Barbarous Mexico

H. Hood’s Barbarous Mexico detonates the 1910–11 Mexican Revolution into a chiaroscuro fever dream: bandoliered guerrillas melt out of agave fields like mythic centaurs; federal artillery chews up cathedral stone while campesinos daub Zapata’s slogan in ox-blood on shattered arcades; a barefoot soldadera, eyes fierce as obsidian blades, exchanges her wedding ribbon for a rifle, her arc from kitchen hearth to front-line strategist charted in trembling hand-cranked close-ups that feel half-newsreel, half-exorcism. Between the first shot of a hacienda burning like a paper lantern and the last, where a locomotive piled with corpses hisses toward an unknowable future, Hood stitches together battle reenactments staged at actual rail depots and smoky cantinas, intercutting portraits of peasant widows whose gazes refuse to flinch. The film’s grammar alternates between tableau vivant and propulsive chase: riders silhouetted against Popocatépetl at dusk, then a smash-cut to grainy footage of Madero’s caravan winding through jubilant, dust-choked throngs. Brass bands collapse into silence; revolution becomes cinema, cinema becomes revolution—both hungry, both unfinished.