One sometimes hears lamented the tendency of movies to depict Mexico — and in particular, its capital Mexico City — as a threatening, rough-and-tumble place where human life has no value. Such concerns turn out to be nearly as old as cinema itself, having first been raised in response to a roughly thirty-second-long film called 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 in order to screen their early films there.
On his travels, Veyre both exhibited Lumière films and made his own. “Between 1896 and 1897, he directed and produced 35 films in Mexico,” writes Jared Wheeler at Moviegoings. “Many of those films feature the Mexican president Porfirio Díaz in daily activities.” The action captured in Duel au pistolet is “most probably a recreation of a famous duel that had taken place in September 1894, between Colonel Francisco Romero and Jose Verástegui, the postmaster general.” It seems that Romero had overheard Verástegui accusing him of not only sleeping with a mutual friend’s wife, but also of having pulled strings to get that same friend a post in the government.
His honor insulted, Romero demanded that Verástegui settle the matter with pistols in Chapultepec Park. By that time, dueling was a technically illegal but still-common practice, one “governed by a complex system of social norms that were, for some, a source of national pride as a sign of Mexico’s modernity, and of its kinship with other European nations like France.” But if a duel were to be re-created and screened on film out of its cultural context, “would other nations recognize it as an honorable, dignified ritual, or simply see it as a sign that everyday life in Mexico was characterized by violence and barbarism?”
What still impresses about Duel au pistolet (a colorized version of which appears above), nearly 130 years after its debut, is less the impression it gives of Mexico than its startling realism, which has given even some modern-day viewers reason to wonder whether it’s really a re-enactment. Many “have commented on the naturalism of the duelist’s death,” Wheeler writes, “one of the first to be depicted on screen and very much in contrast to the melodramatic style that was more typical of this time.” In real life, it was Verástegui who lost, and Romero’s subsequent trial and imprisonment meant that Mexico’s days of dueling were well and truly numbered — but the history of onscreen violence had only just begun.
Related content:
The Last Duel Took Place in France in 1967, and It’s Caught on Film
Drunk History: An Intoxicated Look at the Famous Alexander Hamilton-Aaron Burr Duel
Watch a Witty, Gritty, Hardboiled Retelling of the Famous Aaron Burr-Alexander Hamilton Duel
Watch the Film That Invented Cinema: Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895)
Dueling as a Film Trope: Pretty Much Pop #109 Considers The Last Duel and Its Genre
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
