Tótem by Lila Avilés
By Alonso Aguilar
In Rubén Gámez’s The Secret Formula / La fórmula secreta (1965), the iconographies of Mexican identity are seen to be in flux. Once vignettes of daily life and symbols of a collective, national state of being, their representation starts eroding by the advent of Western referents and the commodities of a globalized way of life, one of so-called development and prosperity.
Obtuse and distorted in their marginalized refractions, these previous bastions of Mexican-ness start drifting away from the recognition of those they ought to portray. In the film, exploited laborers and rural townsfolk no longer see themselves in the lands around them, now just nameless assortments of utilitarian architectures and foreign name brands.
The concerns put forward by Rubén Gámez’s 40-minute masterpiece are as relevant now as they were almost 60 years ago, not only in how they showcase the never-ending uncertainty around socioeconomic and political processes in Latin America, but also in how our relationship with our own history and essence fluctuates over time, a central topic for the region’s cinematic output basically since its inception.
The Secret Formula’s latest restoration was shown in one of the incisive and enlightening programs organized by Woche der Kritik (Berlin’s Critic’s Week, which runs parallel to the Berlinale), and coincidentally, it establishes a multi-layered dialogue with the contemporary Latin American films shown in Germany’s top filmic ceremony.
Of all tentpole events in the festival circuit, the Berlinale is perhaps the one with the most visible association with Latin American Cinema, at least historically. Ever since Walter Salles’ Central Station / Central do Brasil won the Golden Bear in 1998, the Berlin Film Festival has been one of the most fertile showcases of the region' s audiovisual talent within the realm of so-called A-class festivals.
The Secret Formula by Rubén Gamez
For example, the 2000s concluded with a landmark moment after José Padilha’s Elite Squad / Tropa de Elite (2008) and Claudia Llosa’s The Milk of Sorrow / La teta asustada (2009) went back-to-back with the main prize, and despite not winning the coveted animal statuette ever since, the momentum was kept alive by memorable highlights and widely acclaimed films like Sebastián Lelio’s Gloria (2013), Patricio Guzmán’s The Pearl Button / El botón de nácar (2015), Jayro Bustamante’s Ixcanul (2015), Pablo Larraín’s The Club / El club (2015), Tatiana Huezo’s Tempestad (2016), and Marcelo Martinessi’s The Heiresses / Las herederas (2018), just to name a few.
Given its storied place within the festival’s limelight, the yearly advent of Berlinale is still of particular notice for Latin American cinephiles, however, as the festival’s focus and structure has fluctuated throughout the years, so has the discussion around the types of styles and perspectives from the region that tend to be embraced in the European circuit. El grupo de Cali’s foundational concepts of pornomiseria and neocolonial exoticism still lurk like an uncomfortable specter, occasionally manifesting in applauded works and reminding us that such dialogue is never out of time.
Notably, the 73rd Edition of the Teutonic audiovisual event portrays what seems to be an interesting shift in how cine latino has been featured in big tentpole events in recent memory. The only feature-length work part of the official competition was Lila Avilés’s Tótem, her much-anticipated follow-up to her 2018 debut feature The Chambermaid / La camarista, while Encounters, the newest section dedicated to independent and innovative filmmakers, featured Tatiana Huezo’s return to the non-fiction form after Prayers for the Stolen / Noche de fuego (2021), The Echo / El eco, and Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann’s long-form debut The Klezmer Project / Adentro mío estoy bailando. It was Forum and Forum Expanded, sections that embrace experimental forms and more adventurous aesthetic endeavors, that really stood out for its Latin American presence, with seven works overall.
There’s perhaps not much of a sample size yet, and still, that does mirror what happened in 2022’s New York Film Festival before it, where besides a couple feature-length stand-outs like Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta’s Dry Ground Burning / Mato Seco em Chamas and Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen, most Latin American works were part of the short and medium length programs of the more experimentally-adjacent Currents section.
The Face of the Jellowfish by Melissa Liebenthal
Only time will tell if this is merely a circumstantial footnote of the first couple of post-pandemic years, or a wider consequence of the complex amalgamation of economic and political processes boiling up in the continent and affecting the cultural spheres. Whatever the case may be, the works in question have put forward formally playful and conceptually audacious approximations to Latin America’s contemporary milieu.
Despite occasional and very sporadic appearances, the formal clichés and narrative tropes that for many years seemed to characterize many Latin American films doing festival rounds seem to be mostly excised. Slow-burning naturalism, stylized renditions of “magical realism,” and ethnographic explorations with a hint of Otherness are a part of the Latin American independent film catalog, but recently, their shadow no longer permeates the whole region’s cinematic output.
Like the standardized landscapes overcoming autochthonous signifiers in The Secret Formula, once something becomes homogeneous and commonplace, it ends up draining the very essence of what’s being portrayed. So perhaps the lack of instantaneous canonization isn’t exclusively a negative; perhaps it allows for the kind of eclectic (and sometimes erratic) expressions that bypass any uniform notion of a part of the world that’s too diverse and contradictory to be depicted by broad strokes and stylistic placeholders coming from funding grants and screenwriting labs.
The first example of this readjustment can actually be seen spilling over to the main competition with Avilés’s Tótem. In The Chambermaid, the Mexican filmmaker made a name for herself precisely by avoiding the usual pitfalls of social realist approximations to labor, and portraying hard work and its inherent class tensions in Mexican society with an empathetic framing that used time and her protagonist’s relationship with the aseptic physical space of a non-descriptive high-class hotel, to show how body motions carry political weight.
In Tótem, Avilés takes a surprising turn, both conceptually and aesthetically, leaving behind the wide and open shots and droning soundscapes of a high-rise for an almost claustrophobic subjectivity. Technically, the shallow focus, looming tracking shots and low angle shots could be understood as how Sol, the seven-year-old at the heart of the film, except the camera leaves her behind, capturing brief yet significant snapshots of family drama around a surprise birthday party for her ailing father.
The set-up can be read as any number of intimate coming-of-age narratives, and that’s precisely why Tótem stands out. Through immersive, and at times disorienting aural design, and a hypnotizing and free-flowing structure, the film embodies its core parallelism between ancient practices of existential release and emotional solace on a deeply effective sensory level.
About Thirty by Martín Shanly
Martín Shanly’s About Thirty / Arturo a los 30, another sophomore feature, this time part of the Forum program, also takes what can easily be read as a solipsistic personal tale of a certain melodramatic tradition, and expands on it through visual imagination and playful structural games. Shanly’s film is essentially a slacker comedy that sees the Arturo (played by the filmmaker himself) stumble from situation to situation, leaving behind a trail of interpersonal frictions and existential uncertainty. Through its epistolary and deeply elliptical structure, Shanly manages the hard ordeal of creating tangible melancholy from what in less dexterous hands could easily be just cringe-inducing comedic punchlines.
There’s a conscious subversion of narrative and even formal expectations in every moment of Arturo a los 30’s 92-minute runtime. Be it from secondary plot threats that turn out to be mere footnotes, to ingenious aural and visual motifs that end up recontextualizing whole scenes, Shanly’s farcical and kaleidoscopic sketch of Argentine high-class mannerisms has no problem embracing the awkwardness in every sense of the word.
The uncomfortable angles in which Arturo finds himself are as deceitful to the him as to the viewer, creating a sensory back-and-forth in which hyper realistic sounds drifting the focus form “important situations” and weird zoom-ins into picturesque details stealthily manage to make this “good for nothing” figure a deeply endearing tragic core.
A more visceral take on existential angst, also from Argentina and also in the Forum section, is what guides Melisa Liebenthal’s second feature, The Face of the Jellowfish / El rostro de la medusa. Going by an absurdist premise of a young woman discovering how her face has changed all of the sudden, Liebenthal intertwines a series of deadpan, and at times surreal, comedic vignettes with sudden explosions of visual scrapbooking and other unorthodox and hyper-saturated tools like digital face renderings and even seemingly disconnected footage from an Italian zoo.
The Trial by Ulises de la Orden
All these disparate elements, including the strange fiction central to the the film, are examples of El rostro de la medusa’s truly exploratory ethos towards identity. The pseudo-“scientific” textures of biometrics, and the more artisan cut-and-paste constructions both come from the same place of inner inquiry, of questioning in real time what’s exactly the thing that determines our individual selves, and how can it be depicted, if at all.
A third Argentine film from the Forum section also deals with questions of depiction and identity, although in a totally contrasting register. On paper, Ulises de la Orden’s The Trail / El juicio could be seen as another entry into the robust canon of Argentine audiovisual undertakings dealing with the lasting scars and trauma of the military dictatorship, a topic that’s currently back in the international spotlight due to Santiago Mitre’s Oscar-nominated Argentina, 1985.
Technically, de la Orden and Mitre’s films share the same roster of characters and and are built around the same situation, that of the 1985 Juicio a las Juntas, the trial against the men responsible for an horrendous display of unspeakable acts and human rights violations during the so-called Proceso de Reorganización Nacional period between 1976 and 1983. However, their way of approaching the subject at hand couldn’t be further apart.
Far from the Ricardo Darín pathos and the sweeping violins coming in at the most climatic moments, The Trial lets footage speak for itself, literally. Like other devastating audiovisual registers of tragedy like Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Wang Bing’s Dead Souls, de la Orden beliefs in the power of the non-image, of picturing by ourselves a degree of iniquity that can only be somewhat grasped through the cracking voices of the survivors, and the trembling visages of those witnessing their testimony.
Throughout its harrowing 3-hours, The Trial is guided by thematic chapters, each one dealing with different trends found in the court testimonies, and intercut in such a way that the power and specificity of the individual experience is only amplified by the choral retelling of a national memory that’ll always be tainted in blood.
The Devil Queen by Antonio Carlos da Fontoura
And blood is what brings it all together in Antonio Carlos da Fontoura’s The Devil Queen / A Rainha Diaba from 1974. The Brazilian queer classic saw a restoration play at the Forum Special set of events, extending a bridge between contemporary expressions and the often-forgotten traditions of underground cinema. From the start of its eye-popping opening credits, full of glitter and tropical hues, The Devil Queen embraces the flamboyant attitude of Milton Gonçalves interpretation as the titular Queen of Rio de Janeiro’s criminal underworld.
Pastel-colored sets, rollicking needle drops and expressionistic zoom-ins into hyper-stylized violence gives the whole viewing experience an engrossing sense of camp spectacle, nevertheless, the actual socio-cultural environment of the film is never a mere backdrop. Rio’s working class gay subculture is not only represented, but personified in every frame, oozing from a palpable sense of dissent and freewheelin’ anarchy only equalled by the aural dissonance and larger-than-life performances that seem as vibrant today as in 1974.
At the time of its release, de Fontoura’s film eschewed any sense of “good taste” or “traditional quality”, cementing its identity by close contact with its surroundings and the formal thrust that came from an unfettered approach towards audiovisual expression. Its idiosyncrasy became its banner, and almost 50 years later it still stands as both an integral landmark in the region’s history, and an enthralling work of cinematic imagination. Spearheaded by The Devil Queen’s indomitable spirit, the 2023 edition of the Berlinale provided an heterogeneous snapshot of Latin American film, one that shows inspiring developments, fresh new voices, and an expansion of the tired ideas of how the continent ought to look and feel.
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Alonso Aguilar is a cultural journalist from San José, Costa Rica. He does editorial labor in Krinégrafo: Cine y Crítica and his writings have featured in Mubi Notebook, Bandcamp Daily, Film International, photogénie, Cinema Year Zero, Costa Rica Festival Internacional de Cine, La Nación and Revista Correspondencias.
