Pancho Villa, leader of the Mexican Revolution and Hollywood movie star

The Vietnam conflict has been called the first television war, beaming visions of battlefield carnage directly into America’s living rooms. But the first cinematic war likely was the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920, a multiphased, internecine conflict that left at least 1 million people dead. And its biggest “star” was Pancho Villa, the daring, strategically brilliant leader of the guerrilla army that helped seize control of the country’s northern and border territories for the rebels.

The curious symbiosis between the former outlaw-turned-commander and the fledgling U.S. film industry lies at the center of Gregorio Rocha’s unconventional, first-person documentary “The Lost Reels of Pancho Villa.” The 49-minute film will be screened Monday at REDCAT, along with “La vengaza de Pancho Villa” (The Vengeance of Pancho Villa), a black-and-white quasi-documentary made in the 1930s by Edmundo and Felix Padilla, a father-son team of Mexican filmmaker-exhibitors.

A riveting, ironically humorous diary of Rocha’s quixotic quest to track down some long-orphaned footage of Villa’s exploits, “Lost Reels” also plays as a kind of cultural detective mystery. At another level, it’s an insightful meditation on the relation among politics, the mass media and the fabrication of public figures’ popular identities.

It’s well-known among film scholars that Villa, a media-savvy man of no small self-regard, contracted with a U.S. studio, the Mutual Film Co., to shoot parts of his actual battles with Mexican federal troops for a silent feature film, “The Life of General Villa.” By that point, Villa already had captivated U.S. audiences; he was depicted in American newsreels as an audaciously aggressive tactician and Robin Hood figure, stealing from landed barons to give to the poor.

Evidence indicates that the film company even supplied Villa and some of his men with snazzy military uniforms to replace their rag-tag duds and required him to launch attacks only during the day because night-time combat was hard to film. (In “Lost Reels” a Mexican historian refutes this latter claim.)

These initially heroic images reflected and, to a degree, shaped official U.S. foreign policy toward Villa and his rebel compatriots in their uprising against the despotic Porfirio Diaz regime.

“It’s very interesting to see how Washington and Hollywood went together,” Rocha said, speaking by phone from his Mexico City office. “Hollywood interpreted what Washington wanted.”

During his research, combing through European and U.S. archives, Rocha uncovered a surprising number of other forgotten films depicting Villa and the conflict. While World War I raged far away in Europe, American audiences became transfixed with the blood bath taking place right across its southern border. “I think it was the proximity to the United States that converted this into a media circus,” Rocha said.

Mixing documentary footage with staged scenes from Villa’s life (with actor Raoul Walsh playing the commander), “The Life of General Villa” was a curious hybrid of stage-managed reality and fictional melodrama. It was first screened at New York’s Lyric Theater in the spring of 1914. Villa reportedly used his studio payments to buy more military supplies.

Later in the war, Woodrow Wilson’s administration backed one of Villa’s rival commanders, and Villa launched an attack on Columbus, N.M. in 1916. The U.S. political-entertainment complex, as well as the public, promptly turned on him. Mutual went so far as to take some of its footage of Villa, mix it with new scenes starring Walsh, and release another film, “The Outlaw’s Revenge,” casting Villa as a rogue.

For decades afterward, one of cinema’s greatest mysteries was whatever became of “Life” and “Outlaw’s Revenge.” But until Rocha began his dogged archeological dig, little had come to light.

“Gregorio’s really the person who took those scraps and clues and pushed it further,” said film scholar Jesse Lerner, who curated REDCAT’s program with Steve Anker.

As depicted in “Lost Reels,” Rocha’s investigations ultimately led him to an archival vault at the University of Texas, El Paso, then to the home of the descendents of the Padilla family filmmakers. There, Rocha found a version of the movie now known as “La vengaza de Pancho Villa,” which the Padillas had cut and pasted together from bits of the two original silent films. Rocha helped facilitate a Library of Congress-backed restoration of that film.

Among its other achievements, “Lost Reels” underscores the enormous, unsettling volume of silent movies that have disappeared or been destroyed over time. When the sound-film era arrived, many were melted down to recover their valuable silver and other metals.

Yet even in this age of digital pixels and neo-3-D, the fascination with Villa continues. Johnny Depp and Salma Hayek reportedly have been cast to star in Emir Kusturica’s upcoming biopic about the Mexican revolutionary, titled “Wild Roses, Tender Roses.”

This continuing search for historical truth keeps the personalities and events of the past from turning into mere “frozen monuments,” Rocha said. “At the end, if you don’t share what you find, it is lost.”

reed.johnson@latimes.com