Ism, Ism, Ism | Luis Ospina: A Rational Act of Faith

Maybe you could start by talking a little bit about the kind of instruction you got at UCLA . Was a very technical or some mix of film history, film theory, film production? At that time a it was a very open curriculum. By that I mean it was like the spirit of the times. I went to UCLA from '69 to '72 and for the first two years you were not supposed to take any technical courses at all. We would take film history, art history, anthropology, everything except technical knowledge and at the end of those two years you were supposed to make a film without knowing anything about technique, with your fellow students. And that was called the project one, which is the one we saw in the beginning. And you made your project one and it was shown in a big auditorium where the whole faculty was and the whole students were there. And about 70% of the people would fail the 30 that were left would continue. I think the theory behind that type of Education there was that you had to have an innate talent for film, whereas in USC where I studied it was more in the first year. It was more Hollywood orientated and you had to know from the beginning if you were gonna be a screenwriter, cinematographer, sound man, or screenplay writer. It was very different. In fact I think that UCLA was very anarchic in it's teaching. In fact they when the U.S. invaded Cambodia, us students of the film department voted to go on strike and we took over the equipment and fired the teachers and we we had a whole semester where we made all these really bad militant films but it was a good experience to be in at that point and having access to the equipment. It was a very free education. So after you did your project one and you passed you you would take the technical courses. And then returning to Colombia after finishing your studies here, well a couple questions, right. One is it's a country without a lot of, big importer and consumer of cinema but not a big tradition of national production. So one part of my question would be your interest in what we see in Maria right. This search for what there is of a Colombian film history, what fragments or traces you can find. Well in the begining of film in Colombia, in the silent period, about 12 features were made. Most of them have disappeared, only about three or four survived. Only one survives entirely or two. That's "Las Garras de Oro?". Garras de Oro, 80% of it survives but bajo el ciento, Cielo Antioqueno about 70 or 80 percent, and maybe Alma Provinciana is the only one that survives a hundred percent. And when sound came in the industry disappeared in Colombia and no films were made until much, much later when they the same man that made Maria made the first sound picture in 1940. And then the first color film was made in about 1954 in Cali as well. Cali was the pioneer of filmmaking. And after that film disappeared from Cali and also from Colombia, hardly any films were made except Mexican productions or co-productions made with other countries. And when I returned there were, I would say like a dozen filmmakers only and there was no government sponsorship of films, so the only films that were made were advertising films, or sponsored documentaries like the one you saw, the last film we saw. So we had to do very cheap films. The film about the pan-american games it was done while I was at UCLA and it was done with no money at all and we only shot one hour and the film is almost half an hour long. You have to be very resourceful with the editing and with the we didn't have sync sound that's why the cameras always starts on the face it's in sync and then it goes down because it would go out of sync. We had to be very inventive to deal with the technical problems. We only started using sync sound in 1977 with Agarrando Pueblo, the film that was shown yesterday or the day before. So your idea was that you and people like Carlos Mayolo were going to start some kind of local, if not an industry then, Some kind of local film scene? Yes. Beginning with this film about the pan-american games, I started a long association with Carlos Mayolo and we co-directed maybe six films and I edited almost all his films and we had a film group that was very active from in the 70s and the 80s and we made many many films in those twenty years. Then the group disbanded in, disbanded in 1991 approximately because again, the government retired any funding there was and film practically disappeared during ten years. And then another film fund, government film fund was started in the late, middle 80s maybe or late 80s. So your group is what they called Caliwood? Yeah. Groupo de Cali or Caliwood. And at the same time you and members of your group were sort of interested in rescuing what you could of this national film history. Yes, we were very active cinephiles because we had a film cult called cine club de Cali that film club was started by a famous writer and critic Andres Caicedo who is a mythical figure in Colombian literature. He published the most successful novel about youth called Que Viva la Musica. He committed suicide the day the novel was published and now he's a very mythical figure. Then with Caicedo we also founded a film magazine. So we were very active in, active cinephiles, and that made a lot of people, young people, stimulate other young people to become filmmakers and I was also the first film teacher and Cali in 1979 And were you guys in touch with film scenes and other countries or people that had parallel projects or similar types of interests? Well through through the magazine where we were in touch and we had subscriptions to all the movie magazines available in English, Spanish, and French. So, but a lot of our education, film education was from books. We didn't have access to the films but we would read about the films. That was very important to read about film. but hardly any films were available and even Latin American films were not that available in the countries. That has always been a problem with Latin America, is that the films of our neighbors are not shown in our country and vice versa it still happens. But I imagine at some point you started travelling to film festivals in other countries meeting filmmakers and then were you able to invite them to come and share their work in Cali? Well later we got involved with foreign filmmakers. In fact some of our people of our group worked with Werner Herzog when he made Cobra Verde which part was made in in Colombia. I participated in a German film made in Cartagena and there was also another film made in Cartagena by German by, directed by Fassbinder's producer Dieter Schidor. So we had some contact with other filmmakers as well But that would've been, what in the 80s? 80s. Yes. Maybe we can open it up for questions from the audience. There's a microphone. There's a question in the back there. Yeah, we won't be able to hear you. So the films we saw this evening were for lack of a better word a bit disparate, so I'm curious from your perspective if there's a kind of set of themes or concerns that you feel unites them kind of an undercurrent. Well I think the the films we saw today I was still looking for which way my career would go because I started with the film we saw in the first, Acto de fe which was an adaptation of a sad story shot in Los Angeles in another language and I started as a fiction film maker. Then the second film was a documentary and then we started dealing with a mixture of documentary and fiction in a film called Agarrando Pueblo, or the Vampers of Poverty and I've made well many films I've made about 35 films, but only two feature-length fiction films. One a vampire film which was the first vampire film made at Columbia. And the other one a film noir which was the first film noir in Colombia. We were very interested in genre films because we grew up in the 50s and 60s and we admired very much the classic Hollywood movies, and of course the New Wave, and European cinema of the 60s and 70s but we were also very interested in B movies and how to adapt genres to a country like Colombia. How a vampire film could be made into a political film based on real facts or how to make a film noir based on our reality. But I chose, I quit fiction film making in 1999 and since then I've only made documentaries except one that is a mockumentary which is called Un Tigre de Papel Paper Tiger, done in 2007. I was wondering how have you noticed the role in these, of these films and social political life. How have you notice that it varies in screenings in America versus screening your films in Colombia. Well my first experience with that was showing Oiga Vea, the film about the Pan-american games at the UCLA film school. The film was shown without any subtitles so everybody was a little bit dumbfounded. They didn't know what this crazy movie was all about, you know. I don't know how people in the United States see these films. That would be a question I would have for the audience really because some things might seem exotic for you that are not exotic for me. But I I've traveled with my films to many countries doing retrospectives and I found that people can deal with them and understand them you know. I've shown my films in faraway countries and different cultures like Japan or Korea, places like that where hardly anybody know where Cali was or even Colombia you know. Or maybe people had little information about where Colombia is you know. Pablo Escobar or Narcos, those references no, or coffee. I was wondering if you could talk about the connections for you between Oiga Vea and Agarrando Pueblo, because I think I'm just wondering if by the time you made Agarrando Pueblo, if you were thinking back on the experience of having made Oiga Vea and looking for it was a response in certain ways. Yes I think that Oiga Vea was made very much under the influence of the time we were living and influenced by the militant films made at that time. Oiga Vea is is a counter informative film because it's a film done since there was this official film being done about the games which is was in 35 feature-length color then a big-budget. Ours was a 16 millimeter film and we didn't have any access to the venues of the games, so we decided to make the film from the from the point of view of the people that couldn't get in to the games. It's a film about exclusion. I think the most emblematic shot of the film is when you see the diver and it zooms out and the people are outside the stadium looking at that, you know. It's a counter informative film and in a way it's a film of the announcement. When we made Agarrando Pueblo we were more critical. I mean we had developed and since we were film critics we we've thought that film criticism should be brought to film itself. So Agarrando Peublo is a film of film criticism, it's a film about film. We distance ourselves to the mainstream leftist films of the moment. Yes in fact well that's a constant thing in my films. The actor of Agarrando Puebloa appears here in a couple of scenes. That's where we spotted that character and when we wrote the screenplay of Agarrando Puelbo we thought of that person and we looked him up and the same happened Agarrando Pueblo we found another one of the characters in the film and I made a film about him nine years later of Agarrando Pueblo. I'm very interested in what happens to this my subjects, what happens to people after you film them you know. And Mayolo appears in Maria as the filmmaker, right? Yes originally a film like Agarrando Pueblo we tried to do it with actors and it didn't work so I told Mayolo you have to play the role because the actors didn't know how to play the role of a filmmaker, film director and Mayolo was a film director and he's a very good actor I think, so he's in several of my films and in my vampire film he is one of the main characters as well. since we were a group we worked in in each other's films and sometimes we would change roles. I was mostly an editor but sometimes I acted in some of the films. Even in Busca Mari I play a small role as well. Yeah you get that sense, not necessarily of a collective but of a group where people are helping each other out on different aspects of their production projects. Yes our our group was interdisciplinary. We were not only filmmakers somewhere writers ,others were still photographers, some were musicians, and we also will belong at one point to a sort of hippie collective called Ciudad Solar, and and there were several things that we had in common, especially partying a lot. This was the 80s. And, Todo [Comenzo] Por el Fin, narrate some of that (inaudible) or a version of it. My latest film is the story of this group, of this two decades that we worked as a group. It's an autobiographical film. It's a very long film, it's three hours 20 minutes because it also became a very autobiographical film in that I got very sick during the making of the film. The film is also like a medical history of myself and where you're in a near-death experience you, I know it's a cliche to say it usually you start seeing your life as a movie that is unwinding and that's what I felt you know. And I thought it would be the last film I would make so I took my time, and people's time. Are there other questions? For Mr. Ospina? You mentioned in passing Cassavetes in the previous conversation and I felt some resonance of that in Acto de fe, was that someone who was inferencing you, inference probably is not the word but, relevant to you in that moment when you were exploring... More than Cassavetes i was thinking of french films on the one hand because it's an adaptation of a french, existential story and I was very influenced by a film called The Fire Witin, by Louis Malle. Which as well as an adaptation of Drieu La Rochelle, in fact it's a a taxi driver avant la lettre, it's because taxi driver came several years after that film but it has that spirit you know and interior monologue and somebody that decides to go and kill indiscriminately which has been like an American custom in the last twenty years, you know how these guys was start going on a rampage. I think in a way that film was inspired also by ear this guy that went to a tower in a university and started shooting in Texas and and also I thought of a friend of mine who who was in the US Army, he was a Colombian, he joined the US Army then he deserted and he went back to Cali, he started killing people and he was killed as well. He went a little bit crazy, so it's a film based on several things. thank you How did you end up in Los Angeles, and then another question, I have the opportunity to go to dinner with you, what was it like going to movies here when you were a student. Well I went to prep school in Boston for the last two years of high school and when I finished I had to study something. What I really liked was the movies you know but in Colombia there was no future for movies Nobody went to film school so I decided to enroll in architecture in USC but so the shock for my parents wasn't wouldn't be that big, and the first day of classes I changed my major to film. And then I didn't like USC because of what we talked [about] in the beginning it was to Hollywood oriented and too career oriented. My friend who is here bill Coker went to UCLA and he lived in my neighborhood in USC and one day he told me you know you want to go to our school and see how it is UCLA. And we came to UCLA and Ronald Reagan was governor. There was a riot I mean he couldn't go out of the buildings in UCLA and then a whole riot started and police car was burned and there was a lot of action and I said this is the place I want to be so I changed to UCLA. And can you say something about film culture in Los Angeles? Ah yes. I mean for one thing when one great thing at UCLA was that at Melnitz Hall there were movies every day all the time and you could go to other people's classes so instead of going to other classes I would go to other people's classes where they were seeing films and we had, I mean there was an experimental film course where we saw all the American underground films and there were courses of European films, courses documentary and of course there were the repertory houses which I used to frequent especially the Los Feliz Theater they tell me that it's still going on. The Nuart theater and of course we had the the theaters here in Westwood which still exist and and within the school there would be like a film collectives or cine clubs and I used to do that a lot I didn't do a lot of studying I mostly learned from watching films and reading about films And can we assume that Bombardeo de Washington was inspired by a Bruce Conner film [inaudible] of course For me seen the films of Bruce Conner was like an epiphany because it was the first time that I saw a film made entirely with archive material and that's one direction that my films have taken in the in the last decade. They're mostly made out of archive material and for me watching a movie, a movie by Bruce Conner was really something that it had a big impact on me as well as they'd seeing the films of Kenneth Anger for example and seeing the American underground films and of course Cassavetes no, because he was from LA and for me watching films like faces were really something that really changed my mind. I mean Cassavetes is the great influence on the great American filmmakers that came in the 60s like Scorsese you know. I mean Mean Streets couldn't exist if Cassavetes hadn't existed. He for me is a major figure and an example to follow up because he was so independent. I mean he almost made home movies he would shoot those with his wife in his house and with his money you know, and he acted in all these bad movies just to get money. So it sounds like it must have been a real shock moving back to Cali from all this film culture. Yes, that's why I joined the cine club because that way we could show the films that were available. But what was interesting in the 70s, was that the films of the new wave and of the great masters were commercial releases you know even in a country like Colombia. You could see in one year, you could see the latest Buñuel, the latest Bergman, Antonioni, Visconti, Kurosawa, all these films were shown commercially. They would have a lot of audience which is unthinkable. For example I saw the Gattopardo, The Leopard [by] Visconit Sunday in the biggest movie house in Cali and and there were a thousand people watching it. That's unheard of now, even in a big city you can't get a thousand persons to see El Gattopardo. And when we had the Film Club we had to, at that time there were first release circuits and then it would go to second release double feature and our our objective was to show these films before they would be destroyed because after seven years the the prints were burned so our job was to circulate these films before they would be pulled out of release distribution. Distributors assume that there was no commercial value for a film after. Yes III think it was the the arrangement with the the other distribution countries from outside from every country it was like a law you know you can't exploit a film more than seven years. And another source of good films was through the embassies. Especially the French Embassy at the German Embassy. We could see the films of Fassbinder in the 80s. Films I've heard [inaudible] thanks to the Getty Institute or the German Embassy and and of course the French New Wave and in the classic French films from the French Embassy and young Frances. And other Latin American films? That was more difficult to see Latin American films, but there was an exception there were these nuns Paulistas, Paulist nuns, who had a small distribution company and they would distribute the revolutionary and Latin American films so that's the way we got to see the films of Sanjines and some Cuban films and of course the countries from the Eastern Bloc like East Germany would circulate films and of course there was a distributor of Soviet films. But it was very difficult to see Latin American films. I mean Glauber Rocha's films arrived very late but we know all about these films from reading about them. I have a very strange anecdote regarding that. La Hora de los Hornos, the hour of the furnaces of Solanas and Getino which was supposed to be like the most important militant Latin American film. I saw it here in in UCLA after many years, but I had very a lot of information that I had read about it and Mayolo as well and at that time there wasn't any Betamax or VHS, what I did I was I recorded the soundtrack of the film and I took the soundtrack and open real magnetic tape and I I explained the film to Mayolo like the Japanese people that, Benshi tradition so I would say 'in this scene' we would hear the sounds 'American Latina es un continente en guerra' and I would say here you see all these torches and very fast editing and I go through the whole film I explain it to him This is almost as good as the real thing. Are there other additional questions? Thanks Luis, a very open and personal question, how was the experience of watching these films again here? In coming back here and confronting yourself to Luis of the 70s? Well to use the title of a one of my favorite films it's Out of the Past. No. Watching a film I made 47 years ago in UCLA where I made that film I mean for me it has been a good experience you know it's like going back in time. Yesterday for example a friend took me out to go to all the places that I frequented and I started taking photographs you know it's been a good experience you know it's like I always wanted to show my films in UCLA. It took a long time but thanks to you guys, it finally happened. One thing is that the student films at UCLA were never collected of those of that period were never in the collection or the UCLA film archive because the the Regents had this policy that they wouldn't finance the films or archive them because there were very political time. It was a type of Angela Davis on campus and all this so that is a hole a black hole in the archive of UCLA whereas in other schools, USC, NYU, they they had they collected the films of the students in fact was today I had lunch with Chris Horak the head of the UCLA archive and they're in the process of retrieving some of those films and looking for the filmmakers because it was a very important time in LA filmmaking this was the time of the LA rebellion films you know. Many very good militant films. There were films made about the Black Panthers, the Chicago Convention, there were films made by Japanese Americans, by Ethiopians by Latin Americans it was a good time to be in LA at that time. I mean 69 to 72 everything was happening in California. So the University is now trying to recuperate some of that institutional history? That's interesting. Well thank you, [thank you very much.] Tomorrow afternoon we'll be back at 2 o'clock we're presenting the catalog for this film series that Adam Hyman mentioned at the beginning and three o'clock we have a film program that goes along that accompanies the book presentation and Ximena Cuevas, Luis Ospina, Luciano Piazza, will all be back in the afternoon and then another program in the evening that concludes our weekend here so thank you for coming and come back tomorrow. Well thank you for coming and thank you for inviting me it's been a pleasure to share my work for you guys