Chilean filmmaker Cristián Tàpies Goldenberg’s films use a poetic lens to explore the affects of political reality on memory. The films are threaded with the Chilean history of revolutionary hopes and their catastrophic collapse. His films seem to ask: how can we keep the memories of the past clear and alive, in order to learn from past mistakes? How much does cultural trauma control and distort our collective memory?
Over the next several weeks, I will be looking at several of these experimental shorts.
Tàpies is not doctrinaire about media, and happily intercuts beautifully shot footage on video and film, along with hand-processed filmstrips and found footage, all of which can be seen within the first two minutes of Canto del Macho Anciano, his 10 minute short (made in collaboration with Roberto Oyarzún Susñar, who also created the soundtrack). The film is based on a poem by Chilean poet Pablo de Rokha, whom we hear reading the poem on the soundtrack.
To dark, foreboding music, permeated by a sound like an air raid siren, we see old black and white footage of barbed wire and bleak landscapes, both rural and urban. These images are seemingly set on fire by superimposed layers of melting orange and red colors. The sequences are intercut with equally bleak footage of children foraging among railroad tracks overgrown with weeds, and masses of crows assembling in a tree.
We hear de Rokha’s voice on the soundtrack, full of sonorous, elegiac language:
la más amada de las mujeres, retumba en la tumba de truenos y héroes labrada con palancas universales o como bramando
(the most beloved women rumble in the tombs of thunder and heroes, carved with joysticks or bellowing…)
De Rokha, a more bitter and argumentative writer than his rival Neruda, paints a bleak picture of a nation whose aspirations are destined for ruin and catastrophe. As co-translator Carmen Giménez Smith wrote: “The Old Man’s Song is threaded with rage, regret, and disconsolation.”
Tàpies and Oyarzún manage to capture in images and sounds the bitterness and rage of de Rokha’s poem, the cantankerous complaint of his voice, and to enhance and amplify the poem, without illustrating the words literally. Towards the end of the film we see an older man, dancing alone in a café to the music of a dispirited band of musicians, defiantly finding a kind of music in his loneliness.
De Rokha’s highly metaphorical language is filled with striking images which can be read simultaneously on many levels: as a personal story, a political reflection, and a spiritual lament. His language demands an equally metaphorical cinematic language, equally multi-layered, and Tàpies and Oyarzún achieve this with subtle and beautifully crafted artistic skill.
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