Every year, apart from its commitment to experimental forms, it’s Marseille’s very social contradictions that are most striking about the Festival international de cinéma de Marseille, or FIDMarseille. This is a film festival experience marked by the most ghastly signs of inequality, which one necessarily stumbles upon while schlepping from cinema to cinema: destitution, dillapitation, vandalism, garbage, class divisions. White people in air-conditioned screening rooms versus the racialized locals in the sorching heat outside. The city’s dilapidated walls are plastered with posters about the upcoming elections and Gaza.
It isn’t without interest, then, that some of the most memorable films from this year’s selection come from a context of institutional devastation, albeit from the other side of the world. That is, South America, where times of prosperity and democracy are like interludes between one coup d’état or authoritarian delirium and the next. Perhaps FIDMarseille’s selection committee is telling us something via this aspect of its curation process. Perhaps something about cinema’s knack for wondrous resilience as the far-right finds itself at the gates of power in France.
This is the context from which Celeste Rojas Mugica’s An Oscillating Shadow, Ricardo Alves Jr.’s Amusement Park, and Mariano Llinás’s Kunst der Farbe emerge. They all bear the scars from the region’s history of violence—ancient and contemporary—like a fertile inheritance.
An Oscillating Shadow is an intimate essay film crafted through a fragmented voiceover dialogue between Rojas Mugica and her father, a photographer forced into exile during Chile’s Pinochet years. Rojas Mugica documents the process of developing photographs that date back to her father’s clandestine life, when making himself invisible was a matter of life or death.
The literal act of making an image appear, of revealing history, is exploited for all of its poetic reverberations: from the metaphorical registers of the dialogue between father and daughter to the imersive tactile sounds of glossy sheets steeped in a bath. Here, cinema’s most basic unit, most ancestral relative, the still image, is exposed as the ultimate weapon of resistance—a resistance not just against the persistance of human brutality but the ravages of time.
The film’s most memorable sequences take the shape of close readings of two black-and-white photographs that Mugica unearths from her father’s archives. Through the narration, she meticulously observes the images, discovering details that seem initially hidden from the naked eye. She speculates about what lies outside the frame and clearly defines it.
One of the photos was taken by Rojas Mugica’s father from inside a car. We see a checkpoint of some kind and the terrorizing presence of guards. A woman carries a baby as a child takes in the banality of horror, while another one rumages through garbage. A second photograph features a public commemoration of Salvador Allende’s death. We see a group of women, one of them holding onto the back of another, and a child in the street, fading peace signs on the wall behind them. Rojas Mugica speculates about whether some of the women, like the one covering her face with an enlarged photograph of Allende, are hiding from the camera. The filmmaker must be right. Documentation, after all, is dangerous. The natural thing to do before the lens is to escape.
Rojas Mugica’s uncanny ability to take the viewer inside the image with poise, guiding us with her restrained essayistic tone, keeps such a political film from giving in to anger and becoming a kind of pamphletism. She instead trusts that it’s in the depths of poetry that politics lie.
In Amusement Park, Alves Jr. takes us to a more recent moment in Latin American history, when Brazil was in a kind of extreme-right wing trance. It was a trance largely provoked by the rise of future president Jair Bolsonaro, who became famous for uttering, among other things, the common Brazilian adage that a father would rather have a dead son than a gay one.
Alves Jr. precily imagines a place where queer and trans children marked for death, by the state and their fathers in unison, could go to dream, dance, and have unbridled sex. The film is, then, something of a utopian fantasy where an amusement park closed to the public in the wee hours is taken over by people of all sorts of sexualities and gender identities. It’s a place where they seem to run no risk of aggression or retaliation for engaging in the very practices that would make them persona non grata anywhere else. Even the inevitable hierarchy of looks and normative expctations that can rig cruising spaces in the real world are nowhere to be found. Bodies seem to simply glide toward one another without the threat of rejection. Masculinities, femininities, and gender-fucking embodiments of all kinds seem equally desirable here.
Alves Jr. portrays this oasis of freedom with little dialogue, a lot of music, and a commitment to queer enjoyment. The presence of a razor blade is only for shaving a stranger’s hairy body before rimming him. A bottom seems to orgasm through hysterial laughter. The way the film sees it, a trans man’s purple strap-on penis is just as attractive as a so-called “real” penis. And in the film’s most joyous scene, Alves Jr. makes urine look like a thirst-quenching poetic affair, which spurts from a cis man’s penis falling in someone else’s more-than-willing mouth—like a miraculous mirage capable of repairing the most ancestral queer wounds. Or, at least, numbing the pain before exiting the amusement park and re-entering an increasingly anti-pleasure world.
Kunst der Farbe is the third installment in a trypich project by Llinás on the Argentinian art collective Mondongo. It’s difficult not to take the film as an act of defiance against contemporary Argentina’s descent into the the shallows of fascist austerity measures targetting the cultural sector. Most recently, President Javier Milei’s policies have aimed to freeze cinematic productions, forcing even the iconic Mar del Plata Film Festival to rely on private financing. One recent communiqué released by the government literally linked the funding of film festivals to children’s hunger, implying the end of the first to be a prerequisite for the end of the latter.
With such toxic drivel as background, Llinás’s snickering tone and penchant for radical experimentation gain particular urgency. On paper, Kunst der Farbe is a meditation on color. In practice, while the documentary is structured by pedagogical accounts of various colors and their significance to visual arts through the work of Swiss expressionist painter, designer, teacher, writer, and theorist Johannes Itten, Llinás ultimately reminds us of the astonishing complexity of cinema as a language. (The film takes its name from one of Itten’s books.)
Leos Carax, in his most recent film, It’s Not Me, wonders why a cellphone camera wielded by ordinary hands isn’t capable of giving rise to the same sublime feelings that the cinematic apparatus so often does, and Kunst der Farbe seems to inadvertently provide him with an answer. The film’s playful mixture of fictionalized conversations among a filmmaking troupe, Agnès Varda-like quest for visceral manifestations of the theorization of color in the real world, and sifting through legendary paintings and Louis Feuillade’s silent films all give rise to a hystrionic homage to the kinds of multi-dimensional worlds that only cinema can forge.
Kunst der Farbe is most remarkable when it focuses on the literality of this forging—namely, when it turns the camera to the editing room itself. And it does so through the poignant articulations of an editor explaining her craft: its ancient logic, its high-tech tools, and its inextinguishable arsenal of possibilities. In this regard, the film is close to Maria Aparicio’s Undefined Things, another Argentine film screened at last year’s FIDMarseille. While Aparicio relied on an introspective style and a melancholy pace in order to meditate on the awesome responsibilities of an editor’s minor gestures, Llinás favors a more vaudevillian rhythm. Kunst der Farbe is an explosion of intellectual insights and chaotic demonstration of how, contrary to popular belief, we have only just begun to make movies.
FIDMarseille runs from June 26—30.
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