can pres­i­dent Por­firio Díaz in dai­ly activ­i­ties.” The motion cap­tured in Duel au pis­to­let is “most prob­a­bly a recre­ation of a well-known duel that had tak­en place in Sep­tem­ber 1894, between Colonel Fran­cis­co Romero and Jose Verástegui, the submit­mas­ter gen­er­al.” Plainly Romero had over­heard Verástegui accus­ing him of not solely sleep­ing with a mutu­al good friend’s spouse, but additionally of hav­ing pulled strings to get that very same good friend a submit within the gov­ern­ment.

His hon­or insult­ed, Romero demand­ed that Verástegui set­tle the mat­ter with pis­tols in Cha­pul­te­pec Park. By that point, duel­ing was a tech­ni­cal­ly ille­gal however still-com­mon prac­tice, one “gov­erned by a com­plex sys­tem of social norms that have been, for some, a supply of nation­al pleasure as an indication of Mexico’s moder­ni­ty, and of its kin­ship with oth­er Euro­pean nations like France.” But when a duel have been to be re-cre­at­ed and screened on movie out of its cul­tur­al con­textual content, “would oth­er nations rec­og­nize it as an hon­or­ready, dig­ni­fied rit­u­al, or sim­ply see it as an indication that each­day life in Mex­i­co was char­ac­ter­ized by vio­lence and bar­barism?”

What nonetheless impress­es about Duel au pis­to­let (a col­orized ver­sion of which seems above), close to­ly 130 years after its debut, is much less the impres­sion it provides of Mex­i­co than its star­tling actual­ism, which has giv­en even some mod­ern-day view­ers rea­son to gained­der whether or not it’s actual­ly a re-enact­ment. Many “have com­ment­ed on the nat­u­ral­ism of the duelist’s dying,” Wheel­er writes, “one of many first to be depict­ed on display and really a lot in con­trast to the melo­dra­mat­ic type that was extra typ­i­cal of this time.” In actual life, it was Verástegui who misplaced, and Romero’s sub­se­quent tri­al and impris­on­ment meant that Mex­i­co’s days of duel­ing have been properly and tru­ly num­bered — however the his­to­ry of onscreen vio­lence had solely simply begun.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Final Duel Took Place in France in 1967, and It’s Caught on Movie

Based mostly in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His initiatives embrace the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the ebook The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Cen­­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­ebook.