an image: Colombian director Luis Ospina addresses the camera and reads us a poem by his colleague Carlos Mayolo in which he expressed his attitude, between passive and indolent, facing a world in constant movement with which, years passed, he no longer felt identified and in which the present, The past and future intermingle in a continuum without a precise and liberating meaning..
From here, We are informed of the existence of a group of filmmakers called “Los Quitos”, who are making a documentary film about the reality of Colombia. This film work is based on two basic ideas. The first of them takes the confrontation between two abstract concepts, noise and silence, as axes of that reality in permanent armed conflict. The other idea will address the challenge of unraveling a puzzle of images built on moments (that is to say, frames) of different events in Colombian history, some real ones, others perhaps invented. In the center of that puzzle, however, an abyss opens, a black hole yet to be completed with other future images, and that attracts our gaze.
These are the elements that, roughly, compose Quiet syndrome, the latest work of the Cantabrian director Elías León Siminiani, a piece that mixes documentary and fiction resources, and which is presented today Thursday 11 of November within the section of Amalgam at the festival The Cabin. As an aperitif, We offer you this interesting talk with the director, who will attend the corresponding session to maintain a dialogue with the public after the screening of his film. G.LEON
To introduce the viewer and as a first question, I would like you to explain to us who Luis Ospina is and how you came to him to make this film..
Luis Ospina eHe is one of the most important documentary filmmakers of Colombian cinema and Ibero-American cinema., in general, whose work developed since the beginning of the years 70. He is a director who has always interested me a lot because he is one of the pioneers of what is called mockumentary., What is this idea of treating fiction as if it were reality or as if it were a documentary?. This allows him to make proposals that have a lot of humor and in which he can be very acidic regarding reality.. He died in the year 2018, when we were making the movie, and how, in addition to being interviewed, was an active part of the creative process, in the end it turned out, unexpectedly and, Of course, unwanted, a tribute to his figure and his legacy.
What is the group Los Quitos?
Los Quitos is a kind of “false” group that Jorge Caballero and I decided to found.. Jorge is a Colombian filmmaker and documentary filmmaker who has lived in Barcelona for many years., we are friends, and when we considered making a film in Colombia, that I would direct, We thought about what topics might be of interest.. Quickly, Silence emerged as an important topic for both of them for very different reasons.. From his Colombian background, He basically associated silence with when the weapons stop, and I had an interest, let's call him, existential, meditative in opposition to contemporary noise. From there, We plan to create “Los Quitos”, What would be this group of filmmakers who would consider making a hypothetical film about a stillness syndrome that affects the Republic of Colombia, like in B movies, suddenly, one day it dawns and the city is quiet, People don't go to work and a silence and stillness begins to create that no one can explain., that would emerge in Bogotá and then expand throughout Colombia. This fictitious hook allowed us to raise a series of issues regarding the idiosyncrasy, the history or, even, the geography of Colombia seen from the eyes of a foreigner, what am I, and?, somehow, makes the film become a window to look into that fascinating society.
The film poses an equation that is Noise + Silence = Stillness. What does it mean? Because I must admit that I don't know if I get that result. (laughter)
Yeah, It's a bit paradoxical. We gave it a lot of thought. I think this comes from the idea that, especially in a society like Colombia, we live divided by the continuous noise, understood as something literal, but also like the continuous presence of stimuli, due to the lack of disconnection capacity, the inability to concentrate that the entire digital revolution brings us, all this kind of continuous noise. At the same time, there was the need to open spaces of silence or calm or non-doing in our lives. At that midpoint between the two things we think there would be stillness., which is a healthier state, which is not standing still or in continuous movement. Somehow, Colombia, its geography, its history, his art offers the two extremes of noise and silence. In that sense, There are aspects that are very fascinating, What is the idea that Colombia is a country that has been at war for sixty years?, a silent war that does not happen in the cities, what happens in the jungle, where people don't live. It is a war between the government and the guerrilla, which then becomes complicated because drug trafficking enters, which in turn goes to war against the government, and the fact that these battlefields occur in unpopulated areas. They have lived very trapped in that tension, in that quiet war that they had a few kilometers away. We thought that this stillness would be that middle ground in which a more prosperous society could emerge., both there and here, in our pulse between silence and noise.
The movie, as you say, proposes a correlation between certain events and the noise that these events cause in Colombian society. it is, How do you say the noise of drug trafficking?, another would be the noise of politics, and in front of it would be that silence in which citizens fall when faced with an event such as a match of their soccer team in a World Cup.. That is to say that, facing political conflict, the only thing that silence achieves is something more anodyne or banal. While watching the film I thought that this contrast is easy to associate with almost any modern society.. Why Colombia and not another place in the world? To what extent did it serve you as an extrapolation?
Well Colombia basically, because this film arose as a consequence of a friendship with Jorge Caballero who is co-writer and co-producer of the film. The film comes to translate an interest of mine, personal, because of Jorge's origin and in all the things he has been telling me. He has been my guide or my introducer to a deeper level in Colombian society and culture. At a given moment, We wanted to make a film between the two of us that would be a kind of filmed translation of our relationship.. The fact that Colombia was chosen has more to do with this than anything else.. But it is true that, besides, It is always said that Colombia is the noisiest country in the world for many reasons., because it has been at war for sixty years, because it has that quartet that is so complex to explain between the government, guerrilla, drug traffickers and paramilitaries… If it is already difficult to explain the politics of any country, If you add to that an additional power which is that of drug trafficking, which is a power as powerful as that of the government or the guerrilla, that adds noise. If you also add to that that it is one of the cradles of salsa, You have many elements that lent themselves to that premise.. Knowing that we wanted to do something in Colombia, We tried to look for a premise that could flow from its History.
The film proposes a kind of collage of images composed of sequences of frames from different moments in that History., such as the conflict with the FARC or the organization of a strange census in 1993 that kept people locked in their homes to count them!
Yeah, there are very curious things. Talking to Jorge, I asked him about those moments of silence that he remembered. So, He told me that about the World Cup, then she told me about the finals of the mises... Colombia has had many finalists for Miss World and when there was one of these girls, people stopped, He went home to watch it on TV.. Then, when the bombs were dropped in the eighties [with the escalation of the war between the government and drug trafficking], I remembered, in his childhood, that silence after the explosion. It was a very deep silence, very penetrating. Or that image from the census, rara, but, at the same time, so subjugating, How is it an empty city because they have to count the people?. There were a lot of people who weren't registered and the only way to get them to do it was to, wherever he slept, they would go to tell it. All this does is generate filmable images.. The movie, in its essayistic logic, join the dotted line between this series of bizarre. That's fun to do too..
Regarding all this, at the beginning of the footage you have a feeling of disorder, but then it takes on its own structure and discourse.. What was the process of drawing that dotted line??
It was complex. I think that, like some of Luis Ospina's films, It was a montage thing.. In fact, there were two shoots in two years in a row, in the summer of 2017 and that of 2018, and to that more material was added that, somehow, springs from the responses of the three characters we interviewed, Gustavo Petro [candidate for the presidency of Colombia in 2010 y 2018], the writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez, and Luis Ospina. This is an essay film and, therefore, It is not a film too closely associated with the idea of cause-effect more narrative. Many times, associations have to do with concepts that are related. For example, the emptiness of one space leads to the emptiness of another space which happens to be a historically important space, which opens the door to History, etc. In the end, the script responds more to the logic of mental associations of the essay than to a purely narrative logic. In fact, the very premise of making a fake documentary about Stillness Syndrome, there is a moment when you abandon. It is true that, in that sense, It is a demanding film, because it raises something that is a little disconcerting and from there it draws themes. In that sense, the film launches as a kind of request: “hold that, in the end, fits”. But I am aware that the narrative engine, the plot, It's finer than in my other films, as Map o Notes for a heist movie, in which there is clearly a character who is looking for something and is spinning a story. Here it has more to do with the logic of the essay. It's what was intended to be done.
The film exposes two popular leaders who are Gustavo Petro and Jorge Eliécer Gaitán [popular candidate for president in 1948 and murdered that same year] that mark the possibility of that other Colombia that could have been. I was interested, and maybe this is something more personal that I don't know if it's in the movie, that idea of the possible. I wanted to ask you, both in these cases and in general, is the possible the possible, or the possible is impossible because it never happened?
I think this is very subjective.. Basically, The murder of Gaitán is an event that may have the same importance as the uprising in Spain. 36. It is a turning point that changes the history of that society in the 20th century.. Here it would be something like asking, What would have happened if there had not been a Civil War?? What would the country we live in be like today?? The response that Vásquez gives in the documentary is melancholic. He considers that, with that impossible, if they had not killed Gaitán, Colombia would be a better country. I am not clear. I am a little more historical materialist in that regard.. In that sense, I am in favor of admitting reality, what has happened, as it is, and make the necessary revisions. If the possible is impossible? I think it is impossible because, in the end, the possible is the only thing that has existed or the only thing we have. The politics, especially seen from a historical perspective, It is full of possible facts, both positive and negative.. What would have happened to the world if there had not been the Holocaust?? I very much believe in a revisionist vision and that we learn the lessons of the past and history., because I think it's one of the few ways that I feel exist to fight against the absolute transience of everything, in the sense that the passage of time kills everything, closes everything, and one of the few triumphs you can have is that awareness. The digital revolution has brought about two or three more steps towards that kind of continuous dictatorship of the present and absolute denial of the past..
Against all those problems posed by noise, appears as a contrast, the silence, We said. But it has caught my attention that, In the image, It is not so much the silence that we see, like the void. The emptiness of the people, there is no one. What does that emptiness suggest??
It is very interesting because another level would be missing here (Thank goodness it doesn't have it because the movie is already quite complex -laughs-), but it is true that one might ask, what happens when there is silence, but there are people? But if, There is a dichotomy between empty spaces and filled spaces, emptiness being equal to silence. Let's say I was aware of that., but I didn't want to go further. I wanted to produce images where the silence was evident and tangible., palpable, and empty images gave me that. But I think that in a kind of later reading or second part, Yes, there could be a deeper reflection regarding the nature of that silence, which does not necessarily imply that there are no people, because that is very pessimistic regarding the human condition (laughter), as if the only way to have silence was to get everyone out and that's it.. No, I believe that there may be other forms of silence that include people.
With this film you return to that mockumentary style that you already used in other previous works. What does this way of making films give you??
Bueno, Luis Ospina said that, through fiction (he called it imposture) you could be more realistic than with realism because, somehow, that imposture allows you, first, ironize, and two, shape reality to tell it. In that sense, The mockumentary is a genre that interests me a lot.. Not so much as an overtly comical way, as it has been done in the American school, or to deceive the viewer or present a real world that you later reveal is fictitious... I am more interested in a filmic discourse that poses something that you do not fully know if it is true or not., but it contains enough clues for you to think that that, if it's not true, could be. That puts you (And in this there is a filmmaker that interests me a lot, who is the British Peter Watkins., teacher of Luis Ospina) on a somewhat slippery terrain that allows you to free yourself from the ties of extreme verisimilitude that reportage or journalism has, in which you have to contrast everything, and have some things such as the ability to create, to invent some things and, above all, put the humor, something that also interests me because I think that the speeches, when they carry some lightness, they fit better.
It is not the first time that you are at the center of the film. When this is done, you can think to what extent one is so interesting as to attract a viewer. How do you see yourself in that relationship??
Bueno, In this movie my figure is really very diluted. I'm there, Jorge is also there, but we are like pawns. Yeah, when you make films about your own life or your point of view expressly, that's a danger. It occupied me for a long time. When you make first-person films and make diary films, you work with your own life as raw material and, on the one hand, there is modesty and, for another, that idea of pure and simple vanity. I found some tools to try not to fall into that. One was to try to distance myself from myself and test myself as a character., that is to say, not like Elijah, but like an Elias who is a character within a story. And I do have the ability to test, in a third person story, whether a character works or doesn't work. So, If I have that same rigor with me as a character, I think I can protect myself from that.. I see that my students, when they try to do things with their life, They always think that anything can go into a movie because it has happened to them.. And I always tell them that they have to enter the things that are valid for the story you want to tell.. If it's a love story, That's that, Yes it is a story between a father and a son, that, yes it is the story of a guy who wants to start a rock band and achieve success, will that be. If you start taking the story and treating it as if it were in the third person, you will see that there are many things that immediately fall. And then there is another thing that I have deeply engraved by Chris Marker, which is that the first person is always considered a sign of vanity or egocentrism when, In fact, The first person is the most genuine contribution that one can make to the world because it is what you know the most and best.. That's a quote that always worked for me.. Nor is it that Marker is the greatest filmmaker who exists on first-person cinema., But he is one of the people who has worked the most on subjective forms with greater rigor and brilliance.. It is also true that it is a type of speech or film text that will have its detractors., but, over time, you learn to distinguish that if there are people who do not enter into that type of discourse, well it's not my problem. It's not that I want to spend my entire life doing this.. In recent years I have done series that have more journalistic investigation and it has been very enriching. I've also seen a lot of first-person movies and in the end you develop an instinct to see when that guy really loves himself or knows what he's talking about..
To finish… in this project you show a kind of black hole in the center of that collage image that you present on the screen. It's as if the story is left incomplete., with that central issue still pending. I wanted to ask you if that hole responds to the impossibility of closing that question about noise and silence..
I think it is clear that the film is presented as an open work for many reasons.. A, why you just said. Another for the desire to return, if not on this topic, yes in trying to delve into the exercise we have done of offering a look at Colombia from a point of view like mine. And then, regarding the death of Luis, It allowed us to make this fiction that in that hole of images that were not recorded there could be some images recorded in the future, that pose a temporal paradox because, obviously, Those images could not be recorded on the 2024 and present them today, but not with Luis, who died. So, that hole raises that idea, like snatched, that Luis Ospina does not die because he is immortal, because his legacy remains. We thought it was a romantic idea to pay tribute to him., to create that poetic space that cinema grants, What is the possibility of temporary rupture, to make times coexist, something that does not exist in the linear continuum in which we live and that seems to me to be one of the great weapons that cinema gives to fight against the yoke of existence.
