Faction Function

When Pancho Villa crossed the line into Columbus, New Mexico in 1916, the United States army, led by General Pershing, crossed back over the border in a Punative Expedition. Villa was not captured. Was not killed. Yet. Villa knew the intricacies of the Northern mountains. All of the "American" Southwest is/was part of Mexico's Northern Territories. Exploring Sunset Heights in El Paso reveals that Villa also knew the landscape under the earth's surface: the art of the tunnel. This line could also take the shape of a burrowing channel, a labyrinth. Mapping requires vertical lines as well as horizontal ones...like the best of film editing demands. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the notion of vertical montage came to Sergei Eisenstein when he was making his unfinished Mexico film in the 1930s. (November 15, 2017)