Docudrama for the emerging post-war order: Documentary film, internationalism and indigenous subjects in 1950s Mexico1

Abstract

This article focuses on the productive tensions between the competing ideological discourses of post-war internationalism, Mexican post-revolutionary nationalism and local indigenous representational paradigms in the activities of the film unit of the UNESCO-sponsored adult education centre (CREFAL) in the town of Pátzcuaro, Mexico in the 1950s, which combined village screenings of educational, promotional and informative movies from the world over, with the local production of pedagogical documentary shorts by non-professional filmmakers from across Latin America. Inspired by the work of British documentarian Paul Rotha, whose United Nation picture World Without End (Mexico/Thailand/United Kingdom, 1953, codirected with Basil Wright) was partly filmed at CREFAL, these films frequently resorted to a docudrama format that enabled amateur documentary filmmakers to engage with the agendas of their indigenous subjects even as they subordinated them to the United Nation’s call to hygiene, progress and civic values. In doing so, they responded creatively to appeals by theorists such as Kracauer and Grierson for a critical realist cinema. They also acted as a link between the so-called ‘classical’ pre-war documentary movements in the United Kingdom, North America and elsewhere, and the later, socially committed new cinemas.