Ism Ism Ism | Misreadings/Malas lecturas

in 1977 Carlos my Yolo and me made a film called a girl and a boy whoo and I read I edited the film in Paris in 1978 and with for the presentation we published a text on mimeograph to text or noise I think it was on a Xerox copy of a small manifesto called a gaze la Pavoni serie what is poverty porn which was like an introduction or an explanation a little bit of what we were dealing with with our film which criticized the films that exploited poverty either for profit or for winning prizes or or for a political cost sometimes it's a very brief text it's only one paragraph but it explains the context from which we were departing to make this meta film which was shown yesterday and I suppose in the context of this project age he said that you know over the course of the four or five years that we were working on this we were never we never had a very clear definition or we were constantly debating where the limits of Latin American experimental film began and end we were very emphatic about certain points that you know Chicano film and Nuyorican filmmakers should be thought of within this you know a Latin American diaspora should be thought of with it within the context of Latin American film production but then what does experimental film you know that's an open question and one thing that seemed important about your manifest though is that we certainly were talking about you know who ever seen any Latin American or radical militant film coming out of the 60s and 70s and your film I got on the pueblos seemed like it fit very well in terms of some kind of radical critique of a radical cinema yes well they with regards to classifying that film as a an experimental film well we didn't depart from that idea I mean we weren't saying we were making an experimental film only with hindsight is that sometimes that classification comes with a film in fact because they there is a there was not really a an experimental movement in the Colombian cinema maybe the first experimental film was Langosta Sol which I think we you showed that a previous sectional of this program it was made by several intellectuals from Columbia including Garcia Marquez the painter enrique growl the writer Alberto Seveso Somalia and it's a film very much influenced by the American underground I think and that was done in the 50s I can't remember I can't recall exactly what date in 1950 57 maybe after that maybe the next experimental filmmaker would be lizard mr. roat Arocha from Barranquilla as well who had studied in the United States and made cobblers world short films in New Orleans one of them is like a sort of a giant part film in a way yeah unfortunately those films are lost but some of his the work he did further which could be called experimental they were also shown here one of them as he left was a bandannas Ventanas he made there is maybe three short films that could be considered experimental then there are hardly any experimental films in Colombia it didn't have any movement as such in fact I would say that the first film group that was considered a movement would be the grupo de Cali to which I belong and which started in 1971 and by these by considering it a movement I would say I had several things doesn't qualify for that I mean we were filmmakers film critics yeah also we had a scene a club and we had a film magazine and we were active for a period of 20 years which matter that you can say something could be called the movement in a way I had a different body of work to deal with it was considerably easier for me to - I mean I'm writing a book on Argentine experimental film in the 70s and 80s and that's a a group of it's about a group of filmmakers who consciously sought to characterize their own work as experimental film and we're consciously seeking out links to other types of experimental films that they had seen or heard about specifically in the US and in Europe and so my contribution to the book is just a short text on film by mighty Louise le monde it's interesting once we start talking about diasporic so you could say well whose dice for do you want to emphasize so she's part of the German dinosaur right and but she's been incorporated into Argentine film history but she's someone who was always going back and forth between Europe and Argentina but German Germany's not interested in saying you know she's a German filmmaker for example so so we get her which is great buddy Louie Salomon is just a fascinating figure in her own right she's someone who at the end of World War two had ended up in in Prague in Czechoslovakia living in a castle and had some relatives in Brenes itís and decided to go do to Brenna situs and and became part of the the social scene of German when aside is and the high society of Jeremy Burnitz itis ended up marrying a man 35 years older than her a swiss german man who started the first ant ein specifically anti-nazi Jewish schools in drew school in Brno sizes and ran a German language newspaper she started to write for the newspaper she started to work on various levels for the newspaper started to choose an infinite photographer she started an art practice as a photographer and showed in galleries and then when she became friends with Narcy Sahir's they started to do happenings and they both around the end of the 60s by the end of the 60s were were making short films and they were making short films very much aware of what had been going on in New York in the in the 60s and thinking about figures like Jonas Mekas but also thinking about the kind of art cinema that they were interested in and so their work is an interesting has elements of art house cinema Nazi so here in particular was very interested in the films in my Greek Dora my TV's al-imam become a team obsessed with the films of Hertzog but we're also interested in experimental work and so she made a number of films she made about 35 films in super 8 she separated from her husband and became more and more independent and and very focused on this filmic practice and was not only showing her own films but also when she saw things she wrote about she wrote reports from the Berlin ala every year so she would when she would see something she would be interested in she would bring it to - itis oh yeah I was better published mostly in in the German language newspaper she had a column and but she would also go to should present films in words and so after she died in 2015 her daughter let me work with the films and watch them all and they were all in a closet in her apartment and I had interviewed her and talked to her - - to money Louise but she never really let me see all the films I think she had gotten a bit protective of them and so I was very lucky and that her daughter said yeah go ahead and so I sat and watched him on moviola in our CSIS studio and got funding from the Goethe Institute in in Toronto and Inverness itis too to have transfers done of some more what I thought were some of the most interesting films and one of them was his film that no one had ever really talked about or and hadn't been shown in decades called umbrellas which means thresholds which played here thank you low showed it and in a new restoration thanks to you guys and but at least is the film I wrote about umbrellas is a film title means thresholds and what struck me about it was that it was a representation of queer experience the male queer experience in Venice itis during the dictatorship it's a film where she asked friends to she had a number of gay friends and bonus itis and she asked them to invite their friends to come and work on this film and I think quite a lot of it was collaborative and since the the men did came up with some of their own there's a strong performative dance element to the film and so a number of kind of typical scenes of harassment of cruising are are represented in the way the men use their bodies and she also with her own camera kind of lingers over their bodies in an interesting way there's a female filming so there are all kinds of things going on in that film and that I thought for me one of the most interesting in her body of work and so I was happy to write about the word circulating films experimental films in Buenos Aires and the way also the word they were writing just just Marie Lee's just my news and it's part of the one of the goals of this anthology of the book of is amazing book is to was to put in like start a new dialogue among different different scenes of experimental cinema in Latin America and one of the things that we discovered through the process of researching or in putting in dialogue researchers that were not in dialogue before is that there were a lot of scenes that were very similar that started a new dialogue or they were started like at least this is the beginning the point of the partner of of new dialogues in terms of different scenes so taking that into account wanted to ask you the different experiences in to you about reading about experimental experimental media in general from other places from Latin America or the way that information regarding other experimental scenes no no I never never never had was exposed to experimental and I think that's very interesting because my my beginning is that the industry of film actually I'm like the generation of the big stars of Guillermo del Toro and Fonzo cuarón and and Emmanuel Lubezki we are at the exactly same generation that we started together and I was absolutely passionate about cinema but there was a point that I saw that I didn't have any talent for like relationships or getting money for my dreams or whatever so without ever seen an experimental or been exposed of course and it's different because I think that all the the Imbert inventors of language in the history of cinema are experimental filmmakers know from Malia's to more now to any of course buñuel it's like the Liberty that gives you not to be in a conventional language to to keep a conventional language and I think that has to be with freedom that you don't have to have like a special place in the for the audience like like and and I don't know how to say that anyway what I felt it was very interesting it's like when I saw that I didn't have any talent for relation chips to go with the producers no it was funny because even in the in I work with these these superstars that are now superstars in the early eighties and you could see like Alfonso Curran talking to the producer and I was with the the special effects guy like going like what is it made of sugar the glass that it breaks and so I was always like very playful about film I couldn't never take film as a thing of connections and networking and all that so when I saw that I couldn't make I didn't have it that talent I got a small camera because my father was an artist and my father every single day of his life at 7 a.m. he was in his studio drawing so I thought like ok if I'm going to be a filmmaker how am I going to to develop my way of looking my way of saying so I I got a small camera as a notebook and that's how that's how I used it and what I think it's very interesting it's that the tool itself gives you certain repetitions no because I I wasn't exposed to there there wasn't like any kind of scene of experimental in Mexico I wasn't in I wasn't as I said I wasn't exposed to an experimental but the media itself that you have the little camera in your house and suddenly becomes like this extension of your body the mirror the confessional and the liberty of finding the boundaries of the narratives so there was like a moment that my work had like connections with say the bending or I don't know like like I start traveling and then I sense in like like oh how wonderful that the tool gives you also the possibilities of set of a certain language when you have that Liberty but there wasn't a scene in Mexico we were like Islands because of course there were a lot of people making experimental but we weren't connected with we met each other later we were like little islands of weirdos know that we were like the weirdos that were like in our houses because even like my first videos I was like showing them to my friends not in bed like well a lot with thanks to Jesse an experiment there was a of course we were this we're talking early 90s so of course we didn't have internet or anything and another Welo Andrea de Castro gave me and gave me some like like photo copies of some festivals and I start sending the their videos to face the video festivals maybe a little earlier people like Sarah mentor and Gregorio Rocha were organizing the pivec remember the independientes the video and trying to you know Gregorio always had a sort of impresario impulse of like we should have a group we should ever micro cinema we should have an archive we should have a building and organized screening series and there was this sort of debate maybe in the 80s as to whether you as you know the video artists were just trying to crash the world of real cinema meaning 35 or whether you were doing something else or you know how did it fit in was it art was it no but I wasn't part of them really III was always I have always been very like like a loner in the way like like I work alone I don't think because with them it was funny because one day you look whatever you said like you have to give us and I said no I don't have to nothing it's like I'm completely free to do what I want so so I was always like like alone in no way but anyway that's like the personal history that I don't care about what I do care a lot of how the tools give you like a certain way of telling the story or using them yeah there's a lot in that generally in the discourse on super 8 internationally that prefigures the way people will talk about portable video so the lot of the way the way that filmmakers talked about super 8 in the 70s and in the early 80s they talked about the fact that it was not just portable but it was it had a relationship to the body that you know it a lot of the discourse on super 8 prefigures or echoes what you hear in discussions a portable video not not that it's not the discourse on video initially so much because they were big unwieldy things but by the time you get to say depending and vision camera things like that you can you find all these echoes of things that were being said about so yeah but I just wanted to go back to the idea what you were talking about kind of maybe networks are hearing about films or seeing things and how do you insert yourself into the kind of thing and I discovered that in Argentina in the in the 70s well all these filmmakers that I've spoken to would say to me well we would read about things with the exception of NASA and money Louise because they could travel they were both very wealthy and so they could travel and watch films instead of just reading about them but all the other filmmakers would read about make us would read about experimental film particularly from you from the US and Claudio calvini has said you know well there was this translation in this magazine of a Jean Youngblood article about Jordan Belson that was one of the things that I gave me a sense of what experimental film could be but I didn't see any Jordan Nelson film he would say he just read this long article that article was translated by Miguel Greenberg and Miguel Greenberg was this figure who had gone to New York in around 1964 and because he was fascinated by The Beat poets and that's where he met Jonas Mekas and through Greenberg the new American cinema brought 45 film program to Brno situs in 1965 where they showed everyone you can think of they showed Bruce Conner they showed breakage they showed an enormous number of filmmakers from the new American cinema scene at the detail Institute but there were almost no filmmakers in the audience it was artists and the cinematic Nacional in in Argentina bought which was a prize it wasn't a national cinematic it's a privately owned Cinematheque it bought a number of the films and so those films still to this day remain where the site is and so they were screened regularly and I started to do research looking at newspapers every day in the 1970 certain newspapers would publish daily film screenings and I started to see all of these experimental films and festivals and like showings at embassies and I realized okay on the one hand there's the phenomenon of just reading about films you can't see but then on the other hand there is this other phenomenon of films being screened to nobody or films being screened and you don't know who saw those films but it wasn't the people who went on to make experimental films so they would say we had no opportunity to see anything and I'm actually he just opened the paper you would have seen that things were being shown all the time but maybe you're doing something else maybe I mean it was all so decentralized there was no community around it there was a community around super8 where they tried to show think they almost they come if they went to the wrong place they at first they went to that one see pod this kind of amateur film showcase and they were kind of you know booed off the stage so so in the 70s that's was you had on the one hand he's very sophisticated upper-class women who could go and watch all kinds of stuff and then report back and not she said bought some films not a lot at first but she bought a few films like she bought a super8 reduction print of winter water baby moving and so she could show a few things to her friends but really they were either reading about it and there was I found an enormous amount in the newspapers like as a certain there's a leftist newspaper gone low pinyon which had an article on the London filmmakers coop on Warhol's films on an enormous amount of work so you could read about it or if you were paying close attention and trying to see everything going on in the enormous city of Buenos Aires in the 1970s you could have seen some stuff but they didn't it was a lot of missed just I'm not sure what the term is but there was a there were things that were happening that they were missing this reminds me that conveniently knew about the vivo briskets work and then haven't seen a lot of filmmakers you know and also about this beautiful story that you and you actually were you narrate it for him the film and you recorded the audio so you were like playing the audio and it's quite a film for him yes but I got acquainted with the experimental films was when I was in high school in Boston I studied in the last two years of high school in Boston and I started going to the MIT Film Society and to a place where that was an old synagogue and that was then turned into a discotheque called the Boston Tea Party and they had shows of the Andy Warhol films there are there I saw Chelsea girls with the double projection you know and several of our horror films and at the MIT from Caesarea I saw a specially the American underground films and I started reading a film culture the publication of Jonah's make us where all these people like PRM Sydney started writing and and even European experimental filmmakers were right in there then a after that I'm talking this was 66 to 68 doesn't work the period that I was in Boston then when I came to Los Angeles UCLA I was exposed to more experimental films in a course that was very good I like I haven't been able to remember the professor he was he went from New York maybe the last thing was colder no Thomas corner Donald's : maybe I had been through four years try to remember what his name is and they in that course he showed us practically everything that was made in the American underground film so starting with the films of my aberrant yeah but of course there's a misunderstanding there's this misunderstanding that Americans play American underground film started with my aberrant which is not true I mean there were presidents like posture and in the movie the story of Hollywood extra my data all of these experimental films that were made in the late 20s and the 30s but anyway a what was being at that time you need the word experimental wasn't used as much as underground films and they had a circulation I used to go to I think a place called here in the Los Angeles called the AEGON di which shows showed movies and and for in a European movies but it was mainly in this course at UCLA and there I was exposed to filmmakers that influenced me very much among them especially Bruce Conner but that was my acquaintance with film with experimental films but what you say is very true as that lived in Latin America we were very far away from the Muslims they would never arrive we would read about them and the early 8 then when we had the scenic Club in the magazine we had subscriptions to practically all the magazines that would publish in English and some in French and of course in Spanish so we were always reading about films or film education it was mostly through the word not the the actual films and that there's a even nazia here she could travel a lot would hear about certain films she couldn't see and she had a nice her husband had a niece who wrote an article for film culture about the michael snow film a casing shelved which is a it's a it's a slide of a bookcase in Michael snows studio and the audio is a tape of him describing for 45 minutes every object in the bookcase and telling you its relationship to his work as an artist and his idea was it's a film because he's telling you what to look at and so your your eyes like the camera you're moving around the the slide picture the slide never changes and so she heard about this and she thought well that's really interesting I'm gonna make a film inspired by this film I've never seen so there's all there's this history also I think you could write a history of not just Latin American but a whole range of kind of subaltern films film cultures where you respond to the imagined film that you never were able to see that you read about or that you maybe saw a still of it in a in a magazine or a book and somehow that's generative that's allowed you to then make another a work in response to it or based on some idea so she so then she made a single shot film or watched tonight I just wanted to follow up on something that you said where you mentioned that when you interviewed she was very reticent about letting you watch her films and she had them but they didn't really circulate at that point and I'm wondering if you had shown up you know 40 years earlier those films would have screamed with the super 8 reductions that nursys bought in private screenings and their homes or studios or where their what were the forums where that kind of work productions the films a nazi Subodh and brought back she would just show privately no wait that's not true I discovered a a month ago in an obscure film magazine that she put out an ad saying are in the early eighties saying that the Nazi Sahir's has started like a kind of film collection and will start to show these films and sort of give a list of what they were but in the 70s so what they did was they started not because Nazi Sun Marie Louise knew people in what is sometimes called German Brno scientists they heard that the Goethe Institute in Brno site has had an auditorium available they were going to start using to show films and so because they were so unhappy with the screenings at the amateur film societies they took over that space a few times a month to show experimental films and to so not just to show their own work but to show work from other countries and to run like seminars and workshops they got the Goethe to create an experimental film competition which had prizes they would give you film you know even they gave film away so people could participate in the competition and they had like a cash prize or something like that and they consciously used the term experimental film and it's interesting there's a the discourse on the underground film in at least in born of scientists by the early 70s is about underground film being something of the past there's a magazine called Teatro setenta from 1970 an experimental theater group there all lived together in a commune and had their own magazine they had one issue that was called underground is kaput and it was a timeline started in the 1950s and ending in 1970 and the argument of the timeline was underground theater underground film all of that is dead and this is a timeline of when it was this was today and you can you can also find a kind of parallel in last year I I wanted to compare this to the Mexican situation so last year I was doing the same thing I do a monocyte it's just in Mexico I was reading the newspapers every day since India and the went underground would come up Mexican filmmakers would say that's something of the past that's something you know it's something you guys are interested in because it sensational you're a journalist but we've moved on beyond this idea of underground film and Burness itis is one of the few places where a group of people of filmmakers said okay well then we're going to take up experimental film consciously and try to extend that tradition into the present oh yeah living theater ended I think they put the end is 1970 they were talking about what do you mean with you know it was yeah underground not necessarily van juarista that could continue like an attempt at an avant-garde could continue but specifically a movement underground theater underground film for some people had died I mean in the way that we say now say if I don't know if the New York Times writes about it it's not interesting anymore like in terms of cultural trends people underground film had become so well known there was a lot of talk about Easy Rider for example you know Easy Rider being a classic example of a the sellout the the kind of the end of the underground once you get to a film like that it's been appropriated yeah it's been appropriate the narrative that was being that was circulating in brno Sciences at the time not just in front of sight is also in Mexico I'm very far from the top maybe an Argentine you had the Instituto detailer which was a very important movement of artists and and cosmopolitan in Buenos Aires whereas in Colombia we were more far away from Europe closer to the United States but the one thing that made a super8 known in Colombia was a separate film festival bed in Cali whiskas showed the Sinfonia tropicale its film about Bolivar and there was the Caracas a festival DiSpirito I started by Julio nari in which I participated as well so that's the way I got to know the egregore risk is I'm Carlos Castillo and the other super sister say from Venezuela varies because in Colombia there wasn't really a super8 movement the very few films were made in super 8 I've made a couple in and then decay growl and people like that but not very many people were shooting in super 8 the material the film and the processing was available it's just the use that was made of it was for home movies and not for yeah mostly home movies where when I thought I was a first film teacher that was at the University and Kylie this was in 79 we made our films in super 8 and we would have to send them to be developed and we were getting bad but back when by mail in fact one of the films got lost in the mail right and that also is a like sort of started like an appropriation of other films a sort of a way of appropriating films that were circulating and you were appropriate to make your own work yes when I was 16 I said I work with Atlas in Attica Nacional in Mexico and and it was super interesting because in those days it was 1976 1976 there was a lot of censorship so there people from the government would watch the like before the getting to the movie theaters the films they come to the country and in the cineteca the supervisors will mark the forbidden the forbidden scenes to cut them out so to repair the film's really was to cut to cut the the uncomfortable scenes of naked people or talking about abortion in cabaret as I was telling you and I remember very much because it's like a musical it's like it should be like this easy film and it was like completely terrifying that she that Liza Minnelli had an abortion so so I I take out the devil in the trash the scenes are the outtakes so I had a whole collection of them in 35 millimeters so yes that was like the my my beginning to to work with with with appropriate material no I didn't have a movie hola because also that's that's the the youth which difference when he says that we couldn't see films it not it wasn't just Los Angeles experimentals we couldn't see films period no it was like I can remember perfectly well the moment that I had a black box saying like what do you mean there's a film here that was her bedtime max cast ahead it was like a film that you can take to your house see the whole thing because remember those super AIDS are only had like as MO as small as the fragments of the actual film and they were super 8 North Course I didn't have a moviola in my house it was like I don't know it was like until the end oh I stay it was super late late actually my first work in video I also made a lot of super 8 for the same reason for because he was like a pencil no to have a super super 8 camera but then when I started my video it was making super 8 in the very very early eighties 81 82 with my one of the persons that I think is one of the biggest experimental artists in Latin America who is Ricardo Nikola he was him he made actually a body of work that it's very powerful know the whole portraits of the of the areas in New York and again how did we show in those days we didn't have the thing of now of like we were going to make history we are going to be somebody it was like the thing of making as you eat as you get rest it was like an everyday thing that had nothing to do like with a movement at least not Ricard or me nor our friends I would Ricardo it was wonderful because he would make the films and then we go to her his place and he play the piano and we'll make different musics and things but it was only like the audience was like me my sister and two other friends no it was like a huge audience of these master is that he made that he recorded a score like 20 years later actually I told him one day that I was in his I said like take them out of the closet how absurd thank you thank you and there's one last screening of the weekend short program hours films [Applause]