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“We artists are irresponsible people.”

– Maxim Gorky to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, c. 1907-08

As a core member of El Pampero Cine, Alejo Moguillansky was initially known as the team’s editor who was sought-after by directors Matías Piñeiro, Rafael Filippelli, Hugo Santiago, and Albertina Carri. Through El Pampero and his longstanding personal and creative partnership with Luciana Acuña, he has created a body of work unlike any other in Argentine cinema. Embedded with humor, precisely choreographed action, and a touch of melancholy, the cinema of Alejo Moguillansky relies on movement and temporal flow rather than character development and conflict. His films reflect a direct engagement with reality, utilizing documentary material from which fictional scenarios are created. In other instances, he uses fiction as a way to navigate real life situations, and in the process the distance between characters and the actors who play them becomes nearly indistinguishable. Four of his films,2 Castro (2009), El loro y el cisne (2013), El escarabajo de oro (2014), and La vendedora de fósforos (2017), draw on preexisting stories – respectively, Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Gold Bug, and Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Match Girl – each of which provides a rough structure that shapes the film’s narrative. When a new story emerges during shooting and editing, the original adaptation often recedes to the background, letting the real inform the fictional. While this process may seem aleatoric, it is not accidental. Even though his films feel open and playful, they are meticulously structured and allusively dense.

Alejo Moguillansky & Luciana Acuña

Thematically, Moguillansky’s films reflect the volatile circumstances faced by artists who work independently of commercial or state funding structures. The films themselves focus on the interplay between work and money, and the effect this has on interpersonal relationships. As Joshua Bogatin observes, “Moguillansky’s movies exhibit a constant struggle between the promise of a life dedicated to imagination and the constraining lure of money.”3 Amidst these consequential subjects there is a sense of humour that is central to the mix. To deliver such an ambitious balance, Moguillansky invariably engages an ensemble cast that includes Luciana Acuña, Cleo Moguillansky, Walter Jakob, Rafael Spregelburd, Matthieu Perpoint, Rodrigo Sánchez Mariño, Edgardo Castro, and Luis Biasotto. They draw from a shared experience in theatre “off” where actors function as a family and collaboration is cultivated and encouraged.

The stability of this ensemble, along with their shared set of values, has allowed Moguillansky room for constant growth. As Maria M. Delgado and Cecilia Sosa note, “Moguillansky’s formal playfulness and digressive charm have produced … experimental works that operate across the boundaries between dance, farce, slapstick literary adaptation, and vérité.”4 While keenly observed, Delgado’s and Sosa’s description does not mention the films’ incisive critiques of capitalism, where stories of artists working under impossible conditions abound. His playfulness is never wasted, nor is it entirely harmless; he performs these critiques through the humour and wit of his style. In doing so, Moguillansky’s oeuvre embodies the precarity of living as an artist in Argentina while serving as a resilient model for independent filmmaking in times of crisis.

Castro Poster

Castro (2009)

Castro is a loose, though relatively faithful adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Murphy. As an adaptation, the main character of Castro (Edgardo Castro) is a surrogate for Beckett’s Murphy, and his girlfriend Celia (Julia Martínez Rubio) is taken directly from the novel. The bumbling foursome who pursue Castro throughout the film map directly onto their literary counterparts: Samuel (“Neary,” Alberto Suárez), Willie (“Wylie,” Gerardo Naumann), Acuña (“Cooper,” Esteban Lamothe), and Castro’s ex-wife Rebecca Thompson (“Miss Counihan,” Carla Crespo). Says Moguillansky, “Castro was … the last script that I wrote from scratch … meaning without having previously filmed anything, without having any previous event surrounding the film.”5 At the same time, the film moves beyond Beckett’s original story, transplanting Murphy’s trajectory from Dublin to London onto Castro’s journey from La Plata to Buenos Aires. Divided into eleven “chapters,” Castro mirrors the structure of the novel with title cards expressing the major plot and themes. These cinematic inserts function the same way as silent film intertitles, orienting the viewer in relation to the frenetic and dizzying actions of the characters. The film retains the novel’s comedic absurdism and deploys the main character’s indolence as a form of resistance.

Castro opens in medias res with Samuel, Acuña, and Rebecca Thompson vigorously pursuing Castro on foot through the streets of La Plata. It is unknown who these characters are, why they are chasing Castro, or what they hope to achieve if they catch him. In the film, Beckett’s nonsensical wordplay is transformed into visceral action sequences and the viewer is dropped into a world of relentless movement and physical comedy where no explanations, backstory, or motivation are offered. This emphasis on action harkens back to early cinema which relied on the chase sequence as the sine qua non of narrative construction. The link to silent films is further reinforced through the solo piano score by Ulises Conti which plays regularly in place of dialogue.

Instead of character backstories, motivation, and cause and effect chains, the film’s primary narrative driver is movement: a train journey from La Plata to Buenos Aires, Castro and Celia searching to find the cheapest pensión, Castro guiding cars into parking spots for small change or simply running away from those pursuing him. These physical actions are meticulously planned as well as scripted, and Luciana Acuña’s bold choreographic direction gives the film much of its kinetic energy. Whereas Beckett’s Murphy is a character who takes pleasure in “the sensation of being a missile without provenance or target, caught up in a tumult of non-Newtonian motion,”6 Castro is entirely governed by Newtonian laws; he moves only in relation to external forces exerted by Celia’s desire for him to find a job, his need to hide from Samuel and Rebecca Thompson, or his overt shunning of gainful employment. Moguillansky’s Belacqua character abhors the bourgeois trappings of a well-adjusted citizen and spends his time avoiding normalcy at all costs. As Castro resists responsibility, “slapstick meets metaphysics.”7 He is the object of desire that propels the narrative, and the other characters, though his power only exists as long as he is able to elude them.

In addition to being driven by the motion of the characters, the film is imbued with precisely-timed physical comedy reminiscent of Chaplin and Keaton as well as Tati and Tashlin. There are several sequences where Castro scams his way through the day by tricking or swindling those around him. Instead of paying the fare, he boards a bus only to tell the driver he forgot his money, disembarking at the next stop. He then performs the charade with the next driver and the next, hopscotching his way to his destination. In a virtuosic long take, choreographed in midday traffic, Acuña, Willie, and Rebecca Thompson follow Celia in the hope she will lead them to Castro. As they meander through the streets under bright, sunny skies, they develop a complicated system of signals involving the opening and closing of umbrellas. The trio follows an unsuspecting Celia down two city blocks with umbrellas flapping conspicuously, all in perfect coordination. In this, as in other sequences, the timing of the humour is matched by the precision of the staging and the complex camera movements. 

Castro

The speed of the film’s actions parallels the momentum of its dialogue. As Jhon Hernandez points out, “The rhythms and acting style are right out of 80’s Godard, or the early 90’s Hal Hartley riffs on that style. Everything moves quickly, without pause, the actors delivering their dialogue with furious speed, deadpan.”8 Unsurprisingly, the speed of the language also creates a lack of real connection between the characters. They don’t have conversations; instead, they speak over and past each other, either ordering each other to perform complicated tasks or complaining about those same orders. Job interviewers are interested in sycophantic answers to multiple-choice questions, telephone calls only reach answering machines, and missed assignations result in desultory notes. The comedy of the film lies in the aimlessness of the characters’ constant motion, mirrored by their impossibility to achieve meaningful communication. 

Humour in Castro not only exemplifies a masterful combination of wit and rigor, it also serves to underscore the absurdity of labour under a capitalist framework gone haywire. “Work, in Castro, is filmed as something abstract and ridiculous that consists of people in cheap suits taking packages from one place to another for a reason we will never know,”9 observes Lautaro García Candela. The contents of the packages are never explained nor are they ever delivered to their destination, and the endless flow of product becomes possible through the labour of employees who are never paid and are easily replaced. Castro finds himself on the hamster wheel of employment only to reflect on its meaninglessness as he falls out of sync with his story. As the characters run out of time, money, and energy, entropy is inevitable. Ultimately, he achieves Celia’s goal of finding full-time work, losing himself in the process.

Living in a world of pettiness where existence equates to always having to coerce, Castro’s zero-sum game means that scamming someone else is the only way to get ahead. Despite being a film driven by action, Castro resists the cathartic closure of Hollywood cinema. It is a chase film without an achievable goal, or as Gonzalo Aguilar points out, “as in all intellectual slapstick, the goal is to measure with each stumble the struggle between the order of fantasy and the disorder of the real, between the thrust of desire and the organization of labour. In this pendulum, in this confrontation, the protagonist, oppressed by his indecision (or by the lack of a real solution), decides to take his own life.”10 Castro’s felo-de-se by crashing a car into a wall is a reasonable, even predictable, conclusion considering the film’s take on the absurdity of contemporary existence. In a film about physical movement and pointless circulation, the only appropriate ending is the cessation of momentum.

The briskly paced dialogue, the complex set pieces, and the comedic elements in Castro belie the careful orchestration needed to make them all work. Moguillansky’s and Acuña’s use of character choreography and the clockwork timing between movement and editing are finely honed and precise. The pleasure in watching the film comes from both the comedy inherent within its story and an appreciation of the intelligence behind the humour. As a result, amidst the world of motion created in Castro, you can almost forget that its story is ultimately a tragedy.

The Parrot and the Swan Poster

El loro y el cisne (The Parrot and the Swan, 2013)

“From the energizing force of (Castro), a sense of rhythm remains that is recognizable in all his later films, and in terms of the absurd, this would transform into full-blown humor,” observes Roger Koza. “When about five years after that film Moguillansky presented El loro y el cisne, a poetics had found its balance.”11 Castro demonstrated that Moguillansky was fully in control of his medium as both a writer and director. With El loro y el cisne, he ventures into a hybrid methodology of blending documentary footage with fictional sequences. This change is marked by a willingness to relinquish the need for a script prior to filming, and letting reality fully permeate any notion of fiction. “Castro was very choreographed, very sharp in its shape, not only with the physical space but also with the sounds and the dialogue,” notes Moguillansky. “After that I just needed to bring something more impressionistic to the films, something lighter.”12 

El loro y el cisne dwells in the universe of dance performers in Argentina and the problems associated with their reliance on, as well as their rejection of, state funding and external support for the arts. It offers a glimpse into the process of creating art within a market-driven system that dictates what forms and styles get produced while contemplating the fate of those trying to operate outside that bureaucracy. The artforms themselves – opera, classical music, theatre, ballet, modern dance, folkloric dance, avant-garde performance, etc. – are not the subject of the film. Rather, it is the pressures that shape the artworks and how they affect the performers. At the root of this is money. 

Moguillansky is interested in the labour of artistic creation and exploring how money, work, and romance affect the lives of artists. “I’ve always been interested in the artist as a worker because I belong to a generation of artists that has always worked in the independent theatre and cinema with no budgets. And in the particular situation of Argentina, artists really work all the time. The most alienated people you can imagine are artists. When you start to see these people as workers with no wages, no unions, no protection, nothing, they start to become like marginal people in a way. Marginalized from the rest of the working class.”13 As someone working without state support and directly affected by these pressures, Moguillansky uses them not only as narrative material but as chance to adopt a more flexible mode of production that can endure and overcome these constraints. Lautaro García Candela astutely observes, “to integrate the logic of money into the films means to make them as if they were a diary. There isn’t always money to go out and film, and so, the filming rhythm has to adapt to the vicissitudes of life.”14 

As a result, El loro y el cisne emerges from Moguillansky filming experimental dance-theatre troupe Grupo Krapp, co-founded by Luciana Acuña and Luis Biasotto, then branching out to interview other dance groups, and finally building a story after the fact. It is the first film in which Moguillansky deploys this method: “First I shoot, then I edit, and finally I write the script.”15 The film has documentary origins yet it is transformed into a fictional narrative that moves fluidly between the real and the constructed. This is possible due to the atemporality of shot-reverse shot sequences which allow Moguillansky to retroactively construct conversations and a sense of continuity through editing in scenes that started as direct interviews. In crafting the way the documentary and staged footage are combined, the playful and open nature of the story appears. “Therein lies its sense of humor, its ludic spirit, and that spirit tries to play with real materials, respecting the ontology of those materials,” remarks Moguillansky. “The film never betrays the materials. It does manipulate, but in the mind of the spectator.”16 

The film begins with Loro, a boom operator and sound recordist, reading a caustic break-up letter from his soon-to-be-ex girlfriend, Valeria (Mariana Chaud). It then goes on to explore his infatuation with dancer Lu (Luciana Acuña) whom he meets while filming the documentary. Played by El Pampero’s regular sound recordist Rodrigo Sánchez Mariño, Loro comes into view as the unlikely star of the film. He becomes a surrogate for the audience as he works with a team to document the Argentine contemporary dance scene for American Spanish-language television. Loro and the cameraperson (Edgar Lenis) are supervised by Walter (Walter Jakob), an Argentine director, who in turn is working for Jack (Jack Kellog), an American producer. As a result, the film moves between the documentary crew interviewing and filming rehearsals from four separate dance troupes and the events happening behind the camera. 

The Parrot and the Swan

Loro is decidedly non-traditional as a lead character. His job as a soundman requires him to be neither seen nor heard, which makes him an unusual choice for a protagonist. At the same time, his sound recording apparatus functions as a prosthetic device that simultaneously distances him from the people he is recording while allowing him to eavesdrop on conversations and hidden sounds. We rarely get any sense of interiority and only when we hear the world through his microphone do we start to understand how Loro perceives the world. As the film moves back and forth between Loro recording the dancers and his interactions with Valeria and Lu, the viewer constantly gauges how to perceive the events on screen. Is the film about the dancers and their rehearsals or is it about Loro and his romantic entanglements? It is both and neither. As Moguillansky states, “the film is not concerned with what is fiction and what is documentary. (…) To me it isn’t important; in terms of the film, they are the same thing … I work with both of them equally.”17 

The narrative elements are freely adapted from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake as told to Loro and the documentary crew by the director of the ballet. This narrative conceit is introduced as a series of vignettes, revealed through irises or wipes, which trace parallels between the film crew, its subjects, and the characters central to the ballet’s folktale. The ballet director explains, “First, there’s a love triangle, like in real life. And then there’s a story of good and evil. Survival. The struggle for good to overcome.” As the director mentions each character from the ballet, individuals from the documentary crew are shown in relation to their counterpart from its story. Cecilia Sosa notes, “the sequence finishes in another dance studio with a zoom onto Luciana Acuña’s face, ecstatically admired by Loro in the distance. Dressed in a fairy-blue dress, the only woman in the Grupo Krapp strikes a contemporary version of a postcolonial princess and also an unusual kind of swan. This southern Oddette (sic) is also the filmmaker’s partner in real life. Boundaries between documentary and fiction blur once again,”18 and only Loro as the young prince can break the spell with “a declaration of love.”

The film functions dialectically, oscillating from a dance documentary to a fiction about a sound man falling in love with an actress. As soon as we start to follow the developing love story, however, the film returns to its study of Argentine dance and theatre. As Moguillansky describes it, “the background of El Loro y el Cisne was always one concerned with the anthropology of work in that unique situation in which to work is to dance. And what happens when, behind all this, there is an institution that imposes both direction and rhythm; and what happens when that institution doesn’t exist and the artist lives on the border, like a marginal, like a classless being.”19 This interrogation of independent artists and their relationship to structures of funding becomes the fertile ground that unites all of Moguillansky’s successive cinematic projects. El Loro y el Cisne is born out of necessity and discomfort at the cultural crossroads of the country. As Delgado and Sosa postulate, the film “is both a commentary on Buenos Aires’ adventurous dance culture and an interrogation of what it means to be an experimental artist in a global context of multi-national funding arrangements.”20  Moreover, in its fluid treatment of documentary and fictional material, and by devising a production methodology that reflects the conditions under which the work is made, the film also serves as a model for the cinematic works that follow.

The Gold Bug Poster

El escarabajo de oro o Victorias Hämnd (The Gold Bug, 2014)

El escarabajo de oro o Victorias Hämnd continues Moguillansky’s interest in hybridity on multiple levels. Its title, blending Spanish and Swedish, marks the film’s origin as an international co-production and how these funding structures leave traces on the work itself. The film has its genesis in a program created by the CPH:DOX film festival in Copenhagen. Their CPH:LAB is an initiative “that encourages creative risk taking, celebrates raw talent, facilitates collaboration across borders and business sectors and supports visionaries to push the existing boundaries of documentary storytelling.”21 To foster creative synergy, participants are chosen to collaborate on a film, and as Moguillansky explains, “the only rule, as politically correct as it is esoteric, was that one of the film directors had to be European and the other from the periphery: either from the Third World, or, in their words, a ‘non-European.’”22 The resulting collaboration bills itself as an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Gold Bug and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island – “adapted for the screen from the point of view of the pirates” – yet it also is a film about the complexities and pitfalls of international co-productions. In the words of Jonathan Holland, the film is “part farce, part treasure hunt adventure, part film about itself, part road movie and part postmodern political treatise.”23

Opening in a claustrophobically cramped production office, El escarabajo de oro launches directly into its adventure plot when Rafa (Rafael Spregelburd) tells the film crew that he’s discovered a map to 17th century gold hidden near the town of Leandro N. Alem in Misiones Province. Also present is the film’s embrace of screwball comedy, both in the constant movement and jostle of characters in the tiny space and in the rapid-fire overlapping dialogue. Rather than the silent slapstick of Castro, the comedic influences in El escarabajo de oro are more aligned with the comedies of Hawkes or Sturges. From the start the film positions itself as a hybrid of genres, blending the briskly-paced comedic dialogue with the buzzing action of the office as Rafa and his co-conspirators hatch a plan to use the film as cover to search for the treasure. 

The framework of a treasure hunt adapted from The Gold Bug and Treasure Island provides the basic trajectory for the journey that ensues. At the same time this is a multi-layered story, and “the shooting of the film is not just a mere plot device; instead, the work stages the condition of its own production,” observes David Oubiña. “The conditions of the production are an integral part of the film, and this real situation is transformed into the basic narrative engine of The Gold Bug.24 The film crew are waiting for their European producers (Matthieu Perpoint and Georg Tielmann) to arrive to explain the demands of the European co-director, Fia-Stina (Fia-Stina Sandlund), who isn’t in Buenos Aires because “she’s doing a feminist project in the United States.” The producers state that the film they will be shooting in Argentina is about the 19th century Swedish writer and feminist Victoria Benedictsson who died by suicide in Copenhagen in 1888. Seeing an opportunity to expose cultural imperialism, Rafa questions the producers on their knowledge of Latin American history and challenges them to name three major Argentines, to which they struggle to come up with Che, Evita, and “Madonna” (Maradona). As part of their gambit to seize control, the Argentine filmmakers offer to “introduce you to one of our suicides,” Leandro N. Alem, the founder of the Argentine Radical Party. 

The Gold Bug

Initially promising to be an adventure tale, El escarabajo de oro operates on several levels at the same time. It commandeers the treasure hunt story to examine the lines of power involved in funding and confronts Eurocentrism by acknowledging its influence and its imbalances. Rafa’s comedic ability to code switch – dropping phrases in French, German, and English – is calculated to charm the European producers into supporting the revised subject matter. Shifting the focus of the film to Alem’s biography serves Rafa’s clandestine search for treasure, yet it also functions to call out the non-reciprocal and extractive relationship between European funding and Argentine labour. The division of labour between the European producers and the Latin American workers is further underscored by Fia-Stina’s absence. She is marked as a presence in the film only through her acousmatic voice on the phone, giving orders to the producers and the Argentine co-director (Alejo Moguillansky). In addition, her absence foregrounds the use of Argentina as a runaway production site – preposterously meant to double for 19th century Copenhagen – as she sends instructions from New York. The irony that a Swedish playwright and director has to work from New York to gain recognition outside of Sweden is not lost, just as Victoria Benedictsson had to move from Skåne to Copenhagen to introduce herself to the capital of Scandinavian literature. 

The film’s treasure hunt is framed through the lens of Argentine history and politics. As Rafa and his colleagues drive over a thousand kilometres to Misiones Province, there are several moments where the historical details of their quest are rendered on screen. Mixed with Rafa blatantly lying to the producers, claiming that Leandro N. Alem was born in the town that bears his name, voiceover narration from Alem and Benedictsson each offer contrasting views on the onscreen actions as well as their respective legacies. According to Delgado and Sosa, “(Rafa) wants to control the storytelling – and by extension the construction of the ‘official’ history that is being realized through the filmmaking process.”25 But, after discovering the all-male crew’s plan to search for the buried treasure, Lu (Luciana Acuña) explains to Agus (Agustina Sario) the history of the map in a series of imbricated flashbacks, thereby offering a resistant version of Latin American history. She conveys a story of colonialism and extraction: from landowners in 18th century Brazil forced to pay the quinto real to the Portuguese crown, to the expulsion of the Jesuits from missions in Uruguay as part of the Bourbon Reforms, to a 21st century Argentine-Paraguayan co-produced film based on the Paraguay War of the 1860s. In this light, the inclusion of a Latin American history lesson wrests the narrative from its European origins and recasts it in relation to regional history. The sequence also comments on an uneven gender dynamic at work in the film. Beatriz Urraca rightly argues that “the film exposes the different levels of precariousness of the cultural entrepreneur in Argentina. At one end, the well-educated, middle-class male artists, most of them from Buenos Aires, squander their meagre European funds to chase a dream; at the other, the wife and nanny, children in tow, are deliberately excluded from the machinations of the ‘old boys’ network.”26

At the heart of El escarabajo de oro is a biting sense of humour and a deep critique of the inequities of cultural production. Its willingness to call attention to and poke fun at the impossible scenarios faced by “non-European” cultural producers is both refreshing and timely. “If the Argentine filmmakers are pirates, scrambling around for hidden treasure, hijacking the CPH:DOX’s ship to their own purposes,” notes Jhon Hernandez, “then perhaps the true story of the film is the mercenary and back-handed ways that the Europeans use to take what they believe is theirs.”27 The comedy also offsets the broader political treatises that are invoked in the film, marking a cultural shift from the ideological projects of liberal democracy and women’s rights associated with Leandro N. Alem and Victoria Benedictsson, respectively. As Beatriz Urraca points out, “Their nineteenth-century political projects – radicalism and feminism, respectively – are hailed as serious and transcendent in contrast to the lack of moral codes and solidarity demonstrated by the ‘poor devils’ (as they refer to the Argentines), ready to betray their closest friends and even their own families for a handful of gold coins.”28 Moguillansky’s humour in the film is equal opportunity; no one is spared.

The Little Match Girl Poster

La vendedora de fósforos (The Little Match Girl, 2017)

Returning to the same method as El loro y el cisne, La vendedora de fósforos employs material that was initially recorded for a documentary about German composer Helmut Lachenmann staging his opera Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (The Little Match Girl) at Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. From this commissioned material Moguillansky crafts a story of writer-director Walter (Walter Jakob) and writer-actor Marie (María Villar), a couple who serve as clear surrogates for Moguillansky and Acuña. In the blending of documentary footage gathered during rehearsals for the opera’s opening in March of 2014 with scenes of Walter, Marie, and their daughter Cleo (played by Moguillansky’s and Acuña’s daughter, Cleo), the film’s original narrative touches only tangentially on Hans Christian Anderson’s titular fairy tale. La vendedora de fósforos expands on the theme of economic instability and its effect on the lives of artists with greater assurance and a larger scope. 

From the opening, the film makes plain its fascination with music and its relationship to images. As the black screen cuts to a close-up of a musical score bearing the inscription “Sonata (Three grand Sonatas: No.2),” the same strains from the Andantino movement of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A major, D. 959 are heard on the soundtrack. Renowned Argentine pianist Margarita Fernández is shown playing the Sonata in her apartment as a voiceover from actress María Villar introduces the story to come: “In January 2014, German composer Helmut Lachenmann travelled to Buenos Aires to stage an opera at the Teatro Colón. The opera was called ‘The Little Match Girl.’ This film is a diary of that staging.” From this factual information María’s voice also conveys details about the dramatic personae, noting that Walter Jakob plays a character “predictably named Walter” and that she plays a character “which they named ‘Marie’.” Her voiceover and the piano sonata are interrupted by the trilling of an offscreen doorbell as the image cuts to Margarita opening her door to reveal Marie arriving for a job interview. This is followed by an insert shot of a portrait of Johannes Brahams followed by a closeup of Marie’s résumé being read by Margarita as Mozart’s String Quartet in D Major, K.593:1 – Larghetto-Allegro plays over the images.

The film’s style feels familiar as it complicates the relationship between image and sound as well as diegetic and non-diegetic music and voices. Moguillansky is clearly inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s films from the 1980s and 90s – particularly Prénom: Carmen (1983) and For Ever Mozart (1996) – in their blending of classical music performances with dramatic scenes, yet La vendedora de fósforos transcends its influences. The Brechtian style of the opening, where the audience is made aware of the construction of the fiction, recurs throughout the film. As Margarita reads Marie’s résumé the name on the top is revealed to be “María Villar,” the name of the actress, not the character. Reading closer, the details of the résumé are actually those of Alejo Moguillansky, not María’s nor Marie’s. Whereas in El loro y el cisne Moguillansky sought to integrate the documentary elements into the fiction, here he is content keeping documentary and fiction suspended in a state of flux. The audience is encouraged to see Walter and Marie as characters but also as their real-life counterparts. Accordingly, we are able to connect to each of them while also viewing their actions and choices from a critical distance. 

As Jhon Hernandez points out, “Each of (Moguillansky’s) films revolves not only around money, but also work.”29 Both Walter and Marie are cultural producers, though only Walter is currently employed as regie, or stage director, for Lachenmann’s opera. At the same time, he’s shown as creatively perplexed by Lachenmann’s sound compositions and he relies on Marie to come up with ideas for how the opera should be staged. Marie supplies Walter with all his ideas about stage direction without getting credit or paid for her work. Conversely, Marie is unable to find work in her field and has taken a job as an assistant to Margarita, though we never know exactly what the job entails. The film makes evident the divide between the all-male crew chosen to stage the opera and women working in domestic spaces. In a film that emphasizes the labour of artistic work, showing only the rehearsals but never the performances, Marie’s unpaid labour for assisting Walter stands out more starkly.

Economic precarity is brought to the forefront as both Walter and Marie struggle to make a living. After being invited to a local café by Lachenmann to discuss the story of the opera, Walter assumes that the composer paid the bill but is stopped by a waiter as he leaves. The scene takes on a darker tone when neither Walter nor Marie is able to pay the bill and Marie has to leave her maxed-out credit card as collateral. Later, hoping to supplement her meagre income, Marie comes up with the idea of recording the story of The Little Match Girl as a narration to be played over Lachenmann’s music. After recording the narration herself, she drops off the tape with the producer only to be told the theatre is notorious for paying late. 

In a scene that will be echoed in all of Moguillansky’s subsequent films, Marie steals two bundles of Argentine pesos which Margarita has cached in her closet, justifying it to herself by saying she’s borrowing the money. This action is strongly evocative of Robert Bresson’s L’Argent, in which the act of theft is posited as a moral and existential question. Curiously, instead of using the money to pay for necessities like food, rent, or day care for Cleo, Marie buys a used piano and has it delivered to their house. No reason is offered for Marie’s behaviour and the audience is left to ponder the irresponsibility of her actions. It is here that the film most closely recalls The Little Match Girl story, establishing a clear parallel between Marie’s compulsion to acquire the piano and the Little Match Girl consuming all her matches to sustain her need for sanctuary. The film seems to suggest that for artists it is not enough to make ends meet. If a creative life is worth living, it must also include room for exploration, experimentation, play, and even failure. 

The Little Match Girl

Even though the inclusion of Lachenmann’s music can be seen as a felicity of filming his interactions with conductor Baldur Brönnimann arranging the opera at Teatro Colón, the connections between Lachenmann’s music and Moguillansky’s films become more evident. As music critic Tom Service describes it, Lachenmann’s embrace of instrumental musique concrète, where musical instruments are played in non-traditional ways to explore the range of their sonority, “enacted a kind of politics of musical production. In realising or hearing his music, the idea is that you don’t just perceive the surface of a note or a rhythm, but something deeper: as (Lachenmann) says, ‘you hear the conditions under which a sound- or noise-action is carried out, you hear what materials and energies are involved and what resistance is encountered.’”30 Indeed, Moguillansky’s films explore the myriad ways that sounds and images can convey meaning beyond the frameworks of story and narrative, and his films also enact a politics of film production which foreground the materials and energies involved in the process and what resistances are encountered.

As film critic Roger Koza argues, both El escarabajo de oro and La vendedora de fósforos “added a political dimension to (Moguillansky’s) oeuvre.”31 While the former offers a critique of the perils of international co-productions, the latter is more directly political in its observations. At several points in the film, María Villar’s voiceover draws attention to the local and concrete conditions affecting the rehearsals, such as the imminent transit strike, while commenting on the perceived notion of opera as a bourgeois art form. In addition to a recurring subplot that brings in the anti-imperialist Red Army Faction guerilla group, Margarita conveys to Marie a story about the pacifying effect of music when Lenin commented to Gorky about a performance of Beethoven’s Sonata für das Pianoforte, Op.57. “I could listen to it every day,” replied Lenin. “But I can’t listen to music very often. It makes me say nice and stupid things. And kindly pat people on the head.” For Lenin, the fate of music and revolution are linked, and La vendedora de fósforos interrogates the creative work of artists in relation to the real conditions of production.

Commenting on this political turn in his films, Moguillansky explains, “I was accused of being a formalist, abstract, disconnected from a historical present. But that is a conflict that the film confronts head-on, it is the grand conflict of La vendedora de fósforos…. It has a position that escapes the bipolar quality of the current discourse in our country, and a strong critical spirit with respect to this government in particular.”32 Finding the balance between what is documented and what is scripted marks this film as a major advance in Moguillansky’s creative output. At the same time the film can feel a bit overburdened with its subjects – moving between opera, classical music, fairy tales, and multiple references to European cinema – and it comes as no surprise that a lengthy scene elaborating on Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A major was cut during editing and became the centre of his 2023 essay film Un andantino.

As Juan Francisco Gacitúa notes, “La vendedora de fósforos is, in a sense, a story about how the film invents itself.”33 In relation to this reflexivity, the film contains its own self-criticism. Marie discovers a letter written to Margarita from “H,” a member of the Red Army Faction. “Do you know what they have said to me about you?,” he writes. “That your music is the product of an intellectual sophistication to please the palate of the bourgeoisie. That you are an artist that produces abstract things for the bourgeois class. And, worst of all, that your music looks towards Europe and confirms the colonialist inheritance.” These are the same concerns explored in El escarabajo de oro and the criticism could be applied to La vendedora de fósforos as well. Indeed, in the cleverness of its construction and the density of its references, the film can be seen as provocative and wanting to be taken seriously. This is precisely what Helmut Lachenmann says to Margarita about his own music at the end of the film: “They should not only hear madness. They should understand there is method in the madness.” To which Margarita replies, “But your music is not provocative. It’s like a game for kids. Ein kinderspiel.” Regarding La vendedora de fósforos, both are equally true.

For the Money Poster

Por el dinero (For the Money, 2019)

In keeping with the theme of provocation, Moguillansky’s next film is simultaneously his most directly provocative and also the one that is most reliant on a pre-existing work. Por el dinero is a cinematic adaptation of a play by the same name which debuted at Centro Cultural Rojas in Buenos Aires in 2013 and was revived at Centro Cultural General San Martín in 2014. Despite its title, the film is not a direct reproduction of the play; rather, it extends the play’s themes of artistic creativity and resistance while replicating its absurdist humour. The film begins with a framing mechanism where two bodies are discovered lying in the surf – easily recognizable as Moguillansky’s and Acuña’s – and Colombian police officers interrogate Monsieur Perpoint (Matthieu Perpoint), a witness, about what happened. Through a voiceover, spoken in French, Perpoint relays the story of his involvement in an avant-garde Argentine theatre troupe and their journey from Buenos Aires to Colombia. The roisterous tale feels like a reiteration of El escarabajo de oro, with the four members of the troupe struggling to meet their financial obligations but finding a potential solution when they are invited to present their show as part of a competition in Cali.

The impulse to use the theatre troupe and future performance in Colombia as a springboard for a film is not surprising as the play itself interrogates the complexities of making a living in the world of independent theatre. According to Luciana Acuña, “The idea (of the play) was to analyze how we live, reading our receipts and expenses, and display that as a way of reflecting on what one does with money, what one spends it on, and how one earns it.”34 It is auto-critical, bringing up questions of why artists create work in the first place, how they sustain the work, and the quandary of not being paid a living wage for the work they do. These themes permeate the film and the story of the trials and tribulations of an independent theatre troupe guides its construction. As Moguillansky comments, “Somehow, my films are anthropological tales that speak about me. (…) I wanted to portray people that I am interested in and that happen to be creators. That is why the need to represent them in their totality, in action, starting from their activities. The relationships between the world of an artist and reality are always quite complex, and tense.”35

For the Money

While technically an adaptation, the film develops the themes from the play even though the play itself is only briefly alluded to. “The film bills itself as a tragedy in three acts, but it never acts like one (Moguillansky loves to play around too much for that),” notes Jhon Hernandez.36 The first act covers the backstory of the performance group in Buenos Aires and their financial hardships. This is followed by the second act and their trip to Colombia for the staging of their performance at the Festival Internacional de Teatro de Cali in November 2016. Finally, the third act features the aftermath of their theft of the festival’s prize money and finds them stranded on a beach on the Guajira peninsula. Each act is comprised of elements that are familiar from Moguillansky’s earlier films: backstage scenes of rehearsal, a film crew seen documenting the events, slapstick comedy, direct interviews with artists, kinetic chases filmed in the streets, and voiceover narration reflecting on the plot details. At the same time, unlike his prior films, Por el dinero relies more on staged fictional scenes than on developing a story out of documentary footage.

Each of Moguillansky’s films is grounded in an encounter between the world and the characters, whether Buenos Aires, La Plata, Misiones, or San Francisco. Por el dinero ventures geographically farther than any of the other films, yet it struggles to connect with its surroundings and its story remains hermetic. This lack of greater interaction with the world, which the film documents like a travelogue, translates into a film that feels more insular and thus less engaging. Unlike the balance achieved between actors and characters in La vendedora de fósforos, the dramatis personae of Por el dinero remain abstract. Luciana Acuña is referred to as “Mrs. Acuña,” Alejo Moguillansky is “Her Husband,” Gabriel Chwojnik is “Obelix,” and Cleo Moguillansky is “La Petite.” The audience is not privy to the characters’ motivations, apart from the obvious need for money, which makes the film accessible primarily to an audience already familiar with the play or the Moguillansky’s prior works. In doing so, the film risks being too self-referential, and for audiences unfamiliar with his oeuvre, they might find themselves not in on the joke. 

Por el dinero, notwithstanding, presents the perennial question of how artists can continue to be creative despite financial and societal hardship. Positioned as an act of espionage against a rival theatre troupe under the guise of “getting to know our enemy,” there is an illuminating interview with Cristóbal Peláez, the creative director of Matacandelas theatre in Medellín. Peláez reflects on his role as an artist, saying “We work twice as much as a workman, we earn half of what a workman does, and we live three or four times better than a workman. It’s a paradox, but it’s true.” Not only does Peláez offer an idea of what artists can expect from their occupation, he also encapsulates a work philosophy that in many ways responds to the primary concern of all of Moguillansky’s work, a concern that undergoes deeper interrogation in his most recent feature film, La edad media.

The Middle Ages Poster

La edad media (The Middle Ages, 2022)

After the debut of Por el dinero as part of the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019, the Covid 19 pandemic significantly interrupted the creative plans of Alejo Moguillansky and Luciana Acuña. Like most of the world, they spent 2020 in lockdown; confined to their house and unable to work on in-person projects. Whereas most people retreated into their own worlds during this time, Moguillansky and Acuña saw the potential in the situation to examine and satirize their own lives. In doing so, a small miracle of a film emerged. Neither an adaptation nor a film drawn from documentary footage, the co-directed La edad media dazzles in its creativity and stands as the pinnacle of their collaboration. 

Snubbing its nose at a tragic moment in our collective existence, the film is equal parts funny, intimate, and endearing. Its humour stems from circumstances most of us experienced – isolation, limited movement, electronically mediated communication, repetition, boredom, and being stuck with the same people every day. The title The Middle Ages is appropriate as it represents a temporary limbo between one world and an unknown one to follow. Furthermore, it marks a culmination of a style of cinematic construction that pays close attention to reality, freely drawing from it as source for fiction. 

Castro and La edad media serve as bookends in Moguillansky’s career. Like Castro, the spirit of Samuel Beckett is present in the direct citations from his plays Rockabye and Waiting for Godot as well as the absurdism of the confined locale and post-apocalyptic setting of Endgame. The characters are Alejo, Lu, and Cleo, who some viewers may know from prior films, yet they are also actors who literally narrate their own story. As Cleo says in voiceover after she describes the conditions of lockdown during the pandemic, “The characters are my dad, my mom, and me. I think I’d be the main character.” Within this confined world, the three main characters are observed by Juana, the family dog, as they struggle with the effects of isolation and each seeks ways to keep busy. Alejo directs a Samuel Beckett play via videocall, Lu teaches her dance classes over Zoom, Cleo attends school and takes piano lessons remotely, all while Juana watches the comedy of errors unfold. 

The Middle Ages

Key to the structure of the film is the passage of time which runs in fits and spurts. “One Day After,” “A Month Later,” “That Same Week,” or “Sometime Later” read the title cards as we see shots of rooftops, flowers, fruit trees, and cloud-filled skies repeat over and over. The ellipses are abrupt, seemingly random, and time slips in a fragmentary yet familiar fashion. Sliding between instability and irrelevance, the elasticity of time is also marked by the repetition of activities. Early in the film, Lu is seen jointly composing a letter to the Centro Cultural San Martín arguing that without the support of the cultural organizations, creative artists are forced to scramble for whatever work they can find. Time jumps to “The Next Monday” when Lu struggles to control her remote dance class as her students thrash about to their own rhythms. In another room, Alejo bristles at the idea of directing Samuel Beckett’s Rockabye as an online play. And, left to her own devices, Cleo hatches a scheme to sell off items from the household to collect enough money to buy a telescope. 

As time lurches forward, the film returns to the activities of the characters to show their progress or lack thereof. For Lu, the dance class sheds its students, leaving her to reflect “If I am what I do and I don’t do it anymore, who am I?” For Alejo, the complications of directing a one-woman play at a distance multiply and he finds himself unable to satisfy his producer. For Cleo, however, her interactions with Moto – a motorcycle-riding courier who shops stolen wares for a 30% cut – are both lucrative as well as creative. With each item she steals and sells, Cleo hopes to get closer to raising 4,000 pesos for the telescope; yet each time she checks its price the cost increases, putting it further from reach. The setbacks of each character can be seen as tragic, but viewed collectively they become comical in their exaggeration. Lu channels her frustration into impossibly athletic contortions as she runs laps around the house and practices kickboxing. Alejo finally gets official permission to travel to his actress’s apartment to film, but has to carry all his gear while kitted up in a makeshift Hazmat suit of mask, face shield, and raincoat. Cleo, ups the ante as she searches for suitable objects to sell while reading her father’s copies of Waiting For Godot and casting Moto as a willing Vladimir to perform opposite her Estragon. 

Funny, ingenious, and generally light-hearted, the film is also infused with melancholy, loss, and grief. Some losses are self-evident, but others are not as easily identifiable. In a poignant monologue, as steam lingers in the bathroom after a shower, a sombre Lu tells Alejo that she doesn’t see any sense in going back to making the films or plays they used to make. “As if it didn’t make sense that we should be the ones who construct that new form of post-pandemic art,” she remarks. “I reckon we have to quit.” There is a harrowing urgency in her words and a sincere fragility in her demeanour. Something has to change, yet the what and the how are filled with uncertainty. 

The weight of Lu’s words hovers over the remaining scenes as comedy and melancholy intermingle. When Moto finally delivers the telescope to Cleo, an alarmed Alejo and Lu ask her to account for how she procured the money. After explaining her profit-sharing split with Moto, Cleo reveals that she has a running inventory of every item in the house. Intrigued by the possibility of this arrangement, her parents decide to liquidate their assets. In the hilarious and heartbreaking sequence that follows, we see all their personal belongings sold off as the house becomes progressively emptied out. Objects as well as people are described and assigned a price. An old hi-fi cabinet with turntable and radio is described as “ideal for leaving clothes on or other objects that don’t have a home” and priced at eighteen thousand pesos. Even Cleo is labeled as “suitable for filming” yet “very problematic for shoots that stretch out in time” because she “grows faster than adults deteriorate” and priced at two hundred and eighty thousand pesos. As the film reaches its conclusion, with the house completely bare, the family embarks on a new career as bandits, miscreants ready to rob other houses and convert goods into money.

According to Moguillansky, cheating “is needed to make films that avoid what is expected from them. This search for freedom is connected with crime. The artist is a necessary criminal. They have to be.”37 While the protagonists in La edad media could be seen as succumbing to a corrupt society, in which everything and everyone has its price, this is also a film about a real family who traverses the pandemic by honouring their creativity. As Cleo says, “My mother had spent part of lockdown with a colleague trying to convince the world that art and theatre, or specifically dance, was as essential as doctors. And that a stage could be as tragic as an intensive care unit.” The films of Alejo Moguillansky are proof of the invaluable role of art to help us navigate reality in uncertain times. If artists are irresponsible, even cheaters, the question is to what and to whom do they owe responsibility.

Endnotes

  1. Research support provided by Carleton College and the Hewlett/Mellon Fellowship. Translations from Spanish are our own.
  2. Alejo Moguillansky co-wrote and co-directed La prisionera (2005) with Fermín Villanueva and the film debuted at the Viennale in 2006. It has screened only a few times and Moguillansky generally does not discuss the film as part of his body of work.
  3. Joshua Bogatin, “A Search for Freedom: A Conversation with Alejo Moguillansky,Notebook, MUBI (5 November 2021).
  4. Maria M. Delgado and Cecilia Sosa, “Politics, Memory and Fiction(s) in Contemporary Argentine Cinema: The Kirchnerist Years,” in A Companion to Latin American Cinema, Maria M. Delgado, Stephen M. Hart, and Randal Johnson, eds. (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), p. 244.
  5. Jhon Hernandez, “Encounters #2 – Alejo Moguillansky,Lucky Star (18 March 2024).
  6. Samuel Beckett, Murphy, The Selected Works of Samuel Beckett, Volume I – Novels (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2010), p. 70.
  7. Gonzalo Aguilar, New Argentine Cinema: Other Worlds (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 242.
  8. Jhon Hernandez, “Profiles #2 – Un diario de Alejo Moguillansky,Lucky Star (12 March 2024).
  9. “El trabajo, en Castro, se filma como algo abstracto y ridículo que consiste en personas con trajes baratos llevando paquetes de un lado a otro por una razón que nunca sabremos.” Lautaro García Candela, “12 años de cine Argentino, La vida útil, no. 1 (17 April 2019).
  10. Gonzalo Aguilar, New Argentine Cinema, p. 243.
  11. “… de la energética de ese film (Castro) quedaría un sentido del ritmo reconocible en todas sus películas posteriores, y en cuanto al absurdo, este se iría transformando en humor pleno. Cuando unos cinco años después de aquella película Moguillansky presentó El loro y el cisne, una poética encontraba su equilibrio.” Roger Koza. “La segunda línea, Número Cero (1 November 2017).
  12. Bogatin, “A Search for Freedom: A Conversation with Alejo Moguillansky.”
  13. Ibid.
  14. “Incorporar la lógica del dinero a las películas significa hacerlas un poco como un diario. No siempre se tiene plata para salir a filmar, entonces el ritmo de rodaje se amolda a la peripecia de la vida.” García Candela, “12 años de cine Argentino.”
  15. Fernando (G. Varea), “Alejo Moguillansky: ‘Primero filmo, luego edito y finalmente escribo el guión’,” espacio cine (17 August 2017).
  16. “Ahí está su sentido del humor, su espíritu lúdico, y trata de jugar ese espíritu con materias reales respetando la ontología de los materiales. En ningún momento traiciona los materiales. Sí manipula pero en la mente del espectador.” Alejo Moguillansky, et al., “Sobre El loro y el cisne. Conversación con Alejo Moguillansky, Luciana Acuña, Susana Tambutti y Ana Amado,” Cine Documental 14 (2016), p. 197.
  17. “A la película no le importa mucho qué es ficción y qué es documental. (…) No me importa, para la película es lo mismo. … yo trabajo las dos cosas por igual.” Alejo Moguillansky, et al., “Sobre El loro y el cisne,” p. 197.
  18. Cecilia Sosa, “Dancing Affect in the Aftermath of Loss: El loro y el cisne and Argentina’s Generation ‘In Between’,” Latin American Theatre Review 50, no. 2 (Spring 2017): p. 53.
  19. “… el trasfondo de El Loro y el Cisne fue siempre el de una antropología del trabajo, en esa particularísima situación en la que el trabajar es bailar, y qué pasa cuando detrás de esto hay una institución que impone el rumbo y el ritmo, y qué pasa cuando esa institución no existe y el artista vive en un borde, como un marginal, como un desclasado.” Alejo Moguillansky, “Filmar la danza: La fiesta del reencuentro de almas solitarias,” Tiempo Argentino, Espectáculos, Año 4, no. 1320 (12 January 2014): p. 12.
  20. Delgado and Sosa, “Politics, Memory and Fiction(s),” p. 244.
  21. https://cphdox.dk/lab-call-for-projects/
  22. David Oubiña, “The Pirates’ Perspective. Geopolitics, Interstices, and Detours in The Gold Bug (Alejo Moguillansky and Fia-Stina Sandlund, 2014),” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 28, no. 4 (2019): p. 529.
  23. Jonathan Holland, “The Gold Bug, or Victoria’s Revenge (El escarabajo de oro, or Victorias Hamnd): Buenos Aires Review,The Hollywood Reporter (7 May 2014).
  24. Oubiña, “The Pirates’ Perspective,” p. 530.
  25. Delgado and Sosa, “Politics, Memory and Fiction(s),” p. 245.
  26. Beatriz Urraca, “The Gold Bug, or Victoria’s Revenge,” in Directory of World Cinema: Argentina 2, Gary M. Kramer and Beatriz Urraca, eds. (Bristol: Intellect, 2016), p. 253.
  27. Hernandez, “Profiles #2 – Un diario de Alejo Moguillansky.”
  28. Urraca, “The Gold Bug, or Victoria’s Revenge,” p. 254.
  29. Hernandez, “Profiles #2 – Un diario de Alejo Moguillansky.”
  30. Tom Service, “A guide to Helmut Lachenmann’s music,The Guardian (12 June 2012).
  31. “Con El escarabajo de oro y La vendedora de fósforos, Moguillansky sumó una dimensión política a su cine.” Koza, “La segunda línea.”
  32. “Se me acusó de formalista, abstracto, desligado de un presente histórico. Pero ese es un conflicto que la película ve de frente, es el gran conflicto de La vendedora de fósforos…. Tiene una posición que escapa a la bipolaridad que hay en el discurso actual de nuestro país, y un fuerte espíritu crítico con respecto a este gobierno en particular.” Juan Francisco Gacitúa, “‘El Incaa nunca comprendió a cierto cine independiente.’ Entrevista a Alejo Moguillansky,Los Inrockuptibles (29 May 2018).
  33. La vendedora de fósforos es un poco la historia de cómo se inventa a sí misma.” Ibid.
  34. “La idea era analizar cómo vivimos, leyendo nuestras boletas y gastos y exponer eso a modo de reflexión sobre qué hace uno con el dinero, en qué se lo gasta y cómo se lo gana.” Maria José Lavandera, “Por el dinero»: ensayo sobre el arte de ser Feliz,Revista Revol (19 June 2014).
  35. “De alguna manera, mis películas son relatos antropológicos que hablan de mí. Son como autorretratos al estilo de los pintores. Los retratos realizados por los pintores serán documentales, ficciones, relatos fantásticos? No son preguntas pertinentes. Pienso que pasa lo mismo con mis películas: quise retratar a gente que a mí me interesa directamente y que son creadores. De ahí la necesidad de representarlos en su totalidad, en acción, desde sus actividades. Las relaciones entre el mundo de un artista y la realidad siempre son muy complejas, tensas.” Cédric Lepine, “Entrevista con Alejo Moguillansky, cineasta cofundador de El Pampero Cine,” translated by Magali Kabous, Cinémas d’Amerique Latine, no. 27 (2019), pp. 57-58.
  36. Hernandez, “Profiles #2 – Un diario de Alejo Moguillansky.”
  37. Bogatin, “A Search for Freedom: A Conversation with Alejo Moguillansky.”

About The Author

Jay Beck is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Carleton College. He is the author of Designing Sound: Audiovisual Aesthetics in 1970s American Cinema (2016) and co-editor of Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound (2008) and Contemporary Spanish cinema and genre (2008). He was co-editor of Music, Sound and the Moving Image (2012-2021) and currently serves on the editorial boards of MSMI, Tecmerin, and Film Criticism. Cecilia Cornejo Sotelo is a Chilean-American documentary filmmaker, artist, and educator based in Northfield, Minnesota. Her films are distributed by Women Make Movies and have shown at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, L’Alternativa, Arsenale, InVideo, Melbourne Latin American Film Festival, Puerto Vallarta International Film Festival, Festival Internacional de Documentales de Santiago, Cine las Américas, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Athens International Film Festival, Tucson Underground Film Festival, Gene Siskel Film Center, Miami International Film Festival, Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival, and the Frozen River Film Festival. She teaches in the Cinema and Media Studies Department at Carleton College.

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