Cine a contracorriente

Cine a contracorriente. [Experimental works by various filmmakers, 1933-2008]. Dur.: 166 min.

In Latin America, as elsewhere, experimental film keeps a low profile, at times due to its politics, at others its avant-garde impulse that locates it in what Pierre Bourdieu called a "sub-field of restricted production," those cultural spaces frequented by a relatively limited number of individuals of elevated "cultural capital" who reject the market in favor of artistic freedom. But in Latin America experimental film is a relatively expansive concept, encompassing a surrealist-inflected historical avant-garde, 1960s formal invention in the interest of political militancy, a Super-8 underground of the 1970s, and the contemporary proliferation enabled by video technologies. All of these moments are sampled in a DVD, recently released by Barcelona-based Cameo Media, containing nineteen film and video works made between 1933 and 2008. The release grew out of recent work by the Centre de Cultura Contempor�nia de Barcelona to restore and screen experimental works and provide space for new creativity.

Mention of the medium must be made, since many of the works' makers show great concern for the particular qualities of light as it passes through celluloid onto a screen. For that majority of viewers who will never have the chance to see them projected from film, these exceptionally well-transferred digital simulacra are the best option.

The first two selections on the disk are surrealism-inspired trance-films made by artists known for their work in other media. The Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola made the 138-second Traum (Sue�o) while studying at Bauhaus in the early 1930s. Its dream-logic narrative is presented in a fragmented, quasi-cubist (with a proliferation of unexpected camera angles) variation on classic analytical editing. The somewhat-formulaic Freudianism of the next film - Esta pared no es medianera, made by the Peruvian modernist painter Femando de Szyszlo in 1952 - locates it in the historical avant-garde. Once thought lost, it had to be sourced here from an unfortunate Betamax tape copy.

Ferruccio Musitelli's La ciudad en la playa (1961) throws out the script, and the result is a wonderfully playful observation of the heterogeneity of a day in the life of Montevideo's Playa Potitos, starting with morning walkers, sweepers, then tourists. It abounds in spontaneous beauty and an absurdist Tatiesque humor that results from watching ordinary individuals doing ordinary things.

Jorge Sanjin�s' Revoluci�n (1963) is a call to arms that presages his later experimentations with film form and indigenous audiences. The narrative-documentary hybrid opens with visual testimony of the poverty endured by the indigenous community in La Paz, before the wheels of History begin to turn and revolution breaks out. Santiago Alvarez' 1965 Now!, a found-footage denunciation of U.S. institutional racism, is a montage of photos and film of repressive state violence inflicted on the African-American population, backed by Lena Home's rendition of the title song. This is a foremost example of montage manipulation of sound and image to generate affect and articulate a powerful politics.

With Fome (Carlos Vergare, 1972), a clever conceptual conceit on Super-8 around the theme of hunger and plant growth in the absence of sunlight, the collection moves to the 1970s. Agarrando pueblo (1978) is a self-reflexive parody, by the Columbians Luis Ospina and Carlos May�lo, that critiques the emptying of the Rouchian interactive documentary of its ethical dimension in the production of "porno-miseria" documentaries that sensationalize third-world poverty as a spectacle for first-world consumption. The premise is the filming o� a v�rit� documentary on the streets of Cali for German television, to an extremely effective technique, two gazes are constructed: one, in color, is that of the documentary; the other, in black and white, a "making-of in which the cynical director and cameraman are seen at work, provoking the poor (with cash) to perform self-abasing acts. The two gazes are edited together in continuity, periodically liberating the viewer from the address of the documentary through the demystifying behind-the-scenes gaze.

Two films by solitary Super-8 visionaries of the Argentine underground are included. Ama zona (1979-1983), by Narcisa Hirsch, is an extremely open text that activates the Amazon myth without foreclosing its own meaning. Changes in focus and very tenuous visual rhymes result in an intriguing ten minutes of expansive poetic suggestiveness. Claudio Caldini's four-minute Ofrenda (1978) is an ocular massage consisting of a rush of single-photogram images of daisies, gradually fading light and a hypnotic harp soundtrack by Alice Coltrane.

Chapucer�as (1987, Enrique Colina), uses slapstick montage to formulate an indirect, but sharp critique of the contradictions of Revolutionary Cuban society. Ilha das flores (1989, Jorge Furtado) is an ironic but devastating account of a tomato's journey from cultivation through rejection, landfill, and pigswill, before ending up in the stomachs of the dispossessed. Coraz�n sangrante, Ximena Cuevas' 1993 music video, is an irreverent take on the topos of the willingly suffering Mexican female. Cuevas' heavy-handed early-digital manipulations - superimpositions, digi-morphing visual matches, etc.- result in an aesthetic that Honor� de Balzac might have called kitsch-o-rama. Juquilita, less irreverent with Mexican cultural iconry - that of its titular virgin - is a brief, very well-crafted stop-motion animation made by Elena Pardo in 2004. Carnal (Miguel Alvear, 2001) recodes the genre of the slaughterhouse documentary with high-art poeticity through its somber music track and black and white 16 mm imagery.

Of the remaining films two stand out. In the five-minute Opus (2005), Jos� �ngel Toirac appropriates a speech by Fidel Castro, but subtracts everything except the frequent mentions of numbers. This both neutralizes Castro's discourse and brings out the very personal grain of his voice against a stark black screen on which the corresponding numerals appear in white text, producing a rigorously powerful trigger of mental flight.

Ojo de pez (Gabriel Vargas, 2008) employs the crystal-clear images of high-definition video to great effect. The light narrative burden of its tenuous rural plot is easily carried by off-screen sound, freeing the imagery to explore in close-up a fascination with luminous detail that engages virtually with the entire corporeal sensorium, from the smell of fresh milk to the unnerving prick of a bees' feet on the surface of a living eye.

[Author Affiliation]

Matt Losada, San Diego State University