Transformaciones

1984, in Venezuela, in a supermarket, young children are used as caddies: they load customers' errands and roll them up to their car. Their leader is Rafa (Amilcar Rivero). Cheo (Alexandra Rodriguez) would like to be caddy and despite the agreement of the chief of staff, Rafa asked him to pass the test of the "little day": spend a night inside the store without getting caught by the guards.

Tierna es la Noche is a film without bullets nor sea, without mosquitoes, without peasants nor flowers. It only contains a barman, a man and a beautiful woman who lives in a bathroom. For commercial reasons, we have included two policemen, a drop of blood and a multilingual nymphomaniac. For aesthetic reasons, a tear and a black man. For both reasons, the film takes place anachronically, during the fifties and nineties in a make-believe city called Caracas. It's a story of histerics, like all stories, unfinished.

This is the first of Diego Risquez’ trilogy of avant-garde cinematic treatments of historical subjects. Using a painterly style, it features portraits, still lifes, and scenes shot as tableaux vivants, the film provides an experimental interpretation of the arrival of the Spanish and their domination of the New World, as well as the Venezuelan Independence movement, focusing on the role of Simón Bolívar. There is no dialogue or narration, simply a musical score and the depiction of events from Bolívar’s career.

The Orinoko: main character in the film. The first part is set during the pre-conquest and is represented as an earthly paradise. A shaman has precognitive visions: go to Columbus and the Catholic missionary in 1498.

Reel 21 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

The salsa singer Rubén Blades attends the Super-8 Film Festival in Caracas and Margarita Island, Venezuela.

Experimental Super-8 film by Carlos Castillo.

A parody of a movie, including commercials and a surreal trailer. They are the striking prologue to a disappointing film, which consists of the presentation of the characters of a story that is not told. The type of estrangement that the director seeks, to which is added the direct appeal to the public, is a questioning of the role that this type of spectacle assigns to the spectator, and of the conditions that make him distinguish cinema itself from advertising and allow him to enjoy detective narrative. The mockery, moreover, is directed equally at the consumer society and at the radicals who believe they can combat it with graffiti.

Experimental video by Carlos Castillo.

According to its author, Mom's chicken soup is based on a recipe for six people: one small chicken, two onions, two cloves of garlic, one carrot, three cups of milk, two potatoes, one tablespoon of cornstarch, and salt and pepper to taste. Mrs. Maite is making chicken soup in her kitchen, and next to her, on a television set, a strange character (Francisco) is seen struggling with windows and doors, determined to enter a house. In ten minutes, Castillo recounts, two actions are described that ultimately complement each other, as the outcome is disconcerting.

Cinema entertainment creates a series of conditions for the viewer (a dark theater, credits, actors, types of films), elements that prepare us for what we are about to see. In my film, I take a story and offer four endings (happy, dramatic, commercial). So, if films have a beginning, middle, and end, mine has a beginning, middle, end, end, end, end...

Its production seems like a game: throwing a Super 8 camera, turned on and recording, from what was, at that time, the tallest building in Caracas. The film films the shots of its own accelerated fall, a succession of chromatic shots that cannot be identified either in terms of what is “recorded” in each one (windows, columns, walls, sky or floor) or in its own formal configuration as an image (color, composition, shapes or figures). What is perceived and apprehended is the impotence of vision – of perception – to distinguish this extreme and exhausting mobility, this vertigo of “free fall.”

The film is about the connection the viewer establishes with the work from the very first image. The camera pans smoothly over the body of a beautiful naked woman and, just before reaching below her navel, stops.

Television is one of the themes in T.V.O., which tells the story of a lonely woman’s interaction with the contraption. “The dog is no longer man’s best friend; now it’s television,” Castillo said in a conversation with the author of this article. The character is played by Mimí Lazo, one of the country’s most prominent actresses and a Venezuelan sex symbol. The film toys with this stereotype as regards the vicarious satisfaction given by romance and sex on screen. The other theme, linked to loneliness, is developmentalism: the main character lives in Parque Central, a middle-class housing complex whose residential buildings were finished in 1972 and became a symbol of well-being on the brink of the oil boom. (Pablo Gamba)

Experimental video by Carlos Castillo.

Experimental Super-8 film by Carlos Castillo.