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Event
GRUPO DE CALI SHORTS PROGRAM
OIGA, VEA!
aka See, Hear!
Co-directed by Carlos Mayolo.
1971. 27 min.
Made in the style of a straight-shooting As The World Turns style mini-documentary, OIGA, VEA! serves as psychic exposé of Cali upon the arrival of the 6th annual Panamerican Games in 1971. Shooting with a handheld 16mm camera borrowed from Carlos Mayolos ad agency workplace, the film finds wobbly panoramas on spectacular assemblages, but always from the outside an exteriority which defines itself fuller in the films cockeyed dissection of the Games pomp and circumstance. Rallies of military might serve only to demonstrate their planners unmistakable Cold War anxieties, and proprietary feats of infrastructural know-how like a new railroad track, received by some shantytowns like manna from heaven exposed for the limited-time-only publicity perks they are. Ospina and Mayolo steal glimpses at once officially decorative and incisively marginal; by the films end, the bitterness engendered by the project has been transferred in total from the shantytowns outside the Games encampment, and directly into the audience.
CALI: LA DPELICULA
aka Cali: The Movie
1973. 13 min.
The frantic, colorful CALI DE PELICULA is antithesis to the sort of pedantic misery porn AGGARANDO PUEBLO mocked. Like a Mondo movie without the voiceover, Ospina and Mayolo frame bullfighting as silent slapstick, turn voyeuristic girl-watching ominous with a horror heartbeat, and capture life at street level, a pagan carnival churning by. Dancing, so vital to social life in the area, is shown in all its movement and color, but capturing faces without smiles or real joy even enjoying themselves Calis citizens are cautious.
AGARRANDO PUEBLO
aka The Vampires of Poverty
Co-directed by Carlos Mayolo.
1978. 28 min.
This program concludes with AGARRANDO PUEBLO, widely recognized as the Groups masterpiece. Mayolo and Ospina star as effigies of themselves, wielding Bolexes and Nagras on a mission to make the perfect cine de sobreprecio (surcharge film) for German television skewering a then-commonplace of Colombian cinema dictated by the Committee for Quality Control, a government-supported bureau intended to help foster a national cinema but a de facto organ of censorship. Retitled THE VAMPIRES OF POVERTY in English, Agarrando Pueblo mistranslates a number of ways along the lines of the clutching of poverty and the tricking of the people Ospina described it as a popular regional phrase at the time. The certainly film gives away as much (if not more) of its antiheroes sleazy postcolonial errand as it does the poverty they seek. Who is clutching whom? While the filmmakers are obviously the supposed vampires, the film is also explicit in the way their exposure to an impoverished zone gets their minds going about the potential windfall for their own careers (aided, inevitably, by a few lines of blow back at the hotel.)
In his The Aesthetic of Hunger (first presented at a festival in 1965, modified and republished in the early 70s) Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha criticized a certain trend in Latin American cinema that played up tropes of poverty as a kind of image-dependency. Rocha posited that these countries were still living under the same colonialism as yesteryear, only the means of representation (establishing poverty as an indomitable symptom/destiny, and not the result of socioeconomic policies) had changed.
The tension of this encounter between the type of European-inflected filmmakers Rocha referred to as above zero for their filmmaking resources, and Calis indigenous population reaches a remarkable boiling point in AGARRANDO PUEBLO. Its unclear whether the documentarians expedition is being turned on its head, or in fact fulfilling its original intent too perfectly; the barrier between color footage of the slums and black-and-white footage of the filmmakers gets shakier. As Mayolo himself likened the experience of shooting OIGA, VEA! to having 150 assistant directors, PUEBLO brings it all back home when one of the documentarys stars refuses to participate, becoming all the more desirable a subject for the filmmakers. The man is played by one Luis Alfonso Londo, a longtime resident of the El Guabal shantytown profiled in OIGA, VEA! According to the filmmakers, they first met Londo when he jumped out and asked them: Ah, con que agarrando pueblo, no?
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LocationSPECTACLE THEATER (View)
124 S. 3RD ST
BROOKLYN, NY 11211
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: No |
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