El Pampero Sings: Inventions on the Motif in La Flor and Two More

1. Introduction

Like how Julio Cortázar wrote about Charlie Parker, here is an attempt to write about something by means of something else. In the short story “The Pursuer” (“El perseguidor”), narrating as a jazz critic, Cortázar stages a fanatic conversation between himself and the great alto saxophonist, as if splitting into two minds who each must speak in his own language. Can writing speak of music? In front of a great figure, fictionalised as Johnny Carter, the French-Argentine novelist does not pretend to write “about” music. Instead, he writes about the musician’s obsession with time, of him wandering the empire of memory in his head with extended monologues, much like Parker’s improvisations, passionate and often under the influence: “… and Johnny was hitting himself in the forehead and repeating, ‘I already played this tomorrow, it’s horrible, Miles, I already played this tomorrow’…“¹ At the end of the novella, Bruno, the narrator who has penned a biography for the musician, begins to question whether his literary theorisations have served justice for his best friend, who performs music in such a way even he cannot comprehend himself. Cortázar’s work, thus, becomes a duel between a writer and someone invisible, silent.

To arrive at a conception of a musician and his work, a novelist must traverse through his own realm of fiction, where writings and (unseen) images become landscapes of time. The eulogy of a musician thus also describes the works of Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges, or Cortázar himself. But if the work of El Pampero Cine resists anything, that would be this figure of the tortuous genius, with only their arts to make them eternal. And yet, from these films, we also face this terrifying immortality – a text that communicates with all arts, all the mummies of our history and nature. With time being our motif, what this text proposes are certain dialogues between the many musical voices accompanying the work of El Pampero, now standing at some two dozen feature films since 2002. If music strengthens the presence of El Pampero’s work, it is because of how its history and traditions situate us in a place, from the memories conjured by genres to the physical space of making a film.

We begin with some pragmatic notes. As Johnny Carter would have suggested, music is something we can use to experience the world in time, and that is to say, to experience the idea of our past, present, and future. In Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella, 2022), we can recall the music that accompanied the two amateur detectives’ travels, both looking for a disappeared woman they loved: a man (Ezequiel Pierri) listens to his stereo while driving down an open road, and he hears a song titled “Los caminos” (“The Roads”, composed and performed by Miro y su Fabulosa & Orquesta de Juguete), which words describe a past friendship. He drives wordlessly, in serenity, who simply listens, taking in this landscape where he continues his search. We listen to the entire song in a continuous shot, where the camera looks at the landscape, then pans to look at the man, and then back again. After the song finishes, he replays it. 

Trenque Lauquen

What does it mean to play a song again? Is the song a question or an answer to his travels? Perhaps not important, other than the fact that this is a song he carries. Or rather, it is the filmmakers who carry the songs around. Likewise, to discover Citarella’s previous film, Las Poetas visitan a Juana Bignozzi (The Poets Visit Juana Bignozzi, co-directed with Mercedes Halfon, 2019), is also to discover an almost imperceivable yet mysterious cue, composed by Gabriel Chwojnik, El Pampero’s trusted composer, with the sound of a theremin. This airy instrument, performed without touching the device itself, was popular in soundtracks of science fiction films since the 1950s and paved the road for electronic music while its inventor, Leon Theremin, became a legendary figure, who led a double-life, working undercover for the Soviet Union, having developed a prototype of television but afterward seized as an asset for espionage.² (How the theme of spies exists in El Pampero’s world is entirely another story – no less fascinating.) Now, back to Citarella’s films, this short, ghostly melody, later heard again as part of the theme for Trenque Lauquen, was thus transformed as a totem, reminding us how the two films were conceived in tandem, as their proximity in motifs and concerns. The sound of theremin becomes a wave of thought, the rumbling of a filmmaker who, while making one film, dreams another: stories of detectives being given a library from another person’s life, who must get lost in time and disappear into their cobwebs of mysteries.

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2. Inventions on the Motif in La Flor

A man records a song in a studio filled with greenish lights. “Yo Soy el Fuego” (“I am the Fire”) is the title, with a rather catchy melody in the style of Pimpinela, the Argentine brother-sister duo with their signature style of alternating dialogues, centring on the arguments of a couple. “Yo Soy el Fuego”, in particular, seems to be a more wrathful version of the duet’s 2002 hit “A Esa” (“To That”), whose lyrics boil down to a melodrama of a woman pleading to her former man, who has left her for another woman. Episode Two of La Flor (Mariano Llinás, 2018) centres also a couple – a duo of pop singers, who have loved and hated throughout their careers, and it is also a film about a song being played repeatedly until its breaking point, passing through different voices, genres and time.³

For Mariano Llinás, to open a film is to bring forth a certain tension, a shot/reverse-shot between a landscape and the fiction that descends upon it. A landscape by itself, be it a face or the earth, refuses generalised readings, but beneath this image lies a history of cinema of the invisible. As in the “landscape films” by John Ford, James Benning, or Huillet-Straub, a plain serves not only as an open ground for civilization but also as a hiding place for stories, secrets, and evil. These filmmakers wander between the canvas of writing and the writing itself, one is seen while the other is not, only “acousmatic,” to use the term from Michel Chion, “sound one hears without seeing its source.”⁴ Look no further than the first sequence of Historias extraordinarias (Extraordinary Stories, 2008): a typical murder mystery scenario unfolds, seen from afar by a seemingly objective camera, which desires nothing but to take in the landscape and the horizon, with an omniscient narrator that also fracturing the narrative temporality: what was described as a nocturnal rendezvous was shot and seen in broad daylight. But after this, we are introduced to the film’s first song. Composed in the style of a cumbia, a type of Colombian dance music, this theme bombarded as the film’s opening credits made its frenzy entrance, almost too joyful, too “cartoonish,” as Chwojnik described.⁵ An unexpected sense of rejoice extinguishes the danger suspending from the previous shot – a primal melody, submerging itself in pure rhythmic pleasure, too pronounced to our ears and eyes.

Extraordinary Stories

Like many of his works at El Pampero, Chwojnik’s score was composed using synthesisers and samplers, constrained by the production size of the film. While orchestral music was unaffordable to these filmmakers, they carried the idea that they can do many using very little with this all-in-one cinema-body that summons everything. Here, we are reminded of the alignment between jazz and the French New Wave or synth music and B-horror cinema in the 1980s. Therefore, if we are to examine the primary musical cue of Llinás’ films, it would be incarnated in the leitmotifs that announce the fiction and its memories, a kind of “musique concrete” parasitizing on all the existing forms in the world – “theme songs”. However, with Llinás, if such motifs are different from those in Hollywood films that seek almost automatic psychological responses from the audience, it is the separation between image and sound that serves as the first question.

If the cumbia overwhelms through a tonal clash, in La Flor, Llinás doubles down on well-perceived notions, for it is a film that dialogues with the relics of time in the history of cinema. Among its six episodes, Episode One is a B-movie about a mummy terrorizing a historical site, which brings upon horror on the four women – archaeologists, scientists, and mediums played by the Piel de Lava group (Pilar Gamboa, Elisa Carricajo, Laura Paredes, and Valeria Correa). This first shooting of La Flor was indeed an étude: for El Pampero, a practice of Hitchcockian suspense, and for the actresses, who have been theatrical performers, acting for the camera. The filmmakers had created a figure, in the words of Jean Louis Schefer, “an organism endemic to cinema comes to infect us with its impossible birth.”⁶ The mummy’s theme, haunted by the ghost of Bernard Herrmann’s score for Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), announces the genre not only to us, but also to its actors during the first sequence: a love scene, introducing Carricajo, the first of the four women. After a slow and sinister melody looming over a couple sharing an intimate moment, we hear sudden disjunct strikes from the strings – a rather typical horror film sound, announcing the impression of genre. But the tone is unsettled within the characters but also outwards, where the genre itself brings disassociation. As if hearing the music within herself, Carricajo shivers while we hear from her lover a beast-like grunt, sourceless. In La Flor, image and sound often persist in dualist positions, where fiction declares itself in its capability to wrap continuities – the opening up of the stories, the snatching of bodies into “animals” for fiction.⁷ This monster or “murderer” – to tweak the word of Jean-Marie Straub – is indeed this dubbing, making itself heard despite the image.⁸ For Llinás, such a primitive trick mirrors the original evil of cinema: it constructs no reality but a remnant copy.

Back to Episode Two. In the studio, Ricky (Héctor Diaz) sings the countersubject of “Yo Soy el Fuego” – rather badly. He utters a few words, but is largely silent, immobile. Perhaps it is because he is no longer in his prime, or maybe because the camera stares at him in an aggressive close-up, something that punctures much of La Flor – it sees faces as its landscapes. But ultimately, it is because his old flame was not there, leaving him in a void of abandonment. In short, Ricky is not the hero of this story. 

However, nothing prepares us for the actual subject of the song, a furious passage from Victoria (Pilar Gamboa) in an equally petrifying close-up. The actress explodes in fury, lashing at her enemy over the phone with a voice that eclipses the words. This declaration is already an aria, a clearing of the voice – the actress unleashes all of her power, whereas afterward, only silence will remain. Still in close-up, Gamboa paces dramatically across the room, and the camera struggles to follow – so are we. In these episodes of La Flor, the telephoto lens of the video cameras (MiniDV for Episode One, Canon 7D for Episode Two) constrain the actors in an anoxic frame, with an even narrower focal point that cripples any overt gestures. The film becomes a conflict of vision between the attacking actor and the camera that, in order to be seen, must each be in the other’s focus. Movement and speech each exhausts itself rapidly: “Talk, Frank! Talk!” “Never Again!“

La Flor

Then, the chanteuse performs “Yo Soy el Fuego” in perfect stillness (Gaby Laguzzi dubs the vocals). Turns out, the song is a pure malediction, with a parade of diabolical rhetorics, bombs made out of “fire,” “venoms” and “arrowheads.” But the other combatant is not here, barely audible in the pre-recording with his out-of-key cries we just heard earlier – the film is missing its reverse shot. A real face-off must be set. In curious opposition to Episode One where Llinás casually exposes the sound-image discontinuity, here, in this “musical”, we dwell on this failure of “synchronisation” – the distance between a voice and a silence.

Lost time announces its return as Victoria, after the failed recording, recounts the beginning of her career with Ricky to Flavia (Laura Paredes), her assistant. But before that, it is Flavia who relates an “official” version of the story before the singer herself offers the “real” one. However, no “Rashomon” effect accumulated except for a simple love song, “Lluvia” (“Rain”), Victoria’s first, played over and over – often not in its entirety but simply a chord or two, passing from Victoria’s guitar to an unsourced piano to the phonograph, spinning like the figurative wheel in Abel Gance’s La roue (The Wheel, 1923).  The real is fragmented beyond fiction, where only recounting is possible. These chords, always returning as the tale is told, stretch themselves into the ambiances. The heartbreaking part of any love song is its repetitiveness. Likewise, in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963), George Deleure’s “Camille” theme is abused to a point where it no longer evokes any emotional resonance except a funny memory of it: it is all recorded, pressed onto a LP.

But what is “a mummy film” if not a mirror of our fascination for the past and its “reanimation,” of the old idea by André Bazin of preserving images of figures against the finality of death?⁹ What is “a genre film” or “a melodrama”, from I Walked With a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1946) to Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954), if not eternity lying idle in spices, reviving at any time in their mythical yet material presences? This figure of the mummy then becomes prehistoric despite its artificiality, with its hollowed eyes made out of rubber or tiny light bulbs, nonetheless a monstrosity that summons countless B-movies: “bad-taste” films, cancerous even, but with a stillness that terrifies, like the victim of Llinás’s mummy who, after a paroxysm of aggression, falls deadly still, awaiting her next attack. It is the living who fears the dead.

While Victoria and Flavia each recites her narrative, black-and-white images of the couple’s “origin story” play like a pre-recording, almost a silent film saved for some obligatory ambiances – some rainy effect here, some thunder there. Are there images to see? Yes, some faces, some atmosphere – but not really. As Victoria’s narration reaches its heart, Llinás intensifies his shallow-focus close-ups to its extreme, building upon each traversing of the focal point like rising or falling scales. Measuring the physical distance between the faces of the characters, the focal point charges and retracts, to an extent where Llinás films only the “out-of-focus” itself. These are no “Casablanca-esque” flashbacks, but closer to Marguerite Duras’ L’homme atlantique (The Altantic Man, 1981), half made with scraps left from another film, half entirely a black screen. Victoria recounts the silence on the screen, in Duras’ words, “What we sometimes see on the black surface are glimmers, shapes, people going in and out of the projection booth, objects that have been forgotten there……“¹⁰ To cite the expression of Shiguéhiko Hasumi, we must look directly into this field of “out-of-focus” as a “tentacle” to perceive the whole work – a spectacular, limitless blur where raindrops in the foreground begin to resemble scratches on aged celluloid.¹¹ But at the same time, there are the close-ups, the faces of Gamboa, Paredes, and Diaz. As the long confession of the chanteuse obscures the outside world, the fog on her face lifts, where this landscape of visage becomes our shelter. But the longer these shots last, the further we are away from the material world as the face of these actors pulls us into her purely illusionary one.

La Flor

When narration ends, silence returns. Wrote Stanley Cavell in The World Viewed, “for the world is silent to us, the silence is merely forever broken.”¹² A case can also be made regarding Llinás’ tendency towards silent cinema (his love for Louis Feuillade suffices) or a “talkie” that explores that very existence of silence. It is easy to forget that in Historias extraordinarias, all three protagonists hardly spoke during the entire film. The narration, then, serves not as their own voices, but as a voice that accompanies their travels, like the dying lion who “Z” (Walter Jakob) must accompany or the river traversed by “H”, played by Agustín Mendilaharzu, a silent man who only expresses in listening to the word of others, or with these long tracking shots across the waters and plains that he filmed as one of the cinematographers. Isn’t Charlie Parker, after all, silent despite his music, who only “speaks” through music? We no longer hear their words but records of their words, the events from which the stories came were over, and we are merely watching a citation of a lonely past. 

Brusquely, Herrmann-Hitchcockian strings return. As Gamboa’s character finishes her remembrance and exits, something uncovers within Laura Paredes, and the “musical” shifts into another film entirely. But beyond the film score, what has returned exactly? We discover that Flavia is in love with Victoria, but her feeling is unrequited, leaving her as a voyeur as she takes in Victoria’s words. But after this tonal shift, as in confessions, there is no taking the words back. Next, an eight-minute sequence, almost wordless: a long drive à la Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) or Psycho, an anonymous man stalking her car, Flavia retrieving a sinister package from an Egyptian that contains certain specimens of scorpion, which venom she injects herself. Chwojnik’s score seems to be from another film, hangs us in suspense in this drive, as if the film, or Flavia, is emptying herself to take in something else.

La Flor

In fact, a motif we haven’t heard since Episode One makes a stealthy return: the confrontation between love and the supernatural once again takes centre stage, and the two stories gradually collide. The film calls upon its immediate past as a parallel plot injects itself violently into the romantic tale, opening up roads in associations that links us back to the previous story. The critic Adrian Martin aptly reminds us that La Flor can be seen as a succeeding work to Jacques Rivette’s Scenes de la vie parallele (Scenes from Parallel Lives), his unfinished four-film cycle of genre experiments from mid-1970s – romantic ghost story, film noir, adventure film about pirates, etc. – all revolving around mythical females, each accumulating in succession with the usage of live music, finally arriving at a fourth film, a full-fledged musical, which was never realized.¹³

What Rivette and Llinás both shared is a desire in filming bodies and events, even when the vision is to explain the invisible, to imagine exterior forces that implicitly invade our minds in various states: the notion of earthly love and hate, trying to devise its “form” by bringing out an unlikely opposite, in the cosmic or godly entities, as seen in Rivette’s Duelle (1976), a “duel of the sun and the moon” as described by Gilles Deleuze, incarnated in the two actresses, Juliet Berto and Bulle Ogier.¹⁴ Rendering through this machine of cinema, an actor’s body accumulates more fictions as her career onscreen progresses, something Llinás articulated in his statement of La Flor, evoking the presence of Ingrid Bergman at the end of Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950), where, for Llinás, as the actress ascends the titular volcano, her oeuvre from Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) to Under Capricorn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1949) creates an unknowing synthesis: “The filming of Stromboli was the first time that the earlier career of an actor turned a fictional scene into something else. (…) She does not play Joan of Arc: she is Joan of Arc.”¹⁵

By making a succession of films centred on the four actresses with no previous careers in cinema, Llinás seeks the mythical resolution that immortalised Stromboli with its actress. And for the Argentine, it must be a record of the real: an actor recorded through time. In fact, across episodes of La Flor, each of the four actresses became her own film apparatus, projecting not just images of her “past lives,” but more importantly, what she had seen from those lives. Here, we should point out that, other than being a collector of stories or a landscape artist, Llinás also makes portraits. His films don’t merely recount plots of countless narrative possibilities, for he would gladly abandon articulations of specific events in favour of some sketchily shot profiles, above which he recites monologues about how someone gets there. Evident from Balnearios (2002) to Clorindo Testa (2022) and, recently, The Mondongo Triptych (2024), Llinás paints the time that haunts the material, from a face to a bookshelf, in their graceful decays that transform the quotidian to monumental. By just the dust on a book cover, Llinás enumerates an entire world. This is what Edgardo Cozarinsky cites as “verbal mise en scène” when talking about Stevenson, in the literary idea of crystallising a figure in two or three short sentences.¹⁶ But this approach compliments images as well. Citing the ligne claire technique pioneered by Hergés, the author of Les aventures de Tintin, what Llinás seeks is “the extreme synthesis in the composition,” from which he creates “lines within the frame and place objects.”¹⁷ If his work ended up possessing monumentality, it will not be a result of the longueurs but for the amalgam sustained within each portrait.

So, is there such a gulf of differences between the Rivetteian conspiracy revolving around the gangsters/alchemists who experiment on scorpion venoms to achieve eternal youth and those love songs that conjure memories and passions like fire? I don’t think so. The two groups are not that different – they are “filmmakers” attempting to preserve time, and in these records, time is overcome, or regained. In La Flor, as in Rivette, this meet of traditions also brings in the theme of “second chances”. Wrote Hélène Frappat in her monograph on Rivette, the idea of second chances stands as its key motif in the musical comedies, omnipresent from MGM-era films by Stanley Donen or Vincente Minnelli to Rivette’s more utopian Haut bas fragile (Up, Down, Fragile, 1995), whether it be “a second chance for talkies,” “a second chance for Broadway has-beens,” or “the unexpected rebirth of second love in ‘remarriages’.”¹⁸ But for paranoia thrillers, this idea of the second chance then becomes blasphemous, in defiance of death, as in Frankenstein or Vertigo, the tragedies of reviving irrevocable pasts – “a second chance for the dead”, from which came Hitchcock’s masterpiece with James Stewart and Kim Novak. Now, we face the furious couple in Llinás, whose reunion is dissonant in space, carrying records of the past unreconciled. While Victoria must perform her revenge song with Ricky face-to-face, Flavia also reunites with her former love, Isabella, played by Carricajo, who was lured by passion in the previous episode but here, as the leader of the gang seeking the elixir, made herself untouchable in her authority. On the one side, the feeling of everything being irreversibly lost eventually, on the other the obstinate willpower that time must stop, that things can last forever.

Therefore, this idea of a physical record is terrifying. Flavia, who doesn’t sing, possesses another silence. When she delves into her own story, it would seem that the plot is concealing her feelings, leaving the previous melodrama behind. But in the world of La Flor, words like “secret,” “stalking,” or “poisoned” produce dangerous impacts; to hear them in a song is to materialise them in reality. To quote Nicole Brenez, “in cinema, everything circulates,” with its “morphology of the image, connecting materiality and immateriality” relating to “the formal qualities of the shot” and “the treatment of motifs.”¹⁹ 

La Flor

Flavia is under a charm, and with that comes the reveries and conspiracy theories, invading her and the narrative. The “venom of scorpion” produces not mythical youth, which already is nothing but simply the image of the actress herself onscreen, it rather stirs memories into her mouth, where her swearing extends out of the song’s harmonic, where the melody of “Yo Soy el Fuego” surfaces above her piercing words as subconscious homonyms. The more silent she is about this event, the more “toxins” she generates through “the other fiction”, manifesting itself in all directions, in the simplest melody, used unironically, the strings and harps that sing their own little games, not only transforming our vision, but also reverting La Flor back to its genesis. It’s impossible to narrate all of the film’s creations but also consider the nocturnal scene where Andrea (Valeria Correa), a fellow chanteuse and Ricky’s current partner, listens on the iPod to her song “Las Estrellas” (“The Stars”, with vocals by none other than Laura Citarella!), setting off a quadrille of tracking shots that connect all the major characters of the episode, where their wee hours are surrounded with imagery of chemical substances and past souvenirs.

When the film arrives at the logical endpoint, questions remain regarding its parallel plots, each colliding into the other at the final moment. But the centrepiece remains the last duel between Victoria and Ricky, both here totally “in sync” while performing Victoria’s revenge track, with their attack and defence, words too fast to comprehend – feelings aside, the duo are in total control of their craft. Even Ricky, willing himself into the power of negative, finally looks back into the face of his past love, completing the reverse shot. The duo performed the song only once. The recordist deemed it a perfection, ecstatic in securing a hit: “in the can,” as filmmakers would say. Will a second chance be fulfilled?

Hitchcockian tone returns for the final time in the episode. We are still intoxicated in close-ups: the focal point leaps from one face to the next between nothingness. Flavia falls sick suddenly. But is this illness chemical, musical, or both? With this last song, there remains an enigma. A song is a specimen of time – a toxin. The idea of a second chance, always doomed to last, terrifies the woman whose silence becomes a stuttering: not only hearing the music but also witnessing its recording. Indeed, this final showdown is shaded in that sudden hush after the final verse. The song can reach no reconciliation – they sing in order not to speak, but through this music, their internal speech overloads the film. But it has finally “produced” something: a record is made, crystallising this duel and becoming its own entity, lifted from the characters. But we are not relieved yet. Whether Flavia will be exorcised remains unknown – the next time we see her, Paredes will become “Agent 301.” Likewise, “Yo Soy el Fuego” becomes its own monster, a work already made – a frightful thought for a film that refuses to end.

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3. Children’s Game – Alejo Moguillansky’s Trilogy of Music

In 2017, Alejo Moguillansky completed his fifth feature film, La vendedora de fósforos (The Little Match Girl, 2017, thereafter as La vendedora). As always, he is tasked with a multitude of problems, and in 69 minutes, the film chronicles, among other things, the rehearsals of the avant-garde opera by German composer Helmut Lachenmann, based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale, to be opened in the opera house Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. Everyone knows Andersen’s story, but repeatedly, it is told, recited, and conjured. 

In the opening of the film, Margarita Fernández, renowned Argentine pianist, plays the second movement of Franz Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A Major, the andantino once heard in Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966). Marie (María Villar), with a name that evokes both the actress and Bresson’s heroine, introduces the stories and their gallery of players: the German composer who writes “insane music,” Walter Jakob, Marie’s husband who attempts to direct the opera, some public officials, a State-run theatre, orchestra members who need their payments, traffic strike on the streets, the donkey from Bresson’s film. But the critical character here is Cleo, the four-year-old daughter of Moguillansky and Luciana Acuña, as the daughter of Walter and Marie. Here, not only as actors or characters, Jakob and Villar indeed became “foster parents” of the child, who they must bring to their workplaces, as these filmmakers and artists are busy with their jobs, where, with nothing else to entertain, they play her Bresson’s movie. By framing the film around the presence of his own child, as it also does around Andersen’s story, Moguillansky chronicles the lives of independent artists through a potential return to innocence.

The Little Match Girl

Classical versus contemporary music, the poverty of artists, a great figure in the history of cinema, radical activism of the 20th century, parenting, and perhaps the most famous story of all-time – there are “subject matters” that would seem impossible for any films to contain. Nonetheless, behind the struggle between art and poverty, forming a dialogue, Moguillansky made a simple film by capturing concise acts: a young woman having an idea, a veteran pianist playing a sonata, a child watching a film, and a filmmaker/composer reading fairy tale(s). Marie, the pianist’s assistant, can’t simply marvel at a Schubert without worrying about her daily bread; on the other hand, Fernández can’t simply play the sonata without carrying her history with the modernist movements of the 1960s.

But the music, standing in the middle, remains. Unlike the spatial hierarchy established between the bourgeoisie spectators and the work playing inside the music hall, us, the contemporary viewers of the world, while listening to music, seem always to be doing or thinking something else. This “something else” is precisely the lives of the filmmakers, inseparable in their work, where they invite the chaos of excess and limitations, thus inviting other works to join their canon, from Lachenmann to Ennio Morricone’s. But the film also dwells on the loss of innocence, dreaming of a theatre of his own without constraint. In La vendedora, we see music completing its reversed pilgrimage, out of the opera house and into the living rooms of its heroines.

What is music to a filmmaker? What does it mean to film a performing musician? In Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, 1968), working with Gustav Leonhardt and Nikolaus Harnoncourt, the camera of Huillet-Straub filmed, in continuous takes, not only the durations of Bach’s masterpieces but also their formations in space. The camera is at its “only” place to compensate all players, and the film reminds us that the great cantor worked with limited performers at his disposal, who, as Huillet explained, “had authorities over him” and also had composed “functional music.”²⁰ Some two hundred years after Bach, it would be Jacques Rozier, the nouvelle vague contemporary of Huillet-Straub and perhaps Moguillasnky’s greatest influence, who made not only feature films that are the most free and musical but also television commissions that served as a study in staging music for the camera, and both elements meet in the opening scene of Adieu Philippine (1962). In 2013, when Moguillansky was tasked to edit and shoot additional interviews for a documentary on the music of Lachenmann, also featured Fernández, this is precisely the question that dwells with the filmmaker, obsessive with rhythm in his editing, along with his liking of musical terms to explain the tempos of his films, “German” for La vendedora, “Italian” for Por el dinero (For the Money, Alejo Moguillansky, 2019), etc.²¹

The film resulting from this commission, Montage (2015), named after one of Lachenmann’s works, can be seen as the first part of an unofficial trilogy that dwelled through musical forms and problems, with La vendedora as its countersubject, eventually rising to the top. When he edits together Fernández’s theoretical analysis of Lachenmann’s music, as well as live recordings that tasked the performers to “break” the instruments, what is on Moguillansky’s mind, if not this impossibility for a camera to attend to these performances, in the rapports between the performer’s body and that of the instrument. Nonetheless, the film records the staggering touches between the piano and Fernández, performing Lachenmann’s “Guero” (1970), where the instrument is prohibited from its “designated” sound, turning the bulk of the apparatus into percussion. Cinema relates to this material tension. That is the question that Moguillansky attempts to answer in the next film, opening up from Lachenmann’s postmodern work to the romantic period of Schubert and Ludwig van Beethoven, since such interrogation produces a new question: is there a childhood for an art?

Montage

One of the prominent pieces featured in La vendedora is Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, known as “Appassionata”. In Anguish and Triumph, his biography about the German composer, Jan Swafford describes the situation under which Beethoven composed this most revered works, at a time where “his all-but-superhuman productivity, holding at bay the gnawing miseries of his health and deafness and his frustrated love.” From its first movement, beginning with “ominous silences, murmurs, pulsations with enigmatic wisps of gestures”, to finally arrive at the fierce coda, in a “weird, stamping dance,” “more furious than ever, as if it were beating the piano to pieces…”²² I am certainly not qualified to dwell further upon the polyphony between anguish and triumph of Beethoven, a privilege I believe only accessible at the hands of his performers (“Look at my hands,” the pianist reminds us), but as the letter from a German militant had once scribed, addressed to Fernández, “to unmask that tyrant named harmony,” Beethoven’s supposed violence towards his instrument seemed to forebode this duelling relation between the divinity of art and the contradiction which the art descends in reality.

Some 150 years after “Appassionata”, Lachenmann’s “musique concrete instrumentale,” the “insane music” described by Villar, is precisely a form of breaching the instrument: to reveal its materiality, to play it outside its designation. If the questions and answers that bounce between the high notes and the bass notes can be seen as a metaphoric combat between two political axes, it should always arrive first in our experiences with the notes themselves. When Lachenmann’s music was categorised as “provocative” or “radical,” the 91-year-old Fernández saw it as “a game for children”: fragmented gestures that seek the material limit of each instrument, bodies of sounds attacking one another, an abstract dialogue in a strange language. At the beginning of the film, when Cleo is taken to the workplace of her onscreen mother, Fernández tries giving her a lesson on the piano, but Cleo, almost by instinct, stamps the keys in forte, as if to test how loudest the instrument sounds — an experiment of music, indeed!

Played by Fernández in the film, the second movement of “Appassionata” —— Andante con moto, is seen as “the response to suffering,” “noble, hymn-like.”²³ As it is reflected in Marie’s offscreen words thinking about an upcoming strike, mirroring the movement’s own twofold structure, the voices from the bass note ascend as variations on the theme bring “an upward rise,” finally reaching the final succession of dreamy 1/32 notes, ending in a flash, like blowing out a candle, before the third movement takes over in a fury.²⁴ Indeed, and I apologise for the naïveté, if I say this in the way that a piano teacher teaches scales and keys to a five-year-old, this sequence of ascending notes would conjure the exact image of the dream of the match girl, and it is precisely this section that attends to the reading of Andersen’s text, and each girl’s enunciation displays difference each time a match is lit. The words remain the same, but a girl’s dream is shown in its infinite numbers of intonations, from voices of prayers to that of a manifesto: “I will light a match in order to still see beautiful things.“

The Little Match Girl

While “Appassionata” feels like the end of something, Prelude No.1 in C Major, from J.S. Bach’s The Well-tempered Clavier, sounds like a beginning of every musical idea of the world. Almost perfectly even between each note, a truth is given that reaches the player’s hands – even a total amateur as this author would – that as the hands follow the notes on the keyboard, one understands its definitive precision without excesses. If Andersen’s story is the ultimate “children’s literature” with its simple sets of sensations and morals, then Prelude can be seen as the paralleled “children’s music”, following the beginning of discoveries, to find each note, like the primitive use of perceptions that runs through Andersen’s tale, which is, above all, a dream of flourishing in a time of adversity, trying to preserve the only thing that can’t be taken away, like fire or snow. In Moguillansky’s film, it is precisely Bach’s piece that accompanies every burst of inspiration of Villar’s character, who must attend to her husband’s need by “staging” the opera remotely, with dwindling space at her disposal – almost a prelude to Moguillansky-Acuña’s pandemic-set musical comedy, La edad media (The Middle Ages, 2022). In the end, nothing is left but Andersen’s tale, simply read with music – a dream that remains when all else is taken.

But as grownups articulate and expand the meaning of a simple fairytale into many forms, how does a four-year-old understand cinema? Simple, the onscreen mother asks her daughter: “Do you prefer the cat movie or the donkey movie?” Those films become a child’s colouring books – to see something for the first time and to learn the names of animals and their appearances, as in Lachenmann’s “Pression” (1970), where, under the passing hands of the performer, a cello utters the howl of a pig. Moguillansky, in close-up, films her daughter watching Bresson’s film, but what does she see? What is she thinking? While we might see a saint of cinema in Balthazar, Cleo sees, simply, a grey donkey, although for her, not just any animal but one that she would dream about.

Because the filmmaker didn’t stop there, since one must also “play” the film as well, seeing the film as its own sheet music. Remaking one of the opening scenes from Balthazar, perhaps during one of Moguillansky’s family picnics: a young Marie, with Balthazar at her side, binding goodbye to her childhood friend. In the scene, filmed again almost shot-by-shot on 16mm colour film, Moguillansky makes Bresson’s work a playground, with that inherent desire of imitation, of sketching a figure – a father playacting with his favourite toys for his daughter, and a bedtime story transforms. Cleo, Marie, and others “enter” Bresson’s film and become Balthazar’s friends – only this time, it is Bach’s prelude that accompanies the images. It is no longer Bresson’s tragedy, and while the work itself cannot be changed, it is possible for a filmmaker to make imitations with dreams of our own.

The Little Match Girl

One last question: What about Schubert? A mystery remains unsolved during La vendedora in a perplexing sequence, where Fernández plays the central section from “Balthazar’s'” andantino. The pianist launches into the most passionate segment in Schubert’s work, “sweeps of scales, arpeggios, trills, tremolos, chords, octaves,” as she called it. Moguillansky allows the scene play out without disruption, and Fernández’s interpretation haunts us as she plays this crescendo slightly stranger, with hands moving along the keyword but resisting its speed in unnatural pauses, and finishing on an endnote that abruptly cut short its transition back to the theme, as the pianist turns an enigmatic gaze to Marie as well as the camera. This isolated gesture in La vendedora turns out to be part of a missing piece, a thirty-minute sequence where Fernández analyses the usage of Schubert’s andantino in Bresson’s film, a question that Moguillansky left unsolved to make an entire film.

As the third part of this unofficial trilogy where one extends out from the other, Un andantino (2023) was constructed years after its original images were shot, combined with new footages and commentaries at present day. In the sketchy writing of the film, Schubert’s Sonata and Bresson’s donkey form a mirroring contrapuntal piece. It was Bresson who had chosen Schubert, but vice versa. But if La vendedora, with its lyrical thematic flow, is all about bringing back the sensation of innocence, of a child discovering a story for the first time, then the new film is a darker double, where such lyricism turns into a fiery, swinging tempos, fatefully calling for lost time in history, like the bawling of a donkey overwhelming the rising andantino in the opening credit of Bresson’s film. The filmmaker searches for an answer, which calls for some inevitable heaviness, for his goal, if not noble, remains impossible.

But the mission for Moguillansky remains to be (a) to finish a film that began years ago while his daughter was much too young, but now a defiant ten-year-old who talks back to him; (b) to make a presentation of Fernández’s text regarding Bresson’s film to the music which it cites, and for the senior pianist to relive the troubled thoughts during her youth regarding the  aforementioned central section of the movement and the way it sabotages the theme; (c) to make an essay film in pursuit of the tempo of Schubert, this short-lived romanticist who, says the film, “preferred intensity than narratives,” who was against the musical taste of his time – to have the filmmaker’s images synchronise with the symphonies of his idol, and finally, to justify the incompleteness of the venture itself, where the composer’s theme for his unfinished Eighth Symphony returns again and again. Moguillansky’s hermeneutic shatters all traces of innocence, for time has left him a great gulf, with a sense of fury disguising melancholy.

Un andantino 

And there comes the fourth subject, (d) where out of this essay flows not only Balthazar and Schubert but also the reprise of the remake done by Cleo’s family, no longer resided in the narrative of Bresson, returning to the perpetual “home movie” by a family of filmmakers thinking and living with arts. Seeing a much younger Cleo, we discover that her popping eyes were no more mysterious than that of Balthazar. María Villar plays a guitar over the images, away from Bresson but in his memory, singing Take It With Me by Tom Waits, a favourite of Moguillansky: “In a land there is a town, and in that town there is a house, and in that house there is a woman, and in that woman there is a heart I loved, I’m gonna take it with me when I go. I’m gonna take it with me when I go.” 

If I should say that the conjunction between the images becomes too potent to bear when Moguillansky puts the dying donkey at the end of Bresson’s alongside a narration on the twilight moments of Schubert or when Fernández, mincing no words, theorises that the progression of the andantino resembles the always obstinate Balthazar, I would be forgetting that what this boils down to is a matter of free association, otherwise a work of art would exist in solitude, like rocks or the passing time. But we love to lift the stones anyway, like any child would, like the end of Godard’s Éloge de l’amour (In Praise of Love, 2001), where a voice says: “I see a landscape that is new to me, but it’s new to me because I mentally compare it to another landscape, an older one – one that I knew.“²⁵ Moguillansky draws a diagram that connects a film to a sonata – and so, we listen to the images and see the notes of a song.

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4. Historical Songs or: The Art of Sketches

In front of his balcony, Mariano Llinás “directs” a trio of coloured balloons. Sometimes, the purple one disappears, leaving the other two bouncing in the wind, as in a tango-like movement. Speaking of which, the song “La cación de Buenos Aires” (“Buenos Aires’ Song”), a Carlos Gardel classic, composed by Francisco Canaro, plays. This shot opens a series of video correspondences between Llinás and a fellow Argentine, New York-based Matías Piñeiro, made between July and September of 2020, during the height of the pandemic. While a new cycle of films, Saga de los Mártires Unitarios, about “a group of generals and colonels defeated in the Argentine civil war of the 19th century” already in the works, Llinás makes minor films, dedicated to the subjects dear to him by using his camera and himself through the cracks between direct representation, often following (or not following) commissions.²⁶ Llinás already completed “Book One” of the saga, Concierto para la batalla de El Tala (Concert for the Battle of El Tala, 2021), where the recording session of Gabriel Chwonjik’s opera of the same title became a reading place of historical materials, with the texts shown onscreen juxtaposed with musician’s work. In a post-COVID Argentina, each filmmaker at El Pampero reconsiders any gestures that constitute “making films,” as they are shown in La edad media or Clementina (2022), the directorial debut of Mendilaharzu and Constanza Feldman, where family lives under quarantine and economic crisis are transformed as playful choreographies and auto-fictions.

These films also accompany a continuing desire for dialogues between families and colleagues. In the four videos to Piñeiro, Llinás once again takes the form of the landscape study, with his camera recording passing roads during travels, or with the filmmaker attempting at staging only using his iPhone. Each of these “letters” is also attended by a song, a theme curated from Llinás’s daily listening: songs by Azucena Maizani, the most legendary of female tango artists, as well as Le tombeau de Couperin by Maurice Ravel, whose Piano Concerto in G Major graced the most lyrical moment of La Flor. In these short pieces of life, we find, always, a comedic approach at filming the material world, from a monument of Columbus, a book by his father (in the film Clorindo Testa) to portraits of himself and others seen through hidden places. One of the filmmaker’s favourites has been Ignacio Corsini, whose song was featured in Derecho viejo (Straight on Mate, 1998), a student work Llinás made at Universidad del Cine, where it already felt like the narrative was crawling out from a song and into the bodies of actors.

With Corsini interpreta a Blomberg y Maciel (Corsini Sings Blomberg and Maciel, 2021, thereafter as Corsini interpreta), Llinás finds his roots in the great union between Argentine music and the history of cinema. Between the late 1920s to early 1930s, centring around the worldwide popularity of Gardel’s tango-canción, this high time of tango and other porteño music was marked by a deep bond of cross-presentations between radio, theatre, and cinema, having just introduced sound, each shaping the other to be “popular culture phenomenon,” and Corsini, “both a friend and admirer” of Gardel, took part of that legacy, although unfortunately, none of the films featuring him have survived today.²⁷

Corsini Sings Blomberg & Maciel

To paraphrase Serge Daney, there is a record, the filmmakers love it, “and loving it, they filmed it,” remade it on their own terms.²⁸ But Corsini interpreta marks not only a “re-recording” of its titular album, since Llinás also integrates the making of a film into its structural consideration. This means filming the journey of the film’s own making, using filming as a means to understand the musical work, and presenting that process as a reading, a voyage, and finally, a space to imagine future films.

In the invaluable todotango.com, Néstor Pinsón writes a short biography of Héctor Pedro Blomberg, “essentially a poet,” whose father was a sailor and his mother “an excellent writer and translator.” His writing career began thanks to his philosophy that travelling is “a permanent attraction” in life – a heritage of which Llinás sees also himself.²⁹ Blomberg’s first poems came from a two-year-long voyage across the Atlantic when “walking along the waterfront he saw a ship ready to sail to Norway.”³⁰ Upon returning, Blomberg published several collections of poems that were initially overlooked. Later, he became a “popular writer”, moving into theatre and radio, since poetry alone couldn’t sustain him financially, eventually leading to songwriting.³¹

Before he had teamed up with Corsini and Enrique Maciel, the singer’s go-to composer and multi-instrumentalist, Blomberg already has written intensively on the subject of “Unitarios and Federales,” fictionalised historical tales during the Argentine civil wars, particularly the reign of Juan Manuel de Rosas (from 1835 to 1852), with its secret police Mazorca ruling the nation, and characters suffering consequences for “forbidden loves because of irreconcilable ideas” – the themes of the songs re-recorded in the film.³² In a musical form famously deemed “a sad thought that is danced,” the historical songs by Blomberg reveal, from the already defining motif of heartbreaking romanticism, the presence of a concrete space in time.³³ To quote Borges in “A History of the Tango”: “We read in one of Oscar Wilde’s dialogues that music reveals a personal past which, until then, each of us was unaware of, moving us to lament misfortunes we never suffered and wrongs we did not commit.“³⁴

Sheet music of “La Pulpera de Santa Lucía” as seen in Corsini interpreta

The film opens as a travelogue, as we see the filmmakers begin their day: Mendilaharzu, who hums “Los Jazmines de San Ignacio” in the opening shot, drives around Plaza de Mayo, where peaceful protestors have gathered on the Argentine Independence Day. Then Llinás enters with his canine friend to meet up with the cinematographer, and they drive to the courtyard where the shooting will commence – it already is. We see the streets they are travelling along, as Corsini’s biggest hit, the waltz “La Pulpera de Santa Lucía” from 1929 plays. Detective work has already begun, for these are also the streets where history wrote itself, where the music is heard, and a film is imagined. Later, Pablo Dacal, the singer-songwriter who also performed at the end of La Flor, arrives with his trio of guitarists (Julio Sleiman, Muhammad Habbibi Guerra and Gustavo Semmartín).³⁵ As those men arrive at the scene, To unearth an old song that spoke of a moment in history even more distant, Llinás and company dust off their dictionaries, discovering old vocabularies and forgotten names: pulpera, cuarteles, vihuela, etc., each encloses its own fabric of time. This etymological play of understanding and choosing the right words (sometimes the wrong uses of them), plus a treasure hunt around Buenos Aires, brings the pleasure of making a film.

Talking about history is about recognizing names and how each name carries the music and the space in time where the real and the fiction bloom. The film and the album, as two collective works, each reveals its directory: Blomberg-Maciel-Corsini, Llinás-Mendilaharzu-Dacal… There are other names, more distant: Camila O’Gorman and Father Ladislao Gutiérrez, for example, and their tragic romances, each are synthesised in the verses, where the filmmakers find locations and theatres, as well as conventions, costumes, and leisure activities during the Rosas’s reign, when each colour brought its glory and danger.

There also lies a topography in Blomberg’s lyrics, where his extended intonations reveal a map of the old Buenos Aires: “en la pa-rro-quia… de Monse-rrat…” (“in the parish of Monserrant…“) The filmmakers follow suit to conjure memories of places. Engraved in the songs, these names of streets and parishes, as well as fragments from O’Gorman’s biography, which Llinás read en route, each announces their distinct musicality. In the pleasure of narration, voices of stories and discussions flow through the filmmakers’ windshield, into the landscape that passes, where life must go on. Wrote Pinsón, the episodes Blomberg created “belonged to solid earth and depicted the events that had happened several decades before his own birth, even on the same streets where he grew up.”³⁶ Therefore, the “travelling shots” become literal, with the city’s congested roads becoming camera tracks and the vehicle’s windows a viewfinder, where we also discover the tension of finding an ideal shot – or the comedy of a shot that fails. Indeed, it is hard to find, driving on a busy street, let alone film an old parish church from 150 years ago from an enclosed van.

“Porteños always associate tango with words.” wrote Link and Wendland in the book, Tracing Tangueros: Argentine Tango Instrumental Music.³⁷ While musicians reinterpret, dialogues between filmmakers become the film’s second voice. The beautiful concern of El Pampero, being the marriage between words, images, and sounds, mirrors the literary and poetic heritage of Blomberg’s work, also between the distant recorded voice of Corsini and Dacal’s live singing. Meanwhile, the oral tradition of Llinás’s films evolves from its earlier, more solitary form, extending itself as experiments on discourses, explored already in Episode Four of La Flor. Resembling the form of a sainete – short comical sketches originated from porteño theatre, Llinás, Mendilaharzu, and Dacal debate, all surrounding a microphone, and their arguments serve as the rhythm of the film, and both its thought and afterthought, situating the film both at the time of its shooting and its editing.

Corsini Sings Blomberg & Maciel

These discussions keep the humorous energy by contrasting itself with the melodramatic, and often bloody narratives from Blomberg’s verses. While risking trivialising themselves, with arguments about the tyranny (or not) of Rosas or the distinction between femicides or political murders, the filmmakers revitalise past histories as questions to be opened in the present. The “political equidistance” held by Llinás, the film’s running gag that borders on self-parody, ultimately proves the contrary. Here, partisanship serves as material for fiction to invite reconsiderations of the language of legends sung by Corsini. The filmmaker sides neither with Rosas and his trompas nor those who resisted him, but he surely allies himself with the romanticists, people like Blomberg who printed the myths and embraced us with melodies and the pleasure of narration. In those archetypes of the 19th century, what the filmmaker sees is an enduring ambiguity arising from folklores, with the instability of the word of mouth changing a narrative in its continued retelling, in the anonymities of a plain embroiderer or a pulperia, or that of O’Gorman, who seek to survive by being an incognita, someone who renounces the idea of a monument while becoming one herself, who could also become “La Guitarrera de San Nicolás.” Staring into the paintings of those named or nameless figures whose gazes always turn back to the viewers, Llinás and company draw a map of pillars, threading the act of myth-making across art forms; for this, old clothes will be put on to make sketches of future films.

But no “historical dramas” will come out of this. Since a question of mise-en-scene remains: How does one film a bloodstained history, despite this lyricism of music? Is it possible to film wars? How does one film these women under the gazes of tyranny, with their presences inscribed in a man’s words? There are multitudes of silence to traverse, for these women were not heard in their voices, fictional or not. Their myths exist only as reflections in a great cantor’s voice, whose words are written by a romantic who dreamt of paintings and empty streets, tracing these misfortuned tales that can only be imagined, in this “male movie that dances around mythical women,” (“película masculina que danza alrededor de una mujer mítica“) wrote Marcela Gamberini.³⁸ Llinás’ journey begins as Blomberg’s ends, for the film is already made of multiple shootings across time, happening jointly to complement each other in a fugue of sketches. But at the midpoint, a final voice arrives. The heroines of Blomberg and Maciel enter the film as actresses – some we recognize, like old friends: Feldman, Acuña, or Pilar Gamboa – in the simple costumes they don, decisive in their look towards the camera, imprinted with music.

Between dressing workshops and quick outlining of scenes, Llinás and company practise the art of sketches: to play dress-up, as in the spy episode of La Flor where Argentine actors dressed up as Europeans or Americans with their shaggy uniforms and heightened (dubbed) accents, reminding us less of an espionage epic but war games played by children running on the streets. One exterior scene, adapting the story of “Los Jazmines de San Ignacio,” an extraordinarily fast sequence, is composed entirely with still photographs. The extreme synthesis between gestures and ellipses: the rhythm of editing contends directly with Blomberg’s ballad, and in between, a literal “costume drama” that needs little to conjure fiction: an actor in her uniform, embodying someone but resolutely herself. (Once again, El Pampero’s proximity with theatre is pronounced here.) Another sequence of great liberty: a group of actresses try on costumes and do each other’s hairstyles, and the rapport between these women escapes totally the filmmaker’s will, where we imagine with them the silent phantoms they’ve yet to play.

Corsini Sings Blomberg & Maciel

It’s not surprising that a “mysterious female sound editor” – Ingrid Pokropek, a long-time producing collaborator of El Pampero, who made her directorial debut with Los tonos mayores (The Major Tones, 2023) – closes the film, once again pushing the narrative to new mysteries, that of its unending. After the recordings wrapped, this archivist of image and sound stares into the yellowed pages of Blomberg’s songbook, left by the filmmakers – for this is not a closed book. After this coda, a word onscreen: “Ignacio Corsini will return.” (“Ignacio Corsini regresará.“) Sacrilegious for Llinás, who dares to evoke the Marvel regime? No, since it is also Llinás who is still proving the remaining possibility of a popular cinema that doesn’t forget the Earth it came from. In May 2024, Dacal posted on Instagram that a second film on Corsini had finished photography, appropriately titled Corsini: Popular tradición de esta tierra.³⁹ One set photo shows, once again, a meeting of El Pampero’s extended family, this time, compared to the first, also with Chwojnik and Paredes. In another photo, Llinás and Dacal, dressed gaucho-like, are getting ready for their next journey. This story remains unfinished.⁴⁰ 

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Postscript

A pure film does not exist. But there can be a film purely about colour. When you see purely colours, the rest of the material world fades sideways. To create meaning with colour is a unique fiction of human psychology. Luckily for us, the history of painting or the invention of three-strip Technicolor has shown the way: to arrive at a true conception of colour is to mix them. Montage. Mariano Llinás presents, in Kunst der Farbe (2024), based on Johannes Itten’s seminal book of the same title, a chance to see and hear again: learn a new language (hilariously), (re)watch a Feuillade, imitate a painting, to understand a film technique, despite the fact that this world of colour is no longer chemical but digital, synthetic, represented by wavelengths and pixels. As Oscar Wilde once argued, we only begin to understand the colours of nature after we see it through paintings, and for Llinás, same with cinema and light, same with Gabriel Chwonjik’s chamber music, narrating throughout the film nothing but unspeakable sensations and rhythms. The filmmakers don’t look for colours; they pursue them, like Hitchcockian characters on the road. A yellow car thus signifies in equal terms to a Mondarin, same with a cow or a golden plain at sunset, a colour that blossomed from the mix of the sun and the earth. Therefore, an actress’s grin or a colourist’s tool reaches the same abstraction. Even a chance to learn from a mistake, to finally listen to the others – the film succeeded over a failed communication and some butchered portraits. For the first time, the great narrator may have finally exorcised himself from the devil of words.

Endnotes