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The Pastry War
Bombing of San Juan de Ulúa in 1838
Date November 27, 1838 - March 9, 1839 Location Mexico Result French victory
Belligerents
France	Mexico Supported by United Kingdom
Commanders and leaders
Charles Baudin	Antonio López de Santa Anna Guadalupe Victoria Mariano Arista
Strength
3,000	3,239
Casualties and losses
8 dead 60 wounded	224 dead or wounded

The Pastry War (Spanish: Guerra de los pasteles or Primera Intervención Francesa en México, "first French intervention in Mexico"; French: Guerre des Pâtisseries) was an invasion of Mexico by French forces in 1838.

Background[link]

History of Mexico
This article is part of a series
Pre-Columbian Mexico
Spanish conquest
Colonial period
War of Independence
First Empire
First Republic
War with Texas
Pastry War
Mexican–American War
Second Federal Republic
The Reform
Reform War
French intervention
Second Empire
Restored Republic
The Porfiriato
Revolution
La decena trágica
Plan of Guadalupe
Tampico Affair
Occupation of Veracruz
Cristero War
The Maximato
Petroleum nationalization
Mexican miracle
Students of 1968
La Década Perdida
1982 economic crisis
Zapatista Insurgency
1994 economic crisis
Downfall of the PRI
Mexican Drug War
Mexico Portal v t e

The war arose from the widespread civil disorder that plagued the early years of the Mexican republic. In 1828, President Manuel Gómez Pedraza ejected Lorenzo de Zavala from the office of governor of the state of México. Zavala, supported by Antonio López de Santa Anna, was able to rally most of the garrison in Mexico City (then a part of México state) to his aid. Four days of fighting in Mexico City resulted in Zavala winning and installing a new president, Vicente Guerrero. The fighting in the streets destroyed a great deal of personal property. The average citizen had little recourse for damages suffered. They had no consuls, or representatives to speak on their behalf. Foreigners whose property was damaged or destroyed by rioters or bandits were usually unable to obtain compensation from the government, and began to appeal to their own governments for help. Despite the repeated French claims, the French government let the matter subside.

War[link]

In 1838 a French pastry cook, Remontel, claimed that his shop in the Tacubaya district of Mexico City had been ruined by looting Mexican officers in 1828. He appealed to France's King Louis-Philippe (1773–1850). Coming to its citizen's aid, France demanded 600,000 pesos in damages. This amount was extremely high when compared to an average workman's daily pay, which was about one peso. In addition to this amount, Mexico had defaulted on millions of dollars worth of loans from France. Diplomat Baron Deffaudis gave Mexico an ultimatum to pay, or the French would demand satisfaction. When the payment was not forthcoming from president Anastasio Bustamante (1780–1853), the king sent a fleet under Rear Admiral Charles Baudin to declare a blockade of all Mexican ports from Yucatán to the Rio Grande, to bombard the Mexican fortress of San Juan de Ulúa, and to seize the port of Veracruz. Virtually the entire Mexican Navy was captured at Veracruz by December 1838. Mexico declared war on France.

With trade cut off, the Mexicans began smuggling imports into Corpus Christi, Texas, and then into Mexico. Fearing that France would blockade Texan ports as well, a battalion of men of the Republic of Texas force began patrolling Corpus Christi Bay to stop Mexican smugglers. One smuggling party abandoned their cargo of about a hundred barrels of flour on the beach at the mouth of the bay, thus giving Flour Bluff its name. The United States, ever watchful of its relations with Mexico, sent the schooner Woodbury to help the French in their blockade. Talks between the French Kingdom and the Texan nation occurred and France agreed not to offend the soil or waters of the Republic of Texas.

The battle celebrated as Cinco de Mayo, occasionally mistaken as taking place in this war, was connected with a later (1862) invasion of Mexico orchestrated by Napoleon III.

Santa Anna's role[link]

Meanwhile, acting without explicit government authority, Santa Anna came out of retirement from his hacienda near Xalapa and surveyed Veracruz. He asked the government to use his services, and he was immediately ordered to fight the French by any means necessary. He led Mexican forces against the French and in a skirmish with the rear guard of the French, Santa Anna was wounded in the leg by French grapeshot. His leg had to be amputated. Exploiting his wounds with eloquent propaganda, Santa Anna catapulted back to power.

End[link]

With the diplomatic intervention of Great Britain, eventually President Bustamante promised to pay the 600,000 pesos and the French forces withdrew on 9 March 1839.

See also[link]

• History of Mexico
• List of wars involving Mexico

References[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Pastry War

• Nofi, Albert A.; The Alamo and the Texas War for Independence; Da Capo Press; ISBN 0-306-80563-4
• Warner, Michael S.; Consise Encyclopedia of Mexico; Fitzroy Dearborn.
• Marley, David; Wars of the Americas: a chronology of armed conflict in the New World, 1492 to the present

Eli Clare is a writer, speaker, activist, and teacher in Vermont who addresses disability, gender and sexuality in his work. He has cerebral palsy and identifies as a trans man. He has a B.A. in Women's Studies from Mills College and a M.F.A. from Goddard College. He is the author of two books, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (South End Press, 1999, 2009) and The Marrow's Telling: Words in Motion (Homofactus Press, 2007), a collection of poetry.^[1]

Clare has received several awards for his work such as the Creating Change Award from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and LGBT Artist of the Year from Michigan Pride, and frequently speaks at conferences and other events.

Notes[link]

1. ^ [1]

External links[link]

• Official Site
• Interview with Kim Rice at the 217

This article about an American writer is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

D. A. Pennebaker
Pennebaker in New York City in February 2007.
Born	Donn Alan Pennebaker (1925-07-15) July 15, 1925 (age 86) Evanston, Illinois, United States
Occupation	Documentarian, author
Years active	1960s—present
Spouse	Chris Hegedus
Website
http://www.phfilms.com/

Donn Alan Pennebaker (born July 15, 1925) is an American documentary filmmaker and one of the pioneers of Direct Cinema/Cinéma vérité. Performing arts and politics are his primary subjects.

Biography[link]

Pennebaker (known as "Penny" to his friends) was born in Evanston, Illinois, the son of Lucille Levick (née Deemer) and John Paul Pennebaker, who was a commercial photographer.^[1] Pennebaker served in the Navy and later worked as an engineer, founding Electronics Engineering (the makers of the first computerized airline reservation system) before beginning his film career.^[2]

After falling under the influence of experimental filmmaker Francis Thompson, Pennebaker directed his first film, Daybreak Express, in 1953. Set to a classic Duke Ellington recording of the same name, the five-minute short of the soon-to-be-demolished Third Avenue elevated subway station in New York City is the earliest known example of Pennebaker's penchant for blending together documentary and experimental filmmaking techniques.^[3]

In 1959, Pennebaker joined the equipment sharing Filmakers' [sic] Co-op and co-founded Drew Associates with Richard Leacock and former LIFE magazine editor and correspondent Robert Drew. A crucial moment in the development of Direct Cinema, the collective produced documentary films for clients like ABC News (for their television series, Close-up) and Time-Life Broadcast (for their syndicated television series, Living Camera). Their first major film, Primary (1960), documented John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey's respective campaigns in the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic Primary election. Drew, Leacock and Pennebaker, as well as photographers Albert Maysles, Terrence McCartney Filgate and Bill Knoll, all filmed the campaigning from dawn to midnight over the course of five days. Widely considered to be the first candid and comprehensive look at the day-by-day events of a Presidential race, it was the first film in which the sync sound camera could move freely with characters throughout a breaking story, a major technical achievement that laid the groundwork for modern-day documentary filmmaking. It would later be selected as an historic American film for inclusion in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry in 1990.^[4]

Drew Associates would produce nine more documentaries for Living Camera, including Crisis, which chronicled President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy's conflict with governor George Wallace over school desegregation. Then in 1963, Pennebaker and Leacock left the organization to form their own production firm, Leacock-Pennebaker, Inc. Pennebaker would direct a number of short films over the course of two years. One of them was a rare recording of jazz vocalist Dave Lambert, as he formed a new quintet with singers such as David Lucas, and auditioned for RCA. The audition was not successful, and Lambert died suddenly in a car accident shortly thereafter, leaving Pennebaker's film as one of the few visual recordings of the singer, and the only recording of the songs in those rehearsals. The documentary got attention in Europe,^[5][6] and a few weeks later, Bob Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman, approached Pennebaker about filming Dylan while he was touring in England.^[7]

The resulting work, Dont Look Back (sic) became a landmark in both film and rock history, "evoking the '60s like few other documents," according to film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum.^[8] The opening sequence alone (set to Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" with Dylan standing in an alleyway, dropping cardboard flash cards) became a precursor to modern music videos.^[3] It would later be included in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry in 1998, and it was later ranked at #6 on Time Out magazine's list of the 50 best documentaries of all time.^[9]

Pennebaker would also film Dylan's subsequent tour of England in 1966, but while some of this work has been released in different forms (supplying the framework for Martin Scorsese's Bob Dylan documentary, No Direction Home, and re-edited by Dylan himself in the rarely-distributed Eat the Document), Pennebaker's own film of the tour (Something Is Happening) remains unreleased. Nevertheless, the tour itself has become one of the most celebrated events in rock history, and some of the Nagra recordings made for Pennebaker's film were later released on Dylan's own records.

The same year Dont Look Back was released in theaters, Pennebaker worked with author Norman Mailer on the first of many film collaborations. He was also hired to film the Monterey Pop Festival, which is now regarded as an important event in rock history on par with 1969's Woodstock Festival. Pennebaker produced a number of films from the event, capturing breakthrough performances from The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Otis Redding and Janis Joplin that remain seminal documents in rock history. The first of these films, Monterey Pop, was released in 1968 and was later ranked at #42 on Time Out magazine's list of the 50 best documentaries of all time.^[10] Other performers like Jefferson Airplane and The Who also received major exposure from Pennebaker's work.^[2]

Pennebaker continued to film some of the era's most influential rock artists, including John Lennon (whom he first met while filming Dylan in England), Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and most notably David Bowie during his famous "farewell" concert in 1973. He also collaborated with Jean-Luc Godard in 1968 on a film that he eventually finished by himself and released several years later as One PM.

Pennebaker's film company was also a notable distributor of foreign films, including Godard's La Chinoise (the American opening of which became the context for One PM), but the endeavor was ultimately a short-lived and costly business venture. Then around 1976, Pennebaker met experimental filmmaker turned documentarian Chris Hegedus. The two soon became collaborators and then married in 1982.^[3]

In 1988, Pennebaker, Hegedus and David Dawkins followed Depeche Mode at the height of the band's career as they toured the U.S. in support of Music for the Masses, their commercial breakthrough in America. The resulting film, 101, was released the following year.

The National at BAM during the webcast directed by Pennebaker and Hegedus

In 1992, during the start of the Democratic primaries, Pennebaker and Hegedus approached campaign officials for Arkansas governor Bill Clinton about filming his presidential run. They were granted limited access to the candidate but allowed to focus on lead strategist James Carville and communications director George Stephanopoulos. The resulting work, The War Room, became one of their most celebrated films, winning the award for Best Documentary from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures and earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature.

Pennebaker and Hegedus continue to produce a large number of documentary films through their company, Pennebaker Hegedus Films, most notably Moon Over Broadway (1998), Down from the Mountain (2001), Startup.com (2001), Elaine Stritch: At Liberty (2004) , Al Franken: God Spoke (2006), and Kings of Pastry (2009).

In May 2010, they directed their first live show when they directed a YouTube webcast of the National performing a benefit show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.^[11] That same year Kings of Pastry opened at multiple film festivals, including IDFA, Sheffield Doc/Fest, DOX BOX, the Berlin International Film Festival and Hot Docs, before premiering in New York City.

Process and style[link]

Pennebaker's films, usually shot with a hand-held camera, often eschew voice-over narration and interviews in favor of a "simple" portrayal of events typical of the direct cinema style Pennebaker helped popularize in the U.S. Of such an approach, Pennebaker told interviewer G. Roy Levin published in 1971 that "it's possible to go to a situation and simply film what you see there, what happens there, what goes on, and let everybody decide whether it tells them about any of these things. But you don't have to label them, you don't have to have the narration to instruct you so you can be sure and understand that it's good for you to learn." In that same interview with Levin, Pennebaker goes so far as to claim that Dont Look Back is "not a documentary at all by my standards." He instead repeatedly asserts that he does not make documentaries, but "records of moments," "half soap operas," and "semimusical reality things."

An accomplished engineer, Pennebaker developed one of the first fully portable, synchronized 16mm camera and sound recording systems which revolutionized modern filmmaking.^[12] His aesthetic and technical breakthroughs have also had a major influence on narrative filmmaking, influencing such realist masterworks as Barbara Loden's Wanda, which was filmed and edited by one of Pennebaker's proteges, Nicholas Proferes,^[13] and even popular satires such as Tim Robbins' Bob Roberts.

Filmography[link]

• Daybreak Express (1953)
• Baby (1954)
• Opening In Moscow (1959)
• Breaking It Up at the Museum (1960)
• Anatomy of Cindy Fink (1960)
• Primary (1960)
• Happy Mother’s Day (1963)
• Jingle Bells (1964) with Robert F. Kennedy
• Campaign Manager (1964)
• You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You (1964)
• Lambert & Co., or "Audition at RCA" (1964)^[5][6]
• A Stravinsky Portrait (1965) with Igor Stravinsky
• Dont Look Back (1967, filmed 1965) with Bob Dylan
• Something Is Happening (unreleased, filmed 1966) with Bob Dylan
• Eat the Document (limited release, filmed 1966) with Bob Dylan
• Monterey Pop (1968, filmed 1967)
• Chiefs (1968)
• Hickory Hill (1968) with George Plimpton and Art Buchwald
• Rainforest (1968)
• Sweet Toronto (1971, filmed 1969) with The Plastic Ono Band
• Alice Cooper (1970)
• Queen of Apollo (1970)
• 1 PM (1971)
• Company: Original Cast Album (1971) with Stephen Sondheim
• Keep On Rockin' (1969) - a film involving Little Richard
• Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1973) with David Bowie
• The Energy War (1978)
• Town Bloody Hall (1979)
• DeLorean (1981) with John DeLorean
• Jimi Plays Monterey (1986) with Jimi Hendrix
• 101 (1989) with Depeche Mode
• The War Room (1993)
• Woodstock Diary (1994)
• Keine Zeit (1996) with German artist Marius Müller-Westernhagen
• Victoria Williams - Happy Come Home (1997) with singer Victoria Williams
• Moon Over Broadway (1997)
• Bessie (1998)
• Down from the Mountain (2000)
• Startup.com (2001)
• Elaine Stritch: At Liberty (2004) Emmy-winning portrait of Elaine Stritch
• Only the Strong Survive (2003)
• Al Franken: God Spoke (2006) as executive producer
• Rock N Roll Music - a film involving Chuck Berry
• 65 Revisited (2007) - a one-hour documentary accompanying the new DVD release of Dont Look Back
• Kings of Pastry (2009)

Further reading[link]

• Aitken, Ian ed. Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film. Routledge (2005)
• Dave Saunders, Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties, London, Wallflower Press 2007
• Pennebaker, D.A. "Interview with Donn Alan Pennebaker by G. Roy Levin." In Documentary Explorations: 15 Interviews with Film-makers, 221-70. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971.
• Jeanne Hall. "Don't You Ever Just Watch?: American Cinema Verite and Don't Look Back." In Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, 223-37. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1998.

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: D. A. Pennebaker

• D. A. Pennebaker at the Internet Movie Database
• Pennebaker Hegedus Films
• Q&A with D. A. Pennebaker, 2007
• English language podcast interview with D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus
• D.A. Pennebaker, Robert Drew, Hope Ryden and James Lipscomb discuss Mooney vs. Fowle and Richard Leacock