Spectacles of Violence and Politics: El automóvil gris (1919) and Revolutionary Mexico's Sensational Visual Culture

Abstract

One of the first box-office successes of Mexican cinema, the 1919 ‘El automóvil gris’ (dir. Enrique Rosas) fictionalized a case that exemplified a national crisis of political legitimacy – a series of robberies committed by the ‘Grey Automobile Gang’ with the complicity of military officials – using the narrative and visual conventions of French and North American crime film. Evoking cosmopolitan iconographies of crime cultivated in the police blotter, serial literature, and cinema, the film casts criminality as a thrilling and threatening sign of local urban modernity, glossing over the problem of corruption by distorting real-life events. Capitalizing on cinema's claims to topicality and authenticity, even as it extends the use of visual reproduction technologies as a means of social control, ‘El automóvil gris’ exemplifies a sensationalistic visual culture fueled by the dissemination of photochemical images and the expansion of the popular press. By incorporating ostensibly unstaged footage of the real criminals' execution into its fictionalization of the case, ‘El automóvil gris’ throws into relief the political uses of the cinematic image's reality effects. The film foregrounds visual reproduction technologies' role in registering the violent costs of industrialization, urbanization, and civil war, processes that defined the contested trajectory of modernization in early twentieth-century Mexico.