The Colonial Past in the Postcolonial Present: Eddie Romero's "Cavalry Command"

In late 1963, Cavalry Command, a fictional filmic account of the U.S. Army's successful pacification of a Philippine village during the Philippine-American War, beamed across movie screens in the United States. Made through the interdependent efforts of an American film studio, a Filipino director and crew, and a cast of both American and Filipino performers, Cavalry Command was one of many co-produced films made in this decade. This essay examines Cavalry Command in relation to other contemporaneous accounts of the American colonial period, considering its distinct accounting of this history as a function of the production process itself and the subjectivities of its director, Eddie Romero