CON LOS OJOS ABIERTOS

By Roger Koza Favula is one of the most beautiful and singular film in the last years. Who could have filmed something like this not having studied cinema nor in the Moon or in Jupiter? Ituzaingó, a town not too far away from the city of Buenos Aires, and obligatory reference in all the director’s […]

By Roger Koza The title of this section is a distorted loan from a great film by Alexander Balaguara, whose title is “Lapses of life of an object in the frame”. The Ukranian director’s film runs for almost two hours but, to some extent, secretly sums up the obstacle faced by any filmmaker working with […]

El lugar del hijo / The Militant, Manolo Nieto, Uruguay-Argenina, 2013 Por Roger Koza At the beginning of the film, an open shot shows a deep knowledge of the (filmic) space and time occupied by the char- acters. The symbolic space is Montevideo, first, and then Salto; the character is Ariel Cruz, a young militant […]

At Berkeley, Frederick Wiseman, EE.UU., 2013 How do institutions think? The anthropologist Mary Douglas would have loved the magnificent four-hour film At Berkeley, the 38th made by a genius, Frederick Wiseman: what we see here is the collective thought of an institution and al- though the University of California at Berkeley is undoubtedly a peculiar microcosm, […]

E Agora?  Lembra-me / What Now? Remind me,  Joaquim Pinto, Portugal, 2013 A survivor’s confession trans- posed into cinema, a dialectic and loving treaty on theology and biology (or how Darwin, Saint Austin, and the Gospel of John can coexist in the medita- tions of a sensitive soul), a ra- diography of European politics and its decadence, […]

Three Interpretation Excercises / Trois Excercises d’ Intérpretation, Francia-Rumania, 2013 Por Roger Koza Cinema and philosophy –this thesis is not mine– create concepts. A concept gives some order to experience, and filmic shots allow seeing experience in a different way. In Three Interpretations, Puiu adapts the books Three Conversations, and A Short Tale of the […]

The Joycean Society, Dora García, Belgium, 2013 By Roger Koza ‘Sculpting in time,” that was Tarkovsky’s way for describ- ing cinema. Without the meta- physical density of this Russian filmmaker, Dora García’s first feature manages to prove the meaning of that phrase within a secular context and with charm- ing lightness. Here, we literally see […]

Costa da Morte, Lois Patiño, España, 2013 In everyday life, our optical behavior rarely imitates the panoramic of cinema. Maybe that’s the reason we don’t see many panoramic shots as central shots in films. The panoramic shot is often employed to show the dimension of a battle, to pinpoint a location, or to use a […]

P3nd3jo5, Raúl Perrone, Argentina, 2013 By Raúl Perrone What is a cumbiópera? (1) It is a heterodox fusion of two musical genres with just one thing in common —the twelve notes of the musical scale. The result is magnificent, with the electronic intervention of DJs following the lead of Perrone’s mixture between Puccini, cumbia, sounds […]

Escuela normal / Normal School, Celina Murga, Argentina, 2013  By Roger Koza   This superb documentary features Argentina’s first Escuela Normal (Normal School) as scenery, a paradigmatic institution for the civilizing and liberal endeavor led by controversial president Domingo F. Sarmiento at the end of the 19th century. The School, past and present, constitutes an […]