Further Notes toward a Prehistory

by Federico Windhausen

Second post by our Summer 2015 Writer in Residence Federico Windhausen

Let’s assume you are a cinephile or aspiring filmmaker in Buenos Aires in the late 1960s or early ’70s.

You have seen a good amount of the arthouse cinema that plays a prominent role in the city’s cosmopolitan cultural offerings. Perhaps you were introduced to the Argentine variant of auteur-oriented art cinema during the brief heyday of the Generación Cortometrajista (the short-film generation), a wave of productions funded in part by the state, promoted and assessed by the era’s film critics, and surveyed at the Instituto di Tella in its “Cine Corto Argentino 1958/1964” series of programs. Perhaps you read José Agustín Mahieu’s 1961 monograph Historia del cortometraje argentino, which argues for the need to regard the short film on its own terms. As José María Teijido, president of the Asociación Cine Experimental, summed up the problem in his answer to Mahieu’s questionnaire, “The short film has been undertaken as school, as apprenticeship and definitively as springboard toward the feature, annulling the possible expressive futures of its makers, failing in its contacts with the audience, making itself go up in flames.”[1] Given this situation, it is no wonder that in only a handful of the films screened at the di Tella did it seem as if a “new language,” to borrow a term from the younger critics, was being essayed. A frequently-lauded example was Rodolfo Kuhn’s Sinfonía en no bemol (1958), which won a prize at the 1958 International Experimental Film Festival in Brussels and was characterized as by Mahieu as “an allegory of a future world via a conceptualization of the surrealist type.”[2] Another critic saw the film as displaying the “old avant-garde predilections, with added satirical elements,” of its director, who had studied with Hans Richter at the Institute of Film Techniques at the City College of New York.[3] But Kuhn did not continue in the vein of Sinfonía en no bemol, first going on to direct important narrative features (Los jóvenes viejos in 1962, Pajarito Gómez in 1965) and then taking his career deeper into the norms and conventions of industrial cinema.
Let’s also assume that you understand that cine experimental might have more to offer than surrealist-influenced narrative shorts. At screenings hosted by consulates, local film clubs, and occasionally a cultural center like the di Tella or film festivals in Mar del Plata and Córdoba, you might have the opportunity to see films that seem to belong to or are in dialogue with the tradition of experimental cinema. Expectations of diversity notwithstanding, however, if the films were made in Argentina between the 1950s and approximately 1970, many of them can be placed within at least one of a handful of familiar categories.
Situated at a customary point of convergence for artists exploring the moving image and film-school students is the animated film that displays primarily abstract imagery, such as José Francisco Arcuri’s Continuidad plástica (1958) and hand-scratched shorts like Begin (1956) by Sameer Makarius and Algunos Segmentos (1970) by Elda Cerrato.[4] Continuidad plástica is another film that was screened in Brussels in 1958, but very little abstract cinema from Argentina maintained a high profile nationally or internationally. To see artists’ films (and not only of the animated kind), you would need to be fairly close to the inner circles of participants and bystanders in the city’s art scene. With a good amount of luck you might have been among the few who saw the artist Oscar Bony’s 16mm film quartet Fuera de las Formas del Cine in 1966 (consisting of El Paseo, El maquillaje, Clímax, and Submarino amarillo) at the Instituto Di Tella.[5] That work would have provided a glimpse of alternative approaches to filmed performance, a practice that would soon be explored extensively in the 1970s by Marie Louise Alemann and Horacio Vallereggio, among others.

Aldo Persano's Dimensión, 1960
Film still

More common and somewhat easier to see were shortform portraits of modern artworks, often incorporating contemporary electronic music or musique concrète into their soundtracks. In Aldo Persano’s Dimensión (1960), for example, imagery of the geometric, hanging shapes of Mauro Kunst’s mobiles was accompanied by the electroacoustic music of Francisco Kröpfl; Alfredo Mina’s Guernica (1971) conveyed an anti-war message through footage of violence and shots of Picasso’s painting, setting them to Pierre Schaeffer’s compositions. The German-Argentine sculptor Martin Blaszko included both abstract animations and depicted artworks in his Del punto a la forma (ca. 1954-58), juxtaposing animated drawings of his line-based forms and shots of his finished sculptures. The most accessible animations reflected the influence of Norman McLaren and Len Lye and overlapped with trends in television advertising, as in the examples of the well-regarded films of Víctor Iturralde and Luis Bras.[6]

Alfredo Mina's Guernica, 1971.
Fig. 1
Alfredo Mina's Guernica, 1971.
Fig. 2

McLaren had become so renowned within certain film circles after his initial visit to Argentina in 1954 that a national newspaper announced his return a decade later by indicating, in the fashion of pop-idol coverage, the precise day and arrival time of his flight.[7] But even some of those who valued McLaren’s work lamented that the visibility and reach of his work was contributing to the ongoing reliance on certain styles and categories within the contemporary short film. In a review of the second Festival Internacional de Cine Experimental y Documental in Córdoba in 1966, a local critic praised a handful of shorts, including A Study in Wet (1964) by Homer Groening (father of Matt), before adding a broad dismissal: “in the experimental [section of the festival], there was an oscillation between an animated short of rudimentary figuration and geometric combinations copied from McLaren, and a cinema of pretentious and confusing storylines, even if quite well-developed technically.”[8] One can hear an earlier  version of this complaint in Stan Brakhage’s remarks to Parker Tyler about the 1958 Brussels festival, where a total of five Argentines presented short films (none named by Brakhage) and where the filmmaker found himself dismayed by the recurrence of easily identified types of avant-garde films.[9] I mention such objections because I suspect that they would be shared by a number of the filmmakers who sought to transform Argentine experimental cinema in the 1970s. But since most of them had not even seen the majority of the films listed above, in part because their indisciplinary nature of their various interests, my hunch is that the strongest opposition would have been to the very notion of experimental cinema (or more generally, the short film) following recognizable patterns of content, structure, and so on.

Martin Blaszko's Del punto a la forma, ca. 1954-58.
Fig. 1
Martin Blaszko's Del punto a la forma, ca. 1954-58.
Fig. 2

As in the case of the articles on experimental film I mentioned in my earlier post, both the films themselves and the writing about them appeared in a fairly discontinuous, patchwork manner. An article on experimental film might appear in a magazine, specializing in film or general interest news, but the coverage was usually introductory and provisional. Similarly sporadic were the screenings of such work. The di Tella’s retrospective of New American Cinema was unprecedented, but for years afterwards no similar programs appeared in Buenos Aires.[10] Nonetheless, Hirsch and others were aware, to varying degrees, that “scenes” had emerged in places like New York, cultural milieus in which experimental film was playing a role in the formation of alternative communities of performers, filmmakers, artists, musicians, writers, and viewers.
According to a retrospective account published by Alemann, “after lengthy work investigating and learning [Narcisa Hirsch and I] realized that it was as if we were enclosed within ourselves because our completed films were seen by us and a small group of friends. The need to face an unknown audience emerged.”[11] What Alemann describes can also be characterized as a search for an audience, but this pursuit was hardly something entirely new in Buenos Aires by the end of the ’60s. What Hirsch, Alemann, and their friends were extending and transforming was a key feature of the already-existing norm of the short-film screening: the presentation of a film as a direct encounter between filmmaker and audience. Within Argentina (once again, as in so many other countries), the value of the short film format and the customary rites of the short film screening had already been established within film clubs and other cultural organizations.
To return to our hypothetical filmmaker/cinephile, even if she or he had not seen many galvanizing, innovative, or challenging Argentine examples of experimental film prior to the early 1970s, the screenings themselves might have served an important function as instantiations of novel ways of experiencing the cinema. The short film screening was provided with its most coherent defense in Mahieu’s book, which also presents his vision of what the cinematic short could become. Noting that the rise of the Argentine short film had grown out of “amateur cinema, experimental and documentary shorts,” as well as the “independent film movement,” Mahieu asserted that in the best cases the short film was not merely conceived of as a “letter of introduction” into the film industry but rather as “a field of expression with its own aesthetic laws” and “a weapon of experimentation and stylistic rigor.”[12] Whereas industrial cinema was “a phenomenon isolated from the community’s social and cultural context,” the short film represented “a non-commercial activity that covers the needs of ever-larger sectors of the population, [which are] impeded from knowing the cinema by the normal exhibition tracks.” The resistance to such impediments was being led by “the film club movement,” which offered, for audiences, access to international film history and local cinema and, for filmmakers, “the only possibility of finding an echo – that is to say, a possibility of exhibiting and communicating oneself – in front of one’s own works.”[13]
Perhaps neither the Generación Cortometrajista nor the assorted outliers making shorts in Argentina in the 1950s and 1960s were offering much that would have been of interest to later arrivals. Yet in popularizing a novel approach to film exhibition, the cineclubistas had created a space, physical and discursive, which Argentine experimental cinema would attempt to occupy by the early 1970s. The initially fraught nature of that occupation is one of my next topics.
 


 Footnotes

[1] José Agustín Mahieu, Historia del cortometraje argentino (Santa Fé: Editorial Documento del Instituto Nacional de Cinematografía/Universidad Nacional del Litoral, 1961), p. 82. This and all subsequent quotations from texts with Spanish-language titles are my own translations.
[2] Ibid., p. 66. Amos Vogel described Kuhn’s short in his review of the Brussels festival: “Symphony in No B-flat, a mordant little satire, takes place the day after an atomic bomb has been dropped. Mutations have been created; two choir boys officiating at a wedding get married to each other instead; and memory has been erased, compelling young people to go to school once more to relearn the emotions of love.” See Amos Vogel, “The Angry Young Film Makers” (originally published in Evergreen Review, November/December 1958) in Scott MacDonald, Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), p. 340.
[3]   Paulina Fernandez Jurado, “Una realidad para el corto metraje argentino,” Lyra 20: 186-188 (1962), n.p.
[4]   Cerrato’s film actually premiered at a Buenos Aires festival of contemporary music, the Primer Festival Internacional de Música Contemporánea in 1970.
[5]   Bony’s screening was written up in a brief filler text that described his “erotic shorts,” including one in which its performers “had more fun than the audience,” and claimed the artist had “promised to reshoot his shorts: the technical flaws impeded seeing them well.” See “Calendario de Primera Plana,” Primera Plana 4:202 (November 8, 1966), p. 1.
[6]   For an introduction to Iturralde and Bras, see Pablo Marín, “Investigadores de las formas: El cine de Víctor Iturralde y Luis Bras en la tradición de Norman McLaren,” hambre espacio cine experimental (November 2014), https://hambrecine.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/marin.pdf (accessed August 1, 2015).
[7]   “Aguárdase para hoy la llegada de N. McLaren,” La Nacion (August 12, 1964), p. 8.
[8]   Sylvia M. de Potenze, “El Festival de Córdoba,” Criterio 39:1507 (September 8, 1966), p. 672.
[9]   “Brakhage, Stan – Interviewed by Parker Tyler 1958” (sound recording), box 24 file 5, Charles Boultenhouse and Parker Tyler Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
[10] Jonas Mekas has claimed for decades that a number of the 16mm prints sent from New York for the di Tella retrospective were not returned. Some of them remain in Buenos Aires to this day (in ever-worsening states of decay).
[11] Mecha Gattas, “El super 8: Cursos de cine en Punta del Este,” Mundo (January 21, 1977), p. 20. This article was written in the first person by Marie Louise Alemann, despite its published byline.
[12] Mahieu, Historia del cortometraje argentino, pp. 11, 12.
[13] Ibid., p. 23.
 

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