Self-Management, Horizontalism, and “Extremely Cheap Risks”: El Pampero Cinema and Independent Theatre

This article was first published in Entre/telones y pantallas. Afectos y saberes en la performance argentina contemporánea (Libraria, 2020), the volume we co-edited with Jordana Blejmar (Univ. Liverpool) and Philippa Page (Univ. Newcastle). The book identifies an emerging genre in contemporary Argentine cultural production, marked by hybrid aesthetics, a blending of fact and fiction, a playful spirit, and transnational dialogues that take place across screens and stages. Pampero Cine’s productions, which rely on an affective combination of friendship, talent, and cooperative work, have been a solid foundation of that voice within Argentine performing arts. As Jean Graham-Jones argues, Pampero’s strive for independence reveals its wildest and most playful elements in the determination to produce, circulate—and eventually live—outside the official production circuits. We are happy to see Jean’s essay included within this wonderful dossier in Senses of Cinema.

– Introduction by Professor Cecilia Sosa

It is often said that theatre and cinema share only the actors who work in both artistic mediums, and that they are two dissimilar arts, separated forever by their means of communication: theatre, a live, immediate art that fosters the co-presence of actor and spectator; and cinema, a technical, mediatized art that attracts the solitary and passive spectator, an artistic medium akin to television – perhaps today more than ever with films transmitted by Netflix, among other digital platforms, on the small screen.

The division is not so simple: contemporary theatre today (often called “Postdramatic”) has been increasingly intervened by other mediums, including cinema and television, and intermedial intervention is not new. According to US scholar Philip Auslander, television began by employing a theatrical format (which Auslander, following theories developed by Jay David Bolter and Peter Grusin, calls ‘remediation’, or the representation of one medium in another), and, indeed, early television programs consisted of live broadcasts of theatrical performances. Today, more than one theatre actor has become a movie star, and many playwrights work as film screenwriters, while Hollywood celebrities repeatedly cross the Broadway boards in search of a certain artistic legitimacy.

Blanca Podestá

Blanca Podestá & José Podestá

In Argentina’s commercial and state-supported artistic spheres, similar connections can be observed. It could be said that the relation between theatre and cinema in Argentina has existed since the country’s first films. To cite just one example, Blanca Podestá, from a famous circus-theatre family and the most important actress of her time (as well as head of her own theatre company), participated in early films such as the lost silent movie Camila O’Gorman (Mario Gallo, 1909). Throughout her professional career, Podestá alternated between cinema and theatre, ultimately concluding her extensive career with the sound film Sendas cruzadas (Crossed Paths, 1942), directed by Belisario García Villar and Luis A. Morales. Today, Argentina’s best-known film and television actors, such as Ricardo Darín, Guillermo Francella and Mercedes Morán, star in productions at Buenos Aires’s commercial Corrientes Street theatres as well as in city-supported theatres; and more than one Argentine playwright has earned a living writing scripts for TV studios in the sector of the Palermo neighbourhood known as Palermo Hollywood, a nickname cementing its relationship with the national film industry.

And yet, today’s Argentine cinema-theatre panorama is even more complex. It is no longer simply a matter of a film actor trying his luck in the theatre or a director bringing her theatrical vision to the big screen. Argentine independent cinema-theatre artists cross media, roles, aesthetics, and forms. Theatre director, playwright, and novelist Romina Paula, for example, premiered her first film, De nuevo otra vez (Again Once Again) in 2019 and has worked as an actress in the films of Matías Piñeiro, Santiago Mitre, and Mariano Llinás. Theatre director Mariano Pensotti incorporates a cinematographic aesthetic into theatrical performances that goes beyond the simple use of on-stage video. Film director Matías Piñeiro has not only been inspired by the English bard but also uses his “Shakespearean” films to rethink cinematographic narrative form, claiming, for example, that “theatre helps me to think about film from another place” (All translations are my own.).¹ Moreover, Piñeiro began his film career directing theatre actors, because as a theatre spectator he had come to appreciate their community spirit. Working with the same actors for over a decade, he has managed to create his own artistic community, which resembles more a theatre group than a film cast. It is in Argentina’s contemporary independent theatre and cinema—and their seemingly inexhaustible creative symbiosis– where the North American formula (cinema/television vs. theatre) has been completely undone.

Despite such shared intermedial practices, a schism still persists—not only in Bourdieusian terms of taste—between art and industry, and this is where, among the multiple examples of Argentinean cinema-theatre symbiosis, a third group of artists stands out.  By rejecting any type of commercial or state support, they purposefully remain on the fringes of Argentina’s “official” cinema. Unlike other filmmakers who are also part of the so-called “New New Argentine Cinema,”² they do not depend on support from the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts (INCAA) but instead utilize practices of horizontality and self-management that in recent years have been identified with the independent theatre of Buenos Aires.³

Agustín Mendilaharzu, Alejo Moguillansky, Laura Citarella, & Mariano Llinás

The quintessential cinematic example is El Pampero Cine, an artistic cooperative founded in 2002 by Agustín Mendilaharzu, Alejo Moguillansky, Laura Citarella, and Mariano Llinás. El Pampero’s films are not sold on DVD, are not available on Netflix,⁴ and are shown only in festivals or in cultural or art venues. Its participants move among the medium’s traditional roles they write, act, direct, edit, produce—but always in pursuit of a common cause: to make films under their own conditions of production. They themselves claim that this practice “is not only manifested on an aesthetic level” but “especially reaches forms of production and exhibition.”⁵ Citarella refers to El Pampero as a “family” that “thinks of cinema not as an industrial or commercial exercise, but rather as something that self-manages to continue existing… and that is very close to other groups that are on the same wavelength in other disciplines (independent theatre or music).”⁶ Indeed, El Pampero, in terms of its approaches to creation, distribution, and production, finds its counterpart in independent theatre and shares with that theatrical sphere not only artists, stories, and means of production but also a horizontal cooperative structure and the ‘DIY’ philosophy of self-management.⁷ In other words, they focus on the creative process and not on the commercial product in their commitment to making entirely independent cinema.  Their growing roster exemplifies El Pampero’s commitment to innovative, independent filmmaking and exploration of complex narratives and experimental storytelling techniques.

Although all four founders of El Pampero (along with dozens of other artists who have participated in their films) are renowned as cinematic artists, it is Mariano Llinás who is most frequently identified with this ‘other’ way of making films. Llinás, born in 1975 on the eve of the last military coup, belongs to the post-dictatorship generation of filmmakers. A graduate of Argentina’s National University of Film, where he has taught, he is the director of, to date, three films essential to Argentina’s cinematic history: Balnearios (Seaside Resorts, 2002) – a documentary that is not quite a documentary, but rather, according to El Pampero, “an extravagant and humorous encyclopaedia of customs and stories of the Argentine seaside resorts,” Historias Extraordinarias (Extraordinary Stories, 2008) – a film lasting over four hours whose three main stories were filmed in forty locations with fifty actors, all on a budget of less than US$40,000; and La Flor (The Flower, 2018) – a fourteen-hour film that took ten years to produce and was filmed in nine different countries, with six plots of which only one presents a complete narrative. In 2011, Llinás received the Konex Award as one of the five best Argentine film directors of the last decade. 

As Argentine film critic Quintín asserted in 2009, “The case of Llinás is different: he has decided not only to dispense with INCAA but to explicitly challenge the system by creating a method and a factory that leans towards alternative cinematography.”⁸ In multiple interviews, Llinás himself often emphasizes the group dynamic and his way of working with others to replace the “commercial regime” with the cooperative: “Everyone who works gets paid, but it’s a cooperative, I’m not a businessman, I participate in a group.”⁹ By privileging the group experience (“I think about the unit, not just the film”¹⁰) over the commercial product, with El Pampero Llinás has explored other means of artistic subsidy and production: “The key is to maintain a form of production in which we run very cheap risks… We work with just a few people, we exchange roles and we do not take into account a series of overly solid premises inherited from professionalism.”¹¹ The structure of a cooperative that operates without profit or commercial motives changes the rhythm of filming: without the pressure to open the finished film on a certain date and place, El Pampero films at the pace of its artists. Llinás says when asked why it took him ten years to create La Flor: “We like to film… I would continue filming La Flor all my life.”

Petróleo

Indeed, La Flor is an excellent example of the deep interconnection between Buenos Aires’s independent theatre and independent Argentine cinema. The project began when the four actresses of the theatre group Piel de Lava (Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa, and Laura Paredes) approached Llinás to film their second theatrical show. From there, Llinás decided to “exhaust Piel de Lava’s narrative possibilities”. These “possibilities” encompassed dimensions rarely experienced in cinema:  the four actresses already formed a kind of stable ensemble with their own repertoire of six works; as a result of nearly a decade of intermittent filming, the film records the actresses’ physiological changes seldom captured in shorter movies; and as the stories were modified, references to the history of cinema and literature accumulated.¹²

The projection of a film in three parts, running about fifteen hours including intervals and displaying a structural and intertextual complexity, demands from the viewer, as Argentine critic Diego Batlle notes, “a huge physical, emotional, and intellectual commitment.”¹³ Viewers are also transformed by experiencing what Llinás calls the “long journey” that is La Flor.¹⁴ Even the credits invite another cinematic spectatorial experience: at nearly forty minutes, the credits create their own internal coherence, demanding the viewer’s participation (or a conscious decision to leave the cinema and miss the film’s last forty minutes) while also paying tribute to all the artists involved by giving the viewer the opportunity to read the names of the participants as if it were a final bow (unlike the credits of mega Hollywood films, which pass by so quickly that it is impossible to identify all the contributors). The project’s great theatrical-cinematic experience brought La Flor the 2018 BAFICI (Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema) award for the best film in the international competition, with its four actresses collectively receiving the award for best actress, also in the international competition.

La Flor

Over sixteen years, El Pampero has produced films that would never have been made within the commercial or state-sponsored system. These films benefit from approaches and values shared within the independent theatre: teams of workers rather than “stars”; artists who self-manage projects within a community that embraces horizontality and artistic flexibility (and rejects hierarchy and rigidity); rhythms that adjust to the lives of the creators and not to the demands of the market or the institution, and a devotion to the creative process that has given us some of contemporary cinema’s most innovative films. Watching La Flor, I became even more convinced of the magnitude of the artistic and vital interpenetration that El Pampero embodies: at the London Film Festival, I spoke with one of the actresses, Elisa Carricajo, whom I had just seen perform in Piel de Lava’s latest show and with whom we discussed all the personal and professional changes that had occurred over the ten years of filming La Flor (with some of those personal changes visible in the sixth and final part with the pregnancies of three of the four actresses). According to Carricajo, the filming experience was truly one of collaboration and coexistence, but for me the collaborative, co-existential experience also extended to the London audience: by our third day in the same screening room, viewers greeted one another, with some former strangers exchanging email addresses to continue discussing the film. I had witnessed such a construction of co-existential community before, in durational theatrical performances, for example, but never in cinema, which for me remains a solitary experience. Watching La Flor was the most theatrical experience I have ever had at the movies.

Endnotes