THE WORLD OF EL PAMPERO CINE (2): Spies and Specimens

THE WORLD OF EL PAMPERO CINE (2): Spies and Specimens

IV. A Spy's Mission

Both Historias extraordinarias and La Flor begin with a shot of a landscape and a shot of its filmmaker - in the first film, Mariano Llinás is one of the protagonists who is about to walk into a rabbit hole of murder and mysteries, and we know this because there is also a voice who had warned us; and in the second, he is a quirky guide who feels the need to introduce his long film and to show us the sketch which is the film's genesis - the drawing of the six-arrowed "flower" and the four actresses which made it a reality. Although they seemed very abstract, it is already the first map and the first portrait.

What is a spy? Let us examine a gesture. It is as follows: the first is a message. For now, it is not important who sent it, but it would be a message that indicates a meeting at some place. This meeting, often between two persons, would be nonverbal and lasts a very short time - the length of one shot would do, and depending on your interpretation, "a shot" would either mean an image or an assassination, or both. And thirdly, most importantly, an exchange takes place. In short, two people meet over a message and exchange something - one gesture that compresses a world and a secret. The key is that a spy takes part in a great system, fighting a war that has no complete picture, a loner in principle but always in connection with the world through a series of narrative codes. What? Where? Who? Why? These are four essential questions, but in El Pampero's cinema, the fourth question, the "why," is often obscured, and it is that question that links the event and the body. From here, a gesture becomes a novel. Llinás' films, thus, form between the shot and reverse shot of the faces and the plain - the plain of infinite stories as seen by somebody.

A spy is an observer, a collector. Her work is that of a novelist, a detective, a script supervisor (in old times as "script-girl"), or a video camera, who invented her system to see the world, classify it, and extract meanings or time from it. When a particular situation arises, she becomes an actress; she invents characters for herself based upon other characters, sometimes those who are her exact opposite. This performance is a matter of life and death; danger is everywhere, or so she thinks. In Historias extraordinarias, the three men are involuntary spies, and the great obscurity has launched its attack on them, suspended over them, with puzzles that create a desire to solve them. While it is impossible to summarize the situations the characters faced in the film, we understand it through the situations of the filmmakers since this was El Pampero's first proper battle, where the team and the troupe worked out their methods, with minimal means, and would take years to flourish. In the freshly printed interview of the group with Cahiers du cinéma, Agustín Mendilaharzu explains: "We were young people who prepared a film for years, accumulating mountains of mini-DVs with an infinite amount of waste, and we kept hearing 'that's not how we do it.' Proving that a film shot this way could work, be recognized, was a huge boost."

But Llinás' great idea, and his paradox, is to forever prolong the arrival of the conclusion. The ending is like death, like spies being disposed of by their superiors, as Llinás' narrator had repeatedly proclaimed in his voice-over for La Flor. But as documents, photos, evidence of crime, and other dossiers pile up in the protagonist's confined space, the spies/the viewers suddenly discover that the landscape is not linear, like a mountain, but horizontal, like a plain. Historias extraordinarias and La Flor both end with the camera looking afar at the horizon. If there is an answer to the filmmaker's love for the longueur, it is because the horizon carries the possibility of portraits, seen and unseen. If the duration in the films by Jacques Rivette, particularly in Out 1 (1971) or Celine et Julie vont en bateau (1974), is the result of him "wanting to see into every room in a house," Llinás' would be his obstinate desire to make portraits of every passing being, even when they were not there. Actions or non-actions take place, but for Llinás, the essence of showing any actions is always to extract a sketch of their presence: a complex love story seen from various viewpoints, a man with a precious memory during World War II, a slow river which suddenly turns to a sea.

The reverse shot: a spy movie is always about its actresses, the one who must ravel the plain of mystery. She remolds herself by standing beside different situations or being subjected to surveillance by other spies in the same manner, made into dossiers, reports, or other literature - and despite all that, her face remains the same. She either unleashes all her dramatic power or puts on nothing but an unchanging face. Concerning whatcritic Jean Narboni wrote about faces in Hitchcock films: a closeup of an actor's face is like a chamber that emits signals of ambiguities, a transmitter that generates an abundance of misinterpretations and branches of understanding. A spy acts out all the roles, but she is still completely unknown. Take Pilar Gamboa in La Flor. In a previous episode, she's a pop singer with an explosive temper who launches her attacks in verses and extended monologues, and in the next, a mute secret agent whose only protection from the world is her silence.

The offscreen voice, then, not only narrates the stories but also becomes another plain itself: a spy's repose, a pause between the duel, a little miracle of counter-information, or simply little tales or memories, including the portrait of a spy's enemies. What is Llinás' project? To give back freedom to both the face and the mouth, the image and the words, so they finally speak to each other. It's easy to forget that in Historias extraordinarias, two of the protagonists, played by the filmmakers themselves, barely uttered a word during their respective journeys. It is the voice from the offscreen that accompanies their travel, providing them with rhythms and, therefore, drama to their silences; it is like the lion and the lost bureaucrat, with no languages to communicate with the other, sharing a little time of tarnished destiny. What is the triumph of Historias extraordinarias if not the co-existence of these three men, who had never crossed paths at any given time but only crossed because of cinema, of the alternations between the stories which create resonance between their respective movement or stillness: they experience each's isolation or journey for the other. And what is the triumph for the spies, if not an inner victory, when they are no longer loners but a team, no longer on a mission but acting in a film, no longer escaping death but calmly deferring it, like Scheherazade. Like a manifesto, the beautiful final shot of the spy episode proves this power.

V. The Story of Laura(s)

Ostende is a coast-side resort town near Mar del Plata with an iconic landmark, the Viejo Ostende Hotel; it is legendary for bringing inspiration to many literary who had written work at residence, including Adolfo Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French author of The Little Prince. It was also where Laura Citarella made her first film in 2011, where a woman checks into the hotel and begins to hear stories and discover susceptible activities, à la Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), with a couple of her neighboring patrons. Eleven years later, her second solo fiction film is set in the municipality of Trenque Lauquen, which translates to "Round Lagoon" in the Mapuche language, a town 440 kilometers from Buenos Aires. Both films starred Laura Paredes, as someone also named Laura, who might be the same woman, only ten years apart. In fact, Citarella, like many of her peers, takes pleasure in borrowing the first names of her actors as their characters': Elisa (Carricajo), Juliana (Muras), Rafael (Spregelburd), Ezequiel (Pierri, her real-life partner), etc, and that intimacy extends to the space as well.

Citarella's films are born through a series of ideas. First, that of the small town, the space in which the stories are set; while the character's name coms from her filmmaker/actress, the names of their locations inspire the film's titles, which cast their first spell, and moors cinema to a place. The second is the correspondence between two people, sometimes at two different times. The third, perhaps the most beautiful, is that of disappearances, of traces left behind, which inspire presences. To leave somewhere, one must live with it first. Citarella knows that, to answer the question about a disappearance, one must seek out what had appeared before and after, and this would mean evoking an entire world of fiction. Ostende, like many others, begins with the old tale, "a woman enters a house," while Trenque Lauquen is about "a woman who left," a question which haunted filmmakers from Otto Preminger (Laura) to David Lynch (Twin Peaks), a disappearance that kickstarts a mystery.

These two "detective films," which don't necessarily follow the film noir tradition, emerged with the idea of detectives who are lost to time, that her pursuit after a disappearance, a mystery, ultimately guides her into a parallel time where they will also disappear for the rest of the world, like entering the event horizon of a black hole: the flesh of actuality vanishes, but the image of the time past remains. Her enterprise is the transformation of a reader into fiction. That decisive threshold, the threshold between a detective's trail and her eventual transformation into fiction itself, brings the suspense. In Trenque Lauquen, this body carries the name of her storyteller, and her disappearance is seen as both the end of one film (Part II with the mutant) and the beginning of the other (Part I with the mysterious Carmen Zuna). For Citarella's detectives, the act of one narration line can only be resolved by grafting it with another story: to use botanical terms as Laura would, or at the very least, to share one story with another, like the hypnotizing yellow flowers which acted as a catalyst of the mutant story, slowly fusing the botanist with her unknown specimen.

The keeper who tangles (or untangles) this complex network is certainly her director, but Citarella's gesture begins with sharing. A woman shows a visitor the main street of her town: this old building here, this lake there, that boulevard there. The shot travels through the shopfronts, then pans to the man looking at them through the windshield, then the same movements repeat at different landscapes—the camera sees something, then it looks at the characters, seeing. This motion runs through the film, an essential delivery: a story has been given to us, and everything will not be the same.

What sets the narrative labyrinth of Trenque Lauquen apart from the previous Ostende, where Laura was merely an observer, is that enigmas can only present themselves through the speech-act of its protagonist, who must also disappear at the end once the existing story had been exhausted. Like the great folk tradition, if one doesn't tell a story, it will never exist for the world. Laura, both the filmmaker and the actor/writer, embodies the stories themselves. Like a little girl or a "mad woman" (as seen by some from outside the fiction), excited and articulated, she cannot wait to exhibit her latest findings as soon as she finds an audience. She navigates her creations through all forms at their disposal, verging on the fantastic. In the earlier film, the mystery lingers on as its observer goes away, but in Trenque Lauquen, Laura transforms herself into the mystery itself. Wrote Borges in The night of the gifts: "I felt that she was unable to think of anything else and that the story she told us was the only thing that had happened to her in her life." A library is a public collection only because it is made out of countless private ones, books once held by someone, where every set of books can be its own landscapes and network of stories. Thus, it is unsurprising that she would seemingly abandon one story, suspend it, to tell another — she knows that by telling the first story, she would no longer own it. It is now set free in time, in another, in those to have listened to it - hence, Citarella's love for the radio station. For the two Lauras, a mystery is only as important as how it was concealed and obfuscated, which brings emotion, in the bumpy map made out of books in their sea of annotations and folding.

(To be continued.)

wirtten by TWY