'Ventana al Sur: An Evening of Argentine Experimental Films'

Comments (0) By Nick Pinkerton Wednesday, Feb 18 2009

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Ventana al Sur: An Evening of Argentine Experimental Films
Opens February 21, Anthology Film Archives

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Anthology spills out a grab bag of short shorts from way South, the majority completed over the last few years. Sparse Super-8 Espectro marries wagging lights and feedback; its only mystery is why anyone bothered. Rubén Guzmán's Stock features a lad walking to a rural schoolhouse where he reads stock quotes aloud, apparently thus rendering us "witness to the last day of capitalism," which is going into my file of crazy-insupportable Artist's Statement prose. Pablo Martín's double feature includes Bajo Tierra, "starring" artist Claudio Caldini, seen patting a reel of film into a shallow grave for later exhuming. His Sin Título (Focus) I like best—it's a silent strobe of setups that begins by spinning ventilator-like on a Buenos Aires rooftop, then launches out and out and out through an endless city. Also notable is Macarena Gagliardi's lowering Equivale a Mentir, in which the double exposures climbing over each other combine to make associations more evocative than just noise. For point of historical comparison, two relics from the Dirty War '70s will screen: Leandro Katz's Los Angeles and Narcisa Hirsch's Workshop. Hirsch's more recent El Aleph is also here, a flittering minute-long imagistic evocation of fellow Argentine Jorge Luis Borges's story by the same name. Not quite a Promethean explosion, but I am told there will be sweet churros.