A Few Things about Jay Leyda

Although, the main reason that we read Jay Leyda's article was to set up for "The Lost Reels of Pancho Villa," he made certain points, unrelated to the Mexican Revolution that are worth mentioning in a historiography class.

To be fair to Leyda, his article was not a historiogrpahical article, but rather an unscientific survey of documentary, compilation films made at the time, along with some thoughts about hypothetical films that could be made.

A problematic point made by Leyda is this:

"Both are reduced to the same anonymity, no credit or explanation is given for the 'quotations', as if 'one suddenly heard a playwright incorporate a few lines from T.S. Eliot or Tolstoy here and there as his own'" (131).

Aside from the fact that this sentence seems to contain an uncited quotation (the underlined part), or if not uncited, then at least put into quotation marks for ambiguous reasons, the use of Eliot as an example is surprising. Anyone who has taken a few college-level classes in poetry knows that Eliot incorporated various sources into his poetry and cited them as if they were his own! Of course, in an anthology, we see footnotes that name the sources, many printed versions of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Wasteland" make no mention of these appropriations.

That being said, of all the great literary figures to mention in the aforementioned line, why those two? Tolstoy from what I understand was not guilty of that kind of appropriation, but Eliot was. Was the line meant to be ironic? I doubt it, because the rest of the paragraph seems to be a harangue against all the Eliots in the compilation film world.

That being said, it appears that Leyda is setting a sort of double standard; one for fiction film and poetry and the other for 'true' compilation film. If you make no truth claims, you can appropriate as much as you want, but the moment that you make a truth claim you have to cite relentlessly and let the audience know what it is they are watching.

All of this being said, although this is obviously a historical fallacy and meant to be such, what would Leyda think of Rocha's "The Lost Reels of Pancho Villa." It seems that in many senses, Rocha followed the exact prescriptions of Leyda, but in others, especially in the way that he freely mixed documentary and fiction material, he did not. Although Leyda did note that he would have liked to show non-documentary materials to show prejudice, I doubt he would have gone as far as Rocha did it the ambiguities between documentary material and fictive (the staged battle would fit in this middle ground, but of course the argument can be extended to the fact that all film is fictive because of framing and a certain degree of staging), and properly fictitious material. I say this because from my point of view, especially during the montage sequences in the film, I was sometimes unsure of whether the material on screen was documentary or Hollywood. However, in watching the film, I almost wanted Rocha to go ahead and fulfill Leyda's project instead of making the film that he had actually made!

Roman Pazuniak