The Romance of New Mexico

Page 1 2 3 4 5 Moviemakers fell prey to the intoxicating charms of New Mexico from the dawn of film history. A scant two years after the first public showings of motion pictures in Paris and New York, filmmakers were in New Mexico Territory cranking their cameras at the heart-thumping natural splendors, framing in their viewfinders the dazzling array of exotic native cultures. They came, they saw and they imprinted the object of their wide-eyed wonder on strips of celluloid.

From the beginning, the relationship took on the character of a love affair between artists with "the cinema eye" and the landscape - a landscape that was not only extravagantly beautiful, but also gloriously alive with an ageless people. Filmmakers embraced their newfound subject with youthful enthusiasm, catching the mountains, the desert stretches, the wide skies - catching, mostly, the light. The land responded with pyrotechnic displays: colossal processions of clouds, mighty storms, ravishing hues, long expanses of snow, wide mountain meadows, a sacred stillness. It was the start of a love affair that has been going on for a hundred years.

The roster of early filmmakers who uncovered their lenses on New Mexico is surprisingly long, considering how remote it was from the large centers of film activity, and remarkably distinguished. The list includes at least two bona fide geniuses of early cinema, a brilliant documentarian, film's first superstar, its foremost comedienne, a celebrated king of comedy and a world-famous movie cowboy.

In the 1890s New Mexico Territory was still "the Wild West." Eastern authors continued to depict it as the untamed backyard of the American republic where the law of the six-shooter reigned and the dregs of society created constant turmoil among serious settlers trying to tame the land. Photography, born half a century earlier, promoted the landscape and cultures of the West even further as Matthew Brady's photographs of the Civil War in the West and, later, Edward S. Curtis' ethnographic pictures of Native Americans were circulated widely.

Still, the American West was remote from the experience of most people. What was the West really like? Was it the Eden depicted in paintings and photographs? No one who had not been there knew for certain.

In 1898, all that would change. That year the infant medium of cinema arrived in New Mexico, intent on uncovering, capturing and recording the true West. It would do that - and in the process, it would create new Western myths of its own.