“Luis Ospina’s healthy skepticism of revolutionary dogma is also reflected in a feature-length film essay, Un tigre de papel (A Paper Tiger, 2007), about the Colombian collage artist, poet and sometime revolutionary, Pedro Manrique Figueroa. PMF, as he is sometimes referred to in the film, disappeared without a trace in 1981, but is also an enigma because virtually no images of the artist or many of his collages survive. Two of his found footage films do exist and are included in the essay, along with footage from various Communist propaganda films, newsreels and interviews with contemporaries. Born in 1934, and strongly influenced by the murder of leftist politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948, when he was a ticket collector on a tram, we learn that Figueroa was trained as a professional revolutionary in East Germany in the 1960s. He travelled to Eastern Europe and China, but also spent a good portion of his life homeless, an intellectual who floated in and out of Bogotá’s coffee house scene, distributing homemade pamphlets, leaflets and collages, which reflected his own strange mixture of Communist, Socialist and Maoist ideologies with a healthy dose of sexuality. Ospina’s portrait of an artist who never quite fit in is also, then, a social and political history of Colombia’s turbulent past.” —UCLA Film Archie
A PAPER TIGER / UN TIGRE DE PAPEL
A film by Luis Ospina
(Colombia, 2007, 115 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
Now streaming on DAFilms Americas
