For LUX’s exhibition Film as a Subversive Art at Zoo 2009, Ellen Cantor presented elements from Pinochet Porn, a feature film in progress. Alongside the trailer and a raw excerpt from the film, Cantor showed production stills by Rosalie Knox and a slide projection performance, My Best Friend.
In this interview with Soledad García-Saavedra, one of the curators of the Zoo project, Ellen Cantor talks about the inspirations and processes of her work and the intersections of reality and imagination in the context of subversion.
Soledad García-Saavedra: How did Pinochet Porn emerge? Could you briefly talk about the selection of the characters, their narratives and the use of archive in film and sound?
Ellen Cantor: Pinochet Porn is a soap opera-like feature film about five kids growing up during the Pinochet regime. Their individual intertwining stories move from childhood into adulthood, showing how their lives have been affected through personal political and historical circumstances. The film is being made with super 8mm, archival footage and drawing animation.
Two short pieces were shown with LUX at Zoo. They were originally made in order to find support, and to boost morale since filming (on no budget) is such a lengthy process. Pinochet Porn: the dictator and the maid (20 mins. 2009) is excerpted from the rough footage. I inter-cut this footage with Vivaldi’s Gloria to illuminate the divine nature of the sexual love.
Pinochet Porn: Trailer (12 mins. 2009) is almost entirely in Spanish, including Pablo Leon de la Barra’s narration, the Chilean National Anthem, and songs by the martyred Chilean folksingers Victor Jara and Violeta Parra. Their credits arise over the Pope fraternizing with Pinochet – a ghost apparition irrefutably indicting the Papacy. Although the narrative is comical, the gravity of the underlying subject matter is upheld through the music’s intensity. Their music is the film’s moral compass.
SGS: Your sequence of drawings Circus Lives from Hell constitute the standpoint, reference and script of Pinochet Porn. What changed in the process of turning the script into the film?
EC: The film is being shot directly from a hand drawn script Circus Lives from Hell – the drawings provide the narrative structure, emotions, dialogue, clothing… I only changed the character’s names (in order to “protect the innocent”). The new names come from the comic book Love and Rockets. Latin American magic realism especially the Hernandez Brother’s episodic Love and Rockets, is a continuous source of inspiration.
SGS: Among the references behind your work there are historical issues that you mingle with comedy and tragedy. What cultural sources prompt Pinochet Porn?
EC: Clearly, Pinochet’s 17-year repressive regime is not a funny subject. Thousands and thousands of people were tortured, murdered, exiled. The degree of human degradation and corruption is incomprehensible. More often than not, my work combines the tragic with comedic, this probably reflects my Jewish cultural upbringing. Irreverent humour is often employed in discussing moral dialectics, and comedy is used in coping with difficult circumstances – thousands of years of imminent annihilation. My prototypes forPinochet Porn are Mel Brook’s The Producers (1968) and Shalom Asch’s Yiddish plays from the early 20th century.
Another model is Pieter Bruegel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1558) – this mythical tragedy is incidental, imperceptible to the labourer farming. In Pinochet Porn the dictator’s identical daughters Paloma and Pipa, enveloped in their family life and personal dramas, are oblivious to the tragic state of affairs occurring within their midst.
SGS: Your film project started with the question ‘is tragedy a choice?’ How is tragedy developed through the different characters?
EC: The story ends with the question, which is largely unanswerable in the face of illness, addiction, insanity, violence, death and world catastrophes. The film approaches this question on varying levels: Was tragedy a choice when Paloma “innocently” served coffee to her husband’s best friend in her underwear, their perfect conjugal love destroyed through mad jealousy and revenge, he spiralling into drug addiction? Was tragedy a choice when Jaime’s mother, as a young student was “disappeared” from a protest, incarcerated, tortured, went mad, later dying of cancer?
SGS: The excerpt The Dictator and The Maid raises questions about the role and the use of explicit images today – the fine line between sensuality, sexuality and pornography, along with ideas of freedom and control. How does the film tackle such imperatives?
EC: In most intimate relationships sexuality is integral. I find these ‘fine lines’ uninteresting, devoid of meaning. When my tongue is up someone’s ass I’m not thinking is this love or desire, degrading or kind, passion or craftsmanship? In the scene with the dictator and the maid, structures of power and sexual fantasy are simultaneously played out. He is the dictator, he is the patriarch of the house, he is married whilst she is the maid – she is at his mercy.
SGS: For Amos Vogel, in his 1974 book Film As A Subversive Art, the confrontation of visual taboos, such as real sex or death, produces elements of risk and primordial danger in the spectator. What is your approach to those issues in your film?
EC: I don’t approach sex as a subversion or taboo. I consider sexuality normal, particularly when depicting love relationships. The title Pinochet Porn salutes the film characters’ intimate relationships, but refers more to the dictatorship itself – to the regime’s systematic, sadistic, destruction of individual lives – policies furtively upheld by the United States, United Kingdom and the Papacy. In light of this collusion and abuse of power, the film questions, “Is tragedy a choice”?
As an artist, I find myself akin to Vogel’s call to freedom:
“Contemporary America – a late capitalist colossus, owned by large corporations while parading as a democracy and dominated by rabid commercialism and consumerism – is attempting to dominate the world via transnationals, Hollywood cinema and television, the export of American cultural “values,” the Disneyfication of the globe…. For those who still have resources of personal identity – an increasingly difficult and perilous endeavor – there exists no more important obligation than to attempt to counteract these tendencies. Otherwise, future generations may accuse us of having been “good Germans” all over again, cooperating with evil not by deeds but by our silence. Silence, under such circumstances, is complicity” – Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art
