The Parrot and the Swan by Alejo Moguillansky
The Spectacle Theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn will present a special series of films by critically-acclaimed Argentine director Alejo Moguillansky, titled “Por el dinero: The Films of Alejo Moguillansky,” starting tomorrow, Saturday, November 6 with screenings scheduled through December.
Thriving on a playful dialectical struggle between truth and fiction, reality and fantasy, comedy and tragedy, content and form, and aural and visual space, Moguillansky’s films are in a state of constant exploration. From The Parrot and the Swan / El loro y el cisne wherein the main character is also the film’s boom operator and the idea of cinematic subjectivity is taken to comically new heights, to For the Money / Por el dinero in which Moguillansky’s real-life entry into a Colombian theater competition is imagined as the harbinger of insatiable greed and, ultimately, his own death, the very processes of making a film is often the jumping off point for the film itself, leaving the movie to discover and construct its own aesthetic terrain as it unfolds.
In addition to his work as a director, Moguillansky is also one of the founding members of the Argentinian film collective El Pampero Cine alongside other notable Argentine filmmakers Mariano Llinás, Laura Citrella, and Andres Mendilaharzu. Founded on a commitment to independence and collaboration, the films of El Pampero are usually produced without institutional financing from grants or government funding and make use of the collective’s own equipment. Importantly, the founding members also serve in important creative roles on each other’s projects, sometimes even on screen.
As part of this special series, Spectacle is pleased to present a selection other films that Moguillansky worked on as an editor, including Llinás “micro-budget four-hour long Borgesian epic” Extraordinary Stories / Historias extraordinarias, Laura Citrella’s bitterly funny resort-set noir Ostende, and the first two films in Matias Pinero’s Shakespeareads series, Rosalinda and Viola. As evidenced by the prominent acting roles often given to his crew members, the films of Moguillansky thrive on collaborative creativity and these films feel as much a part of his body of work as his own.
Spectacle has split the series into two parts. Playing throughout November are Castro, The Parrot and the Swan, and The Gold Bug / El escarabajo de oro, Extraordinary Stories, and Ostende. Make sure to stay tuned in December for the second part of the series, which will screen The Little Match Girl / La vendedora de fósforos, For the Money, Rosalinda, and Viola.
The opening film of the series is Moguillansky’s Castro (2009). Part Langian conspiracy, part Chaplinesque comedy of work, and part city symphony, Castro is filled with a Nouvelle Vague-esque sense of endless playfulness and ingenuity. A mysterious man named Castro (Edgardo Castro) is wandering around Buenos Aires trying hard not to find a job (“Right now I have you, my body, and my head. If I get a job one, two, or three of those things might disappear,” he tells his girlfriend), while a gang of four comical crooks led by Castro’s ex-wife clumsily tail him. Filled with plenty of absurd comic asides (an inane secret code communicated through umbrellas, a mysterious and omnipresent upstairs neighbor who is always heard moving around the apartment, ominous job interviews that venture into the strangely personal); dusty, sun-drenched cinematography; and a silent movie worthy piano score, Castro is a startling and surprising debut that oozes charm.
Next in the program is Moguillansky’s The Parrot and the Swan (2013). Starting off as a docu-fiction about a film crew making a movie about Argentinian ballet before veering off into a bemusing riff on Swan Lake and eventually settling into a deadpan romantic comedy, The Parrot and the Swan is continually surprising and filled with a keen sense of fun. Dealing with a rough, hate-mail filled break-up meek sound-mixer, Parrot, finds himself falling in love with a pregnant experimental dancer, Luciana (Luciana Acuna, Moguillansky’s wife) while in the middle of filming a documentary. Boom still in hand, Parrot quits his job and pursues her from crowded, bohemian Buenos Aires flats to odd corners of provincial Argentina. While an endearing character study at heart, the film seems happiest when headed off into endless digressions like lengthy ballet rehearsals, Freudian dream analysis, and amusing sound jokes centered around Parrot’s refusal to ever put down his boom. The Sunday, November 7 screening will be followed by a remote Q&A with director Alejo Moguillansky.
Kicking off as a double feature with The Parrot and the Swan, The Golden Bug (2014) was originally commissioned by a Danish film festival as a movie about 19th century feminist poet, Victoria Benidectssen. The film instead became a literal and figurative adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic adventure novel Treasure Island. Using the commission to make a film about Benedictsson as cover, the ensemble sets out to find the buried treasure while convincing the European producers and co-director that their real aim is to also make a biography about 19th-century Argentine political radical Leandro N. Alem, so as to avoid being neo-colonialist. Directly riffing off of the real world circumstances in which the movie itself came into being, The Gold Bug is a metatextual questioning of the possibility of filmmaking in a capitalist, Euro-centric film ecosystem.
Directed by Laura Citrella and edited by Alejo Moguillansky, Ostende is included in the first part of Spectacle’s series to expand on Moguillansky’s fundamental attachment to a spirit of collaboration. Thanks to a radio contest, a girl wins four vacation days in a huge hotel in Ostende, in the province of Buenos Aires. It’s the low season, and she arrives at the hotel alone; her boyfriend will join her a few days later. On the beach there’s plenty of sun but also too much wind, and a not very sophisticated bar with a waiter that talks too much. In this place with no obligations or big attractions apart from a windy beach nearby and the not-so-tempting ocean, the girl starts to pay attention – maybe too much, maybe not enough – to the strange behavior of an old man who’s accompanied by two young women. Flirting with both Hitchcock and Rohmer from a light, feminine perspective, Citrella demonstrates the entrancing possibilities of storytelling in Ostende, which was her debut film.
Also edited by Moguillansky is Mariano Llinas’ 2008 Extraordinary Stories. As though it was a sort of encyclopedia of adventure fiction, this film takes as a starting point three classically used triggers. One: A man who gets accidentally involved in a case of assassination; Two: another man (a smalltown bureaucrat) who gets obsessed with another man, whose life becomes a crescently problematic riddle; Three: A Jules Verne styled challenge takes place in a sort of gentlemen club in the deep argentine country side; that challenge ( a remotely scientific orientated challenge) involves a third man in an unexpected odyssey down a river that run through the lonely plains. Hundreds of stories, altogether in one plot that, more than a film, becomes a sort of essay about fiction: How fiction works, where fiction comes from and what the real purpose of fiction is.
Each film in the program will be screening with multiple showtimes through the month of November! For complete information on the included titles, their screening schedules, and to purchase tickets, visit spectacletheater.com.
