When film critic Roger Alan Koza asked María Aparicio, a young filmmaker from Córdoba, Argentina, about the experience of shooting her first feature film, Las Calles (2016) she used the word ‘sinuous’ to describe it. A fictionalised account of true events, the film follows Julia, a middle-aged history teacher, and her teenage students as they interview the citizens of Puerto Pirámides – a small fishing town located in the province of Chubut – in order to name its unnamed streets. The word ‘sinuous’ refers to curves and turns and waves, and to actions that seem to hide their purpose. When I read this word, my mind traces the waves of oceans and rivers; I am absorbed by their transformative, cyclic and seemingly purposeless way of being. Buenos Aires-based German filmmaker Nele Wohlatz could have used a similar word to describe the making of her first solo feature El Futuro Perfecto (2016). Xiaobin Zhang is the film’s protagonist whose real life is fictionalised as she learns Spanish in Buenos Aires. Through liquidity and sinuosity both Aparicio and Wohlatz play with identity and memory, exploring the ambiguities opened up by language and its possibility for transformation. The liquid landscapes that open both films become metaphors for the way in which these filmmakers experiment with the moving image as a liquid entity that, in this case, embodies the shifting identities of characters whose lives are marked by displacement and alienation.
Wohlatz’s film opens with a shot of a grey Río de la Plata with a ship sailing to a far, indistinguishable point. She remembers basing her first concept of the Chinese community in Buenos Aires on the big containers in which the first immigrants arrived. This first memory evolves into a portrayal and a representation of the river, not as a landscape, but rather as a space of transition and transformation whose tide moves immigrants away from one culture onto a new one, thus moulding the new identity of which they will become aware progressively. Towering towards the south, Las Calles opens with a shot of the Golfo Nuevo’s ocean gently hitting the shores of Puerto Pirámides. A small yellow boat sails close to this blue landscape. The next shot takes us inside the boat, where men are preparing to dive. Reviewing the film, Koza speaks of the ocean as one of the film’s protagonists: it houses the characters and defines them in their activities and imaginaries. These include meditating, playing, diving and fishing. Aparicio’s interest in the ocean’s agency is notable in its unflinching transparency. As in El Futuro Perfecto, its value as a landscape, as an entity solely worthy of contemplation, is minimal. While the Río de La Plata is a metaphor for humanity’s perpetual, often difficult mobility, the ocean by Puerto Pirámides is a warm reminder of community and the quotidian activity of shellfish collecting that supports it. After all, the river and the ocean are metaphors for another type of liquidity: a liquidity that arises from the experience of displacement, the challenges in language and identity that the characters must deal with.
When talking of her film, Wohlatz refers to language as a living being that mutates all the time, mostly due to the effects of displacement. We can recognise this mutability in both films as we are introduced to worlds that are in one way or another linguistically unformed, which despite having a language present, lack an alphabet or a recognition of one. Xiaobin’s world in Spanish is unformed: her objects are as nameless as the streets of Puerto Pirámides. The linguistic identity of the characters is liquid, and the process of naming things – street or object – alters them by turning them into solid, or by making them more malleable. Solidity is synonymous with permanence, and the question of whether permanence matters is at the centre of these films’ treatments of reality. At the butcher, Xiaobin learns that meatloaf is lomito in Spanish, but in school, she is presented with two possible names for herself. Her teacher suggests that she use either ‘Beatriz’ or ‘Sabrina’ as her new Spanish name. Wohlatz says that this malleability of names resembles the freedom with which Xiaobin changes into the dress that best suits her. Something similar happens when she gets into an argument with her love interest Vijay and switches from Spanish to Mandarin. Although the objects and the alphabets in her world take on new identities, becoming solid, her own identity remains liquid, adaptable, empowered in the possibilities of co-existing with two or more ways of being and speaking. The world of Las Calles is similarly liquid. Shot mostly hand-held and following the characters up close, the camera navigates and breathes the territory of Puerto Pirámides’s unnamed streets. Over the course of the film we experience the slow and developing relationship of the citizens to each other and their streets: this gives rise to a depth and solidity that makes the naming of these streets a closer reality. Eventually, these take on the names of significant people of Puerto Pirámides’s collective memory; these figures, once bodiless, phantasmagoric acquire a tangibility of sorts. The interviews conducted by the students with the older citizens are pivotal, and Koza interprets the act of filming them as “intentar capturar la experiencia lingüística por la que se erige la historia de una ciudad” (an attempt to capture the linguistic experience through which the history of a city is built). This applies to both Las Calles and El Futuro Perfecto, as films that seek to capture the roundabouts of particular linguistic experiences.
Aparicio and Wohlatz invite us to experience a process, and not necessarily a result. And the process of dealing with displacement acts as the main narrative undercurrent of both films. The first time we meet Xiaobin, it is clear that her relocation from China to Buenos Aires has been rather unpleasant. “What was it like to see your parents again?” she is asked. The camera looks directly at her and she hesitates before answering – it is not only the language mismatch of the scene that renders the potential reply difficult, but also the existential weight of the question. “We didn’t greet each other”, she replies. Her estrangement is latent in her relationship with her parents, her employers and herself, but the trusting community of the Spanish lessons challenges it. In Las Calles, Aparicio treats immigration as the inherent condition of Puerto Pirámides’s citizens, given that, at some point or another, most arrived there from other regions of Argentina. One man arrived in the Seventies after escaping the dictatorship, whilst another woman and her husband describe themselves as escaping economic malaise. The maritime journey that, as Aparicio suggests, is the most common way people got to Puerto Pirámides, is made to bear the same significance as a transformative rite for these citizens who, coming from radically different situations, have formed a community that is nonetheless defined by displacement. They are different from the time before they traveled to Puerto Pirámides, just as Xiaobin is not the same in the present tense in Buenos Aires.
In fact, the relationship between past, present and future is a significant source of meditation in both films, and the present is given a privileged place that separates the characters from their past, without denying its resonance. Despite the thorough discussion of the past in both Las Calles and El Futuro Perfecto, there is no nostalgia exuded: this gives way to a liquid narrative that flows disjointedly and cyclically as memories do, and surrenders vitality to what is being constructed in the present. And what is being constructed are different modes of citizenship. The liquidity of recent and ancient displacements would seem to require a solidification that could guarantee stability, however Wohlatz and Aparicio are not interested in the traditional citizenship that pursues it, but rather in the one that is constructed linguistically and visually. It is in their keenness for filming small gestures that their cinematographic and philosophical quest towards citizenship is made apparent. Notions of a solid linguistic identity are present when Xiaobin learns to order a glass of orange juice in Spanish or when the voting for the streets’ names takes place. Language, or rather its alphabetic construction, becomes the ground in which both solidity and malleability are attained, and in which the poetic license of both directors is employed. The latter is best exemplified in El Futuro Perfecto when the lessons enter the territory of the conditional tense, where Xiaobin’s way of expressing herself in Spanish is able to become malleable, allowing her to imagine possible scenarios of rejection by Vijay, or her parents finding out about their secret relationship.
While language is the internal route towards attaining citizenship, image is the external one. Not too long ago I stumbled upon an essay by Israeli filmmaker and scholar Ariella Azoulay, titled Citizenship Beyond Sovereignty: Towards a Redefinition of Spectatorship (2008). She writes that “photography thus has formed a citizenry, a citizenry without sovereignty, without place or borders, without language or unity, having a heterogeneous history, a common praxis, inclusive citizenship and a unified interest. The citizenry of photography is a global form of relation that is not subject to national regimes, despite existing within their borders, and that is not entirely obedient to global logic, even as it enjoys the channels of exchange and association the latter creates”. In this case, it is not exactly photography that forms the citizenry, but cinema. There’s something inherently liquid about the moving image: it flows across the screen. It would be, then, in the making of a film, in the understanding of the free flow of the image, that that liquidity is meant to remain as such. Xiaobin and the Puerto Pirámides’s citizens’ citizenries are formed, first and foremost, in this territory. Within the frame, everything is interconnected – the experiences of displacement, bilingualism, youth, living from the benefits of water, and imagining other lives.
For Azoulay, the citizenry of photography is being based on patterns of deterritorialisation that make it possible to dissolve physical borders and redefine limits, communities, places. Both Wohlatz and Aparicio do the same within the universes of their films. While Wohlatz toys with linguistic borders and those that exist between the Chinese community in Buenos Aires and other marginal communities (such the Indian one, which is symbolised by Vijay), Aparicio challenges generational ones. The film starts by describing the tension between the insecurity of the students (who are scared of being invasive) and the older citizens’ openness in answering their questions. However, the more they interact, the more the students become empowered by their civic participation, and the border between their generational differences becomes blurrier. Meanwhile, the camera remains doubtful, curious and liquid. Aparicio states that part of fictionalising the true events that took place in Puerto Pirámides when the streets were named was the decontextualising of the ‘interview’ from its often journalistic standpoint . Common approaches to the representation of ‘real life’ in cinema are also deterritorialised.
Liquidity in both films is never relinquished. In mixing fact and fiction in the recreation of the characters’ real lives, new and liquid narratives arise for Wohlatz and Xiaobin, and for Aparicio and the young and old citizens of Puerto Pirámides. The collaborative processes through which these films were made challenge ‘auteurism’ as being strictly tied to notions of property and ownership. Azoulay states in her essay that “for the citizen of photography, national citizenship is not the ultimate realisation of citizenship and does not see property and ownership as the principal achievement of human existence”. Wohlatz and Aparicio seem to agree in the making of their films. Both women were strangers to the inhospitable territories (the weather and secludedness in Puerto Pirámides; the intense rhythms of the cosmopolitan city of Buenos Aires) in which they filmed; yet attain a citizenship for themselves and the characters of their films through the moving image. Aparicio submerged herself in a small and completely unknown community on the tip of the Golfo Nuevo, towering towards the vast, beautiful and stark south. Wohlatz stepped into shoes of another newcomer, but one whose language and migratory experience she does not share. Perhaps it is because of their status as aliens – their cultural distance from these places and people – that they are able to capture so vividly, with such a profound sense of poetic freedom that they empathise so keenly with the liquidity of not belonging, which due to the adaptability it exudes, might be the most inclusive way of belonging.
References
Aparicio, María. 2016. Las Calles. Color, 81 min. Argentina: Vientosur Cine
Azoulay, Ariella. “Citizenship Beyond Sovereignty: Towards a Redefinition of Spectatorship”. Stallabrass, Julian, ed. Documentary. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2013
Beck, G. (2016, August 10). Language As a Rehearsal Space: An Interview with Nele Wohlatz on Notebook. Retrieved January 15, 2018, from https://mubi.com/es/notebook/posts/language-as-a-rehearsal-space-an-interview-with-nele-wohlatz
Koza, R. (2017, September 4). El giro lingüístico: Un dialogo con Nele Wohlatz sobre El Futuro Perfecto. Retrieved January 15, 2018, from http://www.conlosojosabiertos.com/giro-linguistico-dialogo-nele-wohlatz-futuro-perfecto/
Koza, R. (2016, June 19). El camino menos transitado. Un diálogo con María Aparicio, directora de Las calles. Retrieved January 15, 2018 from http://www.conlosojosabiertos.com/el-camino-menos-transitado-un-dialogo-con-maria-aparicio-directora-de-las-calles/
Wohlatz, Nele. 2016. El Futuro Perfecto. Color, 65 min. Argentina: Murillo Cine
