There is an intimate scene in Oscar Ruiz Navia's debut feature Crab Trap (El Vuelco del Cangrejo, 2009) that reveals the true translation of the film's title. Daniel, a "white" stranger, has drifted into the Afro-Colombian coastal village of La Barra in hopes of securing a boat to escape Colombia. While waylaid in the village, he befriends a local girl Lucia who entertains him one afternoon by showing him how she traps crabs by flipping them over onto their backs. The crabs are helpless in this position until a wave sets them right side up. Is Daniel in the same position? And what kind of wave will be required to free him from being trapped?
"Landscape and dreamscape, like the clashing worldviews of the characters, meet in Crab Trap," John Anderson writes at Variety, "whose effect is an existential disequilibrium. If Samuel Beckett ever went to the beach, this is what he might have thought about."
Treading a fine line between documentary and fiction, Crab Trap is a meditative look at daily life in a remote village on the Pacific coast of Colombia that explores the nuances of social and racial relations in one of the most isolated areas of the country. As Diana Sanchez writes in her program capsule: "Oscar Ruiz Navia's debut feature captures a part of Colombia rarely seen on film, the black communities of its Pacific coast. …Elegantly enhancing the distance between the locals and the foreigners, Ruiz Navia uses non-professional actors from the area to contrast with the two outsider characters, who are played by professionals. Crab Trap registers the languid pace of these remote villages while alerting us to the oncoming clash with modernity and how it is beginning to disastrously affect the lives of local peoples." As reported earlier on The Evening Class, Crab Trap was provided completion funding by the Global Film Initiative in 2007. The film boasted its world premiere at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival, where director Ruiz Navia and his two lead actors Rodrigo Vélez and Arnobio Salazar Rivas sat down to talk to me about their film. [This conversation is not for the spoiler-wary!]
Oscar Ruiz Navia was born in Cali, Colombia, and studied at the National Film and TV School of Colombia and the Universidad del Valle. He created his own production company, Contravía Films, in 2006. He has directed the short films Three Pounds: Music for the Sick (2002), Sunrise (2003), The Children of the Beast (2005), Vacuum-Package 1, 2, 3 (2006), There Is a Brain at La Barra (2006) and Liquefaction (2007). Crab Trap (2009) is his first feature film.
* * *
Michael Guillén: Oscar, during the Q&A session after the world premiere screening of Crab Trap, Rodrigo made mention that you and he met during a campus demonstration when the two of you were fleeing the military who had been brought in to squash the protest. How then did the two of you collaborate on developing the story for Crab Trap?
Oscar Ruiz Navia: Though Rodrigo is now a professional actor, he started his studies as a drama student at the same university where I was studying social communications. Though we had met before, it wasn't until after the demonstration on the university campus that we began talking about film. In some ways, our interaction after that demonstration set the metaphor for our work: we both wanted to get away from the militant and political atmosphere of Colombia to create something beautiful with film. Though we were both worried about the political situation in our country, we didn't want to mire ourselves in the critical, complaining that "this is bad and this is bad"; we wanted to feel we were taking part in the construction of our country, not the destruction. We wanted to meet our lives with our cinephilia, our ideology, and our aesthetics. We didn't want to create direct speech; we wanted to create something metaphoric. But, of course, this impulse towards metaphor comes from the pain we feel from reality.
Guillén: The fact that the film's political subtext was purposely indirect worked for me, though of course I was left wondering about narrative details. I wondered if Rodrigo's character Daniel had gone AWOL from the paramilitary?
Ruiz Navia: No, not really.
Guillén: Or are we even supposed to know about his past?
Ruiz Navia: That is a good point because—when I decided to include the political subtext in the film—I definitely wanted it to be an indirect statement. Sometimes people criticize that Colombian films are always about violence, war and drugs, and—as a consequence—certain filmmakers don't want to talk about those things anymore; they prefer to create in a plastic bubble. They want to escape from the reality of the Colombia in which we live. But I think we have to talk about these things and the problem is not in the subject itself, but in how to talk about the subject. There's a way to talk about it. Often people just talk about the fact of violence but not about why these things happen, not about the cause or the effect.
With El Vuelco del Cangrejo I wanted to talk about the causes and consequences of violence in Colombia, but not so much about the violence itself. I wanted to examine the traces of this problem and, of course, wanted to tell the story through one person's small problem as representative of the larger problem. Thus, the neighbors fighting over the music in the film is a metaphor of the intolerance experienced by many Colombians. Colombia is not a militarized country just because we have big guns that spill blood; it's a militarized country because in the daily lives of Colombians there is much intolerance of neighbors and judgment of friends. I wanted to suggest this pervasive intolerance in Cangrejo but leave it to the audience to make up their own mind.
Guillén: Your film is set in the Pacific coastal village of La Barra. How did you discover this remote place?
Ruiz Navia: I found La Barra while traveling as a tourist. I used to go there with relatives and friends to have fun. We liked the place because it was isolated and wasn't overrun by tourists. There wasn't even electricity when we first visited there. For someone from the city, La Barra was a calm place to relax; but, you could also have something of an anthropological experience because you could interact with these native Afro-Colombians.
One day during one of my vacations at La Barra there was a white man who—just like Paisa in the movie—brought loudspeakers to play his loud music. Arnobio, who plays Cerebro in the movie, was actually the owner of the camp site where I was staying and he was angry about the loud music. He complained this was not the "real" La Barra and that everything was changing for the worse. With this anecdote I felt I found a metaphor to express the intolerance in our country; a microcosm of the larger problem. I also wanted to have a character who has come from the city and is witnessing this conflict between the villagers and modernity. This character, of course, is Daniel who I felt could be as objective as I was when I visited La Barra. I didn't want the story to side with either of the neighbors. I wanted the point of view to be that of an outsider witnessing the conflict. Also, though he observes what's happening, there's really nothing he can do, just like in real life you can dislike something but not be able to do anything about it. Daniel is the most fictional character in the story, even though the story is told through his eyes and vision. But he's not a hero who tries to save the community; he's just a normal person.
Guillén: Normal, perhaps, but wanting to escape?
Ruiz Navia: You could say Daniel's character was a metaphor of what I was feeling about my country at that moment. I didn't want to be there. I wanted to escape. I wanted a change. Making the film was like a journey where I had to rewrite my situation and remember what I'd forgotten. Whether a film is a road movie about a journey or is like a road movie and a journey, you make the trip because you want to change something you don't like or that gives you a pain in your stomach. I wanted to take this trip, make this film, because we have so many problems in Colombia, but I wanted the film to have an elegiac tone. I wanted it to be beautiful and emotional and not simply critical.
Guillén: You mentioned it took five years to make this film. How did Rodrigo and Arnobio participate in creating the characters of Daniel and Cerebro, respectively?
Ruiz Navia: I wrote the characters but took many things from their real lives.
Rodrigo Vélez: My process for developing the character of Daniel lasted approximately 2½ years, during which time it was important for me to visit La Barra, to get to know the place, the surrounding landscape, the rivers, and the people. To build up the character, it was also important to realize that—no matter how many times I visited La Barra and talked with the villagers—I was never going to be a part of La Barra. Ironically, the more familiar I became with La Barra, the more estranged I felt. At first I tended to romanticize La Barra and—because of the romantic feelings I was having about La Barra—I felt I was understanding La Barra; but, as time went along, I realized La Barra was more complex than that and that I would never really fit into the lives and situations of the people of La Barra.
Guillén: Oscar, I appreciated how your camera looked into the faces of the villagers. It introduced them as characters in the narrative but also, by contrast, emphasized Daniel's difference for being so fair, nearly white, an outsider drifting through.
Ruiz Navia: Of course the film is about the clash between these two different ways to see the world. Colombia is a country of mixed races. We have black people, indigenous people, white people. I wanted to have a guy from the city who looked different than the villagers of La Barra. To finish up what Rodrigo was saying about his preparation for the role, I didn't want him to know exact dialogue as much as I wanted him to know about the place La Barra, to live there. By the time we started to shoot the film, he had memories of it because he had stayed there for a while.
For example, the story called for Daniel to have a relationship with the little girl Lucia, so I wanted them to become friends in real life before we began shooting the movie so that the dialogue would develop spontaneously between them. His preparation was also deepened because we were supposed to make the film three years ago but had production problems. Then—when the project was finally ready to go about six months before we started shooting—he was ready.
By contrast, Jaime Andres Castaño—the actor who played the white man Paisa—never visited La Barra because I knew I wanted him to be the enemy of Cerebro. I told him not to show up on location until a couple of weeks after we had started shooting. When he arrived, he was out of touch with the others and this was my way of directing the actors: to understand their relationship in the film and to try to replicate it in real life.
Guillén: Arnobio, you are what would be called a non-actor, though now I guess you would be called an actor. How difficult was it for you to be in front of the camera? To play the role of Cerebro?
Arnobio Salazar Rivas: I've had the nickname "Cerebro" for a long time so I built the character up from myself. At the beginning, I met Oscar and some of his crew when they came to La Barra as tourists and my first experience working with them was a short film called There Is a Brain at La Barra where Oscar filmed me making some coconut cookies. That was my first exposure to the camera and then—when Oscar proposed that I play a part in Crab Trap—I said okay. I thought, "I can do it. Why not go for it?" [Of note was that Arnobio's presence at the Toronto International was the first time he had ever been out of his home country Colombia.]
Guillén: In Cerebro's confrontation scene with Paisa, I appreciated that he wasn't all macho about it and that he approached the conflict thoughtfully. He knew he couldn't take Paisa on physically so, instead, he went to the village council and gathered their support, leading to that wonderful final scene when they dismantle the fence Paisa has built on the beach. I have to commend the both of you for presenting an image of an indigenous people who have an innate intelligence and an integral sense of who they are.
Ruiz Navia: As I said before, I didn't want to show direct violence. Also, it's realistic. Cerebro is not a violent man. He's never hurt anyone and never would; but, he has the strength of his convictions. I wanted to have a confrontation. I built all these situations for Cerebro to be in but the situations were inspired from what I knew about him. The confrontation was a fictional scene; but, in order to make the scene work, I made sure that the actor who played Paisa and Cerebro never met before we started shooting. That confrontation scene was the first time they met and it was already into the fourth week of the shoot. Before we started filming, I had them do a physical exercise where they pushed against each other until their bodies were heated up, and then I had them do their dialogue while they were in that heated state.
Usually in theater an actor builds up his character psychologically, but it's different in film. I think in film an actor should not be aware of his character in that way. He shouldn't think; he should just feel and react. As a film director, I have to get the actors to feel something and then give them complete freedom. But if I started providing Cerebro motivation—"You are very angry"—he would never have been angry. Instead, I have to make him angry in some way and then capture it on film. For example, maybe I would make him run three kilometers before we started filming. Or the exercise I spoke about between he and the actor who played Paisa, I had them physically struggle until they broke a sweat and then I asked Cerebro, "What do you think? Should someone build a fence here on the beach?" Cerebro started saying what he thought about that and—because he was hot—it looked on film like he had psychologically developed his character's anger. I kept it simple and corporeal, not mental. In theater, actors think a lot; but, in cinema, actors should feel. Because Cerebro and the actor who played Paisa had never met before, it was honest on Cerebro's part to think: "Who is this guy?" If they had become friends before shooting this scene, it would have probably lost some authenticity.
Another example: in the story, Lucia the little girl and Daniel become friends. But Rodrigo had already become friends with that little girl so that—when we went to shoot the scene—all they had to do was remember that they were friends. Rodrigo could say to her, "Ah, remember the day when we played…?" and the little girl would go, "Oh, yeah." That made it easier for her to get into the situation with him during the filming because she had already lived it with him.
Guillén: Let's talk about the charming young girl who played Lucia. Who is she?
Ruiz Navia: Her name is Yisela Álvarez.
Guillén: The scenes between Rodrigo and Yisela are delightfully heartfelt. Yisela delivers the line—"I can't stand it when you're angry like this"—with perfect comic timing. Since you were in many scenes with her, what was it like for you, Rodrigo, to work with Yisela?
Vélez: Adding to what Papeto has already said about relationships….
Guillén: "Papeto" is Oscar's nickname?
Vélez: It's his artistic name. [Oscar ducks his head and blushes.] You have to have a different name for your artistic name. [Laughter.] Anyway, yes, Yisela and I spent a lot of time swimming together in the ocean and physically tussling with each other. We developed a playful relationship.
Guillén: You, however, are a trained actor. Was there anything that you learned from Yisela, even though she was a non-actor?
Vélez: She was 100% alive the entire time. She taught me not only how to really live in the scene from the moment Oscar said "action" and the camera started rolling, but also how to live before and after the scene. As an actor who's been trained in the theater, I've been taught to focus and to move into the character when the scene begins; but, Yisela taught me how to move into the character before the scene even started, whether the camera was rolling or not. That was a great learning experience for me.
Guillén: "Papeto", talk to me about the look of the movie and what you were going for with your cinematography. Who are your stylistic influences?
Ruiz Navia: As you can tell by now, I try to mix my life with my cinephilia. I used to program auteur films and the films of well-known directors for a cinema in my home town and I wrote reviews. I've been influenced by many different kinds of directors. It's hard to name one single director; but, for example, I love the work of the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. He had a special influence upon me in his unorthodox depictions of reality. He can find the poetry in real life and in people who are—allegedly—simple.
From Europe, I love masters like Tarkovsky and the way he directs his actors. He's talked about the fact that film is not like literature, just about telling a story—even though this is what the market and industry have told us—but, what's essential in cinema is the possibility of capturing the passage of time. The power of the image and the power of sound is important in his films; the rain for example. When I was in La Barra, it's a humid, rainy place, with a lot of aural texture. I would say the humidity and rain in Tarkovsky's films is also in La Barra. La Barra is also a grey beach. It's not a sunny, fun beach like what most people associate with a beach. No. It's a melancholic and nostalgic place.
For the actors, I was influenced by the methodology of Robert Bresson who didn't believe in Stanislavski's method of theatrical acting. He thought of actors more as models or objects that the director had to manipulate. That wasn't because he was a bad guy; it was because he wanted his films to be as near as possible to real life. In real life, if you are sad, you don't have to emote. Maybe you're just silent?
I've also been influenced, of course, by the new Latin American cinema; films from Argentina, Mexico, which—because the films are in the Spanish language and are filmed in locations similar to Colombia—speak to me.
I love films that are seemingly simple but are full of epiphanies. I don't like it when people say, "Nothing's happening in this film." Maybe that film is not full of Hollywood-style action where something is always happening; but, in real life there are many little things that happen that are simple but important. I want my films to focus on such small details. I don't want to make epic dramas. I want my films to be like life.
01/03/10 UPDATE: In his Senses of Cinema Toronto dispatch, Dan Sallitt agrees with me that—though Pedro González-Rubio's documentary hybrid Alamar (To the Sea) "generated a surprising amount of critical buzz during the last days of TIFF"—he "somewhat preferred another Toronto premiere with a wilderness coastal setting, Oscar Ruiz Navia's El Vuelco del Cangrejo (Crab Trap)", which "puts its trust in the windy ambience of the sparsely populated seascape, and in a faintly Bressonian camera style that advances the narrative without amplifying the drama. The personal stories are handled so elliptically that they ultimately seem perplexing, whereas the political story could do with more ellipsis. But the weight of Navia's visual style makes the film linger in memory."
Meanwhile, in the current issue of Cinema Scope (Winter 2010), Robert Koehler—who characterizes Crab Trap as "one of the most interesting artifacts of recent Latin American cinema"—wilingly explores the embedded contradiction in the film's criticism of encroaching modernity (electricity, tourists, etc.) even as it employs modernity's tools to become a film. Koehler concludes: "It becomes readily apparent that Crab Trap is far more concerned with forces, both natural (weather, ocean conditions, the water level of the river on which Cerebro and Daniel paddle in a hand-hewn canoe) and economic (the eradication of the locals' livelihood, the pecking-order of power in the community, the control of property). And because its interest lies there, the embedded contradictions of racial identity, modernity, and the role and purpose of a hero are coiled in a helix of fascinating effect and range that belies the film's outward shell of simplicity."
Cross-published on Twitch.
Seattle-based journalist Jay Kuehner introduced the screening of Liverpool. "I was told to keep it to five words," he quipped, "so: distant, remote, vodka….?" Kuehner opined that Liverpool consolidates one of the most thematically strong trilogies seen from the cinema in quite some time, especially from such a fairly young director. Many claims have been made both for and against Alonso's cinema: that his are exercises in style and that his films reflect more on him than on his subjects and that—to his credit—he is pioneering a new film language (which, Kuehner suggested, might very well be true).
Earlier in the afternoon at the Masters Workshop, Kuehner wrote down Alonso's statement that he pays attention and thinks about everything: the way that a man eats, goes to the bathroom, and—in the case of Liverpool—the way that he drinks. By paying attention to small moments, Alonso has created a drama in the ongoing moment and, with that, the possibility that a lifetime of regrets can be uncovered in a single moment, or in a tiny object, as Liverpool bears out in its ending.
With Liverpool, Alonso shifted his attention away from uneducated rural laborers to an educated and well-traveled sailor who, nonetheless, is unable to communicate with his family and others. Farrel (Juan Fernández) cannot change the way he is. Even though he is experienced, he cannot change his tendency to observe others at a distance or the way he feels towards his family. After reconnecting with them, he leaves them behind ("I'm off") even though they want him to stay, hoping he can help out. This basic drama was enough for Alonso to shape his film.
Admittedly inspired by Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth, Liverpool is purposely sad and isolated. Alonso wanted to balance aesthetic pleasures with the feelings of his characters. It was filmed in the southernmost part of Argentina in the snowy port town of Ushuaia (nicknamed "the southernmost city in the world"). The film is purposely short on dialogue, adhering to Alonso's mistrust of words. His goal was to tell his story through the images.
In many ways films are like paintings for Alonso, in the sense that there's no way to explain why an artist chooses to use the color blue here and the color red there. He tries to make films for everybody but not everybody wants his films. It's not that he creates films just for film festivals, but it's the film festivals who show his films, not the local cinemas. What should he do? Compromise and make a film that will be played in the local cinema? Or what he wants to do?
By contrast to the way that Alonso found Misael and Vargas and transformed them into the characters of his first two films, Alonso had already imagined the character of Liverpool's mariner Farrel before casting Juan Fernández in the role. True to technique, Alonso knew he wanted to make a film in this part of the world and that he wanted to film within a cargo ship. He had seen a magazine published by United Colors of Benetton that included some photographs of Ushuaia and the people who lived there and it intrigued his curiosity. The only place in Argentina where he could find a harbor that accommodated cargo ships in the snow—and he really wanted to shoot in snow—was Ushuaia. So the magazine sold him on the people and convinced him he could find a film in that place.
The following week he drove 3,500 kilometers over a few days until he arrived in Ushuaia. He stayed there three to four days to organize his ideas, watching the people and how they lived. One of them—the cook who owns the restaurant and operates the short wave radio who appears in Liverpool—was staring out the window (just as he does in the film) and Alonso asked him what he was looking at? He had already walked around enough to know there was not much to look at. The cook answered that he was waiting to see if any brown rabbits would appear. Alonso didn't know how long the cook had entertained this habit of looking out the window for rabbits, but it awakened him to the possibility of creating a film that would show this community and how they lived. He didn't know if Ushuaia's inhabitants were running away from something or why they were a people who preferred not to have much contact with outsiders.
As Alonso detailed in my interview with him in Toronto, Alonso found Juan Fernández in Ushuaia. Fernández operated a snow plow caterpillar that kept the roads clear. In fact, the scene where Farrel waits with card-playing locals for a lift from a truck driving into the interior is the place where Fernández actually works.
Kuehner asked Alonso to explore the theme of how location forms character and character forms location. Alonso specified that he works at the same level with space and character. In Liverpool he tried to use frozen nature to explain the character of Farrel. Others would ask what he was doing filming in such an empty place; but, for Alonso such empty places talk about many things that are happening inside Farrel. This intuitive trust in the articulative potential of empty spaces conforms to Alonso's penchant to leave his camera lingering in empty rooms after characters have left the scene, as if more is said by their absence than their presence. Alonso's camera is infatuated with the white shadow.
Before he started the film, Alonso created a history for the character of Farrel. Though he didn't know what it was that Farrel did in the first place to make him run away for so many years, Alonso suspected it must have been something wrong—maybe it had something to do with Analia?—but, whatever it was, Farrel took off on the cargo ship and didn't return. When the ship eventually returned to Ushuaia, after however many years, Farrel felt guilty about the fact that he had stayed away from "home" for so long. So he asked for shore leave to see if his mother was still alive. He finds her fragile with an addled memory. And though his remaining family members don't ask it outright, they want his help and hope he'll stay; but, he refuses and leaves. That's what Alonso felt from his film anyway, though he acknowledges others may not have the same reaction. The information has been organized in the film and it's up to the audience to decide how they want to take it, what they think it means, and create a narrative or non-narrative history for the character.
Alonso likes to query his audiences about where they think Farrel is going when he walks off towards the woods in the film's longest shot. One person responded that Farrel was going to get the black bag he stashed away when he first got off the cargo ship. But Alonso is not so sure. If his intention was to return to the cargo ship, why did Farrel remove all his belongings from the cabin? Then why did he take only what he could carry in his red bag, leaving the rest in the black bag? Perhaps he never intended to return? Perhaps he intended to disappear? That's Alonso's interpretation; but, if the audience has a different interpretation and wants to believe that Farrel catches a truck that takes him back to his cargo ship in time to sail off, that's fine; but Alonso is not so sure.
What will be the future of those Farrel has left behind? What will happen to the girl Analia? All she has to remind her of her father is a keychain that reads "Liverpool." Can she even read? Alonso doesn't know. Can she imagine what Liverpool means? To her it might just be a key chain that's red and blue. Developmentally disabled as she is, Alonso's not even sure she can distinguish between red and blue. Ironically, this keychain that has so much meaning for Farrel—that represents his life as a sailor traveling around the world, abstracted into a single memento—possibly means nothing to Analia, his daughter.
Alonso believes cinema needs smart critics to help keep his kind of independent filmmaking alive. In Argentina he recommends Quintin who he finds argumentative. Quintin is far from diplomatic in his writing, prefers to fight over films, something Alonso respects. As Alonso puts it, cinema needs "main critics who separate water from oil" and "publish in a main forum, not just one website."
Alonso refuses to shoot digitally because of the medium's destruction of 35mm culture. Part of digital filmmaking is the practice of shooting alone. By contrast, Alonso believes a true film requires a group of collaborators to help shape the film. It's an entirely different process than shooting alone, even though he knows it can be done. James Benning does it. Pedro Costa. But they are exceptional.
Filming anywhere other than Argentina is problematic for Alonso. He is familiar with his Argentine subjects; he understands them fully—"what they eat, how they walk, their sex, etc."—but he wouldn't have the same familiarity with non-Argentine actors, nor the same connection with the land.
Alonso saw Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds and thought it was just fine; but, the real cinematic experience for him was watching the audience's reactions: how they talked, where they laughed, what excited them. Alonso realized the audience for Inglorious Basterds was simply not his audience and never would be. That's just the way it is.
As for what's coming up, every morning Alonso wakes up thinking about an idea he has for his next film but it is not strong enough to support a film and he's not ready to start the process again of writing, securing funding, shooting, editing, promoting. He feels lucky to have made the four films he's made. Alonso has decided to take a break from filmmaking for the next few years. Now that he's been out of the family business for the last 10 years, he wants to return to the ranch and see what his brothers are doing.
His decision has something to do as well with the fact that as a filmmaker he is trying to find new questions for his cinema language so that he doesn't keep repeating himself. He wants to do more than just make films about one man on a horse in the desert, "riding lonesome" as James Quandt puts it in his recently-republished Artforum essay.
In all frankness, Alonso admits that he is not very positive about the future of filmmaking in general and his own in particular, though he will keep trying to make films. He enjoys the entertainment of genre films but it troubles him that their popularity is diminishing the diversity of cinema language. He wants to see new faces, films from Africa for example, because there is so much he does not know about Africans.
Cross-published on Twitch.
As Jay Kuehner assesses for Parallax View: "Fantasma, per its title, coyly and spectrally endeavors to bring together the principal 'non-actors' of his previous films to Buenos Aires, to the fabled Teatro San Martín, for—what else?—a retrospective of Alonso's films. The setup is an ingenious way to bring nature to the city, actors to their affect, and audiences to their subjective screens." The program capsule for the Harvard Film Archives notes the offbeat delight in watching Argentino Vargas wandering the labyrinthine corridors of the Teatro San Martín "in search of the film's premiere."
Fantasma was Alonso's way of saying thank you to the lead actors in his first two films: Misael Saavedra (La Libertad) and Argentino Vargas (Los Muertos). He wanted to thank them because they had both helped him change a certain portion of his life when he became his kind of filmmaker. Fantasma is an inbetween film in many respects. First of all, he was not able to secure the budget he needed to make the film he initially planned to make and, instead, elected to shoot a featurette.
All of Fantasma's scenes were shot in the Teatro San Martín, the cinematheque where Alonso grew up watching films. Teatro San Martín is part of a five-theater cooperative (the Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires) where the films of modern filmmakers such as Bresson, Fassbinder, and Kurosawa have been screened. For many years it was the only place he could see serious film, especially in his later student years when he spent much time there, often among audiences that numbered no more than three or four people, which was admittedly wonderful in a certain way. Sitting alone in a cinema, or sharing a film with only a few people, Alonso could enjoy a film undistracted by voices around him. He wonders if that solitude isn't what made him feel so strongly about film? Without question, Teatro San Martín's physicality left a lasting impression. Further, where tickets were $10 at other venues, at the Teatro San Martín they were only a few. Though he often focuses on people outside of Buenos Aires who don't even know what cinema is and often have never seen a movie themselves, even within Buenos Aires most people don't have the dispensible income to go to movies that are questionably marginal, and rarely discussed in the public sector. If they can't talk about a film with their friends, they tend not to go. Which is to say that choice as much as access determines what filmgoers in Buenos Aires support.
Having visited Misrael in the Pampas and Vargas in Corrientes, Alonso felt it was time to invite them to Buenos Aires for the theatrical opening of Los Muertos. Admittedly, the film is limited and "a strange film, maybe." If you don't know who Misrael and Vargas are, Fantasma makes no sense. As an "inbetween film" requiring the first two, Fantasma continues to pursue Alonso's questions and critiques of Argentine filmic identity. "It seems there's two different kinds of Argentina," he mused. "One is Buenos Aires and one is outside Buenos Aires." When people talk about Argentina, they're usually referencing Buenos Aires, its main city. Similarly, when Argentines talk about culture and what there is to enjoy in Argentina, it's presumed this must be within the city. Alonso invited Misael and Vargas to Buenos Aires because he wanted to shoot how they fit into the cinematheque, which is a building that—though it means little to anyone else—means a lot to the people of Buenos Aires, and especially to him. As it was under reconstruction, the building was empty and Alonso took advantage of this opportunity to shoot his film. If they had said no to his request to film there, Fantasma would never have been made; the building was that important to the concept. As James Quandt specifies: "Fantasma is no less a film of landscape than the previous two. Like the pampas of La Libertad and the jungle of Los Muertos, the labyrinthine San Martín becomes Fantasma's second character: As much as the camera may linger on a now gaunter Vargas, in from the wild and uneasier than ever, Fantasma makes setting its preoccupation."
Fantasma was also Alonso's attempt at comedy, though unfortunately no one laughed. Or more, it was that he "wanted to enjoy some jokes in the film" and to also comment on the kinds of film he wants to see; films which are vanishing and disappearing from distribution. Shortly before he made Fantasma, he had seen Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn and—though Fantasma comes nowhere near Goodbye, Dragon Inn—it was evidently influenced by that film. Several critics have noted the resemblance. Quandt offers a separate comparison: "But, oddly, it is Tati who most comes to mind in surveying the San Martín's modernist horror of malfunctioning elevators, confounding staircases, and harshly lit hallways, rooms too ample or cramped, humanity subjugated to decor, architecture, mazes, and machinery. Like Tati, Alonso sees in this surrounding a kind of elegant inutility, a vast contraption in which people stumble, turn back, retrace their steps, push buttons that don't work, tentatively position themselves in spaces not designed for their being, much less comfort."
For Alonso, the pleasure of shooting Fantasma involved such things as realizing that Vargas had never in his life walked on a staircase, which Alonso could detect when Vargas walked down them. That told him a lot about Vargas in different spaces. You felt no awkward discomfort watching Vargas walk in his natural habitat the jungle. In fact, when they walked together in the jungle, Vargas laughed at how Alonso walked. "This was how I took my revenge," Alonso grinned, "though it wasn't easy." He had to work at convincing the reluctant Vargas to come to Buenos Aires. It wasn't about the money. But Alonso eventually convinced him to come enjoy the process and Vargas subsequently returned to Buenos Aires when Fantasma was released at the cinematheque, which was something like playing with mirrors because the film was made and shown in the same place. It was a multi-layered experience, especially after the film when the audience exited the auditorium into the spaces depicted in the film.
In some ways the film closed a cycle with Misael and Vargas. Perhaps in the future they will do another film together? Or maybe he can find new people to replace them? He cast his ex-girlfriend Rosa Martinez as the employee of the cinema. One of the other actors worked in the cinematheque itself. He tries to work with people who enjoy the particular experience of acting in one film.
Before making Fantasma, Alonso was impressed with Gus van Sant's Last Days because it made him question what cinema is today. He realized he doesn't know what cinema is nowadays. Last Days reminded him that cinema is "simply" image and sound. So he tried to create a strange feeling about the cinematheque but with sounds from the cinematheque, like telephones and elevators. With his camera crew he captured environmental sounds such as street traffic.
Fantasma served as a bridge (or as Quandt describes it, "a pendant") between Los Muertos and Liverpool. Alonso already knew he would be shooting several interiors with artificial lighting in Liverpool. Fantasma gave him the chance to practice, since he had mainly done exterior shots until then. He made many mistakes and perhaps even repeated some of those mistakes in Liverpool.
Cross-published on Twitch.
Introducing Los Muertos, Northwest Film Forum Program Director Adam Sekuler offered that Lisandro Alonso's characters are most often playing themselves and—while the trajectory of his films don't always follow a traditional plot—they do follow the trajectory of what all of us go through in any given day. In the selfsame way that Alonso's films might be unfamiliar cinematically, they are very familiar physically. Alonso followed with a brief, hurried introduction as he was desperate to secure a ticket to the Pixies concert at the Paramount. He said that—if he went back home and his friends found out he could have seen the Pixies and didn't—they would never forgive him. Fortunately, he was able to secure his Pixies ticket and returned after the film for a brief Q&A before rushing off again to attend the concert.
Alonso shot Los Muertos three years after La Libertad. He wanted to make the film because in some ways he felt that La Libertad had happened by sheer luck. He wanted to prove to himself that he could make a second feature; but, this time around, he definitely wanted a producer. Los Muertos was shot in four weeks at a budget of $29,000 with the same crew from La Libertad. He shot the first scene as a one-off reel to secure financing to complete the film (that scene was later edited down but the original is offered as an extra on the DVD). It took nearly nine months before they could finally begin shooting in Corrientes. In Alonso's mind, Los Muertos was a commercial film. Thus, he has been disappointed that—as wonderful as it is that audiences want to see his films—it's not so wonderful that no one wants to buy and distribute them.
Los Muertos won several awards on the festival circuit, including the FIPRESCI prize at the 2004 Viennale ("for its hypnotic fascination with the real"). In 2004, it likewise won the Critics Award at the Lima Latin American Film Festival. The following year it won an Independent Camera award at Karlovy Vary and a Special Jury Prize at Yerevan.
For Alonso, the opening sequence is about dreaming, nightmares and memory and—as James Quandt states it—"employs the tropes of revelation and occlusion in classic horror-film fashion." At that time, Alonso admits he was under the influence of Gaspar Noé's rape scene in Irreversible (2002). That scene made Alonso want to kill the rapist; a reaction he was not comfortable with. His impulse to kill expressed itself in Los Muertos. The opening sequence also conjured the title for the film, which replaced the film's original title Sangre.
Alonso asserts the film's protagonist Argentino Vargas is a wonderful man and the father of 24 children. "He is a good father to all of them." Alonso discovered Vargas through his usual manner of scouting for locations for his next film even before he'd written any form of script. He traveled around with a sleeping bag and tent, visiting locations, meeting locals. When he met Vargas and sensed he could be the actor in his film, he asked if he could hang around and camp out for a couple of days. Vargas wanted to know what for? Alonso answered he didn't know but that he liked the place. Vargas gave him permission and Alonso stayed there. They talked from time to time and got to know each other a little better. When he decided to return to Buenos Aires, he mentioned to Vargas that maybe he would return with a camera crew to make a movie; but, he didn't dwell on it much because he doesn't like to talk about these things with someone like Vargas who has no TV and lives in a poor house made of mud. His children drink water from the river. Vargas has never had the opportunity to understand the power of the cinematic image. Yet, unmediated experience is what draws Alonso to such people. It makes it easy for him in a way and is more interesting. When he returned with his camera crew, he told Vargas simply to not look into the camera and to just do what he always does, to be normal.
When his son turned 18, Vargas gave him a gun. His son killed a man from Bolivia with the gun and was imprisoned in the selfsame jail Alonso filmed in Los Muertos. Vargas's son likewise appeared in the movie in the scene where Vargas arrives at the rancho of Maria and he and Maria's brother talk about fishing. The man who played Maria's brother was Vargas's son. Alonso appreciates working with "these people" who he describes as uneducated people that often don't know how to talk to themselves and understand their own experiences. They represent a sharp contrast to educated people in Buenos Aires who have increased options. When asked whether "these people" were happier than others and smiled more, Alonso responded that they could smile all they want but it would do little to reverse their lack of opportunity. It's not a question of a romantic notion of primitive mystique, as if they have access to some direct source of happiness. They lead difficult lives and—even if they are aware of how impoverished their lives are—there's little they can do to change it. That's why they keep to themselves and have little interest in traveling elsewhere. They defend themselves and the little they have. Because they are uneducated, wherever they go they are taken advantage of and exploited. Vargas has 24 children, with not even one aspirin to his name, so how could they be fantasized as "happy" people? Notwithstanding, whatever they have, they will offer to you because—despite their situation—they are wonderful human beings. Perhaps what audiences find mesmerizing about Alonso's characters is precisely their lack of self-consciousness? Even though they are allegedly "acting" for Alonso's camera, there is more authenticity and less encumberment by what Robert Beavers recently termed the "shadow of performance."
Asked if the woman who played the prostitute was a real prostitute, Alonso responded affirmatively. That seemed to agitate his audience a bit. That brusque sex scene, Quandt writes, "reminds one that Los Muertos appeared not long after Carlos Reygadas's Japón (2002), another Latin American movie in which a grizzled, existentially unmoored man travels into backcountry in search of decease. But the explicit sex of Japón, like the long takes of elemental landscape that film also shares with Los Muertos, strains for the transformative, even the transcendental, while Alonso aims for the opposite."
The killing of the goat is a visceral shock of recognition. What was important for Alonso to reveal—and thereby remember—was Vargas's skill with a machete, and the gutting of the goat proved it. Even after 25 years in prison, he could wield his blade masterfully. But there is something to be said about the fact that—after 25 years—Vargas has retained skills and remained very much the man he used to be. Returning to his home village further reveals that nothing has changed in his absence. As hungry as he and his brothers were before he was imprisoned, his grandchildren are still hungry and abandoned. These Argentines—unlike those in the cities—are uneducated and have little chance, little choice, and turn to alcohol, which makes it easy to use a knife. Quandt had mentioned in passing that Vargas murdered his brothers because they were starving. When I queried him on this, Alonso said that he came up with that answer because so many journalists were asking him about Vargas's motivations; but, he doesn't necessarily know why Vargas killed his brothers.
The goat, Alonso admitted, was bought and brought on location for that scene. Within the narrative, Vargas in essence "stole" the goat, though it could be argued that—since no one seemed to want it and it was wandering alone on the riverside—that it was a gift to him. What interested Alonso was how Vargas slaughtered the goat: that he leaned it over the edge of the boat to cut its throat so it would bleed into the boat. Alonso asked Vargas why he did that? If I am stealing a goat, Vargas said, I wouldn't want to leave blood on the ground because someone would suspect foul play. By spilling the blood in the boat, he covered his tracks and could clean up afterwards. This is a great example of the authenticity—and, to a certain extent, the particular self-consciousness—of Vargas's "acting"; a self-consciousness that insists upon authenticity. The scene was not in the original script. Again, the point was to demonstrate that he was still skillful with a knife, as well as handling a boat; that he retained a certain indigenous knowledge, one might even say a practical wisdom.
Which made me recall something James Hillman wrote in The Soul's Code (1996:206): "Wisdom in Greek was sophia, as in our word 'philosophy,' love of wisdom. Sophia had a most practical meaning, referring originally to the crafts of handling things, especially to the helmsman who steers the boat. The wise one steers well; the wisdom of the helmsman shows in the art of making minor adjustments in accord with accidents of water, wind and weight. The daimon teaches this wisdom by constant appraisals of events that seems not to fit in. Sometimes this attention to the singular event is called by philosophers 'saving the phenomenon' from the metaphysical trajectories of theories." (Emphasis added.) For me, Hillman's statement applies to Alonso's cinema: his attention to singular events saves phenomenon from too much theory.
When asked about what happened to Vargas's daughter, the mother of the children at film's end, Alonso admitted he didn't know. He felt that Vargas returned to his home village only as an excuse to see the place again. Clearly, his daughter is gone but it's unsure for how long. It's not clear if she has fled from his arrival or abandoned her children. If they are abandoned, then it suggests that little has changed since his own abandonment as a child. Even though Vargas may have come to some kind of understanding within himself after his 25 years imprisonment, the possibility is that nothing has changed and may have even become worse. It's possible that life is no different for people in jail than for those outside of it. "I'm interested in the world of prisoners," Alonso has stated. When he was filming in the actual jail, which housed rapists and murderers, he asked them what the difference was between being in jail and outside. Some of them said that the only difference was that outside they could drink whatever they wanted to drink.
The characterization of Vargas as a serial killer to rationalize the film's abiding menace was a notion Quintin and Kent Jones initiated, and which has been explored by such writers as James Quandt; but, Alonso states adamantly this was never on his mind and that—as Quandt reports—"any violence portended in his ellipses is imagined, merely a sign … of Vargas's primitive existence." Quandt detects "an undercurrent of imminent violence" when Vargas sucks on a honeycomb and that, as "an obvious counterpart to the armadillo kill in La Libertad, the slaying and evisceration of the goat, the fierce shove and suck of its organs as Vargas rips them out and mops the gaping cavity, seem less like Misael's natural act of sustenance than an expression of bloodlust." At Parallax View, Jay Kuehner notes that these "small rituals of violence and survival" have now become signatures of Alonso's oeuvre.
As for the film's cryptic ending and why Alonso chose to end the film where he did, Alonso said he always knew the film was going to end that way. He didn't shoot any further footage within the tent that was later taken out in editing. He took a long take of the toy in the dirt with the freckled shadows and held onto his intuition during the editing to create "this strange moment about living reality like normal movement." Alonso has often explained: "If you shoot a glass of water for two seconds, it's just a glass of water. But if you shoot it for a minute and a half, you—as an audience—start to think many things and it's no longer just a glass of water." Alonso extends what critics argue should be short films into long features precisely to explore this aesthetic. For Jay Kuehner at Parallax View the scene lasted just long enough for "the devastation of a life misspent" to sink in.
Cross-published on Twitch.
"Film must provide audiences the opportunity to discover questions."—Lisandro Alonso.
La Libertad (Freedom, 2001) screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, and scored nominations and wins on the film festival circuit, including the FIPRESCI prize. The son of a cattle rancher and disinclined to carry on with the family business, Alonso was a 25-year-old recent graduate of the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires when he made La Libertad; "outside of Buenos Aires but within Argentina." Alonso met the film's protagonist Misael Saavedra on his father's ranch. Misael, logger by trade, epitomized non-urban youth for Alonso; his reaction to the then-popular trend in Argentine cinema to revel in urban narratives. Perhaps it was Alonso's rural background that granted him familiarity with Misael's incommunication?
Alonso spent eight months in the Argentine Pampas with Misael. It was a difficult cohabitation because they had little in common to talk about; but, slowly, they developed a trust. Once he gained Misael's trust, Alonso proposed making the film. Fueled by his anger that his film proposals were not being considered by the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires, Alonso took on La Libertad independently. The shoot consisted of 10 days with a 12-person crew. The film remained "in the box" for eight months because neither friends nor family liked it. He was frustrated. But then—unexpectedly—La Libertad became a festival darling.
Alonso's method of filming consists of long takes (usually four minutes) which he restructures in the editing room, making minor manipulations to create—as he puts it—"strange expressions of natural everyday things." The result is—as the Harvard Film Archive program capsule describes—"a poetic meditation on labor and landscape."
James Quandt observed in his insightful essay "Ride Lonesome": "So matter-of-fact and uninflected is the film's recording of Misael's daily routines (faithfully re-created from weeks of Alonso's close observation of the man's actual life and edited so that several sequences seem to adhere as real-time) that La Libertad has been hailed as the apotheosis of Bazinian realism."
Quandt further tracked that at Cannes "the film elicited inevitable claims that the boundary between fiction and documentary had been blurred, collapsed, or straddled." Alonso, however, argues that La Libertad is not a documentary, though he grants audiences the sovereignty to think however they want about the film. He stresses his concern is more with the point of view of the audience than his own.
The issue of labor chafes against the film's title. "La Libertad subtly questions the 'freedom' and identity alternately gained and lost by the daily burden of hard labor," the Harvard program capsule concludes. At Slant, Ed Gonzalez notes that "the film's long takes and the cyclical, labored nature of the man's daily grind force the spectator to question the nature of freedom." At Parallax View, Jay Kuehner comments: "Clearly, here was a director who had denuded his cinema down to its sheerest essentials, and what remained was a nominally minimal but ultimately voluptuous portrait of a beautifully forlorn landscape inhabited rather efficiently by a man and his work. Nature, and civilization. The banal, and the mythic. The story was not new—who hasn't worked an arduous day's labor at some time? But the grammar with which it was told was. Radically so." At Elusive Lucidity, Zach Campbell wonders whether the title is ironic: "Is the protagonist, Misael, free in the nature of his labor and solitude, or is he burdened by its necessity?" "The irony," Robert Koehler concludes at Film Journey, "is that there's nothing absolutely Argentine about La libertad. Its freedom is a freedom from nationality, time-space, narrative laws, camera laws and the expectations that audiences instinctively impose on themselves. But pay attention to the actual translation of the Spanish title: 'Liberty'—a harder, more profound word than 'freedom,' a word pointing to a greater leap, a commitment to an ideal, an identifier for an equation that even describes its opposition—oppression. Liberty is harder-won. Liberty is that thing that the films that really matter aspire to. This one just has the balls to take it as its own name."
In the film's final "quietly confrontational" sequence, Misael munches on roasted armadillo and then stares directly at the audience "as if"—Ed Gonzalez suggests at Slant—"daring us to question or challenge the integrity of his way of life", or what Sean Axmaker describes as "the integrity of the quotidian." "As if" becomes a convenient way to extrapolate Alonso's otherwise notoriously withheld motivations. Alonso admits that by encouraging Misael to look directly into the camera, he deconstructed documentary expectations and created a direct relationship with the audience. Alonso simply told Misael to "act" as if were looking at someone who was eating across a table from him.
The film's original ending had Misael laughing outloud while looking into the camera—achieved by Alonso unexpectedly dropping his pants; but—persuaded by the Cannes Festival to (as Quandt puts it) "remove this Brechtian breach"—Alonso settled for the somber, more atmospheric ending.
Many critics of the film have suggested it would have sufficed better as a short; but, aware that no one recovers costs on a short film, Alonso chose to make a feature in hopes he might recover some of his family's investment. His father was the film's producer.
When La Libertad premiered at Cannes, one of the critics from Cahiers du Cinema complained that Alonso treated his non-actor Misael like he was a monkey. "I'm sorry to tell you, but he's wrong about how I direct my actors," Alonso asserted defensively. "I'm not trying to make any money from the films. I'm not trying to use them." He knows he's working with non-actors and has to develop specific approaches with them. He can't ask them to behave like professional actors. Nonetheless the question of Alonso's artistic sincerity clouded the film's Cannes reception. As Jay Kuehner summarized at Parallax View: "The question persisted whether Alonso's film was, to reduce the argument, an act of abstract humanism. Was it possible that esteemed auteurs held a kind of deep faith in their wounded protagonists yet had little regard in reality for their more immediate brethren?"
Cross-published on Twitch.
Adam Sekuler, Program Director for Seattle's Northwest Film Forum (NWFF), organized the retrospective "At the Edge of the World: the Cinema of Lisandro Alonso", which ran this past week November 11-19, 2009. All four of Alonso's films—La Libertad (2001), Los Muertos (2004), Fantasma (2006) and Liverpool (2008)—received their Seattle premieres and Alonso was present to introduce the films and conduct Q&As afterwards. He likewise led an intimate afternoon "master class."
In his write-up for The Stranger, Sean Axmaker emphasized: "In addition to putting together this Seattle series, Northwest Film Forum has taken up the mantle of distributor for Liverpool in the United States." At Parallax View, Axmaker elaborated: "Liverpool was heralded at both Cannes and Toronto from 2008, proclaimed 'one of the best undistributed films' by both indieWIRE and Film Comment, and 'Best Film of 2008' by Cinema Scope, yet no distribution was forthcoming. So Adam Sekuler and NWFF stepped in to arrange a fifteen-city tour of the film, essentially taking the distribution of the film as a not-for-profit undertaking and expanding the concept of nonprofit film organization." Along with Axmaker, I say, "Kudos to the Northwest Film Forum!"
Lisandro Alonso and I first met at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival where I interviewed him in connection with TIFF's screening of his fourth feature Liverpool. He reminded me of a wily but friendly fox and his long, dark hair recalled me to my own as a young man. Our exchange was pleasant but Alonso chided me gently at the end of our conversation for not speaking to him in Spanish. I took this criticism to heart and have worked on my Spanish since then. Alonso and I reconnected this past week in the lobby of the Northwest Film Forum where he recognized me from Toronto and came up to shake my hand. I had the chance to practice my Spanish with him, and he was visibly pleased.
Alonso was equally pleased when I told him that—since catching Liverpool at Toronto—I've been wanting to see his first three films but could only find Los Muertos on DVD. Further, though I rented Los Muertos from Netflix, I kept it sitting on my coffee table for nearly six months, conflicted over wanting to watch it but not wanting to watch it on DVD, but not wanting to return it without watching it. Netflix loves conflicted cinephiles like me all the way to the bank! But the moment I confirmed my flight to Seattle, I returned Los Muertos to Netflix; conflict resolved.
I am most appreciative to Glenn Fox for alerting me to the retrospective and to Adam Sekuler, Dave Hanagan and Ryan Davis of NWFF for encouraging me to attend and for being so accommodating once I arrived. Adam was particularly affable; I never once saw a smile leave his face nor mirth desert his eyes. A cursory review of recent and upcoming events at the Northwest Film Forum confirms that he has done fantastic and important work for the organization.
One particularly exciting aspect of Alonso's NWFF residency is that—per their one-shot film commission series—Alonso agreed to participate and make a short film for the Forum. He was, in fact, scouting for locations just outside of Seattle the day I arrived. He had wanted to make a film about a Northwest hunter but couldn't find a hunter willing to cooperate so, instead, Alonso noticed some horses and decided he wanted to make a film about horses. The morning they were scheduled to shoot, it began to rain; but, for Alonso the rain was a perfect combination with the horses. He and his camera man got the horses positioned just as they wanted them and then the film jammed in the camera. In the process of going back to the car to reload the camera, the cinematographer accidentally left the gate open, which brought the rancher yelling out of her house, kicking them off her land; but, not before Alonso negotiated his one-shot. I wonder where and when this film will show up? It's something to anticipate, given Alonso's frequent statements throughout the retrospective that he is planning to take a break from making films. I'm grateful he and I had numerous opportunities to talk throughout his stay in Seattle, albeit in bursts and spurts. This "conversation" is cobbled together from an ongoing one over the course of several days.
When I asked Alonso what he thought about his movies being more popular internationally than at home, he smiled: "I've often felt that I dance with more beautiful women outside of Argentina than within."
When I asked him why that is, he offered that Argentines are, perhaps, accustomed to the images of labor he depicts on screen. They tend to focus more on his films' structures and his cinema language. In Europe and the U.S., however, the labor has become somewhat exoticized and, thereby, perfect for the film festival circuit where vanishing modes of labor are a popular thematic concern.
The achievement of Los Muertos, what constitutes its stern beauty, is the aesthetic tension between Alonso's calm, observational camera, its sinuous and fluid movement, and a perceived sense of menace throughout the film, a withheld violence. I asked him if he intended this tension or if I was reading too much into the film? Certainly, Alonso responded, he and his camera man sought a rhythm to the film. Perhaps they achieved it? Yet, most of the time Alonso needs his audience's help to make the movie better. "It's better for all of us," he asserted. "If you use my film and work with your own ideas and your own imagination, that's what cinema is about." I complimented him for creating that space for us as an audience.
I asked how he kept his camera so steady moving through the foliage and down the waterways? He said they built a platform over two boats and floated down the river after Vargas who had an assured mastery over his boat.
I asked him to speak about his films' sound designs and music scores. Alonso replied that the sound designer for all his films has been Catriel Vildosola. Flormaleva is Vildosola's band. Vildosola has been entirely involved in each of Alonso's projects from their onset through post-production. From the moment Alonso begins talking about an idea, and then seeks the financing, and then goes to shoot the film, Vildosola is involved. He listens to Alonso's ideas (or sometimes not). For a while, before he began making films, Alonso was a member of Flormaleva, playing maracas (which he admitted added little to the act).
After he finished filming Fantasma, Alonso asked Flormaleva if they could create music for the film? They asked him what kind of music he wanted but he answered, "I don't know." But because they were thoroughly familiar with Alonso's ideas, having entertained them from the very beginning, they were able to create the music.
Sometimes Alonso had ideas about what kind of music should or should not be used. For example, he had seen a documentary on Stanley Kubrick about the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey and been impressed with the 10-minute musical introduction to the film. Though he could hardly compare Fantasma to 2001, why not? He tried to do something similar. He tried to replicate in the audience the same "What's happening? Why is this happening?" through the music.
Though I had wanted to take Alonso out for manhattans at the Grey Gallery & Lounge—and he expressed his willingness to do so—the opportunity never arose because he was so embraced by his audiences. To complicate timing, I had to race off after each evening's screening to catch the bus to my host's home.
One social gathering that I much enjoyed, however, was dinner with Adam Sekuler, Dave Hanagan, Jonathan Marlow, Glenn Fox and Jay Kuehner (whose Parallax View entry cross-published at Hot Splice is quite commendable). Adam had already expressed to me that—contrary to my opinion—he didn't consider James Quandt's "Ride Lonesome" essay on Alonso the best out there. [Decide for yourself: Quandt's essay is now available in a condensed edit at the Cinematheque Ontario website as introduction to the cinematheque's own upcoming retrospective "Ride Lonesome: The Films of Lisandro Alonso", running November 27 through December 1.] Jay Kuehner began pursuing the notion that Alonso's protagonists were comparable to the anti-heroes of Hollywood westerns but Adam stopped him short, stating firmly that the only comparison between western anti-heroes in the Old West and Alonso's characters was their placement in wilderness, nothing more, and hardly enough to warrant such an equation. I found the difference of opinion fruitful. How wonderful that such lean cinema should produce such diverse commentary!
In preparation for the retrospective, Adam compiled an expert primer on Alonso for the Northwest Film Forum's blogsite Hot Splice, expanding upon Harry Tuttle's invaluable efforts at Unspoken Cinema.
Cross-published on Twitch.
There is an intimate scene in Oscar Ruiz Navia's debut feature Crab Trap (El Vuelco del Cangrejo, 2009) that reveals the true translation of the film's title. Daniel, a "white" stranger, has drifted into the Afro-Colombian coastal village of La Barra in hopes of securing a boat to escape Colombia. While waylaid in the village, he befriends a local girl Lucia who entertains him one afternoon by showing him how she traps crabs by flipping them over onto their backs. The crabs are helpless in this position until a wave sets them right side up. Is Daniel in the same position? And what kind of wave will be required to free him from being trapped?
Treading a fine line between documentary and fiction, Crab Trap is a meditative look at daily life in a remote village on the Pacific coast of Colombia that explores the nuances of social and racial relations in one of the most isolated areas of the country. As Diana Sanchez writes in her program capsule: "Oscar Ruiz Navia's debut feature captures a part of Colombia rarely seen on film, the black communities of its Pacific coast. …Elegantly enhancing the distance between the locals and the foreigners, Ruiz Navia uses non-professional actors from the area to contrast with the two outsider characters, who are played by professionals. Crab Trap registers the languid pace of these remote villages while alerting us to the oncoming clash with modernity and how it is beginning to disastrously affect the lives of local peoples." As reported earlier on The Evening Class, Crab Trap was provided completion funding by the Global Film Initiative in 2007. The film boasted its world premiere at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival, where director Ruiz Navia and his two lead actors Rodrigo Vélez and Arnobio Salazar Rivas sat down to talk to me about their film. [This conversation is not for the spoiler-wary!]
Oscar Ruiz Navia was born in Cali, Colombia, and studied at the National Film and TV School of Colombia and the Universidad del Valle. He created his own production company, Contravía Films, in 2006. He has directed the short films Three Pounds: Music for the Sick (2002), Sunrise (2003), The Children of the Beast (2005), Vacuum-Package 1, 2, 3 (2006), There Is a Brain at La Barra (2006) and Liquefaction (2007). Crab Trap (2009) is his first feature film.
Oscar Ruiz Navia: Though Rodrigo is now a professional actor, he started his studies as a drama student at the same university where I was studying social communications. Though we had met before, it wasn't until after the demonstration on the university campus that we began talking about film. In some ways, our interaction after that demonstration set the metaphor for our work: we both wanted to get away from the militant and political atmosphere of Colombia to create something beautiful with film. Though we were both worried about the political situation in our country, we didn't want to mire ourselves in the critical, complaining that "this is bad and this is bad"; we wanted to feel we were taking part in the construction of our country, not the destruction. We wanted to meet our lives with our cinephilia, our ideology, and our aesthetics. We didn't want to create direct speech; we wanted to create something metaphoric. But, of course, this impulse towards metaphor comes from the pain we feel from reality.
Guillén: The fact that the film's political subtext was purposely indirect worked for me, though of course I was left wondering about narrative details. I wondered if Rodrigo's character Daniel had gone AWOL from the paramilitary?
With El Vuelco del Cangrejo I wanted to talk about the causes and consequences of violence in Colombia, but not so much about the violence itself. I wanted to examine the traces of this problem and, of course, wanted to tell the story through one person's small problem as representative of the larger problem. Thus, the neighbors fighting over the music in the film is a metaphor of the intolerance experienced by many Colombians. Colombia is not a militarized country just because we have big guns that spill blood; it's a militarized country because in the daily lives of Colombians there is much intolerance of neighbors and judgment of friends. I wanted to suggest this pervasive intolerance in Cangrejo but leave it to the audience to make up their own mind.
One day during one of my vacations at La Barra there was a white man who—just like Paisa in the movie—brought loudspeakers to play his loud music. Arnobio, who plays Cerebro in the movie, was actually the owner of the camp site where I was staying and he was angry about the loud music. He complained this was not the "real" La Barra and that everything was changing for the worse. With this anecdote I felt I found a metaphor to express the intolerance in our country; a microcosm of the larger problem. I also wanted to have a character who has come from the city and is witnessing this conflict between the villagers and modernity. This character, of course, is Daniel who I felt could be as objective as I was when I visited La Barra. I didn't want the story to side with either of the neighbors. I wanted the point of view to be that of an outsider witnessing the conflict. Also, though he observes what's happening, there's really nothing he can do, just like in real life you can dislike something but not be able to do anything about it. Daniel is the most fictional character in the story, even though the story is told through his eyes and vision. But he's not a hero who tries to save the community; he's just a normal person.
Guillén: You mentioned it took five years to make this film. How did Rodrigo and Arnobio participate in creating the characters of Daniel and Cerebro, respectively?
Guillén: Oscar, I appreciated how your camera looked into the faces of the villagers. It introduced them as characters in the narrative but also, by contrast, emphasized Daniel's difference for being so fair, nearly white, an outsider drifting through.
Arnobio Salazar Rivas: I've had the nickname "Cerebro" for a long time so I built the character up from myself. At the beginning, I met Oscar and some of his crew when they came to La Barra as tourists and my first experience working with them was a short film called There Is a Brain at La Barra where Oscar filmed me making some coconut cookies. That was my first exposure to the camera and then—when Oscar proposed that I play a part in Crab Trap—I said okay. I thought, "I can do it. Why not go for it?" [Of note was that Arnobio's presence at the Toronto International was the first time he had ever been out of his home country Colombia.]
Usually in theater an actor builds up his character psychologically, but it's different in film. I think in film an actor should not be aware of his character in that way. He shouldn't think; he should just feel and react. As a film director, I have to get the actors to feel something and then give them complete freedom. But if I started providing Cerebro motivation—"You are very angry"—he would never have been angry. Instead, I have to make him angry in some way and then capture it on film. For example, maybe I would make him run three kilometers before we started filming. Or the exercise I spoke about between he and the actor who played Paisa, I had them physically struggle until they broke a sweat and then I asked Cerebro, "What do you think? Should someone build a fence here on the beach?" Cerebro started saying what he thought about that and—because he was hot—it looked on film like he had psychologically developed his character's anger. I kept it simple and corporeal, not mental. In theater, actors think a lot; but, in cinema, actors should feel. Because Cerebro and the actor who played Paisa had never met before, it was honest on Cerebro's part to think: "Who is this guy?" If they had become friends before shooting this scene, it would have probably lost some authenticity.
For the actors, I was influenced by the methodology of Robert Bresson who didn't believe in Stanislavski's method of theatrical acting. He thought of actors more as models or objects that the director had to manipulate. That wasn't because he was a bad guy; it was because he wanted his films to be as near as possible to real life. In real life, if you are sad, you don't have to emote. Maybe you're just silent?
