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.