Glory to Small Forms: The Recent Work of Mariano Llinás

To accompany this essay, read Hamed Sarrafi’s ‘Part 2’ interview with Mariano Llinás published in this issue. 

The difficulty of writing about Mariano Llinás’ recent work, after the monumental La Flor (The Flower, 2018), can be summed up as a question of visibility – or rather, its invisibility. First, that these films are shown only in small capacities, limited to a few film festivals and retrospectives, as well as limited releases in Buenos Aires. No streaming options as well, although some can be found on the internet. Second, that these are stubbornly “local” films that deal with “local” subjects, which are difficult for most non-Argentinian viewers or critics to conceptualize how they would resonate with said locals. This, however, is not an indication that these films have been playing to a large audience in the filmmaker’s native country, currently under an administration that has been hostile to independent filmmakers who, allegedly, make movies for “just four people.”¹ But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The real questions would be: in the years since his most ambitious project, what exactly did Mariano Llinás film? What are their subjects, their materials, their intimate concerns?

To start, since La Flor, Llinás has been making films with the quality of daily exercises: a whopping seven feature films, plus a bunch of shorts and other work-in-progress projects. No more grand schemes or vehicles, no more diagrams of flowers, but only a persistent cycle of filming and editing, where he practices an inventory of “small forms”: the shot as a reading or writing device; transgression of commissions; itineraries of travel; collaborations with other artists, or “duels”; the rediscovering and classification of marginalised popular traditions; self-portraits masquerading as its negation, etc.

Kunst der Farbe

As always, Llinás is not doing these practices alone. El Pampero Cine, the group which he cofounded some 20 years ago, continues to flourish (“longer than The Beatles!“), and outside of its core members (Laura Citarella, Alejo Mouguillansky, Agustín Mendilaharzu), it now has a roster of frequent and young collaborators, some of which, notably editor Ignacio Codino, have made a significant mark on Llinás’ recent efforts, which Llinás refers to as “the Codino era” in a conversation with critic Roger Koza.² Although not all are edited by the same person, these works present a unique challenge of making sense of displaced, improvised or fleeting materials into an editorial rhythm that gives shape and logic to projects that are in constant flux, because its subject, Llinás, films too much and yet, too little – too much, since everything seen can be filmed, like his endearing canvas of the Pampas, this plain that overwhelms both with grandeur and flatness; too little, since each shot also induces its sense of poverty, a certain modest clumsiness: a view out of the windshield, a country road stretching out to the distance, a blank page on a laptop, or simply, a self-portrait. What is remarkable is a distinct taste for the sketch, rather than a conceivable whole, within which these small forms circulate or subvert. 

The following brief introduction should provide a peek into Llinás’ interlocking interests. The cycle opened with Concierto para la batalla de El Tala (Concerto for the Battle of El Tala, 2021), initially conceived as preparatory work for an opera of the same name by Llinás and composer Gabriel Chwojnik, and intended as the first chapter of a currently discontinued cycle of films titled Saga de los Mártires Unitarios (Saga of the Unitarian Martyrs), combining footage of rehearsals with a reading of a text about failed military leaders during the Argentine Civil Wars. Words from the text are shown on screen in a rather cozy approach, like hosting a book club accompanied by live music and karaoke sessions, although the film doesn’t promise much with its scope, neither the filmmaker’s general desire of making another epic, nor a more particular representation of these bygone subjects, ideologically “incorrect” by contemporary standards, although a sole image remains in the figure of duelling fencers.

Corsini interpreta a Blomberg y Maciel

Concierto para la batalla de El Tala

At least one key motif was established: the immediate record of the filmmaking process, thus terminating the gap between different stages of production, from the shooting to the recording of music to editing. In Corsini interpreta a Blomberg y Maciel (Corsini Sings Blomberg and Maciel, 2021), in which a cheerful partnership was found with singer-guitarist Paolo Dacal, the rerecording and deciphering of old, historical songs of Ignacio Corsini (1891-1967) continues the fascination with history’s little persons.³ The film, with its mixture of musical, literal, theatrical and cartographical detective work, is a comprehensive display of El Pampero’s artistic cobweb within the contemporary as well as historical – the return of Llinás in modes of the arabesque. The theme of civil war and its martyrs finds an ideal poetics in the songwriting of Héctor Pedro Blomberg (1889–1955), with his romantic depiction of the roles of women during the rule of Juan Manuel de Rosas, provided the perfect specimen for Llinás and his Commando Corsini to stage scenes for potential future films. However, these short sequences, shot quickly with actresses from El Pampero’s usual troupe (Pilar Gamboa, Constanza Feldman, Luciana Acuña, etc.), are not merely means to an end, it rather seeks to mirror or rival the poetical compactness of the songs themselves, using a few quick verses to paint a portrait or a passage of time. Meanwhile, the film’s etymological investigation of forgotten books and words, of the geography of a bygone 19th-century Buenos Aires, envisions a rich gallery of civil-war era porteño culture. In addition, by mirroring the trio of artists that formed the original 1929 album “Corsini interpreta a Blomberg y Maciel,” the film also saw the typical off-screen voiceover transforming into a series of comedic dialogues between the filmmakers and the musician, and with that, a clash of perspectives and tonal conflicts.

The next three works, consisting of five films, also saw Llinás attempting at an all-powerful fictional machine, where a tricky contest with reality ensued:

1. Clorindo Testa (2022), in which the filmmaker’s negation of his materials backfires in a comedic manner, revealing an emotional and enigmatic family history;
2. Tríptico de Mondongo (2024), consisting of Mondongo: El equilibrista (Mondongo: The Tightrope Walker), Retrato de Mondongo (Portrait of Mondongo), and Kunst der Farbe (The Art of Colour), in which an explosion of artistic and personal clashes ruptured the original project into three contradicting parts;
3. Popular tradición de esta tierra (Popular Tradition of This Land, 2024), the second instalment in the Corsini saga, in which the continuing classification of Corsini’s oeuvre circles back to Argentina’s present, in a moment where many things are at risk of being lost.

Therefore, each work contains a dialogue, or in the filmmaker’s term, a duel. In there, a delicious tension also unfolds with Llinás himself becoming omnipresent onscreen, if not a protagonist of all these films. Always funny but with a glimpse of uneasiness, this caricature of Llinás is our trusted guide through these personal labyrinths, although he leads as much as he diverts. A film is already the body of its creator, increasingly enormous, as if he would swallow Hitchcock, Fritz Lang and Jean Renoir all at once, with an appetite for constant contradiction: playing the buffoon, the conservative, the villain. The films often negate their true nature by inventing false scenarios, in which Llinás indulges in eccentric comedic detours and other promises. “It’s not wise to make an autobiography,” the filmmaker claims in Clornido Testa, since his desire for fiction remains strong, but here, fiction fertilises not stories borrowed from Hollywood B-movies or Borgesian mysteries, but instead involuntarily invites the reality that surrounds its fabrication. The realism of these films (that is, the joy of filmmaking) exists also in the company that Llinás resides, not simply El Pampero, but also family members, friends and enemies, musicians, painters, critics, other distanced figures, etc. In every film, a balancing act takes place between Llinás’ performance of a Wellesian megalomaniac and his amiable figure of a collective player, between sincerity and provocation, wandering between extended monologues and chirpy debates, shaped by the abundance of enunciations that popularise each work.

In a way, these films do not stray from the guiding principle of Llinás’ epic works, such as La Flor or Historias extraordinarias (Extraordinary Stories, 2008), where the synthesis of a sequence is formed both from the silent materiality of the shots and the musicality of a voice, a device not only to fabricate narratives, but also to grant the images their right to remain silent. Therefore, there is a freedom to film everything, or, in certain cases, nothing at all. There is always a dangerous silence in the shots, which requires another element to save it, to fill it with mysteries and adventures. But in these recent works, that other element suddenly became tricky – it speaks to the viewers in stranger tones, sometimes even in silence, as if no longer in the filmmaker’s control, or that he has willingly give that control away. 

One can simply watch his video correspondence series with fellow Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro (one of Llinás’ earlier projects after La Flor) to already see him engaging with cinema in a more direct way. In July 2020, during the pandemic, Llinás suggested to Piñeiro a game of practice, to film iconic places of where they live, respectively, in Buenos Aires and New York City. The proposal was not concerned with how an image conjures fiction, but on how to film an object or a landscape. These ten-minute shorts thus are playful variations on the idea of landscape study. Llinás, already playing the clown, struggled to set up shots with his iPhone. He sees his surroundings as materials: views he saw as he drives, touristy postcards, a playlist of Argentine classics, and, already, the computer screen which acts as a voice of its own. Before submitting to Llinás’ rules, Piñeiro, at the time a lecturer at Pratt Institute, replies by playing the professor, citing the film he is teaching (Toute une unit [A Whole Night, Chantal Akerman, 1982]), and correspondences by other bygone figures (Edward Hopper), already twisting Llinás’ pitch. Piñeiro’s New York was charged with political turmoil of the time, and his film portrays a city in protest (against police brutality, homophobia and Trumpism), while Llinás would visit a statue of Columbus, relocated from the government plaza to the banks of Río de la Plata, part of his country’s effort to marginalise this symbol of a coloniser. Llinás, again, makes it a comedy, showing himself against the whirlwind, in another attempt to film this monument. Piñeiro’s next letter would also be funnier, as if the two enter a contest of cinematic gags, while Llinás would follow with even more outrageous vignettes – all shot during his peripatetic road trips: a mini-saga of failing to hit “record” on “one of the great shot” of his life, or arguing about whether his nostalgia and sympathy towards “Progress” is all but a provocation.

Llinás’ second letter to Piñeiro

One minor but important detail: some time before this, Llinás had acquired a minivan, quickly becoming the mobile headquarters of all his location shootings. Although arguably less photogenic than Llinás’ vintage blue Volvo 224 GLE, memorable in both Historias extraordinarias and La Flor, the minivan carries a functional effect on how the act of traveling, so crucial to his cinema, is shown in these recent films. The minivan transforms essentially as a film set itself, uniting the functions of a camera, a dolly, a pickup truck, a recording studio, not to mention providing great scenes of dialogues and arguments. The road, which invites both freedom and confinement, had marked Llinás’ images since Balnearios (Spas, 2002), and the so-called tracking shot, or le travelling in French, is now a literal question of traveling.

Therefore, the relationship between fiction and reality is somewhat reflected in the act of looking out of the window while driving on a road, marking a sharp turn from Llinás’ first period of work, in which the above relationship is marked by a shot of the horizon and its surrounding shapes, inspired by the ligne claire technique of Hergé (author of Tintin), where an orderly arrangement of worldly elements invokes the fiction in a shot. But now, separated by the windshield, the world outside becomes unassuming while the filmmaker bonds himself to a limited field of vision, willingly or not. Despite this, Llinás has never filmed more on the road, and those vehicular shots serve as a presence, increasingly directionless and claustrophobic, mirroring the fact that the films are no longer going into fictions merrily. In Corsini, Llinás, Mendilaharzu and Dacal set out to film places once sung in the cantor’s oeuvre: the parish church of Monserrat, Santos Legates de Rosas (now the Rosas Museum), etc. But they find themselves in traffic, with the architecture they were searching hardly in the frame, although the failures of not capturing a shot are materials for a good comedy. 

Corsini interpreta a Blomberg y Maciel

But what kind of a story was Corsini really telling? Was it simply a series of portraits painted by a helpless Romantic, of his attachment to women in history who were violated, silenced, or erased? Llinás, who is never shy about his romanticism, gathered actresses, dressed as historical figures, and let the female protagonists – previously sung about only by male voices – enter the film, disturbing the monopoly of male speech that initially surrounds it. Still, like Blomberg, the filmmaker exercises the power of the poet who sings about his muse, while the latter looks back at him, silenced. Naturally, one can defend by observing how the actresses are merely “dressed” for the roles without really embodying them, thus becoming independent from the author’s intent. But could this be another one of Llinás’ game of negation and reversal, similarly when he, in the film’s longest-running gag, declares political neutrality at the start of the film, neither on the side of Rosas and his secret police (trompas) nor on the side of the rebels, only to reveal his true alliance with one thing surely, that of the myth-makers.

This somewhat premeditated debate, a comic setup between a false truth and the real, turns out problematic in Clornido Testa, which one may proclaim as Llinás’ first melodramatic work. Here, the filmmaker is commissioned to make a documentary about Clornido Testa, a celebrated surrealist architect whose brutalist designs adorn many Buenos Aires or provincial landmarks. Testa was, incidentally, a close friend of Mariano’s father, Julio Llinás, an art critic who later had a career in advertising, among other things. With the film, Mariano found the seemingly perfect specimen to avoid the trap of standardised documentaries: a slim book written by his father regarding Testa, a book that, incidentally, might have to do with something else entirely – the fate of his country. But it is here that we confront Llinás’ strange negation of his material. “This is not a film about Clorindo Testa…… This is not a film about my father,” claimed the filmmaker. He plays his usual game of excess, from acting out the meeting for the commission (very funny), to directly calling out detractors who had enough of his monologues and self-parodies, but as this wears out, the image in Corsini of three men surrounding an omnidirectional microphone increasingly reverts back to that of one man speaking to a directional one, where his image is surrounded increasingly with solitude – the negative space of the screen.

Clornido Testa

But recall Jacques Rancière’s words in Intervals of Cinema, on Vincente Minnelli: “… performance and fiction can combine in shutting the door to melodrama. On the other hand, melodrama begins when the fiction becomes entangled with the ‘real’ fiction known as society. In it there are fathers who are invariably too much or not enough……”⁴ If Llinás adopts Howard Hawks’ famous motto of “always try to make a comedy first” in all his work, this would be the first instance where the work is most ambiguous and exciting when such a promise fails to take shape, or is obscured enough to turn towards the opposite emotion, the melancholy. For Llinás, it takes a couple of jokes and detours for time to amass, and the negation becomes the only condition to make the film its reversal. The book by Julio Llinás turns out to be a single thread for his son to walk upon, the only authentic link that is also the most fragile.

In Clordino Testa, the abundance of Llinás’ materials are reduced to a slight weight, threatening the film’s construction, but such excesses must be worn down to reveal a family history whose hero was missing, leaving the son wandering in its detritus: gazing at the buildings built by Testa, or the cryptic words in his father’s booklet. These odd landscapes, once again seen from a car, build another tension between the upward view and the eye-level view, which one could interpret as the distance between mythology and reality, hence the generosity of a modest shot of the horizon versus the horror of the titled low-angle shots looking at the city skyline. Thus, there is something liberating when we meet again the shots of the plain, at the film’s final moments, when the filmmaker driving out of town with his son, Pedro Clornido. This is where Llinás can finally accept the true story he has been telling, attended by the spaces defined by the myth of a man who never comes home – a gaucho. These scenes are also marked by a rare silence, which will return forcefully in future films: the voluntary silence while writing a poem, and the reluctant wordlessness of a father in front of his young son. Llinás, the great narrator, speaks no more in the final scenes. Just like how Mariano had encountered Julio’s old book – looking at young Clornido, one sees that his father has left him the same enigma.

Allow for a slight digression: due to certain anxieties regarding the structure of this text when it comes to introducing these largely unknown films, the author of this article resorted to finding other texts about subjects that he has no knowledge of. While stumbling upon a text by Jonathan Rosenbaum, in his book In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, about Adam Curtis, a British documentary filmmaker celebrated for his essayistic documentaries on the subject of late 20th century neoliberal politics, the author was astounded to discover, other than the structural effectiveness of Rosenbaum’s text, that this totally unrelated filmmaker has utilised the exact same formal device as Mariano Llinás did: the liberal and unlicensed usage of Hollywood film soundtracks, notably those from Alfred Hitchcock’s films. As Rosenbaum’s text continues, the similarities between the two filmmakers intensify further in their familiar approaches regarding voiceovers, in that “fanciful and seductive arabesques” surrounding the arguments.⁵

 But this is where Llinás diverges from Curtis, regardless of any direct influences. For Llinás, the usage of a “diegetic” soundtrack is often connected with the dispersing of the narrator, and such silence indicates a serious matter. 

What does it mean to narrate? In simple terms, it means the absence of silence, or of the blank page – the most terrifying thing for a writer. More than a decade since Historias extraordinarias, where three silent men were saved by the voice that told their stories, Tríptico de Mondongo largely excludes Llinás’ narration, silencing it. Or rather, when one must silence himself, the voice must express (or not express) through something else: the clattering noise when typing on a laptop, announcements at train stations, some other insignificant sceneries, and other music – that of Hitchcock’s films.

To put it plainly, Tríptico de Mondongo tells the story of Llinás’ failure to make a commissioned documentary on the artist group Mondongo, consisting of Juliana Laffitte and Manuel Mendanha, while they create an installation work based on Johannes Itten’s seminal treatise Kunst der Farbe (The Art of Colours). The making of these films ends their 20-year friendship. Mondongo, old friends of Llinás and Mendilaharzu, had previously made the poster for Historias extraordinarias in a similar triptych, portraying the characters of Llinás (“X”), Mendilaharzu (“H”) and Walter Jakob (“Z”) with their signature material of playing plasticine. If Historias extraordinarias weaves a friendship between complete strangers with its external voice, then a film about the end of a friendship stubbornly deploys the will of silence, suppressing the urge to speak, since the emotion itself becomes too difficult to properly enunciate. Indeed, much like Hitchcock’s modernist invention, the heroine, guilty of an innocent crime, is slayed halfway through the film, thus splitting it in two (or three, in Llinás’ case).

Mondongo: El equilibrista

But before the fellowship bursts, Llinás still has to answer a key question: how to film an exhibition, how to film a work of art, how to film one’s artist friends? The first of the triptychs, Mondongo: El equilibrista, therefore becomes a pseudo-documentary. Mendilaharzu, the ever humble cinematographer, diligently photographed the preparatory work of Mondongo’s exhibition, and its “scientific” study of materiality in contemporary art. Mendilaharzu and Llinás have indeed formed a double-headed machine, one behind the camera as the patient observer; the other as the onscreen incarnation of provocation and “evil,” like Renoir and Lang; and if “Lang” must persist with his furious law, with his negation and a faith in sin, then Mendilaharzu, like Renoir, salvages with his taste for improvisation and forgiveness.

But for Llinás, it’s not that the camera had captured an object without passion, but simply because it only relates to a false science, in which the colours of the world are sealed in a museum, inside a black box, which a filmmaker has no interest in seeing. The film did dutifully show the workers at the venue, and their pounding and arranging of the plasticine blocks, labours unrelated to “the art world”. Meanwhile, Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo (1959, Alfred Hitchcock) hovers above these images, like stains on a screen. While Rosenbaum doesn’t find Curtis’ usage of music adds much to the off-screen arguments, Llinás, in El equilibrista, offers no informational commentaries at all. There is simply a sinister touch in the separation between image and sound, just a bit of gravel that gets into the shoes, chafing one’s feet. The melodies by Herrmann are almost synonymous with a particular feeling, such that one feels they are indistinguishable from the view the director had filmed during his train rides or the blank pages displayed on a computer.

Mondongo: El equilibrista

This is what Llinás does when facing something he cannot film. Then, after meandering for 50 minutes with his contracted duties, the filmmaker finishes off the first film with a 20-minute wordless sequence of him writing an impromptu poem, a vicious, aphoristic rant after-the-fact, still accompanied by Hitchcock. The rhythm of the filmmaker’s typing announces a truly aggressive second instalment, the centrepiece of the triptych. Although Llinás’ recent efforts have obscured the distance between a film’s production and post-production – showing the filmmakers commenting in the editing suite while the footages play, for example – nothing came closer to the astonishing adversity in Retrato de Mondongo. For the refusal to film a piece of “luxurious” art was not the real danger, the challenge was to confide it to one’s old friends, and to film their portraits afterwards, where the melodrama will unfold. What pains more, for a filmmaker, than his inability to film his friends’ faces? The principle of mise en scène thus is parallel to friendship itself: when Llinás, Juliana, and Manuel could not complete an easy rehearsal, the shots already foresee the eventual breakdown.

An often infuriating film, in which the filmmaker may have played the buffoon too much, it would be unwise to reveal, except in formal terms, the nuances behind the collapse of a friendship, except that Llinás did propose a duel where he and Mondongo would both create their interpretation of Itten’s treatise on colour, or the way the filmmaker constantly talked over the other, transforming artistic creation into competitive sports: a masculine, hysterical contest. Or that the images he shot had an unmistakable touch of contempt – as if saying, “look at what you have become” – from which Llinás attempted to reenact a previous argument in his amateurish acting class: the idea is to pick up quirky or ominous little gestures during the conversation, those “Oh!“, obnoxious laughs, or “clear as the sky“, to amplify such moments to an unbearable extent. In these clumsy sequences, the exercise exhausts the participants, and the camera fails to find the right distance to film the portrayed, either too close or too faraway.

After a violent confrontation, which doomed the commission, Llinás finds himself alone, with scarcely any materials other than fragments of communication. The radical gesture of Retrato de Mondongo, perhaps even agreeable to Mondongo’s own approach towards materiality, came after the realisation of failure, from which Llinás put together a grieving yet brilliant essay on transgression in art, with half the film made of Llinás filming himself in his office, browsing the web, dissecting a Wikipedia page, searching on Google regarding portraits by Manet while the clips from Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock) play on YouTube, etc.. (Let’s not forget that our first encounter with the score of Psycho had nothing to do with the film’s plot, that it was accompanied first by rapidly flashing lines and a few fragmented names in Saul Bass’ opening credits graphic.) Meanwhile, the talkative man continues to write lengthy poetry yet remains silent. The flat surface of the laptop display, the filmmaker’s editing table, suddenly becomes hypertrophic – the film’s second screen, where Hitchcock’s films are reduced to internet memes, meaning they are also liberated, becoming another voice of the filmmaker, stuttering around the multitude of layers piled on the “desktops” – both those of the computer and the desk. Recalling another film set almost entirely around an editing table, Pedro Costa’s Où git votre sourire enfoui? (Where Lies Your Hidden Smile?, 2001), a portrait of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, of which Jean-Pierre Gorin comments: “The staccato rhythm, the stuttering that gives rise to form from the relentless attention to the material gathered according to the idea, the intention that guided its collection.”⁶

Retrato de Mondongo

Therefore, this rhythm of typewriting, to use Llinás’ analogy, would be his tightrope, where the silent pronunciation of a word becomes a danger. The act of writing thus possesses a vertical pull, going downward towards the nothingness of the page, or rather, Microsoft Word. The motif of falling, fittingly Hitchcockian, suddenly recalls the argument of Shiguéhiko Hasumi, the great Japanese critic, in his series of rather wilful essays regarding cinema’s limitation with verticality, that the realist, or horizontal tendency of the movie camera often finds itself handicapped when depicting a vertical movement, particularly that from the falling of a human being, which the critic refers to as one of cinema’s greatest desires, yet is ethically impossible since it requires the “actual throwing of an actor from a high position.”⁷ Referring to the scene in Vertigo, where James Stewart fails to actually ‘witness’ the fall of Kim Novak, Hasumi concludes that “the vertical world of Hitchcock, instead of its relationship with the theme of falling, has its most profound relationship with that of disappearance.”⁸ It’s a dazzling notion that Llinás, famously a “horizontal” filmmaker, finds himself inside the motif of the vertical, in which the thing that disappears is his unfilmable subject, or rather himself as a filmmaker. Therefore, to write a poem becomes a literal free fall – what Hitchcock promised with images, Llinás accomplishes with letters, and the verbose gesture of writing marks a filmmaker’s true struggle.

On top of that, since the filmmaker had already breached the “rights” of his commissioned contract, of Mondongo, of Itten, even of a Letterboxd user who criticises his earlier work (the film’s most outrageous sequence), the entire Tríptico de Mondongo can also be seen as a Godardian meditation on the subject of “public domain”, despite much of the materials used were still copyrighted, but it nonetheless displays a certain nomadic landscape of image and sound, of completely displaced or banal materials that still save a broken project. The last image which Llinás brought into this domain would be his own, previously private footage shot years ago with Mendilaharzu, still in the workshop of Mondongo, while the four artists were still friends. This was when the music selection also took a turn, from Herrmann’s soundtrack to Llinás’ karaoke favourites, where online music videos become crystals of memories. Only then will Llinás’ narration return, in the film’s most moving passage, an elegy on lost time, as if he finally exorcises himself from the purgatory of ego.

Music video for “L’appuntamento” by Ornella Vanoni, which plays at the end of Retrato de Mondongo

Kunst der Farbe, the final piece of the triptych, is a joyous “revenge” against Mondongo, where Llinás fulfills, solely, his end of the bargain. Recall Itten’s book, before he introduces “the seven color contrasts” that constitute the main body of his text, the designer-theorist first displays an experiment, using the musical term “subjective timbre,” where he lets his students draw colour combinations that they believed to be the most harmonic.⁹ Inspired perhaps by this musical approach, Llinás teams up once again with Chwojnik for a live concert, which serves also as a wall-to-wall soundtrack, with kaleidoscopic chapters highlighting different colours. If Llinás was visibly not “at home” at the workshop of Mondongo, he renews himself here in his own kingdom. The invention of the film, then, is to consider each colour on the spectrum with its contrasting one: each chapter/movement, with its cryptic title (for example, “Blue, His Majesty, Prince of the Air“, or “White, or the Demon“), focuses on one colour, which inevitably also invites its opposing or neighbouring one – the art of colour is precisely that of montage, where cinema, music, painting and the world all juxtapose one another. There is also a twist: the unexpected inclusion of Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires (The Vampires, 1915-1916) through a frame-within-frame device, and there, Feuillade’s film is summoned as yet another vessel, with its black-and-white images tinted with different hues. Meanwhile, Llinás and Mendilaharzu search for colours in the provinces, along the roads and the plains, following vehicles, billboards, vegetation and animals.

Returning to El Pampero’s basecamp, Llinás also provides a wondrous yet cheeky parade of his collective of colleagues and friends. Inés Duacastella, the colourist of many films, provides lively tutorial on DaVinci Resolve, and the film reveals an interest in examining the digital colouring process, where all colours have the possibility to interchange at will. Meanwhile, in front of the camera, two actresses, Pilar Gamboa and María Villar, both veterans of La Flor and other films, assume the roles of Juliana Laffitte and, presumably, a female variant of Itten. The two women, tasked with reenacting, remain undoubtedly themselves. Still, in their simple costumes, their presences evoke different personas, no more mysterious than the colours themselves. Stunningly, Llinás plays Fritz Lang, but hardly as a character, but as a gag. (The post-credit scene of the last film teases this like that of a Marvel film.) Nothing shows the way Llinás contorts his material better than the oddly funny scene where he reads aloud, like a child learning a new language, Itten’s original German text, in front of a visibly amused Villar, the German-speaking actress, in the role of a schoolteacher. Recalled the actress: “He tells me to translate, read and explain passages; he sits in front of a large monitor where he can be seen talking about art. And when he positions the camera and I perceive the framing, for a moment I feel the magic shine: we are in a mamushka.“¹⁰  

Kunst der Farbe

Hilariously, Itten’s treatise, which is hardly recited in the film, transforms into a language lesson, twisting the film through further tonal variations. And with Gamboa, already an intense presence in La Flor, Llinás takes a chance to review his failed experiment with Mondongo, but this time to examine it within his realm of cinema. The emotional density of Retrato, the project’s true centre, still haunts the third part. Through a parody of mannerism that he plays with the actors, Llinás reveals through intonations, and the immediacy of performances that nullify the incompleteness of his project, a bittersweet ending where he duels with himself, but through the collaborative joy of comedy, coexists with melancholy. Among all the figures the director had impersonated, “Llinás the buffoon” may turn out to be his most revealing creation.

This delight of documenting the collective work continues in Popular tradición de esta tierra, the latest work that this text will examine, which dives deeper into Corsini’s rural origins, exchanging the narrow streets of Buenos Aires for the provincial sceneries of Trenque Lauquen – the town now world-famous after the revelation of Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen (2022). What contrasts this image of vastness is a luxurious yet frugal display of El Pampero members, this time also including Laura Paredes and Chwojnik, all jostled in a visibly tight room that acts as a recording studio, where both the dialogue and the music are performed. This time, even non-musicians joined as instrumentalists, with Llinás on percussion and Paredes on tambourine. Once again, the word games are played, journeys are followed, catalogues are studied, detours are made, but the feeling evoked here is remarkably different. An almost sombre film, finished after the presidential election of Milei and amid his relentless attacks on fronts of culture, Popular tradición treats its landscape and odd subjects as endangered species, standing firm in the face of extinction.

Popular tradición de esta tierra

It is in this film that Dacal, like Dylan of 1965, trades his acoustic guitar for an electric one, as he and the musicians update Corsini’s work into the contemporary, particularly the songs “Popular tradición de esta tierra” (“Popular Tradition of This Land”) and “Tristeza Criolla” (“Creole Sadness” – the word “creole / criollo” refers here to the rural cultural identity associated with The Pampas region). The film argues that these songs, which are variations on the same motif, recorded again and again, have served as bookends to Corsini’s career, from his arrival from Sicily as a young immigrant through the end of his life as a portraitist of the criollo tradition. “Tristeza Criolla,” the centre of the film’s investigation, unlike the songs in previous films, has no viable characters or narratives, but is instead a fragmented collage, an automatic writing of assorted gestures when it first appeared as “Popular tradición de esta tierra,” but has settled into something moodier, brewing with time as the same theme was practiced over and over, like gazing over a landscape for too long, where visions of seemingly insignificant details have precipitated into permanent images: a shack, a tree, a sight of the horizon. The film sets up his narrative like a genre film, almost a B-Western, depicting how Corsini’s first compositions exploited popularised tropes of the region, and finally, as he rerecorded the song decades later, found the traditions which he once sang innocently had become a fleeting past. (Here, the film invites the audience to connect this to the current landscape of Argentine cinema, albeit in codes.)

Llinás rests the song and its variation over a long sequence – a wide shot that pans across the plain on a wintry, overcast day, in which he and Dacal wander and film while the voices debate about the origin of the song. Scratchy, old records intertwine with electric guitar. But the landscape remains defiant, devoid of his fictions, where the air of this landscape, the separation between the sky and the earth, produces an overwhelming melancholy. 

Similar to the first Corsini film, the uncovering of old-time vocabularies used in Corsini’s songs makes for an everlasting discovery, which is another way of saying that the filmmakers are laying everything on the table – everything within their disposal, no matter how small. To remember a word or a relic becomes a precious act. It is here that El Pampero finally films its namesake: Pampero, a strong, cold wind that blows through the Pampas, which “dissipates the storms” and “revives the powers, inspires with joy and the energy of life which cannot be described.”¹¹ An amazing sequence that must be seen to be believed, in which Chwojnik bursts a chilling score with the theremin, this instrument that is performed without direct contact – simply with a windy gesture, as if conjuring sound out of nothing. 

This sequence is followed by the introduction of the ombú, the mystical, gigantic tree famous in the gaucho mythology, which provides its lonesome heroes shelter from the flatness of the plain. Does Llinás know that the ombú happens to be a desired material in the art of the penzai (or bonsaï)? Finding this, the author of this article exclaims quietly, “Eureka!” In the raising of a penzai tree, in which a specimen of nature is delicately preserved in pottery, a harmonious quality of structure and branches is maintained, yet remains modest to allow the fullness of a shape. Isn’t this miniature landscape unlike his beloved art of cartography, which figures the mystery of lands and their meandering forked roads, or how a good dictionary is already a map of a universe? The art of El Pampero and Llinás is indeed the preserving of landscape, of being reminded of one’s own distress, to exercise a freedom while being unfree of the world, to see its majestic anonymousness but with a passion of an encyclopedist, obsessed with the origin of a word, a tradition, to reinterpret it and reach it through friendship, to write with cinema, to witness the reconstruction of something impossible, almost out of nothing. Melancholy aside, making comedies is also sacred.

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