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

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

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.